Microsoft’s major partnership with AT&T includes both Azure cloud infrastructure services and Office 365. The motivation for AT&T is to transition the majority of its non-networking workloads to the public cloud by 2024. The deal edges Microsoft closer to taking some of Amazon Web Services slice of the cloud computing market, and extends Microsoft’s lead over IBM, Google, Tencent and Alibaba. The overall cloud market is growing at around 40 percent per quarter.
Transforming the workplace
Speaking about the deal, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the Microsoft blog: “Together, we will apply the power of Azure and Microsoft 365 to transform the way AT&T’s workforce collaborates and to shape the future of media and communications for people everywhere.”
AT&T’s decision reflects the growth of connected devices for the enterprise and the increased demand for streaming content from consumers, from movies to games, and with businesses applications. Behind the deal the two companies aim to develop emerging technologies like 5G, according to TechCrunch. The objective is through combining Azure with AT&T’s 5G network, the two enterprises will be able to offer new services to business customers for creating different types of applications and solutions.
Microsoft and AT&T take it to the edge
Microsoft and AT&T have also worked together recently to test an edge computing-based tracking and detection system for drones (a platform called network edge compute). The edge computing project involves positioning Microsoft’s cloud services closer to the edge of the network (like geographic locations for drone operations). This permits businesses to access low-latency network compute at a fraction of the cost of traditional cloud-based processing.
IBM in the news
In related cloud computing business news, IBM has recently closed a $34 billion deal with Red Hat. This represents one of the largest tech acquisitions of all time. Red Hat provides open-source software products to the enterprise community and its CloudForms service provides a service for the management of virtual machines, instances and containers.
