Bharti

Bharti Airtel draws Top Honors at the MIS Asia IT Excellence Awards 2006

• ● The first Indian telecom company to win these awards.
• ● Wins ‘Best Bottom Line IT’ & ‘Best Knowledge Management’ awards .
• ● Over 100 of the best Private and public sector companies across Asia and Japan participated.

New Delhi, August 13, 2006 : Bharti Airtel Limited continued to add to its impressive list of accolades and recognition, winning the coveted MIS Asia IT Excellence Awards at the MIS Asia IT Summit 2006, Singapore. Bharti Airtel won awards in two categories - the ‘Best Bottom Line IT’ and ‘Best Knowledge Management’ category and is the only Indian Telecom Company to win these awards. The MIS Asia IT Excellence Awards 2006 recognizes companies that have pushed the boundaries of excellence and demonstrated outstanding performance in IT implementation.

The ‘Best Bottom Line IT’ award category demonstrates the way IT at Bharti Airtel tangibly impacts business thus increasing shareholder value for the company. This category was one of the most contested categories and the organisations which reached the finals include companies like - BASF Southeast Asia, Immigration Department, Hong Kong and the Ministry of Defence, Singapore.

The win in ‘Best Knowledge Management’ award category reflects the company’s robust and systematic approach in retaining, aligning and propagating best practices in IT. The co-finalist in this category was Immigrations and Check Point Authority, Singapore.

Dr Jai Menon, Director - IT & Innovations, Bharti Airtel Limited said “Bharti won this award last year in the "Best Change Management" category for its transformation journey of the IT Community of Practice (IT COP) . The "Bottom Line IT" award further punctuates this transformation through the practical implementation of a large scale enterprise utility computing paradigm. An additional recognition for "Knowledge Management" re-emphasizes the benefits of this transformation. Several other such group level transformation projects will truly set the IT COP on its way towards a global benchmark”.

Bharti was amongst an impressive list of over 100 global companies across multiple industries participating from countries that included Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Japan.

The process of awards finalization included month’s rigorous evaluation by a panel of judges that comprised CIOs, industry experts and analysts. The key judging criteria included: execution of the project, business alignment and measurable results.

About MIS Asia IT Excellence Awards

The MIS Asia IT Excellence Awards are organised annually by MIS Asia. This is the fourth year MIS Asia is staging the event, which recognises IT organisations and CIOs for excellence in management and for helping to attain business goals. Since they were launched in 2003, the response to the Awards has been overwhelming. Since 2005, MIS Asia has changed the name of the Awards to the MIS Asia IT Excellence Awards to better reflect the role of IT and the CIO in business.

About Bharti Airtel Limited : Bharti Airtel Limited is one of India’s leading private sector providers of telecommunications services with an aggregate of 25.89 million customers as of end of July‘06, consisting of 24.34 million mobile customers. Bharti Airtel created history by being ranked among the top 10 best performing companies in the world in the globally renowned BusinessWeek IT 100 list.

The company was the first private operator to provide mobile services in all the 23 circles in India. The company also provides telephone services and Internet access over DSL in 92 cities. The company complements its mobile, broadband & telephone services with national and international long distance services. The company also has a submarine cable landing station at Chennai, which connects the submarine cable (owned by an associate company) connecting Chennai and Singapore. The company is a part of the consortium, which jointly owns and has developed the next generation undersea cable system SEA-ME-WE-4.

The company provides reliable end-to-end data and enterprise services to the corporate customers by leveraging its nationwide fiber optic backbone, last mile connectivity in fixed-line and mobile circles, VSATs, ISP and international bandwidth access through the gateways and landing station. For more information, visit www.bhartiairtel.in