IBM and Bharti Airtel have agreed to deploy Airtel’s edge computing platform in India, which will include 120 network data centres across 20 cities. Once deployed, the platform is designed to enable large enterprises across multiple industries, including manufacturing and automotive, to 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 while addressing data security and sovereignty requirements, which is critical as workloads increasingly shift to the edge. The business value delivered by edge computing can be significantly enhanced when combined with 5G.
Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO – Enterprise, Airtel Business said, “As India gears up to experience 5G, we see a massive opportunity to help businesses across industries transform how they deliver goods and services. 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.”
Howard Boville, Head of IBM Cloud Platform said, “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.”