Bharti Airtel and Cloud major IBM have announced to deploy Airtel’s edge computing platform in the country, as India prepares for the 5G initiation. This will include 120 network data centres across twenty cities. To start with, Airtel edge computing platform backed by IBM Cloud Satellite will power Maruti Suzuki’s policies to streamline plant productivity and quality operations.
The CEO of Airtel Business, Ganesh Lakshmi Narayanan said, “As India gears up to experience 5G, we witness a huge opportunity to help business across industries transform how they deliver goods and services. We have the widest network of edge data centers available in India under the Nxtra brand and we will leverage our work with IBM to help Indian businesses address their critical business needs with greater efficiency.”
Once deployed, the platform is designed to enable large enterprises across numerous industries along with manufacturing and auto motive to strengthen innovative solutions that deliver new value to their clients and operations. By 2035, 5G has the potential to create a cumulative economic impact of $1 trillion in India.
The chief of IBM Cloud platform, Howard Boville said that associating with Airtel to bring IBM’s hybrid cloud offerings to their Indian multi-access edge compute customers will help them embrace the opportunities presented by 5G and edge, like innovating with greater speed and security. Airtel’s edge computing platform, deployed as a hybrid environment is based on IBM Cloud satellite and Red Hat OpenShift.