Colt joins IBM partner ecosystem to collaborate on 5G and Edge

London: Colt Technology Services has today announced it will collaborate with IBM (NYSE: IBM) to help customers adopt an edge computing strategy designed to enable them to move data and applications seamlessly across hybrid cloud environments, from private data centres to the edge. Colt, a leading provider of high bandwidth and on demand connectivity solutions, plans to work with IBM to jointly explore innovative use cases using IBM Cloud Satellite and Edge Application Manager, designed to benefit enterprise customers globally across 29,000 enterprise buildings.

Organisations are adopting new cloud technologies designed to address their business challenges but managing this new distributed infrastructure paradigm is not simple. In particular, when these applications have stringent location-dependent requirements like low latency, regional data compliance and resiliency. Colt and IBM’s collaboration, in a lab setting, has shown how deploying IBM Cloud Satellite on Colt’s edge platform can be simplified for customers. IBM Cloud Satellite is IBM’s hybrid cloud offering, built on Red Hat OpenShift, that allows customers to deploy secure and open IBM Cloud services anywhere they choose –on-premises, on any public cloud, or at the edge. Virtual machines for IBM Cloud Satellite can be instantiated and configured using a management and orchestration tool with zero-touch provisioning. Furthermore, Colt’s on-demand networking capabilities are designed to help critical connectivity be provisioned in near real- time to help enable distributed cloud deployments with IBM Edge Application Manager for its customers (in industries such as retail and healthcare) across 29,000 enterprise buildings.

A recent IBM Institute for Business Value report, “Why organisations are betting on edge computing: Insights from the edge,” revealed that 91% of the 1,500 executives surveyed indicated that their organisations plan to implement edge computing strategies within five years. IBM Edge Application Manager, an autonomous management solution that runs on Red Hat OpenShift, enables the secured deployment, continuous operations and remote management of AI, analytics, and IoT enterprise workloads to deliver real-time analysis and insights at scale. The introduction of Intel® Secure Device Onboard (SDO) made available as open source through the Linux Foundation, provides zero-touch provisioning of edge nodes, and enables multi-tenant support for enterprises to manage up to 40,000 edge devices simultaneously per edge hub. IBM Edge Application Manager is the industry’s first solution powered by the open-source project, Linux Foundation Open Horizon.

“We look forward to collaborating with Colt to help customers deploy, operate and manage thousands of endpoints throughout their operations with IBM Cloud Satellite and IBM Edge Application Manager,” said Evaristus Mainsah, GM, IBM Hybrid Cloud and Edge Ecosystem. “Together, we can help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation by acting on insights closer to where their data is being created, at the edge.”

“Colt and IBM have been working together for many years across multiple markets and verticals with a focus on accelerating digital transformation. As we see an increasing demand for multi and distributed cloud environments, we will collaborate on how we can serve our joint customers,” said Mark Hollman, Colt’s VP Partner Development and Success. “We’re exploring now how to combine our Colt IQ Network with IBM’s hybrid cloud platform, to help deliver innovative solutions designed to help accelerate digital transformation for our enterprise customers.’’

Colt is part of IBM’s partner ecosystem, collaborating with more than 30 equipment manufacturers, networking, IT & software providers to implement open standards-based cloud-native solutions that can autonomously manage edge applications at scale. IBM’s partner ecosystem fuels hybrid cloud environments by helping customers manage and modernize workloads from bare-metal to multi-cloud and everything in between with Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.