AT&T partners with IBM and Microsoft, focuses on network capabilities

-
-
23.08.2019

Before this season, AT&T finalized a deal to divest itself of its 31 info centers for about $ 1.1 billion. Now it has dumped its information center company, the firm participates with two of the biggest suppliers of these: Microsoft and IBM.

IBM and AT&T this week declared a strategic alliance where AT&T’s network and IBM Cloud will join to provide software-defined community (SDN) providers, such as giving IBM Cloud access to AT&T’s 5G network.

In return, IBM will make AT&T its primary supplier of 5G, edge computing, and net of things (IoT) providers and assist handle AT&T’s whole infrastructure footprint, including third party cloud solutions, utilizing Red Hat’s open-source tools to manage the network. This isn’t really new, as AT&T was using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for a certain time.

In terms of Microsoft, Azure will become the preferred cloud provider for AT&T’s non-network applications. This means non-network infrastructure applications will transition to Microsoft Azure, and”much” of AT&T’s workforce will proceed to Microsoft 365 cloud-based collaboration.

AT&T focuses on core system capacities

AT&T has the objective of getting a”public-cloud first” business and plans to migrate most non-network workloads into the public cloud by 2024. Like so many other companies, AT&T wants to get out of running its own data centers to focus on core network capabilities. Microsoft is your logical choice, since it has Office 365 and there is no viable option.

As with the IBM deal, AT&T and Microsoft have many more future plans and ambitions to work outside, which includes 5G and advantage computing networks.

“AT&T is in the forefront of specifying how advances in technology, such as 5G and border computing, will change every aspect of work and life,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. “The world’s leading firms run on our cloud, and we are thrilled that AT&T chose Microsoft to accelerate its creation ”

The deal isn’t exactly a first. Verizon dumped its data centres a few years ago to Equinix and last year signed a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create AWS its favored public cloud provider with the guarantee of migrating more 1,000 business-critical applications and backend systems to AWS within the offer.

Connect the Network World communities on Facebook and LinkedIn to remark on topics which are top of mind.

Login to start.