Indian service provider Bharti Airtel tapped Cisco to provide networking and connectivity services to its enterprise and small-medium business customers. This includes an SD-WAN service based on Cisco’s Viptela platform.

Airtel is one of the largest service providers in India. While it is headquartered in New Delhi, India, it offers its telecommunications services to 20 countries across South Asia and Africa. In India alone, the company claims a customer base of 2,000 large and 500,000 small-medium businesses. And it claims to serve over 1,000 global enterprises.

Under the partnership, Cisco is aiding Airtel in offering a managed SD-WAN service to its customers. The managed service will be built on Cisco’s Viptela-based SD-WAN alongside additional analytics and security capabilities. The service will also provide a centralized policy and management controller for complete visibility into traffic data.

Airtel will also offer Cisco’s Webex conferencing service.

This builds upon previous partnerships between Cisco and Airtel. In February, at MWC Barcelona, the two companies said they would be jointly building a 5G-ready, IP-based automated network in India.

Airtel is leveraging Cisco services to repurpose its network reach, reliability, and scale. This includes enabling new functionalities such as segment routing, traffic engineering, and an ethernet VPN on its IP-based network architecture.

These digitization and new enterprise offerings are part of a greater public-private effort led by Airtel and India called Digital India. The government launched this campaign to advance new technologies and improve infrastructure and connectivity.

In a prepared statement Airtel CEO Ajay Chitkara said: “Digital India has opened up a huge residual opportunity to help businesses in their digital transformation journey and achieve the next level of growth. We look forward to working closely with Cisco to bring best-in-class digitization and collaboration solutions to customers and consolidate Airtel’s leadership position in the Indian B2B segment.”