Airtel and IBM forge a new era with AI-ready hybrid cloud expansion in India

Bharti Airtel partners with IBM to enhance its Airtel Cloud platform, integrating IBM’s Power systems and AI infrastructure to accelerate enterprise digital transformation across regulated sectors in India.

Bharti Airtel has announced a strategic partnership with IBM aimed at significantly enhancing its Airtel Cloud platform. The collaboration combines Airtel’s telecom-grade reliability and robust data residency with IBM’s advanced cloud solutions and AI-focused infrastructure, targeting enterprises in regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, and government. This move is designed to allow these sectors to scale AI workloads more efficiently while maintaining compliance and security.

Central to the partnership is the integration of IBM’s Power systems portfolio into Airtel Cloud as-a-service. This includes the latest-generation IBM Power11 autonomous, AI-ready servers, which are engineered to handle mission-critical applications. These servers support various enterprise workloads running IBM Power AIX, IBM i, Linux, and SAP Cloud ERP platforms. The collaboration will also facilitate SAP customers on IBM Power systems in their transformation journey, migrating to SAP Cloud ERP on IBM Power Virtual Server. The incorporation of IBM’s technologies is expected to imbue Airtel Cloud with enhanced AI inferencing capabilities, leveraging IBM watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI for hybrid cloud environments, thereby promoting productivity through automation and generative AI integration.

To bolster data security and operational resilience further, Airtel plans to significantly expand its cloud infrastructure footprint in India by increasing the number of availability zones from four to ten within its next-generation sustainable data centres. In tandem with IBM, Airtel is establishing two new multizone regions (MZRs) in Mumbai and Chennai. These new MZRs will consist of multiple independent data centres, strategically distributed to support data residency requirements while ensuring uninterrupted operation of critical enterprise workloads. This expansion underscores an effort to offer high availability and disaster resilience crucial for regulated industries, which demand stringent compliance and continuous uptime.

According to Bharti Airtel’s vice chairman and managing director, the partnership sets new industry benchmarks by delivering an agile and secure cloud platform tailored for AI readiness and migration from IBM Power Systems. IBM’s senior vice president and chief commercial officer highlighted that the collaboration is expected to support Indian enterprises as they balance the demands of modernisation with the complexities of regulated technology and AI requirements.

Beyond infrastructure, the partnership also extends to software and platform services, allowing Airtel Cloud customers to leverage IBM’s enterprise-grade innovation stack. This includes infrastructure as-a-service, platform as-a-service, automation tools, and hybrid cloud solutions such as Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation and Red Hat AI. IBM’s hybrid cloud architecture is designed not only to meet current AI needs but also to enable future advancements in quantum computing, offering a forward-looking technology foundation for its clients.

This strategic partnership positions Airtel Cloud as a competitive and secure option for enterprises in India seeking to capitalise on AI and cloud technologies within regulatory boundaries, supported by scalable, interoperable hybrid cloud infrastructure and services. It also reflects a broader trend in the Indian market where telcos and technology providers are expanding cloud capabilities to cater to the growing demand for secure, compliant, and intelligent cloud solutions.

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Source: Noah Wire Services