"It is working with Reliance Communications to provide its customers with a complete portfolio of highly secure and scalable infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings running on the IBM cloud," IBM said in a statement today.

Rcom has a client base of over 115 million, including over 39,000 large enterprises and small and medium businesses (SMBs) across industries.

IBM said through this alliance, Rcom will be able to provide enterprises, especially the SMBs, a robust infrastructure platform to run their business applications.

"The company will not only offer IBM cloud infrastructure services to its customers but it has also launched new offerings designed to provide end-to-end integrated e-commerce services for India's SMB market-all running on the IBM cloud," it added.

IBM said its recent research reveals that communication service providers (CSPs) are recognising cloud services as a growing service line for their organisations and integral to driving new revenue streams with customers.

IBM is partnering a number of leading CSPs in major markets including Bell Canada, Indostat, Telstra (Australia), Reliance (India) AT&T and Verizon.

"Through our partnership with IBM, customers will instantly benefit from the added flexibility and global reach to be more competitive, especially as we look at new opportunities from the 'Digital India' programme," said Braham Singh, SVP of Global Product Management, Rcom (Enterprise) and Global Cloud Xchange.

IBM cloud has a collection of services including analytics, mobile, networking, storage, internet of things and cognitive computing and the company has 47 global cloud data centres.

"We are delighted to partner Reliance Communications and support their efforts to offer our Cloud services in the Indian market," Vivek Malhotra, Cloud Leader, IBM India/South Asia said.