New Delhi, May 12, 2020: In simultaneous announcements yesterday, leading Indian telecom providers, Vodafone India and Bharti Airtel announced that  they had opted  for the  Open Universal Hybrid Cloud, powered by IBM and Red Hat   to fuel their  core network functions.
The Open Universal Hybrid Cloud is a hybrid cloud platform that is based on open technology and open standards from IBM and Red Hat. The platform  enables IT and network applications to run on a common cloud architecture leading to improved  return on investment and optimal capital and operational expenditure.
Vodafone Idea
It enables Vodafone Idea to better serve its more than 300 million subscribers by simplifying and transforming its IT and telecom network operations. The new platform is deployed across many distributed Vodafone Idea cloud microsites across India, as well as its central IT operations which are also run by IBM.|
Yesterday’s announcement brings it all together, with a single Open Universal Hybrid Cloud supporting both IT and network function within Vodafone Idea, and enabling those capabilities to be taken to market with extreme agility.
Says Vishant Vora, CTO of Vodafone Idea Ltd: "Through our collaboration with IBM and Red Hat, we are adopting open standards and leading with highly automated, machine learning based hybrid cloud solutions to create India’s first Open Universal Hybrid Cloud that supports our most mission-critical operations across Network and IT systems, and B2B Enterprise customer offerings. This is part of our transformation journey to set up a robust, future ready network."
Airtel
With the new network cloud, Airtel intends to deliver a better customer experience through enhanced network performance, improved availability, operations automation and scaling the network to the edge. This is designed to reduce latency and improve bandwidth availability and automation, thereby strengthening the overall quality of the network.|
Using IBM and Red Hat’s portfolio of hybrid cloud and cognitive enterprise capabilities, Airtel plans to adopt an open cloud architecture that uses Red Hat OpenStack Platform for all network workloads and Red Hat OpenShift for newer containerized workloads. It will also tap into Red Hat's ecosystem of network OEMs. In the future, Airtel’s open hybrid cloud platform is expected to help enable new revenue streams with the on-boarding of third-party services including gaming, remote media production and enterprise services.
Says Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel" ".As part of our endeavor to build a 5G ready network for India’s requirements, we are pleased to collaborate with IBM and Red Hat in our cloud journey. Our goal with this powerful, seamless horizontal approach is to make our network future ready and enable Airtel to efficiently serve the massive surge in data consumption. The hybrid cloud architecture will resonate with our customer-obsession by providing improved flexibility, network stability and performance and bringing agility and automation in our network operations.”