Before this year, AT&T finalized a deal to divest itself of its 31 data centers for $1.1 billion. Now it has dumped its information centre business, the company partnering with two of the largest suppliers of these: Microsoft and IBM.
IBM and AT&T this week declared a strategic alliance where AT&T’s network and IBM Cloud will link up to supply software-defined network (SDN) providers, including providing IBM Cloud access to AT&T’s 5G network.
In return, IBM will create AT&T its primary provider of 5G, edge computing, and net of things (IoT) providers and assist handle AT&T’s whole infrastructure footprint, such as third party cloud solutions, using Red Hat’s open-source tools to manage the network. This is not really new, as AT&T was using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for a certain time.
In terms of Microsoft, Azure will become the preferred cloud provider for AT&T’s non-network applications. This means non-network infrastructure applications will transition to Microsoft Azure, and”much” of AT&T’s workforce will proceed to Microsoft 365 cloud-based collaboration.
AT&T focuses on core system capacities
AT&T has the goal of getting a”public-cloud first” business and intends to migrate non-network workloads into the public cloud by 2024. Like so many other companies, AT&T would like to get out of running its own data centers to focus on core system capabilities. Microsoft is your logical option, since it has Office 365 and there isn’t any workable option.
As with the IBM deal, AT&T and Microsoft have many more future plans and ambitions to work outside, and that includes 5G and advantage computing systems.
“AT&T is in the forefront of specifying how advances in technology, including 5G and edge computing, will change every aspect of work and life,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. “The world’s leading companies run on our cloud, and we’re thrilled that AT&T chose Microsoft to quicken its creation .”
The deal isn’t exactly a first. Verizon dumped its data centers a few years back to Equinix and last year signed a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make AWS its preferred public cloud supplier with the promise of migrating more 1,000 business-critical software and backend systems to AWS as part of the offer.
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