Airtel & IBM to work together to bring secured Edge Cloud Services to Indian enterprises

Jammu Tawi: IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Bharti Airtel, a premier communications solutions provider in India with more than 358
million subscribers, today announced their intent to work together to deploy Airtel's edge computing platform in India, which will
include 120 network data centers across 20 cities. Once deployed, the platform is designed to enable large enterprises across
multiple industries including manufacturing and automotive to accelerate innovative solutions that deliver new value to their clients
and operations — securely at the edge.
Airtel's edge computing platform, deployed as a hybrid environment based on IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat OpenShift®,
extends secured and open cloud services wherever data resides. This can help improve business performance and customer
experience by reducing latency while addressing data security and sovereignty requirements – which is critical as workloads
increasingly shift to the edge.
The business value delivered by edge computing can be significantly enhanced when combined with 5G. In India, where 5G is
expected to be rolled out later this year, it has the potential to create a cumulative economic impact of $1 trillion by 2035.
Speaking about the work, Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO – 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 centers 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.”
Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, India's largest passenger car maker, intends to use the edge platform to increase accuracy and
efficiency for quality inspections on the factory floor. By deploying this platform, Maruti Suzuki expects to boost quality control and
ensure their data remains protected at the edge.