IBM and Red Hat broaden their edge computing offerings, introduce Edge Ecosystem

July last year saw IBM secure one of the largest acquisitions in the world of technology, purchasing software company Red Hat for a $34 billion.

 

Now, that partnership is bearing fruit, with the tech giant announcing a raft of new edge computing services in combination with Red Hat’s open source technology.

 

The new offerings include an Edge Application Manager, which enables the management of up to 10,000 edge nodes simultaneously by a single administrator, greatly improving the efficiency of AI, analytics and IoT workloads; a Telco Network Cloud Manager, which increases network agility for telcos and helps to deliver intelligent automation; and a host of edge-enabled applications and services, such as IBM Asset Optimization and IMB Connected Manufacturing, all designed to AI at scale.

 

All of these solutions run on Red Hats OpenShift and OpenStack platforms, which aims to simplify the task of managing huge volumes of devices and data, allowing enterprises to make better use of edge computing capabilities.

 

IBM also took this opportunity to introduce its growing IBM Edge Ecosystem, a selection of companies which will work with IBM to focus on creating edge computing solutions. The announced partners include ADVA, Altiostar, F5 Networks, Juniper Networks, and Metaswitch.

 

The company is also creating a sister project, focussing instead on deploying cloud platforms, called the Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem.

 

“As we accelerate into this hybrid cloud world, we’re going to do our best to leverage open-source technologies to make them real,” said IBM President Jim Whitehurst.