IBM Collaborates with Lumen to make its Cloud Services Available At the Edge in Any Environment

IBM on Monday announced that its hybrid cloud services are now generally available in any environment — on any cloud, on premises or at the edge via IBM Cloud Satellite.

Lumen Technologies and IBM have integrated IBM Cloud Satellite with the Lumen edge platform to enable clients to harness hybrid cloud services in near real-time and build innovative solutions at the edge.  

IBM Cloud Satellite brings a secured, unifying layer of cloud services for clients across environments, regardless of where their data resides. This is essential to help address critical data privacy and data sovereignty requirements.

Industries including telecommunications, financial services, healthcare and government can now benefit from reduced latency that comes with analyzing data securely at the edge. Workloads related to online learning, remote work, telehealth services and more can now be delivered with increased efficiency and security with IBM Cloud Satellite. As workloads shift to the edge, IBM Cloud Satellite will help  clients deliver low latency, while still enabling them to have the same levels of security, data privacy, interoperability and open standards found in hybrid cloud environments.

IBM is also extending Watson Anywhere with the availability of IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service with IBM Cloud Satellite. This gives clients a flexible, secure way to run their AI and analytics workloads as services across any environment – without having to manage them on their own. EquBot, a fintech firm helping global investment professionals, is already seeing early benefits. The work has shown reduced latency from ten seconds to under one second on some of the time critical models. This allows investors to make better-informed decisions across financial markets.

Lumen, an enterprise technology company enabling the 4th Industrial Revolution, is using its global Edge Compute platform to deliver IBM Cloud Satellite to customers. By combining the deployment flexibility of IBM Cloud Satellite with the Lumen edge platform’s broad availability, adaptive networking and connected security capabilities, Lumen customers gain choice and speed in how they securely tap into the benefits of edge computing services.

Customers using the Lumen platform and IBM Cloud Satellite can deploy data-intensive applications like video analytics across highly distributed environments such as offices and retail spaces, and take advantage of infrastructure designed for single digit millisecond latency. Because the application can be hosted on Red Hat OpenShift via IBM Cloud Satellite from the close proximity of a Lumen edge location, cameras and sensors can function in near real-time to help improve quality and safety. For example, cameras can detect the last time surfaces were cleaned or flag potential worker safety concerns. Additionally, customers across geographies can better address data sovereignty by deploying this processing power closer to where the data is created.

Paul Savill, SVP Enterprise Product Management and Services at Lumen said, “With the Lumen platform’s broad reach, we are giving our enterprise customers access to IBM Cloud Satellite to help them drive innovation more rapidly at the edge.

“Our enterprise customers can now extend IBM Cloud services across Lumen’s robust global network, enabling them to deploy data-heavy edge applications that demand high security and ultra-low latency. By bringing secure and open hybrid cloud capabilities to the edge, our customers can propel their businesses forward and take advantage of the emerging applications of the 4^th Industrial Revolution.”

As part of this collaboration, customers will be able to:

• Deploy applications across more than 180,000 connected enterprise locations on the Lumen network to provide a low latency experience
• Create cloud-enabled solutions at the edge that leverage application management and orchestration via IBM Cloud Satellite
• Build open, interoperable platforms that give customers greater deployment flexibility and more seamless access to cloud native services like AI, IoT and edge computing

Howard Boville, Head of IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform said, “IBM is working with clients to leverage advanced technologies like edge computing and AI, enabling them to digitally transform with hybrid cloud while keeping data security at the forefront.

 “With IBM Cloud Satellite, clients can securely gain the benefits of cloud services anywhere, from the core of the data center to the farthest reaches of the network.”

IBM is collaborating with more than 65 ecosystem partners, including Cisco, Dell Technologies and Intel to build secure cloud services helping clients run workloads in any environment via IBM Cloud Satellite.

 Infrastructure partners offer a choice of storage, networking and server solutions to help clients leverage their existing infrastructures to deploy IBM Cloud Satellite locations at data centers or the edge. Service partners plan to offer migration and deployment services to help clients manage solutions as-a-service anywhere. IBM Cloud Satellite clients can also access Red Hat OpenShift-certified software offerings on Red Hat Marketplace, which can be deployed to run on Red Hat OpenShift via IBM Cloud Satellite, offering flexibility to install and manage with greater simplicity.