Airtel, IBM partner to deliver Secured Edge Cloud Services In India

IBM and Airtel have now tied up to deploy Airtel’s edge computing platform in India, which will enable large enterprises across multiple industries which includes manufacturing and automotive, to accelerate innovative solutions.

To begin with, Maruti Suzuki, 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 make sure its data remains protected at the edge.

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."

Rajesh Uppal, Senior Executive Director, HR and IT, Maruti Suzuki, said, "At Maruti Suzuki, we continuously strive to meet the highest quality standards by ensuring our processes and quality control are well above industry standards. Technology is a key enabler in this journey, helping boost quality and efficiency and deliver the next-gen user experience. We are excited to work with Airtel Business and IBM to set an even higher benchmark and explore the vast possibilities of deploying AI and analytics at the edge to augment the expertise of our workforce".

Airtel’s edge computing platform in India includes 120 network data centers across 20 cities under its data center arm Nxtra Digital.

The business value delivered by edge computing can be majorly enhanced when combined with 5G. The work between IBM and Airtel around embracing 5G was revealed at Think Mumbai. Airtel’s solution leverages IBM Maximo Visual Inspection for AI-enabled quality inspection.

IBM Consulting is to lead the systems integration for the IBM Platform. Via this hybrid cloud platform and IBM Consulting industry expertise and access to best-in-class technology and partners, IBM and Airtel Digital Engineering teams will build use cases that leverage Airtel’s 5G connectivity and IBM’s hybrid cloud capabilities to address the pressing business issues faced by the enterprise clients.

Harnessing Airtel’s 5G connectivity and highly secured edge computing capabilities from IBM can enable enterprises to deploy and manage workloads in near real-time.

Industries which include financial services, telecommunications, government, and healthcare, can benefit from reduced latency, increased connectivity speeds, and high availability.