Bharti Airtel, one of India’s leading telecommunications service providers has entered into a strategic partnership with IBM (NYSE:IBM) to augment its recently launched Airtel Cloud. The partnership is expected to bring together the telco-grade reliability, high security, and data residency of Airtel Cloud with IBM’s leadership in cloud solutions, and advanced infrastructure and software technologies designed for AI inferencing.
Together, Airtel and IBM will aim to enable enterprises in regulated industries to scale AI workloads more efficiently, delivering interoperability across infrastructure including on-premise, in the cloud, across multiple clouds and at the edge.
Through this partnership, Airtel Cloud customers will be able to deploy the IBM Power systems portfolio as-a-Service, including the latest-generation IBM Power11 autonomous, AI-ready servers for mission-critical applications in regulated industries like banking, healthcare, government and others. The Power11 hybrid platform will also support critical enterprise workloads including IBM Power AIX, IBM i, Linux and SAP Cloud ERP. Additionally, this partnership will help enable SAP customers on IBM Power with their enterprise resource planning transformation to SAP Cloud ERP on IBM Power Virtual Server.
Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman & Managing Director, Bharti Airtel, said, “Airtel Cloud is designed to be highly secure and compliant, setting new industry benchmarks as an agile and resilient cloud platform. Today, with the IBM partnership, we are adding substantial capabilities to our Cloud platform to address the unique needs of several industries that require migration from IBM Power Systems and allow for AI readiness. With this partnership, we are also extending the footprint of our availability zones in India from four to ten, hosting these on our own next-gen sustainable data centres. We will, together, also establish two new Multizone Regions (MZRs) in Mumbai and Chennai soon.”
Rob Thomas, SVP and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM, said, “Enterprises today need to balance modernisation with the growing regulated technology and AI requirements. Through our partnership with Bharti Airtel, clients across India can leverage IBM’s innovative cloud offerings designed for workloads that address their strategic business priorities. Together, we will help clients drive true transformation in the era of AI.”
With IBM’s software stack for AI inferencing, built on IBM watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI, clients in India will have the ability to run AI inference across hybrid cloud environments. These capabilities are coupled with IBM’s enterprise-grade cloud platform with innovative IaaS and PaaS offerings, as well as IBM’s automation portfolio designed for accelerating the impact of generative AI in core enterprise workflows to drive productivity. Customers will be able to access Red Hat’s hybrid cloud solutions including Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat AI. Beyond these capabilities, IBM’s hybrid cloud architecture is designed to help clients enable future innovation in AI and quantum computing.
Airtel Multi Zone Regions will help Indian enterprises strengthen their resilience, address data residency requirements and keep mission-critical workloads and applications up and running at all times. Together, the Airtel and IBM partnership will enable Indian enterprises to accelerate digital innovation at scale.