With telco cloud, “It’s no longer a technology conversation”
Operators are, at varying speeds, embracing the scale, speed and economics of telco cloud as they look to make the most of 5G network investments. In the first part of this piece, we heard loud and clear from operators that, in this move to the cloud, people and organizational changes can be more vexing than the massive technological shift that necessitates them. Now for the view from the vendor side.
Google Cloud is busy striking deals with operators with much of the action focused on linking together enterprises to 5G at the edge. If DISH is an indicator, there’s more to the relationship between hyperscalers and operators than just joint go-to-market. And it’s time for operators to make moves. But how does they play out in practice?
“We take the conversation pretty immediately to operations, people, process, and organizations because we are at the point now where it’s no longer a technology conversation,” according to Goolge Cloud’s Kevin Shatzkamer, digital transformation officer for telecom. “We understand the technology at this point. The technology has been well-proven; it’s been well-proven inside a telecom environment and operating environment.”
He continued: “I think when you really start to see technology adoption ramp and you start to see the hockey stick curve towards the upper right, it happens when you spend less time proving the technology is viable and more time focused on how do I organize myself to operate this technology at scale?’
Shatzkamer, who also serves as managing director of Google Cloud’s Telecom, Media and Entertainment Center of Excellence, said operators need to make an operational shift from vertical silos to horizontal layers. Reflecting on conversations with operators, he said a common need is to put conversations and decisions into contained buckets. “The first one is a set of decisions that actually need to be made early on in the process and they’ll set the direction for how you’ll adopt cloud and migrate into the cloud. The second is a set of decision…where it turns out you don’t need to make some of these decisions right now. They can be delayed until later and you can move forward with imperfect information. I think that’s tough traditionally for telecom to absorb. The third one…it’s the set of decisions that you actually think you need to make that actually turn out not to matter at all.”
Regarding the fungibility of decisions and working with the understanding that you’re using imperfect information, recall Rakuten Mobile’s Atri who commented in part one of this story, “Be bold. You don’t have to have a plan B. No decision is bad.”
VMware sees a “fundamental shift” in operator thinking
This decision-making process also applies to DISH which is building a brand-new, cloud-native network using AWS’s cloud infrastructure and following multi-vendor, Open RAN specifications. VMware is providing DISH its Telco Cloud platform for cloud-based network operations and services management.
VMware’s Chris Hill, building on Shatzkamer’s commentary, said DISH has “a mantra which is fail quick…let’s not try and be in possession of all the data and all the surety before we begin a new phase of the project.” The attitude, rather, is “let’s get out there and learn how to do it as we go. I think that’s a fundamental shift in how operators and consumers need to think about this. But we’ve been through that same change in the data center.”
Building on that, “We’ve been delivering clouds into the data center, enterprise, private cloud, multi-cloud solutions, for a long time now. It is about people, process, technology, and actually…probably the easiest one of those to achieve is standing up a technology platform. You really do have to focus on the people piece and the process piece.”
Hill also pointedly noted that, at the end of the day, investments in telco cloud are all about driving efficiency and revenue. “I think it’s worth keeping your eyes on the prize as well which is about competitiveness in a 5G/edge cloud world.”
