IBM has expanded its partnership with AT&T, announcing a new multi-year strategic alliance which will enable the moving of the telecoms giant's business applications to IBM Cloud.
Under the agreement, AT&T will leverage IBM's expertise and infrastructure support to modernise its Business Solutions applications, as well as utilise Red Hat's open source platform to manage workloads and applications.
In return, IBM is making AT&T Business its primary provider of software-defined networking, which the tech giant says will help transform its networking solutions with 5G, Edge Compute, IoT, as well as multi-cloud capabilities using Red Hat.
"In AT&T Business, we're constantly evolving to better serve business customers around the globe by securely connecting them to the digital capabilities they need," said Thaddeus Arroyo, CEO of AT&T Business. "This includes optimizing our core operations and modernizing our internal business applications to accelerate innovation.
"Through our collaboration with IBM, we're adopting open, flexible, cloud technologies, that will ultimately help accelerate our business leadership."
As AT&T Business's prime developer and cloud provider, IBM will help oversee the firm's on and off-premises IT infrastructure across both public and private clouds, which it says will enable the company to build and deploy application workloads and deliver innovative services.
The partnership will also see the pair collaborate on edge computing platforms, which will help enterprise customers capitalise on the power of 5G network speed, as well as the internet-connected devices and sensors on the edge of the network.
IBM's recent acquisition of Red Hat also means AT&T Business will have greater access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift platforms to provide the foundation for workload portability and interoperability across any vendor's cloud.
"Building on IBM's 20-year relationship with AT&T, today's agreement is another major step forward in delivering flexibility to AT&T Business so it can provide IBM and its customers with innovative services at a faster pace than ever before," said Arvind Krishna, SVP of IBM's Cloud and Cognitive Software division.
"We are proud to collaborate with AT&T Business, provide the scale and performance of our global footprint of cloud data centers, and deliver a common environment on which they can build once and deploy in any one of the appropriate footprints to be faster and more agile."
