Microsoft has announced a major new partnership with AT&T that could take the company to €2 billion. This agreement will allow the American telecom giant to switch to the cloud system of Microsoft Azure, the two companies collaborating on technologies such as cloud, AI and 5G to improve the lives of customers around the world. AT&T will also be moving many of its employees to the Microsoft 365 Office suite, providing access to tools like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and more.
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According to AT&T, this move is part of its transformation to become a "public cloud first" company, and by 2024 it will migrate most of its off-grid workloads to the public cloud. The agreement is not exclusive, as AT&T is free to use other cloud providers such as Azure, a point brought forward by a separate agreement approved yesterday with IBM that will entail a Cloud Migration. "AT&T and Microsoft are among the companies most committed to promoting easy-to-use technology," said AT&T CEO John Donovan. "By working together on common efforts around 5G, cloud and artificial intelligence, we will accelerate innovation and impact for our customers and communities." AT&T was the first US carrier to move to 5G and anticipates strong growth in mobile data in the coming years, which will be supported by Azure and other Microsoft technologies. The companies have already worked together to bring various products and services such as networking, IoT and blockchain to market, and plan to announce new services later in 2019. "AT&T is at the forefront of defining transformations in all aspects of work and life in technologies, including 5G and advanced computing," said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. "The world's largest companies are using our cloud, and we're thrilled that AT&T has chosen Microsoft to accelerate their innovations. Together, we will harness the power of Azure and Microsoft 365 to transform the way AT&T people work across together and shape the future of media and communications for everyone around the world."