Microsoft said digital strategies are key for the survival of telecom operators
BERLIN – Telecom operators should think in a different way in order to launch digital transformation strategies, Bob de Haven, GM of worldwide communications and media at Microsoft, said during the Amdocs Experience 2017 event.
“Microsoft is now a different company compared to what it was two years ago. The company has shifted from a productivity-based company around the office to a cloud-first, mobile-first company,” the executive said. “When you think of Microsoft, think of a platform and the cloud. We are now going after solutions but as a platform company. This was a fundamental shift for the company.”
The executive said it is key for telecommunications carriers to implement digital strategies. “We are telling carriers that they go digital or they go broke,” de Haven said.
De Haven said carriers needs to change their mindsets to undertake digital transformation. “Operators have spent 125 years building out five-9s [reliability]. That’s in their DNA, that’s what they do. It’s very difficult to quickly launch digital solutions that are not five-9s enabled. And that culture is a huge barrier to getting things done quickly.”
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Telecom operators need to “experiment and fail fast”, in order to rapidly bring new services. He also said that operators do not need to focus on testing and reliability prior to service launches as this scenario creates a window of opportunity for rival telcos.
There are currently 28 Azure regions available worldwide, he said, adding that new Azure regions have been recently announced in Germany and the United Kingdom. Last month, the U.S. company said that its data center regions in Germany Northeast (Magdeburg) and Germany Central (Frankfurt am Main) are already available to firms interested in running applications and storing data through Microsoft Azure. The two data centers will be able to run Office 365 from the first quarter of 2017 and Microsoft Dynamics from the first half of 2017.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. Azure provides both platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings.