The New Delhi-head quartered Bharti Airtel has over 257 million subscribers across the country, as per the recent data released by the Telecom Authority of India (TRAI). It is also one of the youngest firms to use open source software on a large scale.
Apart from being a market leader in the telecom world, Airtel is widely known for its broadband and DTH (direct-to-home) services. Though the group, founded by veteran entrepreneur Sunil Bharti Mittal, is not directly related to the IT industry, it has recently started contributing back to the community.
“Open source has helped us build elastic, scalable systems at low cost and hence increase our productivity,” says Harmeen Mehta, global chief information officer, Bharti Airtel.
Airtel has deployed a large number of open source technologies to improve efficiency. These include solutions such as Redis, Nginx, Apache Tomcat, Drools, JBoss Wildfly and Spring. Besides this, the company’s vast user data is stored primarily on community-based offerings like AeroSpike DB, MongoDB, OrientDB and PostgresDB.
“The telecom industry is all about technology and innovation. And today, more innovation is happening using open source technology than with proprietary software. This is a testament to all the committers and contributors around the world who have helped completely change this landscape,” Mehta told Open Source For You in an exclusive interaction.
Making the switch from proprietary to open source software
Earlier, however, Airtel had opted for proprietary software over open source solutions. Anant Kumar, general manager and head of product engineering, has helped the company make a swift shift from using proprietary solutions to open source technologies. Kumar heads a team of more than 80 engineers at Airtel’s Gurgaon office.
“Open source lets us take control in order to make our own decisions smoothly, along with contributing back to the community. It enables us to be more lean, agile and secure and, hence, move faster in the competitive world,” says Kumar.
‘More exciting than challenging’
This story is from the January 2017 edition of Open Source For You.
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This story is from the January 2017 edition of Open Source For You.
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