Airtel and IBM to work together on Secured Edge Cloud Services for Indian Enterprises

Digital Desk: With more than 358 million subscribers, Bharti Airtel is a leading provider of communications solutions in India. Today, IBM and Bharti Airtel announced their intention to collaborate to deploy Airtel's edge computing platform in India, which will include 120 network data centres spread across 20 cities.

The platform is made to allow large businesses in a variety of sectors, like manufacturing and the automotive industry, to expedite creative solutions that provide new value to their operations and clients while remaining safe at the edge once it has been deployed.

The edge computing platform from Airtel offers safe and open cloud services wherever data is located. It is implemented as a hybrid environment based on IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat OpenShift®.

Decreasing bandwidth and satisfying data security and sovereignty needs, which are crucial as workloads progressively move to the edge, can aid in enhancing corporate performance and customer experience.

When used in connection with 5G, edge computing can considerably increase the business value it provides. By 2035, 5G in India, where it is anticipated to be deployed later this year, may have a cumulative economic impact of $1 trillion.

Speaking about the workplace, Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO - Enterprise, Airtel Business, said, "We see a huge opportunity to enable businesses across industries change providing of goods and services as India gets up to experience 5G. We have the largest network of edge data centers in India available under the Nxtra brand, and we'll use our collaboration with IBM to help Indian businesses more effectively address their crucial business needs. This will make it much simpler for businesses to process workloads where their data is located. The largest manufacturer of passenger cars in India, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, plans to employ the edge platform to improve the precision and effectiveness of quality inspections carried out on the production line. Maruti Suzuki hopes to improve quality control and guarantee that their data is secure at the edge by implementing this platform."

"At Maruti Suzuki, we strive to meet the highest quality standards by ensuring that our processes and quality control are far above industry standards." We are pleased to engage with Airtel Business and IBM to establish an even higher benchmark and explore the wide possibilities of employing AI and analytics at the edge to supplement the knowledge of our employees," said Rajesh Uppal, Maruti Suzuki's Senior Executive Director, HR and IT.

The collaboration between IBM and Airtel to embrace 5G was revealed today at Think Mumbai. For AI-enabled quality inspection, Airtel's solution makes use of IBM Maximo Visual Inspection.

IBM Consulting will be in charge of system integration for the IBM platform. IBM and Airtel Digital engineering teams will build use cases that leverage Airtel's 5G connectivity and IBM's hybrid cloud capabilities to address pressing business issues faced by enterprise clients using this hybrid cloud platform and IBM Consulting's industry expertise and access to best-in-class technology and partners.

Using Airtel's 5G connectivity and IBM's highly secure edge computing capabilities, organizations can deploy and manage workloads in near-real time. Reduced bandwidth, high availability, and improved connectivity speeds can help industries such as telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, and government.

"As businesses, particularly those in regulated industries, work to modernize their infrastructures, they must be able to do so in a way that allows them to stay compliant while not becoming overburdened by their compliance obligations – regardless of where their data resides, working with Airtel to bring IBM's hybrid cloud capabilities to its Indian multi-access edge compute customers would enable them to grasp opportunities presented by 5G and edge, such as faster and more secure innovation," said Howard Boville, Head of IBM Cloud Platform.