IBM and Telefónica double down on tech partnership in enterprise hybrid cloud push

Telecommunications giant Telefónica is doubling down on its long-standing technology partnership with IBM and Red Hat to accelerate its clients’ pace of hybrid cloud adoption.

This is through the roll-out of the next iteration of  Telefónica’s hybrid IT-enabling Cloud Garden environment, which is designed to help its clients accelerate the modernisation of their application estates, while also letting them choose whether to run their workloads in on-premise or cloud-based setups.

Cloud Garden 2.0, as it is dubbed, is built using IBM’s artificial intelligence-powered IBM Cloud Pak technology and Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based open source containersation platform OpenShift, and is already being put to use by Telefónica customers. 

These include the Information Technologies and Networks for Insurance Entities (TIREA) consortium, which Telefónica confirmed have tapped into Cloud Garden 2.0 to bring to market a customer-facing application geared towards speeding up the digital transformation of the entire insurance sector.

“Cloud Garden 2.0 speeds how clients can create next gen applications that improve quality and efficiency across core business operations, from customer-facing applications to mission critical back-end processes,” said IBM and Telefónica in a joint statement.

“By integrating IBM Cloud Pak, clients can also include a series of programs that help clients ease the transition to cloud native development environments, such as MongoDB, Red Hat JBoss, Red Hat AMQ, IBM WebSphere Liberty and Redis, among others.”

The setup is also hosted within Telefónica’s virtual datacentre in Spain to provide its in-country clients with low-latency connectivity to Cloud Garden 2.0 resources.

Andrés López Hedoire, enterprise product marketing director at Telefónica España, said the creation of Cloud Garden 2.0 is an important next step in the delivery of the company’s wider hybrid cloud strategy.

“We are very pleased to have been able to count on the right partners to accelerate our hybrid cloud strategy and offer our clients the speed, flexibility and decision-making power they need to modernise and quickly launch innovative digital services to their users and customers,” said Hedoire.

Javier Valencia, vice-president of IBM Technology at IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel, said the two firms are committed to helping enterprises take full advantage of hybrid cloud and AI, and the rollout of Cloud Garden 2.0 is an important next-step in their on-going technology partnership.

As such, the pair’s past collaborations have resulted in the creation of the first iteration of Cloud Garden, which made its debut in April 2019.

“Cloud Garden 2.0 builds on a long-standing relationship with Telefonica to deliver the latest innovations through an open, secure cloud platform that is built for core business applications and will speed modernisation for clients across Spain,” added Valencia.

The news of IBM’s deepening technology relationship with Telefónica coincides with a series of other customer wins Big Blue has chalked up recently. These include the news of its partnership with Baltic-based banking firm Luminor and the announcement that Swiss decentralized finance platform provider DIA has committed to migrating its workloads to the IBM Cloud.