IBM is partnering with American Tower to deploy an edge service that the companies hope will help jumpstart a lethargic multicloud edge connectivity market.

The partnership will see IBM deploy its Hybrid Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift capabilities into the tower giant’s neutral-host sites. These sites are currently home to American Tower’s Access Edge Data Centers that are located at some of the company’s nearly 225,000 existing tower and antenna sites.

The edge data centers are conceived as small form factor installations that can take advantage of the power and connectivity already established at a cell site location to extend compute power closer to the network edge.

Utpal Mangla, GM for industry edge cloud at IBM, explained in an interview with SDxCental that American Tower will handle building the colocated sites, with IBM in charge of the hybrid-cloud environment running in those locations.

“We will be working with American Tower and obviously also dealing with additional partners, depending on what the use cases are,” Mangla said. “But it's going to be on our hybrid cloud, which is obviously a Red Hat environment. It's going to be leveraging IBM Cloud, it's going to leverage our software and our consulting services.”

Red Hat recently updated its Device Edge platform to ease challenging deployments. The platform includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the vendor’s Ansible automation platform and Red Hat MicroShift – a lightweight Kubernetes that can run on small form factor devices.

The IBM partnership will take advantage of American Tower’s worldwide footprint to serve data sovereignty issues for enterprises. Mangla noted it’s becoming more critical “to provide services at the edge, [with] the ability to avoid having all of that stuff go back to the central cloud and then come back.”

The deployments are also designed to be connection agnostic. Mangla said end customers can bring their own connection options or IBM can work with local telecom operators for connectivity.

“And American Tower, obviously, has partnerships with almost all of them, and they'll become the prime for that,” Mangla said. “That's the way we are doing it, truly neutral, truly hybrid, not making a call on one carrier. Our objective is to help the client, whichever carrier they're using. We will work with them if they ask us to pick a carrier and we'll also work with American Tower.”

The agreement furthers IBM’s push toward bolstering the edge compute environment.

IBM Consulting CTO Shawn D’Souza in a previous blog post praised the role of edge computing as “the key to digital transformation” by shifting compute to the edge of the network, like mobile devices, equipment or routers that collect data. Edge is “one of the formidable tools that will help businesses drive innovation and uncover new revenue streams,” D’Souza wrote.

The move also continues American Tower’s efforts to better monetize its physical assets. The company boosted those efforts when it acquired CoreSite Realty in late 2021, which included 25 data centers, 21 cloud on-ramps and over 32,000 interconnections in eight major U.S. markets.

However, adoption of its edge services has underwhelmed.

“When you look at the macroeconomic conditions, no one that we were talking to has stopped any of their edge development, but it has slowed down a bit, so I don't know exactly when it's going to be there,” Steven Vondran, EVP and COO at American Tower, said during an analyst conference last month.

Mangla said the edge market has not advanced as quickly as many had hoped, and that “telcos are frustrated because telcos have made significant investments of their 5G and they expect monetization through B2B use cases. They probably don't care whether it's B2B2B or B2B2C, but they expect monetization and so obviously it hasn't scaled the way that some of us who have been in the business for a long time expected.”

One issue for the market has been the depth of edge options that have flooded the space. Enterprises are faced with a number of ways they can approach an edge decision, which Mangla said has slowed the decision-making process. This includes operators, system integrators (SIs) and hyperscalers that have entered the edge computing space.

“I was talking to one of the CTOs of a large company and he said the last thing he wants to do is pull all of these pieces together and have separate contracts with everybody,” Mangla said.

“[The CTO said] I don't know if this platform that I'm going to build is a custom platform, which will remain active two years from now because technology's changing, and I would much rather have a platform that is off of the shelf that a company can help maintain. But there is no platform where all of these things are being done consistently.”

IBM hopes this partnership with American Tower is one step toward being that platform.

“We will be able to bridge a significant portion of those challenges, and the platform will allow other partners to play on top of it, depending on the use case,” Mangla said. “IBM is a company with such a reputed brand name that if any CTO chooses us, he or she will not lose their job for sure.”