Big gains Cloud helps milk farmers get more benefits

Airtel Business, the B2B unit of Bharti Airtel, and IBM have collaborated to deploy a hybrid cloud solution for a group of milk producer companies (MPCs) created by NDDB Dairy Services. The hybrid cloud solution that leverages Airtel Cloud and IBM Power servers, will host the ERP and other key applications to accelerate the digital transformation of the MPCs. These five large MPCs include Paayas in Rajasthan, Maahi in Gujarat, Shreeja in Andhra Pradesh, Baani in Punjab, and Saahaj in Uttar Pradesh.

The transition to the Airtel-IBM hybrid cloud platform along with advanced IT infrastructure will enable these MPCs to strengthen the support provided to member milk farmers. It will enable these producer companies to securely record and access key information of members, the quantum of milk procured from the farmers, milk products made and sold, etc. The MPCs will be able to make direct and timely digital payments to over 500,000 affiliated milk farmers. Most of them are from small or marginal income groups, contributing up to 25 lakh litres of milk each day from more than 14,000 villages.
For companies without their own data centres, the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model can provide an inexpensive, fast, fundamental system that can scale up or scale-out as required. This model tends to work well for businesses that need scalable workloads and control over their data. Says Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO, Enterprise Business, Airtel Business, “Our endeavour is to enable enterprises to stay focused on their core businesses as we drive end-to-end digital transformation on their behalf. Through the joint value proposition, we have offered producer companies a modern and secured data centre infrastructure to run their data-intensive workload on a hybrid cloud platform in a very cost-effective manner.”

Ravi Jain, director – Server Sales, IBM India/South Asia, said, “IBM and Airtel will collaborate and complement each other’s capabilities to address the growing needs of digital transformation of enterprises in India. We are glad to support producer companies in their journey to the cloud. Our engagement is aligned with the “Digital India” plans of the government and to push for large-scale adoption of digital platforms including direct payments to millions of farmers to their bank accounts.”