IBM and AT&T Form Multi-Year Strategic Alliance To Deliver New, Innovative Services

AT&T Business to become IBM’s primary provider of software-defined networking while IBM will be its primary developer and cloud provider.

Building on their 20-year existing relationship, IBM and AT&T got into a multi-year cloud alliance recently to enable moving AT&T Business applications to IBM Cloud. Under this agreement signed in IBM’s Q2, 2019, AT&T Communication will leverage IBM’s expertise to modernize AT&T Business Solutions’ internal software applications that will facilitate easy migrations to the IBM Cloud. IBM will also make available its infrastructure for AT&T that will employ Red Hat’s open-source platform to handle workloads and applications. IBM had announced the acquisition of Red Hat earlier at the beginning of the third quarter of 2019.

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Roles of the Parties Involved

IBM will serve as the primary developer and cloud provider for AT&T Business’s operational applications. It will also assist in managing the AT&T Communications IT infrastructure, on and off-premises and across different clouds – both private and public. The strategic alliance, the aforementioned arrangement, in particular, will empower AT&T to deploy internal application workloads and deliver new, innovative services.

“We are proud to collaborate with AT&T Business, provide the scale and performance of our global footprint of cloud data centers, and deliver a common environment on which they can build once and deploy in any one of the appropriate footprints to be faster and more agile,” Arvind Krishna, Senior VP, Cloud and Cognitive Software at IBM said.

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AT&T is already the strategic global networking provider for IBM. In addition, it will be made the primary provider of software-defined networking by IBM. AT&T Business will utilize its latest technologies such as 5G, Edge Compute, and IoT as well as multi-cloud capabilities using Red Hat to help transform IBM’s networking solutions. As a result of the collaboration between the two organizations on the edge computing platform front, enterprise clients would be able to capitalize on the power of 5G network speeds and the internet-connected devices and sensors at the edge of the network. In the near future, 5G will enable enterprises to transmit data rapidly to and from multiple clouds and billions of edge devices with increased reliability and security, reduced latency, and dramatic improvements in bandwidth. Businesses would be able to optimize processes across numerous industries and transform the user experience for their customers.

“In AT&T Business, we’re constantly evolving to better serve business customers around the globe by securely connecting them to the digital capabilities they need. This includes optimizing our core operations and modernizing our internal business applications to accelerate innovation,” remarked Thaddeus Arroyo, CEO of AT&T Business. He also went on to add that through their collaboration with IBM, they would be adopting open, flexible, cloud technologies that will ultimately help accelerate their business leadership and benefit their customers.

The clients of AT&T include around 3 million global businesses, containing nearly all of the Fortune 1000 companies. The alliance between the two companies will allow AT&T Business to better serve its enterprise customers with innovative services at a much faster pace.

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