Hybrid cloud milk: Airtel and IBM deploy solutions for Indian dairy companies

Today, Airtel Business and IBM have announced their collaboration to deploy a hybrid cloud solution for a group of five MPCs in India.

 

Using Airtel Cloud and IBM Power servers, the transition to the cloud will support the enterprises’ resource planning (ERP) and other crucial applications, as well as accelerating their wider digital transformation. 

 

Perhaps more importantly, it will enable these MPCs to more directly support their workers, which will now not only be able to record key data, like inventory, more efficiently, but also help deliver digital payments. 

 

"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,” said the companies in a joint statement. 

 

In total, the deal will help support around 500,000 affiliated milk farmers in around 14,000 villages, the majority of which are women from low-income households. In total, these workers help to produce around 2.5 million litres of milk per day.

 

It is the scale of these milk production operations, which require a huge amount of data processing and organisation, that demonstrates the real value in hybrid cloud infrastructure.

 

"Clients are looking for solutions that are scalable and secured,” said Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO of Enterprise Business at Airtel Business. “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.”

 

The effect that data and connectivity solutions can have on agriculture cannot be underestimated. Indeed, numerous telcos around the world are exploring agricultural solutions in various forms, from deploying private networks to enable drones, automation, and the IoT, to introducing AI and machine learning to deliver operational efficiencies. 

 

Earlier this year, for example, Italy’s TIM announced they were leveraging 5G to improve crop yields at a vineyard in Piedmont Langhe. Similarly, Chinese vendor Huawei, reeling from the effects of US sanctions on their smartphone business, announced they would be helping pig farmers to monitor their livestock using AI.