“Everything we do is laser-focused on growth opportunity out in the market, cost reduction internally, and transforming ourselves into a simpler operation which then transitions into both cost and customer effectiveness,” says AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan. “This meets that hurdle. It’s wide, it’s deep, it’s formidable. It meets all those criteria. It’s one of those rare things that affect revenue costs and then how you serve your customers. In that regard, we love it.”

John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, discusses their new long-term cloud alliance announced today with IBM in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

It’s Wide, It’s Deep, It’s Formidable

If you think about the history we have with IBM, the risks of moving to the cloud in a really aggressive way, the kind that not only transforms your company internally and your cost structure but also how you address customers and therefore opportunities for growth, you worry about technology, you worry about how to transform your applications, and then you worry what happens if I get in trouble.

We’ve had a 20-year relationship with IBM. They know us. So when you think about expanding Red Hat, with the experience that those guys have inside of our operations, and then the ability to go to market together, those things combined for us to form a low-risk and really high opportunity kind of situation.

Everything we do is laser-focused on growth opportunity out in the market, cost reduction internally, and transforming ourselves into a simpler operation which then transitions into both cost and customer effectiveness. This meets that hurdle. It’s wide, it’s deep, it’s formidable. It meets all those criteria. It’s one of those rare things that affect revenue costs and then how you serve your customers. In that regard, we love it.

5G Coming Out Of the Chute As an Enterprise First Network

5G is the most important network that we’re going to launch in my career. We’ve been about 10 or 15 years in an architecture where everything was consumer first. This one’s coming out of the chute as an enterprise first network. It’s really about consumers seeing everything they do, whether it’s to shop or go to the hospital or new experiences with toys being statically different. Us getting the right enterprise relationships done early on 5G will be the foundation for how fast this thing scales.