IBM announced its intent to work together with Indian telecom major Bharti Airtel for providing secured edge cloud services to Indian enterprises.
The companies plan to deploy Airtel's edge computing platform in the country as a hybrid environment based on IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat OpenShift, which would extend secured and open cloud services wherever data resides.
The platform will include 120 network data centers across 20 cities.
Once deployed, the platform would enable large enterprises across multiple industries to accelerate innovative solutions for their clients and operations.
With Airtel's 5G connectivity and highly secured edge computing capabilities from IBM, enterprises will be able to deploy and manage workloads in near-real time.
Teaming with Airtel to bring IBM's hybrid cloud offerings would help industries embrace the opportunities presented by 5G and edge, and benefit them with reduced latency, high availability and increased connectivity speeds.
IBM expects the business value delivered by edge computing can be significantly enhanced when combined with 5G. In India, 5G, which would be rolled out later this year, has the potential to create a cumulative economic impact of $1 trillion by 2035.
While announcing the work between IBM and Airtel around embracing 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 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."
IBM noted that Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, India's largest passenger car maker, intends to use the edge platform to increase accuracy and efficiency for quality inspections on the factory floor. The platform is expected to help Maruti Suzuki to boost quality control and ensure their data remains protected at the edge.
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