Airtel has recently announced a strategic partnership with IBM to enhance its newly launched Airtel Cloud service. This collaboration will combine Airtel Cloud's high reliability, security, and data residency advantages in the telecommunications sector with IBM's specialized expertise in cloud solutions, advanced infrastructure, and artificial intelligence inference software.
According to Airtel's statement, both parties will work to help enterprises in the regulatory industry expand their AI workloads more effectively, ensuring interoperability between different infrastructures, including on-premises, cloud, and edge computing environments. Airtel Cloud users will be able to use IBM's Power Systems as a Service, equipped with IBM Power11 AI-ready servers, to support critical applications such as banking and healthcare. This hybrid platform can support enterprise workloads including IBM AIX, IBM i, Linux, and SAP Cloud ERP. At the same time, this collaboration will also help SAP customers smoothly migrate to SAP Cloud ERP on IBM Power virtual servers.
Gopal Vittal, Deputy Chairman and Managing Director of Airtel, said: "Through our collaboration with IBM, we are adding powerful capabilities to our cloud platform to meet the unique needs of customers across multiple industries, especially those that need to migrate from IBM Power systems and achieve AI readiness."
In addition, Gopal mentioned that they will expand the available regions in India from four to ten and host them in the upcoming next-generation sustainable data centers. Both parties plan to establish two new multi-region zones (MZRs) in Mumbai and Chennai. MZRs will provide cloud infrastructure at different physical locations to ensure the safety of data and operations in case of regional failures. This will help Indian companies meet data residency requirements and ensure the continuous operation of critical applications.
IBM's AI inference software is based on IBM watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI, enabling Indian customers to perform AI inference in hybrid cloud environments. The software provides advanced Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, along with automated tools for generative AI. Customers can also access Red Hat's hybrid solutions, while IBM's architecture supports future innovations in AI and quantum computing.
Key points:
🌟 Airtel has reached a strategic partnership with IBM to enhance the capabilities of Airtel Cloud service.
🏢 Both parties will expand the cloud infrastructure available regions in India, increasing from four to ten, to meet the security and data residency needs of enterprises.
🤖 IBM's AI inference software will support Indian enterprises in handling AI workloads in hybrid cloud environments.