First, IBM will provide managed services to Vodafone Business, the mobile operator companys Vodafone B2B division. What the Vodafone agreement will do is to tap into even more of these advanced developments IBM has built up and worked on particular projects, and to make those products available to a wider range of businesses and other organisations who may already be Vodafone customers. Thinking about the kinds of services mobile operator Vodafone could offer to end users today — it would be covering mobile data and voice, mobile broadband, IoT, and 5G services — that first agreement would be tapping into mobile broadband, with a focus on 5G and IoT.
Exclusive apparently believes that Vodafone is taking this bold step in order to accelerate its growth in the cloud, and to take advantage of IBMs deep expertise in the sector. Vodafone sources said that effectively, Vodafone would be becoming a retailer for both its own private cloud as well as IBMs suite of cloud services. IBMs cloud will be used to expand global operator Vodafones private cloud service footprint globally, and establish a new hybrid cloud offering for Vodafones business customers, which will be offered across 19 countries, Vodafone said Tuesday at the 2017 VMworld Europe conference in Barcelona. It will also enable Vodafone customers to tap IBMs hybrid cloud capabilities and relationship with VMware, said Vodafone, the global carrier, meaning that they will have access to IBMs other services, such as IBM Watson.
Vodafone, Vodafone will be offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service, offering customers frictionless, faster access to the VMware cloud services. This partnership is part of the IBM-Vodafone Strategic Global Agreement, where Vodafone business customers get access to the full IBM cloud portfolio and open technologies. Under the new partnership, Vodafone Business customers will have immediate access to IBMs full portfolio of cloud offerings, underpinned by IBMs deep domain expertise and open technologies. This new Vodafone Business-IBM joint venture addresses the entire spectrum of multi-cloud concerns across the real-world, with a powerful mix of capabilities expected to allow customers to deploy a multi-cloud strategy across layers of their organisations.
The new venture allows Vodafone Business to focus on our strengths in fixed and mobile technologies, while benefiting from IBMs multi-cloud, AI, and services expertise. The new venture will jointly develop new digital solutions, combining the strengths of Vodafones leading position in the Internet of Things, 5G and edge computing, with IBMs expertise in multicloud, domain knowledge and professional services. Second, together, the two will build and deliver solutions across areas such as AI, cloud, 5G, IoT and software-defined networking for enterprise customers.
In addition to the cloud deal, IBM and Exclusive Vodafone are joining hands on creating solutions in the areas of SDN, AI and 5G for enterprise customers. Together, IBM and Vodafone Business will leverage hybrid cloud capabilities to safely integrate key business applications, driving enterprise innovation — from agriculture to next-generation retail. Under the terms of the new strategic business arrangement, IBM will deliver managed services for Vodafone Businesss cloud and hosting units, with a total eight-year commitment valued at about $550M (EUR480M).
IBM will deliver dedicated private infrastructure for Vodafone Portugal, to be hosted at IBMs data center in Portugal. Our customers, like Ryanair, are increasingly moving their key IT services into the cloud, and with todays announcement, Vodafone Ireland is now able to offer our enterprise customers the option to have their IT services hosted at Vodafone Irelands secure data center facilities. IBM and global operator Vodafone announced a new service that allows businesses to migrate their VMware-based workloads from the Vodafone hosted private cloud into the IBM Cloud Enterprise on the IBM Cloud.