Bharti Airtel Delivers One Airtel Experience with a Simplified and Scalable Application Network Architecture

Bharti Airtel is a global ICT provider and one of India’s largest telecommunication companies with a 320 million subscriber base. Headquartered in India, the company has a global network across the U.S., Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) regions.

Bharti Airtel is continually expanding its digital and enterprise services portfolio beyond connectivity. Intending to integrate banking, lifestyle, and connectivity services in a single interface, the telco plans to build a frictionless omnichannel customer experience.

The telco integrated a large number of secure digital applications in its journey to build a super app and offer a unified omnichannel experience for its customers. While these large adoptions enabled Bharti Airtel to proactively meet changing customer behavior and demand, they led to a multifold year-over-year increase in encrypted traffic.

In the face of growing digital demand, Bharti Airtel aimed to modernize its application delivery process. However, the current architecture was unable to fully support the objective as it involves change of IP addresses for application delivery.

The change in IP address not only adds operational complexity but also hinders the time-to-market of applications and their scalability. To manage the increasing traffic and application workload, Airtel required a system without change of IPs that would allow its applications to scale massively even on a single IP.

It was also becoming increasingly complex for Bharti Airtel to manage mission-critical applications. The spike in traffic was adding costs given the operational needs to protect, maintain, and scale the infrastructure.

Bharti Airtel required a flexible and secure solution that does not disrupt its daily operations across its digital channels. It established a reliable application delivery and expandability mechanism for delivering a superior customer experience. The telco began with the F5 BIG-IP suite to support single IP integration along with F5 VELOS  for lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and to establish a future-ready platform.

The existing proprietary hardware of Bharti Airtel can now be redesigned to manage and scale large applications without hassles and IP changes.

Bharti Airtel was able to integrate modern SSL support with the ability to effectively manage applications across multiple Airtel websites and mobile apps.

Bharti Airtel placed a strong emphasis on ensuring new capabilities and features could be introduced in an agile manner. The new infrastructure set the momentum for operations as there were no hassles for the applications team to change IPs and add IPs for expansion.

Additionally, now Bharti Airtel manages the increased workload during peak periods with ease, supporting every request on the website without failure. The company is also ready for the future, with each of its operational layers optimized for load balancing and data traffic management tailored according to the expected multifold growth in the future. These scalable digital solutions have also positively impacted the TCO for Bharti Airtel.

Bharti Airtel witnessed significant improvements to its digital channel performance. A single IP is scalable up to 20 times the original capacity with expansions on the same instance. The new integrated platform now allows Airtel to simultaneously perform multiple complex use cases.

The telco realized a fourfold reduction in operational activities and lowered its TCO. The new application made troubleshooting easier and logic customizable—helping the company save precious time and effort.

Bharti Airtel managed customer traffic effectively with lower latency, even in peak seasons. The new applications go the extra mile by protecting Bharti Airtel’s future digital investments and return on investment by unlocking future-ready solutions for container workloads and functions such as load balancing, DNS, and web application firewalls. It’s this kind of state-of-the-art, omnichannel architecture Bharti Airtel sought out, enabling it to drive operational excellence while enhancing the customer experience.