AT&T has added Accenture to its Microservices Supplier Program, which offers a new approach to delivering business functionality for software developers.
Teams from Accenture and AT&T will develop microservices using scaled, agile and DevOps processes. The collaboration is expected to improve customer experiences, reduce support costs, and get services to market faster.
AT&T describes microservices as one of the key pillars of its next-gen network platform. In 2017, AT&T deployed more than 300 microservices, with hundreds more planned for 2018.
“Our collaboration with Accenture allows us to quickly deliver the products and services our customers need to stay competitive in today’s technology-based economy,” said Pam Parisian, president, Technology Development, AT&T. “Soon, they will be able to access a whole new level of scalability and functionality as we shift legacy business functions into flexible, software-centric capabilities.”
Steve Tibbetts, a managing director at Accenture said, “By decomposing legacy systems into suites of small, modular and independent services, we can co-develop new products more rapidly than ever before. Together with AT&T, we are able to deliver an enhanced experience for their customers.”
AT&T launches Microservices Supplier Program
Under this partnership, IBM will collaborate with AT&T to design, develop and deploy microservices that will transform AT&T’s business backend processes. IBM’s creation of microservices across sales, ordering, and enterprise data will enhance and modernize AT&T’s mission-critical systems. This enables higher-performing backend processing with minimal downtime while allowing the whole business to adapt quickly to changing market dynamics through the deployment of new fast and easy to access services and capabilities.“Our software journey has focused on virtualizing our network functions to give more speed and flexibility than the traditional hardware model,” said Melissa Arnoldi, president, AT&T Technology and Operations. “We’re now looking at the 2,200+ apps in our IT system. And we’re starting to break them up into microservices to create agility, speed, and scalability that wasn’t possible before. Microservices are at the very core of our vision for the future of our network.”
Earlier this week, AT&T introduced Acumos, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that makes it easy to build, share and deploy AI applications, built with microservices.
AT&T moves Acumos into open source as an AI-enabling platform
Acumos, which will be hosted by The Linux Foundation, makes it easy to build, share and deploy AI applications. More specifically, it provides the capability to edit, integrate, compose, package, train and deploy AI microservices. Acumos will provide a marketplace for accessing, using and enhancing those applications.
“Our goal with open sourcing the Acumos platform is to make building and deploying AI applications as easy as creating a website,” said Mazin Gilbert, vice president of Advanced Technology at AT&T Labs. “We’re collaborating with Tech Mahindra to establish an industry standard for AI in the networking space. We invite others to join us to create a global harmonization in AI and set the stage for all future AI network applications and services.”
“We’re opening up AI. We’re focusing on the telecommunication, media and technology spaces, starting with the network. The platform will be available to anyone and the more users who adopt it, the better it will get,” added Gilbert.
AT&T said the Acumos platform is built on open source technologies and can be powered by AT&T Indigo, its next-generation platform for delivering a seamless network experience.
Earlier this year, AT&T moved its ECOMP into the open source curation of The Linux Foundation under the newly launched ONAP project. With Acumos, AT&T said it was acting to place the initial framework into open source as quickly as possible.
