Technological innovation is happening nonstop. You need to keep learning to stay on top of things and avoid getting left behind. In this episode, Carrie Charles sits down with Steve Gleave, Marketing Director in the Strategic Missions and Technologies Group at Microsoft. He talks about Microsoft’s Azure for Operators and how it helps service providers navigate the intersection of AI, cloud network, and modern connected applications. Steve also explains why hyperscalers and telco companies make good partners, why employers should prioritize hybrid setups in a post-pandemic world, the best solutions in retaining the best talents, and the right approaches in de-stressing a work environment.
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Cloud, Connectivity, Careers and Challenges: A Conversation with Steve Gleave of Microsoft
I have with me Steve Gleave. He is a marketing director in the Strategic Missions and Technologies group at Microsoft with a specific focus on Azure for Operators. Steve, thanks so much for joining me.
It’s fantastic to be here. I’m coming in hot from Arizona. I’m delighted.
Tell me. How did you get to where you are? You are in a very interesting role at Microsoft.
It’s quite a journey. I’m a director in the SMT team with a focus on Azure for Operators there. We will get into that. This is the eleventh tech company that I have worked for. Throughout that time, I have been at companies that have sold products and partnered with telcos. That was mostly a few with enterprise coupled with doing business with the Feds. It was an interesting journey. I was an engineering grad at a college called Bristol University in the UK. I never worked a single day as an engineer though.
I went straight into tech support, into sales, and for as long as I can remember now, into marketing. I moved to the US in the late ’90s and went to Silicon Valley. I have bounced around from Silicon Valley to DC and then back to Silicon Valley. I now make a home in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s weird that I stayed in the US though. Fun fact, I relocated from the UK, sold everything, and moved out to California to work for a guy at a tech company back then. The day I landed, he quit the company and said, “Good luck.” I have been here ever since.
Tell me one lesson that you have learned in your career. If you are talking to a young person, you want to say, “I learned this lesson in my career. Maybe if I had it to do over, I would do it differently. This was a valuable lesson that I learned.“
To me, the thing that matters most is that tech changes every day. I often think if I was making pizzas, the dough doesn’t change every week, or the pepperoni is the same. In my career, I have gone from TDM to ATM to IP. We have gone from dedicated appliances to cloud software. We have gone from Class-5 switches to soft switches. We have gone through so many of these significant changes, and you have to keep learning. You have to stay on top of the technologies as they come and go.
The challenge is that you have to be aware of those because that’s what you are marketing but sometimes, what your customers are buying isn’t exactly what you are marketing. There’s that paradox almost or that discontinuity between the stuff that you are aware of, the stuff that you are positioning, and the stuff that your customers are able to take on any given moment in time because they typically move slower than the vendors who are constantly innovating.
What is Azure for Operators?
It’s an initiative. What happened here is that Azure for Operators has this mission to help operators modernize and monetize their network infrastructure. That’s how we like to explain it. I don’t necessarily love the phrase but it’s used a lot in the industry. We have what we would call a full-stack solution. When we talk about helping our operators modernize and monetize, we like to think that we bring a complete solution to them but that solution is enhanced by the many partners that we work with.
If you look at that “stack,” it starts at the bottom with what we call a hybrid cloud platform. That’s a combination of public cloud resources and then an intelligent edge, which can be deployed on operator premises or even on enterprise premises as well. These elements are deployed all over. The applications that you run on are deployed in regions or locations that depend on the kind of applications that they are. Oftentimes, you hear people say, “I don’t want to put my stuff in the cloud,” but the reality is that the cloud can be on their premises as much as it can be anywhere else.
We have this hybrid cloud which then accesses cloud services for management, deployment, scaling, and analytics. That’s the base. That’s the platform. On top of the hybrid cloud platform, you then have what’s called network functions. These are the guts of telco services. Think about mobile core services and voice core services. We have a suite of those that run on that hybrid cloud platform. Some of those are from Microsoft, and many of those are from our partners as well.
On top of that, you have an analytics layer. Telcos generate petabytes of metadata each day around their subscribers. You want ways to analyze that data to be able to quickly identify and resolve issues to look at how you can improve network efficiencies. In that management layer is the ability to deploy complex services by communicating commands out to the cloud and saying, “Put this software here. Deploy that. Make these connections.” You have both analytical platforms and then also what we would call orchestration or lifecycle management platforms.
On top of that, you have this monetization layer, “How do you create new revenue on the network?” In that layer, we would have things like private wireless enterprise solutions and programmable connectivity options being able to program features in the network. We have something called a public MEC solution, which is advanced 5G services from inside the operator network, how you might connect your network to Microsoft Teams, and things there that you can add on top. That’s our entire full-layer stack. We wrap that up in the Azure Zero Trust security framework and a DevOps configuration and control environment. That’s what we do.
How is Azure for Operators helping service providers navigate that intersection of AI, cloud networks, and those modern connected apps?
It’s a question we get a lot. I tend to look at it in a few ways. First of all, why do we exist at all, let alone before we start throwing in AI and modern connected apps? The original idea is you want to bring the benefits of the cloud to the operating side of the telco, not the IT side of the telco but the operating side or the services that they sell to their consumers and enterprise customers. You are trying to bring the well-advertised benefits of the cloud to that. You have got scalability, agility, cost efficiencies, usage-based consumption models, and sustainability. That was the early appeal of the cloud.
What we found in Azure for Operators is you don’t take a regular cloud off the shelf and apply it to real-time communications networks. You need expertise on exactly how the demands of these networks are so stringent and the world in which telcos work. Microsoft acquired two companies to buy that telco DNA and some software stacks. We stitched that together. We have got the cloud and the telco DNA but then operators don’t want you to help modernize their infrastructure. They are constantly modernizing their infrastructure. They have been doing that since time began but they also want to monetize that infrastructure.
How can we do more with these assets? There has been a big push lately on what’s called programmable networks where you extend a bunch of what’s known as APIs or Application Programming Interfaces out from the networks that you have. There are standards for this now or recommendations for this, and we make those available inside Azure so that our big developer communities can create applications for telco networks that leverage those APIs.
We have this phrase that we call modern connected applications, which says, “The future cloud is fully distributed. There’s edge computing all over. If you want to be successful with apps on a telco network, you have to make them accessible for developers to write those applications. You want to create an environment where they can write at once and run it anywhere.”
If you want to be successful with apps on a telco network, you have to make them accessible for developers to essentially write them and run them anywhere.
We believe in distributed computing and connectivity all over, whether that’s a typical landline or terrestrial communications but also space connectivity. We see quantum computing factoring in here. We are looking at how people can write apps that take advantage of those many elements of telco networks and the ways that people connect. We do all of that.
You mentioned AI as well, which is on everybody’s mind. How do we do that as well? We have been in AI ML for a long time. There have been Azure services with those names for quite some time. A lot of that was what I would call the narrower AI or narrow ML looking at amounts of data and being able to analyze that data and make decisions based on it. Microsoft has been associated with OpenAI. We have made a lot of announcements around what we call Copilot. We are putting the Copilot technology in pretty much every strand of our product lines across the company.
What that does is to enhance those products and make those products more usable for end users. We are allowing people to do LLM or foundation model training on Azure. We are providing access to that through Azure AI Studio. Telcos know that they have to figure out AI. They see it as vital to improving customer experiences and managing their networks more intelligently and empowering their employees. We are helping them with all of that.
Why hyperscalers? I hear a lot about hyperscalers. First, we might want to define what that is. Why do hyperscalers and telcos make good partners?
You can think of the largest cloud operators. Typically, when you talk about hyperscalers, you are talking about Microsoft but you are also talking about Amazon, Google, and Oracle. Some people put Red Hat and companies like that in there as well. We make good partners because we understand how to do things at scale. Telcos have always done things at scale with millions of subscribers. They have very strict guidelines that they have to meet in terms of performance, being secure, and providing high degrees of customer confidence in their networks.
The hyperscalers have built probably the biggest machines in the world now. We see things the same way but the two things grow up slightly differently in terms of the need for what was called very high 5-9s availability in telco networks and maybe originally 3 or 4 9s in the cloud. It wasn’t completely unheard of for the cloud to go down but it’s still unheard of for telco networks to go down. Those worlds are now colliding. Telcos bring their connectivity, customer relationships, and all of the things that they do well. Hyperscalers bring this new approach to how things should be run for maximum efficiency, better sustainability, and the ability to scale and only use resources when you need them.
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If you are a telco that’s gone through this transition where products used to run on dedicated equipment from dedicated equipment providers, that spread apart years ago with something called network functions virtualization where people started saying, “Let’s split these into software and then off-the-shelf hardware.” That quickly became, “Let’s split this into cloud-native software running in hyperscale clouds because these guys do a great job of providing all of the equipment or the platform that we would need to run these on.”
A company like Microsoft in particular says, “We will meet you where you are. Wherever you are on this journey, we can continue with the way you have got your networks architected, or we can gradually experiment and bring parts of your network into our cloud running on our platforms. We don’t compete with your core business. You do connectivity. You manage customers. We help you with the back-end infra. We have a developer community, which can help write these new modern connected apps. These are the things we bring. We know the things that you do well.” You stitch those together. It has a great promise on both sides of the fence.
I would like your opinion on the future of work but I want to look at it from a wider lens. What macro forces do you see that are impacting the workforce?
I’m not a doomsayer at all but I got kids who are teenage now. I have spent a bit of time looking at this because it intrigues me what their future of work looks like. To me, there are some interesting macro forces that don’t get talked about enough in tech in general or what the future is going to hold for both employers and employees. Some of the things that I have been quite vocal about is that the workforce to an extent is getting hammered in a bit of a supply chain way because the supply chain is going to get tighter.
Here’s why. There are a number of things that are happening. The first thing is that the birth rate is going down across the world. This is a fascinating topic. We could go on for hours on it. Typically, you have what’s called a replacement rate. How many children do couples need to have to keep the population at the same rate? That’s normally 2.1 children per couple pretty much across the world in the developed nations. The actual birth rate is way lower than that. In the US, it’s about 1.6. In China, it’s 1.3. South Korea is the lowest in the world with 0.8.
People are having fewer babies. What this means is that populations are going down on the new schedule of birth rates. The projections are that the population of China will be halved by the year 2100. Japan would be down to 53 million. The global population is estimated to be down one billion from where it is now by the end of the century. That’s a major factor.
On top of that, you have got all these other things going on. College enrollment is falling off a cliff. There are four million fewer students in American colleges than there were years ago. Enrollments are dropping. Sixty-three percent of high school grads are saying they want to go to college. That’s down from 75%. People are getting sticker shock with the prices. They don’t understand the financial aid options. In 2008, the birth rate dropped significantly. That is now impacting kids who are coming into college. There are fewer people coming through. The people who are already out there are being overworked. Stress is a real issue at work now. There’s some uncertainty around layoffs.
There are less people coming through the workforce. Meanwhile, those who are already out there are being overworked, making stress a real issue at work.
There’s a very interesting survey I came across from a company called Qualtrics and also from Prudential about employee engagement. People’s ambition seems to have gone down during COVID. There’s a difference between generations. A high percentage of Gen Z are more focused on getting the job done whereas Boomers typically have a better attitude toward going above and beyond. You are seeing some generational changes in approach to work and the supply chain over the next few decades.
Do you have any ideas? We have fewer people in the workforce and everything you said with the enrollment and universities dropping. Looking at solutions, it would make sense to say, “Automation, machine learning, robotics, and all of that,” but are there any other solutions here that I as a leader could take from this and say, “This is something I need to start doing now so I can attract, engage, and retain the workforce that I need to get the job done.“
There are a couple of parts to that. I do want to quickly talk about the tech side of it and then also some of the softer side of it. Generative AI is a massive addition here to a productivity boost. Satya, our CEO, is in the Wall Street Journal saying something like, “We need something that truly changes the productivity curve so we can have real economic growth.”
We do this Work Trend Index. I was reading that. In there, Satya was saying that this new generation of AI will remove the drudgery of work. It will unleash creativity. There’s this opportunity for AI-powered tools to alleviate what he calls digital debt, build AI aptitude, and empower employees. This Work Trend Index that Microsoft runs every year across about 31,000 people found that 57% of the time for those surveyed was spent communicating, and only 43% was spent creating.
We waste all of this time by not being able to find information easily, having too many meetings, and lacking clear goals. AI can help alleviate all of this. 49% of people were worried about AI replacing their jobs but 70% would welcome delegating as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workload. AI is going to help improve our efficiencies, and that’s a massive part of what helps us as we go forward here in terms of, “Are there fewer people to do it?”
On the softer side of things, if I’m an employer and a leader, I’m looking to get the right people, not just to get people. I’m looking to sell a purpose for what we are doing. I’m trying to be a company that does good things and cares about the environment and its employees. I would be as interested in hiring older people as I would younger people. There’s some age discrimination going on in the industry. Old people have an awful lot of good knowledge. I would be flexible that not everybody wants to live in Seattle, Boston, San Fran, or San Jose.
Steve Case, the AOL guy, had a book out that I was reading called The Rise of the Rest talking about how people now are living in other places and how those places are thriving. We should be talent-centric, not org-centric. Everybody likes to fill a gap to put somebody in an org chart. You have to look at the people who are coming through the door and go, “How do we best use them? What’s the career path for this person?” Not stick them on the ladder, “You start here and then you go here.”
You talked about stress in the workplace briefly, and I know it’s at an all-time high. How do we de-stress the work environment?
I’m a big fan of hybrid work. I get why we need offices and why we don’t. On some days, I will do fourteen hours. I’m not trying to say I’m overworking but I wonder how I ever spent two hours commuting. That would have been extra time, extra stress, and extra parking. I used to live in the Bay Area. It could take me 3 hours sometimes to drive 25 miles home. We don’t have that time.
People do have to continue with an element of hybrid working because of the efficiencies. There’s a paradox where employees find them more productive when they work hybrid but the employers sometimes have a lack of confidence in their productivity levels when they are remote. We have to get over this whole disconnect between where I’m most efficient and generically where my boss may think I do my best work. That’s important. Hybrid work should be here to stay.
We should reduce the number of meetings. I read something about someone saying, “You should limit them all to fifteen minutes.” I don’t think that’s a bad idea if you could knock out four meetings in an hour and then leave plenty of time for you to get on with your job. There was this interesting thing by a nonprofit called 4 Day Week Global. They did some research with companies and different researchers at some of the higher-end colleges.
They did this thing over 6 months with about 30-odd companies and 900 workers trying a 4-day workweek and no reduction in pay. Nothing else changed. The results were off the charts. Everybody thought it was brilliant. Those responding to the survey rated it very highly based on productivity and performance. Workers were positive about reporting lower levels of stress, fatigue, insomnia, and burnout. There are some interesting things there.
At the end of the day, we have to realize we are only human. How efficient can we be? If I’m running 100 meters, there’s probably a time that is the maximum the fastest a human could ever run. It’s 9.59. It’s not going to get down to 7.5 seconds. We push people to the absolute maximum. Constantly trying to get more efficiency out of people adds to the stress levels. There are things that people can do. You work for a company that has a great mission. You empower your employees. You are focused on compelling goals. You are trying to bring individuals through as opposed to an org chart. That can help.
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We need to keep an open mind and have a paradigm shift. The way it was is not going to take us into the future when it comes to people, humans, and the workforce. It’s going to look different. I couldn’t agree with you more. Everything you have said was spot on. We have run out of time. This has been fascinating. I could talk to you for hours and hours on this topic. I want to thank you so much. Where can we learn more about you and Azure for Operators? What’s your website?
The easiest place to go is we have a URL, which is quite simply Microsoft.com/telecom. That’s your entry point to everything Microsoft does with telecom and telcos. That will lead you through and down to Azure for Operators. You can move sideways to the Strategic Missions and Tech group. As for me, LinkedIn is as good a place as any. I have been on there since day one. I don’t do Twitter or X anymore. Don’t look for me there. I wouldn’t be part of that now. I’m on LinkedIn. Look me up there.
Steve, thanks so much for your time. It has been a pleasure.
Thanks. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Have a great one.
You too. Take care.
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Important Links
- Azure for Operators
- Copilot
- Work Trend Index
- The Rise of the Rest
- LinkedIn – Steve Gleave
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About Steve Gleave
Steve Gleave is a Director of Marketing in Microsoft’s Strategic Missions and Technologies group. In this role, Steve works to evangelize and progress Microsoft’s success in several new technology and market areas, with particular focus on the Azure for Operators initiative. Azure for Operators helps communications service providers modernize and monetize their network infrastructure by partnering with Microsoft’s trusted hybrid cloud platform and a broad range of network functions, cloud services and partner solutions.
Steve has spent his entire career in the telecommunications industry, working for multiple technology suppliers, through many industry transitions: From TDM to IP, fixed voice to mobile devices, and hardware appliances to hybrid cloud software solutions. Born and graduating in the UK, Steve has spent the last 20+ years living, working, and unsuccessfully rehabilitating his accent in the USA. Along the way he has become passionate about progressing the modern telco agenda, figuring out what AI means for his future, and charting a course back to the English Premier League for his beloved Coventry City.
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