AT&T is covering all of its cloud bases with yet another cloud announcement, this time with IT vendor Tech Mahindra.

The multi-year agreement, which is reportedly worth $1 billion, follows hot on the heels of recent cloud announcements with Microsoft, IBM, and Mirantis.

AT&T’s announced partnership with Microsoft in July was the telco’s coming out party for its “public cloud first” strategy, which includes moving most of its non-network workloads, such as IT workloads and systems and HR functions. to the public cloud by 2024.

Tech Mahindra will takeover the management of many of the applications that support AT&T’s network and shared systems. It’s not clear if that means layoffs for AT&T employees.

While there weren’t a lot of details in Thursday’s announcement between Tech Mahindra and AT&T, it looks like Tech Mahindra will do the heavy lifting in regards to moving some of AT&T’s systems and operations to the cloud.

AT&T and Tech Mahindra did say that they would work together across several technologies and platforms such as artificial intelligence, DevOps, data analytics and 5G.

On a related note, Tech Mahindra announced at Mobile World Congress earlier this year that its continuous integration and continuous deployment framework was designed to accelerate 5G adoption by automating key network lifecycle stages such as telco cloud, VNFs (virtual network functions) lifecycle automation, and implementation of DevOps continuous integration and service orchestration.

By offloading some of the work to Tech Mahindra, AT&T will be able to focus more on virtualizing the remaining 75% of its network by the end of next year and the continued build out is software-defined 5G network.

“Our agreement with Tech Mahindra is another step forward in delivering greater flexibility across our IT operations,” said AT&T Communications CIO Jon Summers, in a prepared statement. “This includes optimizing our core operations and modernizing our internal network applications to accelerate innovation as we march forward to our goal of a nationwide 5G network by the first half of 2020. Our collaboration with Tech Mahindra will ultimately help accelerate our network operations and overall technology leadership.”

According to a story by The Economic Times, the Tech Mahindra deal is worth $1 billion, and it’s among the New Delhi, India-based company’s biggest over the past five or six years.

Tech Mahindra has a long history of assisting AT&T, including AT&T’s deal to of buy BellSouth in 2006. More recently, the two companies worked together on artificial intelligence project Acumos prior to AT&T putting it into open source with the Linux Foundation. Early last year, Tech Mahindra announced it was reselling AT&T’s FlexWare network product.

Source: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/tech-mahindra-racks-up-multi-year-cloud-agreement-at-t