Bharti Airtel teams up with IBM to strengthen Airtel cloud capabilities

Bharti Airtel has entered into a strategic partnership with IBM to enhance its recently launched Airtel Cloud on October 15. The announcement was made at the IBM Think 2025 Mumbai event.

Through this partnership, Airtel Cloud customers will be able to deploy the IBM Power Systems portfolio as-a-Service, including the latest-generation IBM Power11 autonomous, AI-ready servers in regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, government, and others.

"The Power11 hybrid platform will also support critical enterprise workloads, including IBM Power AIX, IBM i, Linux, and SAP Cloud ERP. Additionally, this partnership will help enable SAP customers on IBM Power with their enterprise resource planning transformation to SAP Cloud ERP on IBM Power Virtual Server," the statement said.

Airtel plans to open Multizone Regions (MZRs) with IBM in Mumbai and Chennai. "We will, together, also establish two new Multizone Regions (MZRs) in Mumbai and Chennai soon," said Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman & Managing Director, Bharti Airtel.

Airtel's MZRs will help Indian enterprises strengthen their resilience, address data residency requirements, and keep mission-critical workloads and applications running efficiently.

"Today, with the IBM partnership, we are adding substantial capabilities to our Cloud platform to address the unique needs of several industries that require migration from IBM Power Systems and allow for AI readiness. With this partnership, we are also extending the footprint of our availability zones in India from four to ten, hosting these on our own next-gen sustainable data centres," said Vittal.

Rob Thomas, SVP and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM, said, “Enterprises today need to balance modernisation with the growing regulated technology and AI requirements. Through our partnership with Bharti Airtel, clients across India can leverage IBM’s innovative cloud offerings designed for workloads that address their strategic business priorities. Together, we will help clients drive true transformation in the era of AI.”

With IBM's software stack for AI inference, built on IBM watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI, clients in India will have the ability to run AI inference across hybrid cloud environments. Customers will also be able to access Red Hat's hybrid cloud solutions, including Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation, Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat AI.