AT&TとIBMがオープンソース、エッジ、SDN、IoTでコラボレーション

AT&T BusinessはIBMのSDNの主要プロバイダーになり、IBMはAT&Tのビジネスアプリケーションの改善とIBM Cloudへの移行を支援します。AT&T and IBM forged a new multi-year alliance that will blend IBM’s expertise in the enterprise with AT&T’s networking prowess. AT&T Business will become IBM’s primary provider of SDN and IBM will help AT&T improve and migrate its business applications to IBM Cloud. AT&T will also use Red Hat’s open source platform to manage workloads and collaborate with IBM on multi-cloud capabilities around 5G, edge computing, and IoT. AT&T’s expanded usage of Red Hat comes just a week after IBM finalized its $34 billion acquisition of the hybrid cloud provider, making it the first major partnership in the telco space since IBM gained control of Red Hat. Red Hat is an “integral part of today’s announcement” because AT&T can use the technology to convert its business applications with containers, microservices, and more portable infrastructure, said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “AT&T’s always been a big proponent of open source.” Other factors also contributed to the alliance, including IBM’s weakened position in the cloud market when compared to the major hyperscale providers and the effective reach of IBM’s cloud network with assistance from AT&T and its burgeoning 5G network, Nag said. AT&T Business CEO Thaddeus Arroyo said the alliance will help the operator improve its core operations and modernize its internal business applications. “Through our collaboration with IBM we’re adopting open, flexible, cloud technologies that will ultimately help accelerate our business leadership,” he said in a prepared statement. Building a 5G network is expensive and that places pressure on network operators like AT&T to develop more services, Nag explained. “It’s great to build a network but unless you have applications and workloads riding that network it’s really a great highway with no traffic on it.” AT&T’s alliance with IBM brings the operator one step closer to modernized services and workloads running at the edge of the network, Nag said. “The 5G network itself is not going to make money and will eventually get commoditized,” he said. “So in order to drive margins and expansion it’s really all about services and servicing workloads.” IBM will now be the primary developer and cloud provider for AT&T Business’ internal applications and help manage its IT infrastructure — including on- and off-premises and across private and public clouds. The agreement also calls for the companies to collaborate on edge computing platforms to help businesses benefit from higher speeds, increased reliability, and reduced latency in a 5G environment. Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software at IBM, noted that the companies have worked together for 20 years and described the new agreement as a “major step forward” and expansion of their partnership. By collaborating with AT&T Business, IBM can “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,” Krishna said in a prepared statement.