Days after closing its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, IBM announced that it has inked a multi-year strategic alliance that is reportedly worth billions.
IBM will be the primary developer and cloud provider for AT&T Business's operational applications and will help manage the AT&T Communications IT infrastructure, on and off-premise, and across different clouds, private and public.
Under the agreement, IBM says, AT&T Communications will use its expertise to modernize AT&T Business Solutions' internal software applications, enabling migrations to the IBM Cloud. In addition, IBM will provide infrastructure to support AT&T Business's applications. AT&T Business will utilize Red Hat's open source platform to manage workloads and applications. The improvements will allow AT&T Business to better serve enterprise customers.
IBM will also make AT&T Business its primary provider of software defined networking. AT&T Business will help transform IBM's networking solutions with their latest technologies including 5G, Edge Compute, and IOT as well as multi-cloud capabilities using Red Hat. This builds on the existing relationship where AT&T Business is IBM's strategic global networking provider.
The two companies will also collaborate on edge computing platforms, which will help enterprise clients capitalize on the power of 5G network speeds and the internet-connected devices and sensors at the edge of the network. Using 5G, enterprises will one day be able to rapidly transmit data to and from multiple clouds and billions of edge devices with increased reliability and security, reduced latency and dramatic improvements in bandwidth. This will eventually help businesses transform the user experience for their customers and optimize processes across industries from retail to financial services, transportation to manufacturing, to healthcare and beyond.
AT&T Business has a strong commitment to utilizing open source technologies. As part of the relationship, AT&T Business will continue to use Red Hat's open source platform to manage the workloads associated with AT&T Business's internal applications.
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