Bharti Airtel completes first phase of open-hybrid cloud network deployment through IBM and Red Hat

Telecommunications giant Bharti Airtel on Tuesday announced that it has completed the first phase of deployment of an open-hybrid cloud network which it is building in partnership with IBM and Red Hat.

Back in May this year, TechCircle reported that the Armonk based technology company and its open-source solutions subsidiary Red Hat will build a cloud based telecom network for Bharti Airtel to enable easier 5G adoption.

The new network cloud would help the Delhi based telecom company to offer better network performance as well as reduce network lag and improve bandwidth.

Now, with the completion of the first phase,  IBM said that Airtel and its ecosystem partners would have a flexible foundation to build and deploy new applications on the cloud network, a statement said.

Under this first phase, IBM and Airtel have co-developed a “single-click” automated hybrid cloud design, along with operations termed as ‘light touch’. These capabilities would help Airtel to improve network connectivity and accelerate core network transformation, the company said. This would also result in being able to speed launch of new cloud services and onboard new customers quickly.

The architecture of Airtel’s hybrid cloud has been built on Red Hat’s OpenStack and OpenShift and would help Airtel manage communications across distributed environments when completed. The open architecture would also help Airtel with open source Radio Access Network for better interoperability between ecosystem partners.

“By adopting an open hybrid cloud network with the support of IBM and Red Hat we are building a scalable and future-ready network to serve our customers with best-in-class services,” said Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel.

According to a 2019 study by Hyderabad based intelligence firm Mordor Intelligence, the telecom cloud market was worth $ 21.93 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $62.28 billion by 2025, at a compounded annual growth rate of 19.9%. Another study by Technology Business Research’s telecom market forecast from 2018 says telecom operators worldwide are expected to spend over $111 billion by 2022 in upgrading their networks and cloud platforms.

Read: IT firms to increase expenditure on hybrid cloud to 49% by 2023: IBM

“Together with Bharti Airtel, our most recent automation benchmarks have demonstrated our approach can shorten RAN service deployment times from weeks to a few days,” Steve Canepa, global managing director, communications sector and worldwide head of telecommunications, media and entertainment industry, IBM said.