The on-going collaboration will bolster the operator’s 5G launch, making enterprise services available from the start
India’s second biggest operator, Bharti Airtel, and IBM will collaboratively deploy Airtel’s edge computing platform in India, which will involve 120 network data centres in 20 cities. A study from Juniper Research, published in May, predicted that spending on global multi-access edge computing will grow from $8.8 billion (€8.74 billion) in 2022, to $22.7 billion by 2027.
It said the growth of 260% will be driven by increasing requirements for on-premises machine learning and low-latency connectivity, enabled by 5G technology.
Different sectors
Airtel’s edge platform is intended to support large enterprises including from manufacturing and automotive with solutions at the edge. Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO of Enterprise, Airtel Business, said, “As India gears up to experience 5G, we see a massive opportunity to help businesses across industries transform how they deliver goods and services.
“We have the largest network of edge data centres 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, making it significantly easier for companies to process workloads where their data resides.”
Airtel’s edge computing platform is developed as a hybrid environment based on IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat OpenShift, extending secure and open cloud services.
Airtel’s solution relies on IBM Maximo Visual Inspection which uses AI to assess quality. IBM Consulting will oversee systems integration for the IBM platform. Combining these capabilities, IBM’s and Airtel’s Digital engineering teams will build use cases that merge Airtel’s 5G connectivity and IBM’s hybrid cloud.
Customer at the ready
India’s largest passenger car maker, Maruti Suzuki India, reportedly intends to use the edge platform to increase accuracy and efficiency for quality inspections on the factory floor. Rajesh Uppal, Senior Executive Director of HR and IT, Maruti Suzuki, said, “We are excited to work with Airtel Business and IBM to set an even higher benchmark and explore the vast possibilities of deploying AI and analytics at the edge to augment the expertise of our workforce.”
Airtel has a long association with IBM: in August 2021, they announced the completion of the first phase of Airtel’s Open Hybrid Cloud Network, built with IBM and Red Hat’s hybrid cloud and cognitive enterprise capabilities. At the time, Airtel said this paves the way for it and its partners to offer new, cloud-based applications with better automation, availability, performance and scaling. Five milk producers signed up in December.
Earlier this year, IBM rolled out a companywide focus on hybrid cloud including on its Red Hat OpenShift assets.
Bharti Airtel has fared better than other competitors, such as the merged entity of Vodafone Idea, since Reliant Jio entered India’s mobile market in 2016.