Bharti Airtel said that it has completed the first phase of its Open Hybrid Cloud Network built with IBM and Red Hat’s portfolio of hybrid cloud and cognitive enterprise capabilities.
Bharti Airtel said that it has completed the first phase of its Open Hybrid Cloud Network built with IBM and Red Hat’s portfolio of hybrid cloud and cognitive enterprise capabilities.
With this deployment, Airtel’s customers and ecosystem partners will have a flexibility 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.
Telecom operators worldwide are expected to spend over US$111 Billion by 2022 upgrading their network cloud and platform.
India’s telecom sector, in the efforts of enabling policies including more quantum of the spectrum, is set to establish new benchmarks in the next-generation network deployments and service delivery.
To handle customer demand for seamless connectivity services and the continuing exponential growth in data traffic, Airtel is currently involved in executing a massive cloudification programme to make its network agile, robust and scalable.
“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.” said CTO, Bharti Airtel, Randeep Sekhon.
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, enables Airtel to manage communications across distributed network environments. 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, as per an official statement.
IBM Services is setting up the infrastructure, designing and implementing Airtel’s open hybrid cloud network and executing overall program management.
“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” said Steve Canepa, Global Managing Director, Communications Sector and Worldwide Head of Telecommunications, Media & Entertainment Industry, IBM.
