IBM has signed two significant deals with telecoms companies as it continues to expand its presence in the cloud and ramp up its involvement in fledgling 5G networks. It is a sign that Big Blue’s open hybrid-cloud strategy is helping it gain ground on its rivals as the role of the cloud changes to cater for increased processing of data from the edge which can be enabled by 5G.
This commitment to an open, hybrid way of doing cloud is partly born out of necessity, says Yugal Joshi, vice president of digital, cloud, and application services research for Everest Group. “IBM realizes it has probably missed the public cloud bus which is now dominated by the three hyperscale vendors (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform),” he says. “Therefore, hybrid cloud, which is also a preferred way for enterprises to consume workload, becomes extremely critical for IBM.”
