Mumbai, Sept. 23 -- For manufacturers, cloud infrastructure is moving beyond IT modernisation to integrate legacy systems, production applications, warehouses and supply-chain platforms.
Bharti Airtel, India's leading telecom operator, has signed around 40 customers within a year of launching its sovereign cloud platform, with manufacturing companies accounting for about a quarter of its clientele.
Manufacturers such as VE Commercial Vehicles are among those adopting Airtel Cloud, Infrastructure Today has learned.
Originally built for Airtel's large-scale digital operations, the platform has been battle-tested to handle 1.4 billion transactions per minute. Hosted entirely in India, Airtel Cloud offers infrastructure, connectivity and GenAI-based provisioning, enabling enterprises to scale mission-critical and regulated workloads while retaining data control and avoiding vendor lock-in.
During the company's Q1 FY27 earnings call, Airtel Executive Vice Chairman Gopal Vittal said Airtel Cloud added 11 new customers in the quarter, taking its count to 33 at the time. "We continue to see strong momentum here with almost all critical services now live on our platform," he said.
Manufacturing is emerging as a key market for cloud services as factories deploy connected machines, automated production lines, industrial sensors and AI-driven analytics, generating larger volumes of operational data. For manufacturers, cloud infrastructure is moving beyond IT modernisation to become an enabler for integrating legacy systems, production applications, warehouses and supply-chain platforms, while providing the computing and storage capacity required for automation and AI.
The increasing digitalisation of factories is also sharpening focus on where industrial data is stored and who controls it, given the sensitivity of intellectual property and proprietary processes. This is creating demand for sovereign cloud platforms, where data and infrastructure remain under domestic jurisdiction.
Continuity Priority
Business continuity is another critical consideration for manufacturers, since outages can disrupt production schedules, inventory flows, supplier coordination and customer commitments. Airtel Cloud offers automated backup, data replication and disaster recovery, with integrated connectivity linking factories, offices, cloud environments and recovery sites.
Vittal said traction is strong for straightforward propositions such as disaster recovery, backup-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service and video surveillance-as-a-service. "These are where we have won a lot of deals over the last quarter," he noted.
Larger deals, however, are emerging around sovereign cloud requirements involving sensitive workloads in regulated sectors and public-sector enterprises. "The one place where the deals are large is the need for sovereign clouds where there are more sensitive workloads. This is largely in the regulated spheres or in the PSU (public sector unit) spheres," Vittal added.
These trends reflect steady growth since August 2025, when Airtel's digital subsidiary Xtelify rolled out Airtel Cloud, a sovereign, telco-grade platform for Indian enterprises.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Infrastructure Today.