Airtel Bangladesh, Mahindra Comviva in managed VAS deal

Bharti Airtel has entered into a three-year, managed Value Added Services (VAS) agreement with Mahindra Comviva.

As part of the agreement, Mahindra Comviva will now manage Bharti Airtel's VAS services across all operations in 20 countries in Asia and Africa. At present, Mahindra Comviva manages more than 4,000 VAS nodes for Airtel Africa in 17 countries, Airtel India and Airtel Sri Lanka from various partners to meet defined service-level agreements.

Mahindra Comviva will manage Bharti Airtel's service delivery platform including of Mahindra Comviva's deployed products like Messaging Service Delivery Platform (MSDP), unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), bulk messaging gateway (BMG) and dBILL VAS charging solution.

''Mahindra Comviva has proved to be a trusted partner for Bharti Airtel group across our operations in Asia and Africa. With this extended partnership, Mahindra Comviva will provide greater operational simplicity and enhance efficiencies, whilst enabling improved service performance to our customers in Bangladesh,'' Airtel Bangladesh chief information officer Lutfor Rahman said.

''This is a landmark deal for Mahindra Comviva, as we will now manage all Bharti Airtel operations across 20 countries in Asia and Africa. Our success with Airtel Sri Lanka, India and Africa, where we manage over 4,000 VAS nodes against stringent service level agreements, has given Airtel the confidence to outsource the management of VAS operations in Bangladesh to Mahindra Comviva,'' said Anurag Srivastava, head of M=managed VAS Services at Mahindra Comviva.

In addition to managing the VAS nodes, Mahindra Comviva will provide 24/7 VAS monitoring and will help Airtel Bangladesh to optimise its data centre operational costs by 15-25 per cent savings of up to 20 per cent on overall capex.

This end-to-end service management will further help Airtel Bangladesh to improve overall customer experience.