Google and Amazon will both be upset this week as Microsoft has managed to sign a huge deal with AT&T which will see the telecommunications company shift to run on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.
As TechCrunch reports, the deal is thought to be worth $2 billion to Microsoft, with AT&T expected to move most of its non-network workloads to Azure by 2024. At the same time, AT&T's workforce will shift to use the suite of tools that make up Office 365.
For AT&T, although the deal is costing a lot, it should, as Microsoft puts it, "optimize costs" as the company will operate on a single cloud platform as far as its workforce is concerned. However, the water is muddied slightly because a couple of days ago AT&T also signed a deal with IBM to run AT&T Business' applications on the Red Hat open source platform. So it looks as though Microsoft secured the consumer side of AT&T's operations while IBM gets the enterprise and business side.
Microsoft is using the deal as an opportunity to talk about the potential of cloud computing and 5G. The two companies have already collaborated to track drones using AT&T's network, for example. Microsoft sees a lot of potential for using 5G to stream content stored on the Azure cloud.
There's also a lot of room for innovation, with the example given by Microsoft being, "near-instantaneous communications for a first responder who is using AI-powered live voice translation to quickly communicate with someone in need who speaks a different language." It'll be interesting to see what else the two companies think up together.
