AT&T and IBM are making good on their recently reinvigorated alliance to fuse enterprise and networking expertise. AT&T is deploying a 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) network at IBM’s lab in Yorktown Heights, New York, to develop and showcase new capabilities for enterprises seeking a private, on-premises cellular service.

The operator is deploying sub-6 GHz and millimeter-wave 5G radios alongside its private MEC offering that will allow IBM, and eventually other enterprises to run workloads on premises with low latency, and increased privacy and security, according to Mo Katibeh, chief product and platform officer at AT&T Business.

The collaboration will “serve as a model of innovation to help enterprise customers across many industries learn, experiment, and scale solutions built on 5G, edge computing and [artificial intelligence] to increase productivity and drive efficiencies in their business,” he told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

The longtime partners envision developing a wide range of use cases for enterprises. “The implications are there for almost every single industry. As we think about this offering in the market, we’re targeting manufacturing, health care, public sector, finance industries where 5G technologies and AI can have a significant impact,” Katibeh said. 

Steve Canepa, general manager of the global communications sector at IBM, said the 5G private capability will also be linked to IBM Cloud “so that services and workloads that we want to run on IBM Cloud can coordinate with those that are running on the MEC platform at the facility.” IBM is also bringing other unique features to the effort, including its experience in AI, an edge application manager that operates in a hybrid cloud environment, and the open frameworks provided by Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes platform. 

“Red Hat brings this tremendous ability to coalesce this massive upstream development environment,” he said. “And because we see so much innovation coming to this edge compute world, using Red Hat and the power of that open source community to have a platform to land that kind of innovation on with OpenShift, we think is really going to just accelerate our ability to deploy these services.”

This also bolsters AT&T’s 5G for business strategy, which revolves around three pillars: the ongoing evolution to 5G, fixed 5G, and edge computing, Katibeh explained. “There is both a premise-based edge variant as well as a network-based edge variant,” and it’s an important distinction because businesses are seeking different use cases and face unique challenges or environments in delivering those outcomes, he said. 

“Perhaps you want a signal that only covers your smart factory, and is private to the workers, and the equipment, and the machines that's inside of that factory. And you want to be able to manage at an application level the traffic that stays inside the prem versus what goes back to the cloud,” Katibeh said. 

This latest effort with IBM is about “exploring the ability to use the on-prem variant of edge to drive very specific business outcomes around operational efficiencies, employee safety, as well as creating entirely new use cases to drive revenue,” he said.

Once the platform is deployed at IBM’s facility, the companies plan to layer in multiple enterprise use cases for very different customers and objectives. 

As enterprises increasingly shift to a hybrid-cloud model, IBM is working with AT&T and other operators to allow businesses to deploy applications or workloads wherever they see fit, Canepa said. “That includes now what we’re highlighting here, the mobile edge environment that comes with this, the emerging 5G world.”

Because enterprises are no longer restricted to a single cloud architecture on premises, they’re gaining access to a larger pool of potential innovation sources, he explained. This extends to mobile network operators’ infrastructure as well.

“Up until this point, the networks inside the telcos were very kind of structured environments, hardwired, specialized equipment that was really good at what it did, but did a fairly limited set of things,” Canepa said. “What we're evolving to now is truly a hybrid-cloud environment where that network itself becomes a platform. And then the ability to extend that platform to the edge creates a whole new opportunity to create new insights as a service, new applications, and solutions that can be deployed in that environment.”

This broadening cloud ecosystem paired with cellular connectivity and mobile edge computing is fueling many seemingly overlapping partnerships, but that’s exactly as intended, Katibeh explained. With respect to premise-based 5G deployments, enterprises will “likely have a preference of the hardware and the specific capabilities that they want to bring to life at their business location,” he said. 

Enterprises that want to take advantage of the combined offerings developed by AT&T and IBM will have to have customer relationships with both companies, for example.

“To date, we’ve announced that we’re working with Microsoft in the network edge compute space from a metro 5G and edge deployment perspective,” Katibeh said, adding that the operator is likely to strike more partnerships to expand opportunities anchored in the cloud. 

“Watch this space. We would expect that the continued ecosystem play between the clouds and the communication companies will evolve over time,” he said. “In the 5G world, you would need to integrate each network with each cloud independently in order to drive the broad ecosystem that we’ve been talking about.”