IBM and Bharti Airtel announced their intention to work together to deploy Airtel’s edge computing platform in India, which will span 120 network data centers in 20 cities.
Once deployed, the platform is designed to enable large enterprises across multiple industries, including manufacturing and automotive, to accelerate innovative solutions that bring new value to their customers and operations – safe at the edge.
Airtel’s edge computing platform, deployed as a hybrid environment based on IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat OpenShift®, extends secure and open cloud services wherever data resides. This can help improve business performance and the customer experience by reducing latency while meeting data security and sovereignty requirements—critical as workloads increasingly shift to the edge.
The business value of edge computing can be significantly increased when combined with 5G. In India, where 5G is expected to be rolled out later this year, it has the potential to have a cumulative economic impact of US$1 trillion by 20351.
Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, India’s largest passenger car manufacturer, intends to deploy the Edge platform to increase the accuracy and efficiency of factory quality inspections. By deploying this platform, Maruti Suzuki expects to improve quality control and ensure their data stays protected at the edge.
The collaboration between IBM and Airtel around the rollout of 5G was announced today at Think Mumbai. Airtel’s solution uses IBM Maximo Visual Inspection for AI-enabled quality inspection. IBM Consulting is to lead the systems integration for the IBM platform. Through this hybrid cloud platform and IBM Consulting’s industry expertise and access to best-in-class technology and partners, IBM and Airtel Digital’s engineering teams will develop use cases that leverage Airtel’s 5G connectivity and hybrid cloud -Use capabilities of IBM to address the pressing business problems they face Enterprise customers.
Leveraging Airtel’s 5G connectivity and IBM’s highly secure edge computing capabilities, organizations can deploy and manage workloads in near real-time. Industries like telecom, financial services, healthcare, and government can benefit from reduced latency, high availability, and faster connection speeds.
Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO – Corporate, Airtel Business
As India prepares to experience 5G, we see a tremendous opportunity to help businesses across all industries transform the way they deliver goods and services. We have the largest network of edge data centers in India under the Nxtra brand and will leverage our collaboration with IBM to help Indian companies meet their critical business needs more efficiently, making it significantly easier for companies to run workloads there , where your data is located .
Howard Boville, Head of IBM Cloud Platform
As organizations – particularly those in regulated industries – work to modernize their infrastructures, they must be able to do so in a way that allows them to remain compliant without being overwhelmed by their compliance obligations – regardless of where their data resides. Working with Airtel to bring IBM’s hybrid cloud offerings to their Indian multi-access edge computing customers will help them leverage 5G and edge opportunities such as: B. Innovate with greater speed and security.
