Bharti Airtel, one of India’s largest providers of communications services with more than 358 million subscribers, and IBM have announced their intention to collaborate on the deployment of Airtel’s edge computing platform in India, which will include 120 network data centers spread across 20 cities.
The platform is intended to allow major businesses in a variety of sectors, including manufacturing and the automotive industry, to expedite creative solutions that provide new value to their operations and clients – safely at the edge.
The edge computing platform from Airtel would offer secured and open cloud services wherever data is located. It is implemented as a hybrid environment based on IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat OpenShift. By decreasing latency and satisfying data security and sovereignty needs, which are crucial as workloads progressively move to the edge, this can aid in enhancing corporate performance and customer experience.
When used in conjunction with 5G, edge computing may considerably increase the commercial value it provides. In India, where 5G is slated to be rolled out later this year, it would have the potential to produce a cumulative economic effect of $1 trillion by 2035.
“As India gears up to experience 5G, we see a massive opportunity to help businesses across industries transform how they deliver goods and services,” said Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO at Enterprise, Airtel Business. “We have the largest network of edge data centers available in India under the Nxtra brand and we will leverage our work with IBM to help Indian businesses address their critical business needs with greater efficiency, making it significantly easier for companies to process workloads where their data resides.”
Reduced Latency, High Availability
For AI-enabled quality inspection, Airtel’s solution uses IBM Maximo Visual Inspection. Leading the system integration for the IBM platform will be IBM Consulting. The IBM and Airtel Digital engineering teams will develop use cases that take advantage of Airtel’s 5G connectivity and IBM’s hybrid cloud capabilities to address the urgent business issues faced by enterprise clients through the use of this hybrid cloud platform, IBM Consulting’s industry expertise, access to best-in-class technology, and partners.
Using IBM’s secured edge computing capabilities and Airtel’s 5G connectivity, businesses can install and manage workloads almost instantly. Reduced latency, high availability, and higher connectivity speeds can help the telecommunications, financial, healthcare, and government sectors.
“As businesses – particularly those in regulated industries – work to modernize their infrastructures, they need to be able to do so in a way that enables them to stay compliant, without becoming overburdened by their compliance obligations – regardless of where their data resides,” said Howard Boville, Head of IBM Cloud Platform. “Teaming with Airtel to bring IBM’s hybrid cloud offerings to their Indian multi-access edge compute customers will help them embrace the opportunities presented by 5G and edge, like innovating with greater speed and security.”
