In a historic development that will see the transformation of cloud and AI in India, Bharti Airtel has declared a strategic relationship with IBM to greatly revamp its newly started Airtel Cloud platform. The partnership combines both the telco-grade infrastructure and sovereign clouds of Airtel with the next-generation hybrid cloud, AI, and enterprise software of IBM- building a very strong ecosystem in regulated industries of the need of secure, scalable, and AI-ready cloud solutions.
A Sovereign, Secure Cloud Meets AI-Optimized Infrastructure
Airtel Cloud that is already known to be highly secure with data residency compliance and resilience will now augment with the new generation Power11 autonomous and AI ready servers, as-a-Service, provided by IBM. By allowing enterprises to move mission-critical workloads with ease, this integration allows them to move workloads in especially sensitive areas such as banking, healthcare, government, and manufacturing, to prepare their infrastructure to incorporate generative AI.
Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Bharti Airtel, stressed the strategic value of the joint venture:
Airtel Cloud is developed as a highly secure and compliant platform to deliver new standards in the industry as an agile and resilient cloud platform. Today, with the addition of IBM partnership, we are ensuring we add considerable functionality in order to meet the special needs of various industries that need to move out of IBM Power systems and enable the possibility of AI.
As an extension of this growth, Airtel is raising its cloud availability zones in India to ten with four, but in its next-generation sustainable data centers. Also, two more Multizone Regions (MZRs) will shortly be launched in Mumbai and Chennai- adding to redundancy, disaster recovery, and fulfillment of India requirements as a data sovereign nation.
Hybrid Cloud and Artificial Intelligence of Regulated Industries
This collaboration is particularly important to companies dealing with the IBM Power legacy systems that have a core application like the IBM AIX, IBM i, Linux, and SAP ERP. In Airtel Cloud, such organizations are now able to migrate to an SAP Cloud ERP on IBM Power Virtual Server without sacrificing performance or compliance to digital transformation.
Rob Thomas, the SVP and Chief Commercial Officer of IBM, emphasized on how the two companies fit together:
The modernization of the enterprises nowadays must be carefully balanced in terms of the increasing regulated technology and AI demands. By teaming up with Bharti Airtel, customers in India will be able to take advantage of the innovative cloud services that IBM offers as workloads that are customized to meet their strategic business objectives.
Artificial Intelligence Scale Inferencing in Hybrid setups
Infrastructure is not the only area that the alliance opens access to more advanced AI functions through IBM watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI. Enterprises will be capable of executing AI inference workload in hybrid environments on-premise, in the cloud, on multiple clouds and on the edge, with the flexibility and performance. The combination of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat AI and the automation portfolio of IBM further enhances the implementation of the generative AI in central company processes and enhances productivity and innovation.
That hybrid cloud architecture also sets the stage of the future developments in quantum computing, which makes Indian business be ahead of the innovative technologies.
Empowering the Digital Sovereignty and Innovation of India.
The collaboration of Airtel sovereign cloud infrastructure and IBM experience in the field of providing cloud-based solutions on the enterprise level bridges a gap gap in the Indian digital ecosystem: that of reliable, compliant, and AI-focused cloud solutions that can withstand the strict requirements of the regulated sectors.
The increased Airtel Multizone Regions will make sure that mission-critical applications are available and resilient, and data residency requirements are completely satisfied- important factors in the case of the public sector and financial institutions.
Looking Ahead
With India gaining momentum in its digital transformation process, the Airtel-IBM relationship is a key move towards a reliable and future-proofed cloud platform. The collaboration helps enterprises to innovate at scale, safely, and sustainably, and reigns sovereignly, through the support of AI readiness, seamless migration, and hybrid interoperability.
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