It is easy to be benevolent when you’re top-dog. Which is true in life, of course – and is not to say that goodness should be graded by the relative comfort of the do-gooder. But what goodness is there in a boardroom, really? Because business is business, right? Goodness? Gracious! When the suits are sitting, it only ever masks another agenda. Which should, perhaps, inform our view of the hyper-scale drive to sell digital change to sundry enterprise sectors – especially when there is a tangle of interests, as with private 5G.
Because, make no mistake, the big cloud vendors are the top dogs in the IT room. Increasingly (arguably) they are also the top dogs on the OT floor – which is a noisy crucible for the provision of new cellular systems, and all the Industry 4.0 gubbins that go on top. And one way or another, the hyperscalers, with direct lines to all the big chiefs in enterprise companies, are calling the shots about this new digital supply, or at least in a position to have their say – not just on cloud infrastructure, but about all the services, including cellular, that plug into it.
The issue is these companies are playing both sides of the line – as agents of change for enterprises and also for their other suppliers, some of which are selling bits and pieces of the total change solution. Of course, they are not the only ones; a whole bunch of consultancy and integration businesses are working the same angles. The 5G conflict in this IT/OT crucible arises because of the anywhere-supply of private cellular – a telco-born technology, made cloud-native, which was supposed to give telcos new life.
But spectrum liberalisation, open systems, and network sovereignty has made private 5G anyone’s game. Because anyone can be a telecoms supplier, now; anyone can be a telecoms operator. Hyperscalers are selling digital change to telecoms suppliers, like to everyone else, and they are also (directly or indirectly) selling telecoms systems to telecoms customers as part of their broader change-bundles. And they want you along for the ride – maybe in some digital meritocracy, which delivers results and plays out as survival-of-the-fittest – so long as they get the workloads.
So, yeah; benevolence is a loaded concept in business.
But of course it is; this article, essentially a free-form meditation about the power-play in the private 5G market, says nothing revelatory; everyone knows all of this. But it has also sat on file for weeks, and is hard to write – and it is never really said, or written down. Some explanation: it comes, really, out of a series of conversations with and about AWS at various trade events during the past few months – most notably at Hannover Messe, where it made such a busy impression that one might suppose paranoid factory operators have embraced the public cloud completely.
The interpretation of these conversations applies just as well to Microsoft (with a bustling stand in Hanover, also), and to Alibaba Cloud and Google Cloud. Indeed, there is a sense these cloud mega-firms are the new Industry 4.0 kingmakers, if not the gatekeepers. But let us consider the AWS story, again, as it crosses with telecoms. There are four ‘pillars’ to its telco transformation practice, it says; all of them, as per the master plan about economies of hyper-scale, are geared to put digital ‘workloads’ on cloud infrastructure, tapping into regional and enterprise edge operations, as required and requested.
Only one of the four pillars (the last) is about private 5G networks, which is where the flare-up is. The firm’s tiered telco strategy goes like this: one, to help network vendors to migrate functions onto the cloud (to bring flexibility to network operations); two, to do the same with network operators (to bring efficiency to trailing ‘workloads’); three, to automate and illuminate network data, notably in customer-facing functions; and four, to monetize the new services this double whammy of next-gen cellular and digital change affords, including with private networks for enterprise.
Of course, this overplays the ultimate role of the network. As previously, AWS comments: “In the last decade, the value has moved above the connectivity layer to the services on top – the devices and applications that run on top of the networks. That is where the value is, and we are helping telcos to recapture some of it… Private networks.. [are] a part of both our push to develop cloud offerings [to] enable telcos to get into new verticals, and our move to integrate the cloud into the network-edge to help telcos to create services that combine both elements.”
There are other things, as well, of course; for example, AWS is “helping [telcos] to build new services and solutions, like in the smart home space”. These all sound like benevolent pursuits; they are not, of course. One only has to consider its Sidewalk play in the LPWAN segment to know AWS will step in where it sees an opportunity to fast-track the workloads. It is the same with Microsoft, buying 5G service vendors Metaswitch and Affirmed Networks. At least AWS has not taken 5G in-house – yet, anyway.
And while there is zero evidence to think otherwise, this is all just business. The hyperscalers view telecoms like any other ‘vertical’ opportunity, albeit with its own unique scale and capabilities. What is most notable with AWS – when speaking with it, and also about it – is how complete its customer focus is. It is astonishing how the script repeats during half-dozen in-depth discussions at trade shows through the spring. The weirdest part, in fact, is quite how unaffectedly earnest it all is – as if AWS is not just paying lip service to some old PR cliché.
“We always work backwards from the customer,” said Ishwar Parulkar, speaking with RCR Wireless around the time of MWC in March. It was the same line from Yasser Alsaied, in charge of the company’s IoT business, speaking at IoT Solutions World Congress the month before; the same one again from Michael MacKenzie, general manager of its industrial IoT and robotics business at Hannover Messe the month after (to be written). It is the same line as well from its partners, variously; it is corporate brainwashing on a grand scale, or else there really is something to it.
And in the end, it feels kinda genuine. The point, as discussed, is that AWS is selling digital change to any enterprise that wants it. Which, as per the jeopardy, includes telecoms operators, but also, and more expansively, every enterprise in every industry the telecoms market wants to ‘prime’ with private 5G. But, as quoted, cellular is perceived by non-telco natives as just another tool in the box. It is available from many suppliers, not just from telcos. And so these hyperscalers are quite able – and quite prepared – to sidestep one customer group to serve the other.
AWS will do it through partners; Microsoft will do it on its own, if the deal makes sense. Because the hyperscaler perspective, from on top of the tech stack, is that the network is just an elevator mechanism to get machine data into the cloud, wherever that is, and back again as a string of action-items. Just business, y’see? Like we didn’t know.
But actually, as well: this is not a straight dog fight. There is a difference, which the cloud community understands. It is business, alright, but it is business of a highly-speculative kind, and on an entirely-massive scale. Which requires suppliers to go searching together, mob-handed, and not always with clearly defined roles or prospects. The question for telcos is whether they will join this caravan of adventurers, on a glory road to some kind of industrial promised-land.
They already are, to be fair; even if they are only along as rope carriers, to draw the gold out of the ground. Perhaps the question is just whether they will hoist themselves up with their 5G rope, or hang themselves with it.
