KOLKATA: Bharti Airtel has temporarily extended its technology outsourcing contract with IBM till January end, and is in talks with the US firm for a new contract after that, which could be narrower in scope and lower in value, at $200-250 million, two people familiar with the matter said.India’s second largest telco is also engaged in separate talks with a clutch of software companies, including Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services and Amdocs, for its mainline IT infrastructure outsourcing needs, including data centre management, applications management services (AMS), and operations of switching & billing system, that could culminate in additional outsourcing deals, aggregating around $250 million, the sources said.“Going forward, IBM’s scope may be reduced to handling only select high-value pieces, such as data analytics, AI, network virtualisation and public cloud services,” one of them told ET.IBM’s existing five-year contract — which was to expire on March 31 — was worth $500-550 million.The proposed change in Airtel’s outsourcing model stems from its multi-vendor approach at a time the operator continues to face financial stress in an ultra-competitive industry, one of the people said.IBM India said Airtel has “continued with the IBM contract past the March 2019 milestone”. “From application management services (AMS) to AI, we support Airtel in its digital transformation journey to help them generate more value from their existing IT infrastructure, and provide strategic (high-value) services that are critical to their future business growth,” the company said in a written response to ET's queries.Airtel did not respond to ET’s emailed queries as of press time Tuesday.The mobile phone operator had originally inked an end-to-end managed services contract with IBM in 2004.
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