AT&T is hoping that cloud partnerships with two of the biggest in the market will help position it as a gateway to the services.
The telecom company signed a multi-year strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services in a move that will see it link business customers to AWS over its high-speed private networking service, NetBond.
The idea is that customers with large enterprise cloud requirements will want to use the NetBond service to access AWS as it will speed everything up and hopefully provide a more resilient connection.
As part of the partnership users will be able to tap into AT&T’s network in order to gather and send data from sensors and devices over its global network and into the AWS cloud, this will be possible through Internet-of-Things apps.
The two companies are also working on combining various security tools and expertise to improve network security.
The expanded partnership with AWS is not the only deal that the company inked this week.
The telco also decided to strengthen its relationship with IBM so that it will distribute the FlexWare software.
FlexWare is AT&T’s offering that is designed to be used to manage virtual network functions, essentially helping providers to deploy IT as a service.
As part of the agreement IBM will deploy FlexWare on its own website and offer it to enterprises and AT&T will run its applications on IBM’s cloud.
This isn’t the first time that Big Blue and AT&T have worked together. In December 2015 a deal was struck that saw IBM take over the telco’s hosted data centre services.
For AT&T the value of both deals is clear; it gets a connection to AWS customers, and it gets what is essentially a re-seller deal with IBM.
The concept of aligning with large cloud companies isn’t a new one and a number of deals are struck throughout the year with this in mind. This week for example Egnyte aligned itself more closely with Microsoft Azure, despite being a competitor it gives the company a way to tap into the large Microsoft user community.
