IBM and Bharti Airtel have completed the first phase of Airtel’s Open Hybrid Cloud Network built with IBM and Red Hat's portfolio of hybrid cloud and cognitive enterprise capabilities, announced IBM on Tuesday.
With this deployment, Airtel’s customers and ecosystem partners will have a flexible foundation to build and deploy innovative applications on the cloud network. They will also gain enhanced performance, availability, automation, and scaling, all the way from the core to the network edge.
Airtel has been working with IBM to integrate end-to-end advanced automation and plans to embed AI capabilities in the future as a core part of its network transformation. In this first phase, IBM and Airtel have co-developed a “single-click” automated hybrid cloud design and deployment capability and “light touch” operations. This will enable Airtel to rapidly improve network connectivity and accelerate its continued core network transformation. As a result, Airtel will be able to scale to meet increased customer demand, onboard new partners more quickly, and speed the launch of innovative cloud-based services.
The architecture, which is built on open source technology, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift, enables Airtel to manage communications across distributed network environments. This gives Airtel’s customers and ecosystem partners the flexibility to create more targeted, cutting edge solutions in the cloud or on-premises location of their choosing. Additionally, this open architecture enables Airtel to embrace open source Radio Access Network (RAN) to improve interoperability for ecosystem partners using RAN equipment.
Once fully implemented, Bharti Airtel’s Open Hybrid Cloud Network will help millions of partners and customers across industries rapidly harness the power of emerging technologies like 5G and edge computing. For example, a customer could use the network to leverage AI, IoT, and edge computing capabilities to power applications that can deliver better insights from factory floors or enable remote doctor visits.
Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel
Airtel has been at the forefront of adopting leading-edge technologies to modernize our network architecture. By adopting an open hybrid cloud network with the support of IBM and Red Hat we are building a scalable and future-ready network to serve our customers with best-in-class services.
Steve Canepa, Global Managing Director, Communications Sector and Worldwide Head of Telecommunications, Media & Entertainment Industry, IBM
Together with Bharti Airtel, our most recent automation benchmarks have demonstrated our approach can shorten RAN service deployment times from weeks to a few days -- compelling improvements in innovation for Bharti and their customers.
