Bharti Airtel Announces a Strategic Partnership with IBM to Augment Airtel Cloud
Bharti Airtel, one of India’s leading telecommunications service
providers has entered into a strategic partnership with IBM to augment its
recently launched Airtel Cloud. The partnership is expected to bring together
the telco-grade reliability, high security, and data residency of Airtel Cloud
with IBM’s leadership in cloud solutions, and advanced infrastructure and
software technologies designed for AI inferencing.
Together, Airtel and IBM will aim to enable enterprises in
regulated industries to scale AI workloads more efficiently, delivering
interoperability across infrastructure including on-premise, in the cloud,
across multiple clouds and at the edge.
Through this partnership, Airtel Cloud customers will be able to
deploy the IBM Power systems portfolio as-a-Service, including the
latest-generation IBM Power11 autonomous, AI-ready servers for
mission-critical applications in regulated industries like banking,
healthcare, government and others. The Power11 hybrid platform will also
support critical enterprise workloads including IBM Power AIX, IBM i, Linux and
SAP Cloud ERP. Additionally, this partnership will help enable SAP customers on
IBM Power with their enterprise resource planning transformation to SAP Cloud
ERP on IBM Power Virtual Server.
Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman & Managing Director, Bharti
Airtel, said, “Airtel Cloud is
designed to be highly secure and compliant, setting new industry benchmarks as
an agile and resilient cloud platform. Today, with the IBM partnership, we are
adding substantial capabilities to our Cloud platform to address the unique needs
of several industries that require migration from IBM Power Systems and allow
for AI readiness. With this partnership, we are also extending the footprint of
our availability zones in India from four to ten, hosting these on our own
next-gen sustainable data centres. We will, together, also establish two new
Multizone Regions (MZRs) in Mumbai and Chennai soon.”
Rob Thomas, SVP and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM, said, “Enterprises today
need to balance modernisation with the growing regulated technology and AI
requirements. Through our partnership with Bharti Airtel, clients across India
can leverage IBM’s innovative cloud offerings designed for workloads
that address their strategic business priorities. Together, we will
help clients drive true transformation in the era of AI.”
With IBM’s software stack for AI inferencing, built on IBM
watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI, clients in India will have the ability to run
AI inference across hybrid cloud environments. These capabilities are coupled
with IBM’s enterprise-grade cloud platform with innovative IaaS and PaaS
offerings, as well as IBM’s automation portfolio designed for accelerating the
impact of generative AI in core enterprise workflows to drive productivity.
Customers will be able to access Red Hat’s hybrid cloud solutions including Red
Hat OpenShift Virtualisation, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat AI. Beyond these
capabilities, IBM’s hybrid cloud architecture is designed to help clients
enable future innovation in AI and quantum computing.
Airtel Multi Zone Regions will help Indian enterprises
strengthen their resilience, address data residency requirements and keep
mission-critical workloads and applications up and running at all times.
Together, the Airtel and IBM partnership will enable Indian enterprises to
accelerate digital innovation at scale.
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