Airtel-IBM hybrid cloud solution to help 5 lakh farmers with analytics on their milk production

Telecom major Airtel’s B2B wing, Airtel Business, has partnered with Armonk, New York-based global technology firm IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud solution for a group of milk producer companies (MPC) through NDBB Dairy Services. 

NDBB Dairy Services is a not for profit organisation that provides technical and management services to milk production companies. 

The five milk producers include Maahi in Gujarat, Baani in Punjab, Saahaj in Uttar Pradesh, Shreeja in Andhra Pradesh and Paayas in Rajasthan. 

The hybrid cloud solution will utilise the Airtel Cloud, which will host the SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution hosted on IBM Power servers. 

The migration to the Airtel-IBM cloud is expected to help the MPCs strengthen support provided to milk farmers. It will help the producer companies to record and access key information of members, such as the quantum of milk procured, the milk products made, sold and the likes. 

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Most critically, the MPCs will be able to make direct digital payments to 5 lakh affiliated milk farmers, whom Airtel said are from small and marginal income groups. About 25 litres of milk are contributed each day from more than 14,000 villages in this regard. 

The hybrid cloud platform is expected to provide better integration of operations, and allow for easier customisation, better data control. IBM also said that it will migrate workloads from IBM Power8 to IBM Power9 servers, with a scalability option to for SAP S/4 Hana. 

“We are witnessing a considerable surge in demand for cutting-edge digital technology. Our goal is to push for the large-scale adoption of digital platforms including direct payments to millions of farmers to their bank accounts,” said Ravi Jain, Director - Server Sales, IBM India/South Asia. 

For companies without their own data centres, IBM will offer its Infrastructure as a Service model to scale workloads and have better control of data.