Airtel's edge computing platform will be deployed as a hybrid environment based on IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat OpenShift

Bhartiairtel

Airtel Centre, which serves as Bharti Foundation’s headquarters. (Credit: Bhartiairtel/Wikimedia Commons)

IBM and Bharti Airtel (Airtel) announced a collaboration to deploy the latter’s edge computing platform in India, that will enable large enterprises across various industries to expedite innovative solutions.

The edge computing platform of the Indian telecommunications firm will include 120 network data centres across 20 cities in India.

Based on IBM Cloud Satellite as well as Red Hat OpenShift, the platform will be deployed as a hybrid environment for extending secured and open cloud services wherever data is located.

By reducing latency and addressing data security and sovereignty requirements, the platform is expected to aid in enhancing business performance and customer experience.

Airtel business enterprise CEO Ganesh Lakshminarayanan 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.”

The engineering teams at IBM and Airtel Digital will develop use cases that will utilise Airtel’s 5G connectivity and the former’s hybrid cloud capabilities to help enterprise clients address their pressing business issues.

Airtel’s solution also utilises IBM Maximo Visual Inspection for artificial intelligence (AI) enabled quality inspection.

IBM cloud platform head Howard Boville said: “As businesses – particularly those in regulated industries – work to modernise 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.

“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.”