News

IBM Expands Hybrid Cloud Initiative with 5G Push

• By David Ramel
• 11/06/2020

Having gone all in on the hybrid cloud, IBM is expanding its new initiative with a partnership push to roll out 5G wireless implementations as part of the new IBM Cloud for Telecommunications.

IBM, often trailing leaders AWS, Azure and Google Cloud in industry surveys and market reports, made big news last months when it announced the company was splitting into two parts, one just focusing on the hybrid cloud and AI and one a spin-off for managed infrastructure.

"Going all in on our open hybrid cloud platform and AI solutions will create value for our clients, our company, and our shareholders," said CEO Arvind Krishna in a post at the time. "This change best positions IBM for improved growth."

Just about a month later, IBM announced the new IBM Cloud for Telecommunications, described as "an open, hybrid cloud architecture designed to help telecommunications providers address the specific challenges of the highly-regulated industry: accelerating business transformation, enhancing digital client engagement and improving agility as they modernize their enterprise applications and infrastructure to unlock the power of 5G and edge."

Designed to help accelerate 5G and edge innovations, it provides an IBM-centric ecosystem populated by more than 35 partners.

That ecosystem will be based on IBM tech including:

• IBM Cloud Satellite, now in beta, which helps organizations launch consistent cloud services on-premises, at the edge and in public cloud environments
• Red Hat OpenShift, a family of containerization software products acquired with IBM's acquisition of Red Hat, which provided the impetus for the hybrid cloud/AI corporate shake-up
• IBM Edge Application Manager, an autonomous management solution to enable AI, analytics and IoT enterprise workloads to be deployed and remotely managed, delivering real-time analysis and insight at scale
• IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager, a unified telecommunications cloud management platform designed to support OSS transformation for communications service providers (CSPs) who want to increase automation and reduce their operating expenses (OpEx)

"The holistic hybrid cloud offering will be complemented by our ecosystem partners' software and technology, and enable mission critical workloads to be managed consistently from the network core to the edge to position telecom providers to extract more value from their data while they drive innovation for their customers," IBM said.

IBM's move follows other similar efforts by cloud providers. For one example, Microsoft recently touted its Azure cloud as a "carrier-grade" platform for telecommunications companies deploying 5G.