In a bid to help enterprises and telecommunications companies speed their transition to edge computing in the 5G era, global software giant IBM has announced several multi-cloud offerings that run on Red Hat OpenShift, a leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.
Red Hat’s industry-leading open source technology became part of IBM last year after completion of a $34 billion deal.
The new offerings were announced at IBM’s annual “Think Digital” conference.
For organisations worldwide, the rollout of wireless 5G telecommunications networks is designed to accelerate the utility of edge computing.
With new edge services, IBM Business Partners and open multicloud solutions from IBM, enterprises will be able to tap into the potential of 5G to support crucial uses like emergency response, robotic surgery or connected-vehicle safety features that benefit from the few milliseconds latency saved by not having to send workloads to a centralised cloud, IBM said.
“In today’s uncertain environment, our clients are looking to differentiate themselves by creating more innovative, responsive user experiences that are adaptive and continuously available – from the data center all the way out to the edge,” said Denis Kennelly, General Manager, IBM Hybrid Cloud.
The new offerings enable enterprises to overcome the complexity of managing workloads across a massive volume of devices from different vendors and provide telcos the agility they need to quickly deliver edge-enabled services to customers.
Clients across industries can now fully realise the benefits of edge computing, including running Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics at the edge to achieve insights closer to where the work is done.
The new solutions include IBM Edge Application Manager, an autonomous management solution designed to enable AI, analytics and IoT (Internet of Things) enterprise workloads to be deployed and remotely managed, delivering real-time analysis and insight at scale.
The solution enables the management of up to 10,000 edge nodes simultaneously by a single administrator, IBM said.
IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager is another new solution offered by IBM that runs on Red Hat OpenShift, to deliver intelligent automation capabilities to orchestrate virtual and container network functions in minutes.
Service providers will have the ability to manage workloads on both Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Platform, which will be critical as telcos increasingly look for ways to modernise their networks for greater agility and efficiency, and to provide new services today and as 5G adoption expands.
A portfolio of edge-enabled applications and services, including IBM Visual Insights, IBM Maximo Production Optimization, IBM Connected Manufacturing, IBM Asset Optimization, IBM Maximo Worker Insights and IBM Visual Inspector, all offer features to give clients the flexibility to deploy AI and cognitive applications and services at scale, the company said.
It also announced new dedicated IBM Services teams for edge computing and telco network cloud.
(IANS)
