IBM and Bharti Airtel, a communications solutions provider in India with more than 358 million subscribers, announced its intention to work together to deliver 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 are sure to bring new value to their customers and operations 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 customer experience by reducing latency while meeting data security and sovereignty requirements, which is 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 roll out later this year, it has the potential to have a cumulative economic impact of $1 trillion by 2035.
Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO of Airtel Business, says of the work: “As India prepares for 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 their data is located .”
Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, India’s passenger car manufacturer, intends to use the Edge platform to increase the accuracy and efficiency of quality inspections on the factory floor. By deploying this platform, Maruti Suzuki expects to improve quality control and ensure their data stays protected at the edge.
“At Maruti Suzuki we continually strive to meet the highest quality standards by ensuring our processes and quality controls are well above industry standards. Technology is a key factor on this journey, helping to increase quality and efficiency, and to deliver the next-generation user experience. We are excited to partner with Airtel Business and IBM to raise the bar even further and explore the tremendous possibilities of using AI and analytics at the edge to expand the expertise of our people,” said Rajesh Uppal, Senior Executive Director, HR and IT, Maruti Suzuki.
The collaboration between IBM and Airtel around the rollout of 5G was announced 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 technology and partners, the IBM and Airtel Digital engineering teams will develop use cases leveraging Airtel’s 5G connectivity and IBM’s hybrid cloud capabilities to address the pressing business problems of 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.
“As organizations, particularly in regulated industries, work to modernize their infrastructures, they need to be able to do so in a way that allows them to remain compliant without being overwhelmed by their compliance obligations, regardless of where they are their data resides,” says Howard Boville , head of the IBM Cloud platform. “Working with Airtel to bring IBM’s hybrid cloud offerings to their Indian multi-access edge computing customers will help them capitalize on 5G and edge opportunities such as: B. Innovate with greater speed and security.”
Learn more about IBM’s hybrid cloud capabilities here.
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