IBM and AT&T announced a multi-year strategic alliance with the following major points:
- AT&T will use IBM's expertise to modernize AT&T Business Solutions' internal software applications, enabling migrations to the IBM Cloud.
- IBM will provide infrastructure to support AT&T Business's applications.
- AT&T Business will utilize Red Hat's open source platform to manage workloads and applications.
- IBM will make AT&T Business its primary provider of software defined networking.
- AT&T Business will help transform IBM's networking solutions with their latest technologies including 5G, Edge Compute, and IOT as well as multi-cloud capabilities using Red Hat.
- The two companies will also collaborate on edge computing platforms.
AT&T Business has previously been designated as IBM's strategic global networking provider.
"Building on IBM's 20-year relationship with AT&T, today's agreement is another major step forward in delivering flexibility to AT&T Business so it can provide IBM and its customers with innovative services at a faster pace than ever before," said Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President, Cloud and Cognitive Software, IBM. "We are proud to collaborate with AT&T Business, provide the scale and performance of our global footprint of cloud data centers, and deliver a common environment on which they can build once and deploy in any one of the appropriate footprints to be faster and more agile."