Verizon continued shedding weight this week, announcing an agreement to sell its private cloud and managed hosting business to tech giant IBM.

In a blog post, Verizon Enterprise Solutions SVP and Group President George Fischer said the deal represents the “latest development in an ongoing IT strategy aimed at allowing us to focus on helping our customers securely and reliably connect to their cloud resources and utilize cloud-enabled applications.”

According to Fischer, the carrier agreed to hand the services over to IBM for an undisclosed sum, but will continue to work with IBM on a number of “strategic initiatives” involving networking and cloud services.

“Our goal is to become one of the world’s leading managed services providers enabled by an ecosystem of best-in-class technology solutions from Verizon and a network of other leading providers,” Fischer commented. “Along the way, we will invest in technology that helps our customers continue their IT transformation journey. Our customers want to improve application performance while streamlining operations and securing information in the cloud. VES is now well positioned to provide those solutions through intelligent networking, managed IT services, and business communications.”

Though the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Fischer said Verizon expects the transaction to close later in 2017.

The move to dump its private cloud service comes little over a year after Verizon quietly shut down its public cloud offering. Last week, Verizon also completed the sale of more than 20 of its data centers to Equinix for $3.6 billion. That transaction was first announced back in December.