IBM And AT&T Announce Multi-Year Strategic Alliance

IBM and AT&T have announced a multi-year strategic alliance through which AT&T Communications will use IBM’s expertise to modernize AT&T Business Solutions’ internal software applications, enabling migrations to the IBM Cloud. In addition, IBM will provide infrastructure to support AT&T Business’s applications, using Red Hat’s open source platform to manage workloads and applications.

IBM will also make AT&T Business its primary provider of software-defined networking, thus building on the existing relationship where AT&T Business is 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.”

IBM will be the primary developer and cloud provider for AT&T Business’s operational applications and will help manage the AT&T Communications IT infrastructure, on and off-premises and across different clouds –private and public. This approach will enable AT&T Business to build and deploy internal application workloads, and deliver new services.

The two companies will also collaborate on edge computing platforms, which will help enterprise clients capitalize on 5G network speeds and the internet-connected devices and sensors at the edge of the network.

Channel Impact^®
The upshot of this development is to better enable the movement of AT&T Business applications to IBM Cloud with the intent of better serving enterprise customers.