Global telcos gathering in force this week during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, are working on rebranding themselves as AI, cloud, and edge providers, alongside long-established hyperscaler and platform services rivals. Operators are tackling this via connectivity with AI tooling (and necessary compute), leveraged through partnerships, and released as part of their evolving portfolios, including edge cloud, sovereign cloud, and AI-injected connectivity. The infrastructure leaders are going after cloud giants’ customer base, including enterprises and the public sector.
The cloud ecosystem is evolving quickly and is more confusing than ever, because there’s so much competition and cooperation among players spanning the entire cloud stack. “The early years of digital transformation focused on the app modernisation part of digitisation; now the industry is focused on infrastructure modernisation,” said Charlotte Dunlap, GlobalData research director. “That means networking and telecommunications players are stepping up to fill in the gaps left by application platform services providers.”
What this means to enterprises is an increase in hyperscaler partnerships to enable telco workloads in the cloud, including edge compute, and a trend towards telcos being able to co-sell cloud services–think Red Hat OpenShift platform services.
“Those platform service providers opening up their Kubernetes container and GenAI service opportunities to new infrastructure partnerships will open the floodgates of opportunity for themselves and partners,” Dunlap added.
“Platform providers have been faltering in their ability to keep up with integration and consulting demands from enterprise customers. Telco/platform partnerships represent a win-win for the industry.”
Telcos and network providers are leveraging GenAI and even AIOps to improve their network automation capabilities and to ensure secure connectivity. In this way, managed cybersecurity represents a top-shelf digital transformation offering that infrastructure players can lead with as they go after the cloud space. Enterprises know that telcos will handle the heavy lifting of infrastructure modernisation requirements (e.g., redesigning network architecture) to support these technologies.
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By GlobalDataFinally, operators are exposing network functions through standardised APIs to build out enterprise developer followings and play a role in the application layer of the cloud stack. Popular network services include identity, fraud detection, location, and QoS. These activities are often associated with GSMA/Open Gateway.
In many ways, MWC is more important than ever to global enterprises and the evolving role of telcos in supporting their app and infrastructure modernisation efforts. Businesses are counting on digitisation to provide new business opportunities to ensure their future success.
