IBM and Bharti Airtel, India’s leading communications solutions provider with more than 358 million users, announced their intention to collaborate to deploy Airtel’s edge computing platform in India, which will include 120 network data centres across 20 cities. When deployed, the platform enables large enterprises across multiple industries, including manufacturing and automotive, to accelerate innovative solutions that bring new value to their customers and operations securely at the edge.

Airtel’s edge computing platform is deployed as a hybrid environment based on IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat OpenShift, extending secure and open cloud services to wherever data resides. This can help improve business performance and customer experience by reducing latency while meeting data security and sovereignty requirements—critical as workloads increasingly move to the edge.

Combined with 5G, the business value brought by edge computing can be significantly improved. In India, where 5G is expected to roll out later this year, it has the potential to have a cumulative economic impact of $1 trillion by 20351.

Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO of Airtel Business, said of the work: “As India prepares to experience 5G, we see a huge opportunity to help businesses across industries transform the way they deliver goods and services. We have the largest edge network, the Nxtra brand, that provides data. We will leverage our partnership with IBM to help Indian businesses meet their critical needs more efficiently, making it easier for companies to handle the workloads where their data resides.”

Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, India’s largest passenger car manufacturer, intends to use an edge platform to improve the accuracy and efficiency of quality inspections on the factory floor. By deploying this platform, Maruti Suzuki hopes to strengthen quality control and ensure its data is protected at the edge.

The work between IBM and Airtel around 5G was announced today at Think Mumbai. Airtel’s solution leverages IBM Maximo Visual Inspection for AI-enabled quality inspection. IBM Consulting will lead the systems integration for the IBM platform. Through this hybrid cloud platform and IBM Consulting’s industry expertise and access to best-in-class technologies 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 pressing business problems faced by enterprise clients.

Businesses can deploy and manage workloads in near real-time by leveraging Airtel’s 5G connectivity and IBM’s highly secure edge computing capabilities. Industries such as telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, and government can benefit from reduced latency, high availability, and improved connection speeds.