IBM and Vodafone announced during Mobile World Congress 2019 that their $550 million cloud and AI partnership has received strong interest from heavy-weight clients.

SEAT, a Spanish sub-brand of the Volkswagen group, and KONE, a world leading lift and escalator supplier from Finland, are likely to become the first customers of the open cloud and AI technologies offered by the IBM and Vodafone Business partnership.

SEAT is going to use the cloud, AI, and 5G technologies to facilitate its transformation into a “mobility services provider”. KONE’s main interest is in the IoT domain. With the new technologies it aims to move its customer service from reactive to proactive then predictive mode as well as to improve the efficiency of the monitoring and fix operations.

The partnership between IBM and Vodafone Business was announced last month. Although billed as a “joint venture”, Michael Valocchi, IBM’s General Manager of the new venture, clarified to Telecoms.com that it is not a formal joint venture or a separate organization but an 8-year strategic commercial partnership and $550M managed services agreement. IBM and Vodafone Business are going to put in equal amount of investment.

“IBM’s partnerships with global telco companies like Vodafone will help speed up the deployment of 5G and provide easier access to new technologies such as AI, blockchain, edge computing and IoT,” said Valocchi in a statement. “This is because the promise of 5G doesn’t just depend on fiber, spectrum and gadgets, but on advanced levels of integration, automation, optimization and security across the ever more complex IT systems that companies are building in a bid to transform.”

“By providing the open cloud, connectivity and portable AI technologies that companies need to manage data, workloads and processes across the breadth of their IT systems, Vodafone and IBM are helping to drive innovation and transform user experiences across multiple industries – from retail to agriculture,” added Greg Hyttenrauch, Co-leader of the new venture for Vodafone Business.

The partnership will become operational in Q2 this year. IBM told Telecoms.com that by that time Vodafone Business customers will immediately have access to IBM’s entire hybrid cloud portfolio to optimise and enhance their current solutions. These solutions and services are not dependent on 5G. In the future, clients will benefit from new solutions and services that the new venture will develop, combining IBM’s multi-cloud, AI, analytics and blockchain with IoT, 5G, and edge computing from Vodafone.

Considering that Vodafone is going to start with a non-standalone approach to 5G, the use cases for verticals that demand extreme low latency are hard to realise in the near future. The engineers at IBM’s stand also conceded that although Watson can be deployed and trained to support many scenarios, the implementation of mission critical cases will have to wait till end-to-end 5G network is in place.