Industry Insight: AT&T’s Alliances with Microsoft and IBM/Red Hat – A Tale of Two Clouds?

July has been a watershed month for AT&T as it enters into two major “cloud deals”, one with Microsoft and another with the newly merged IBM and Red Hat. At first glance, the two deals seem oddly contradictory – a collision of proprietary Microsoft cloud (although about half of Azure workloads run on top of Linux) with open source cloud from the combined IBM and Red Hat. But why two cloud deals? What makes them different? What does it mean for the companies involved?

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Industry Insight: IBM+Red Hat, The Great Cloud Brokerage Play

It’s official, IBM will now become the biggest Cloud broker play in the ICT universe with its acquisition of Red Hat for a whopping $34 billion in cash. It seems only yesterday that neXt Curve sat down with IBM to discuss the future of cloud and the future is the hybrid cloud. The cloud landscape is poised to change as cloud brokerage models are poised inject transparency (economic and service quality) and portability of workloads into enterprise cloud strategies. Are the walled public cloud gardens about to come down? 

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The Democratization of 5G Everything

The original telco central offices of the past had legacy mainframe-like telephone switches with legacy voice features, which was ideal in the 1980’s and 1990’s but are archaic today. With VoIP over LTE in the cloud, these local offices can be re-architected into 5G nano-datacenters that provide very low latency fixed and mobile access and distributed edge computing that will enable new and innovative hyperconverged IT/CT applications and services that avail new business models and network monetization opportunities for operators.

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The Hybrid Cloud Bill of Rights

The cloud landscape continues to change and evolve. Our current assumptions about cloud and how it will influence IT and our IT investments will need to evolve as well.  When you consider the fluidity of the cloud vendor landscape, it is important to consider price/performance market intelligence to make the best decisions for your cloud strategy – your hybrid cloud strategy. 

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