Bharti Airtel is a pioneer and the leader in Indian telecom space. It leads and most of the other telcos follow. It was the first to outsource its IT operations to IBM. The deal is now worth more than $2bn. At least 6 other telcos has outsourced their IT operations to IBM, Wipro and TCS.

Almost a similar thing is done for its tower business. It hived off most of its tower business to an independent Joint Venture (Vodafone and IDEA are the other partners) company of Indus Towers. The latest in its outsourcing kitty is the managed services outsourcing pact with Comviva.

As per this new arrangement Comviva will manage the infrastructure for Airtel’s value added services including SMS, ringtones and multimedia messaging. As per Airtel this is first of its kind deal in the world.

Comviva will manage more than 2,000 nodes -– including SMSCs (short message service centers), MMSCs (multimedia messaging service centers), and IVR (interactive vocie response) servers — that deliver Airtel’s mobile value-added services, and report to Airtel through a series of “stringent” service level agreements (SLAs). (Light Reading)

Here is what Airtel has outsourced so far.

1. Outsourced IT operations to IBM started at $750 million and is worth $2.5 billion now.

2. Alcatel-Lucent manages Airtel’s fixed network

3. Airtel’s network outsourced to Ericsson AB and Nokia Siemens

4. Comviva takes care of Airtel’s managed services (value added services)

This of course is valid until Airtel becomes MTN-Airtel or Airtel-MTN. Then we will be dealing with a different company where MTN’s arrangements come into picture.