State-owned firm Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd and technology giant Microsoft signed a memorandum of understanding on Thursday wherein the latter will provide complete suite of telecom and information technology solutions for enterprise business.

BSNL has a large share in landline network including leased line connectivity to various enterprises.

Enterprise customers including government organisations need end-to-end solutions which also involve many allied services in the field of IT/software as a service/cloud computing/ servers/transducers/audio video solutions, it said. “In order to provide such solutions, it was felt necessary to have strategic business alliance(s) with world renowned companies having expertise in above areas on non-exclusive basis to pool resources and to go to the customers collectively to provide end-to-end solutions,” Anupam Shrivastava, Chairman and Managing Director, BSNL, said.

A request for proposal (RFP), therefore, was circulated in which Microsoft showed interest and submitted its proposal, he said.

This strategic alliance would be non-exclusive and is aimed at leveraging the domain expertise and strategic position in the industry to garner more business either as a front runner or as a support associate to provide connectivity and telecom solutions in line with the need and demand of the end customer, BSNL said.

This initiative to have strategic MoU is of course, without any commercial or legal commitments at this juncture and actual relevant business agreements on case to case basis would be done by the respective business verticals of BSNL by entering into bilateral or multilateral specific business agreements as the case may be after following the necessary guidelines as applicable, the company added.

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