Bangalore: Bharti Airtel, the country's largest telecom operator plans to foray into information technology business too. As a part of this move, the company plans to offer software applications on a pay per- user model to small and medium business and enterprises.

BusinessLine report states that Airtel is in talks with the giant vendors such as Google, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and Jamcracker to offer different applications based on SaaS model. The company has already partnership with Microsoft that lends its hands for hosted messaging and collaboration solutions for SMBs.

To make the Airtel's dream true, the company is investing in network infrastructure and expanding data centers to power its IT initiatives. Airtel aims to play the role of 'CIO in the cloud' for the SMBs to leverage its country wide infrastructure of back-bone network and data centers. By offering this service the service provider aims to meet the demands of CIOs. Having partnership with Wipro, IBM, Airtel aims to leverage the SaaS model.

Jai Menon Group Chief Information Officer, Bharti Enterprises said, "SMBs are yet to adopt IT for the transformation and we see a huge potential."