07 October 2022
Bharti Airtel and IBM have announced their intention to jointly deploy Airtel’s edge computing platform in India, which will include 120 network data centres across 20 cities. Once deployed, the platform will enable large enterprises across multiple industries to securely accelerate innovative solutions that deliver new value to their clients and operations.
Airtel’s edge computing platform, deployed as a hybrid environment based on IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat OpenShift®, extends secured and open cloud services wherever data resides. This can help improve business performance and customer experience by reducing latency. It also addresses data security and sovereignty requirements, which are vital as workloads increasingly shift to the edge.
The business value delivered by edge computing can be significantly enhanced when combined with 5G. In India, where 5G is expected to be rolled out later this year, it has the potential to create a cumulative economic impact 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 – Enterprise, Airtel Business. “We have the largest network of edge data centres 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.”
IBM and Airtel Digital engineering teams will build use cases that leverage Airtel’s 5G connectivity and IBM’s hybrid cloud capabilities to address the pressing business issues faced by enterprise clients. Harnessing Airtel’s 5G connectivity and highly secured edge computing capabilities from IBM can enable enterprises to deploy and manage workloads in near-real time. Industries including telecommunications, financial services, healthcare and government can benefit from reduced latency, high availability and increased connectivity speeds.
“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.”
