IBM and AT&T enter strategic alliance

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.

“In AT&T Business, we’re constantly evolving to better serve business customers around the globe by securely connecting them to the digital capabilities they need,” said Thaddeus Arroyo, CEO of AT&T Business. “This includes optimizing our core operations and modernizing our internal business applications to accelerate innovation. Through our collaboration with IBM, we’re adopting open, flexible, cloud technologies, that will ultimately help accelerate our business leadership.”

“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.”