When our in-person world shut down over a year ago, connectivity became the critical enabler of our digital future. Daily video calls connected us professionally and personally. We logged into apps to speak with doctors and helped our children adjust to remote learning. Enterprises did the same as their services became increasingly driven by digital engagement.
As telecommunications companies (telcos) race to capture the new potential of 5G and Edge, they are realising that monetising digital engagement remains one of their biggest challenges, given the massive infrastructure investments and rapid technology disruptions.
A new global IBM Institute for Business Value study has just been released on “The Future of Telecom”, and it polled 500 global telecom executives in 21 countries including the United Arab Emirates, with the key goal to understand the greatest challenges and opportunities as telcos transform their businesses to capture this new potential.
The study revealed that 74% of Communications Service Providers CPS agreed that partnering with webscale companies, including the cloud hyperscale companies, for 5G-enabled edge computing would mostly benefit the strategic interests of webscalers. Webscalers being enterprises that operates internet applications, services, or technologies at global, or close-to-global, scale. Typically, they were born cloud native and are known for rapid innovation, data-centricity, and business agility.
To own their own destiny, I’d argue that telcos must become platforms themselves or face the realities of competing with them.
Hybrid cloud keeps telcos in control
One thing is clear: our role as enterprise technology providers is to help telcos embrace platforms that keep the power of innovation in their hands. We do this by helping them evolve to open software platforms that align to standards-based approaches and enable them – and the enterprises they serve – to maintain control of where and how they deploy their network services, edge platforms and enterprise offerings.
The reality is 5G will cost in the range of five times what 4G costs to deploy. Essentially major telcos have announced their commitment to spending billions of dollars in the coming years on infrastructure to support 5G. Because of this, there is a pressing financial urgency for telcos to harness their dominant position in connectivity to deliver a platform for innovation to their customers. And many are already doing this by transforming their network architectures into software-defined platforms that can support growing volumes of 5G and Edge-enabled use cases.
The recent IBM study backs this up by showing that 62% of the surveyed telcos in the Middle East and Africa agreed that it is important that their organisation become more proficient at automating the decisions related to infrastructure, network functions, and operations. And open hybrid cloud architectures are emerging as the essential platforms to support this transformation. Why? Because by design, they ensure that your data remains your data, and your decisions regarding where to move that data, how to harness and secure it, how to create valuable insights from it, and who to partner with to monetise it remain yours.
Public cloud is not an “either-or” decision
Public cloud should be a key part of any telco’s IT transformation strategy, but it’s not an either-or decision, and this is a crucial distinction.
Say, for example, you’ve moved the application layer of your network onto one public cloud. You want to build and deploy new edge applications, but your provider limits what security vendors you can partner with; or maybe you want to continue using a different cloud for sensitive workloads, but your provider won’t support interoperability.
Instead, with an open hybrid cloud approach you can bring together your choice of cloud and on-premises environments as well as third party vendors, all enabled by an open platform
A hybrid cloud model also means you stay in control of your data by infusing enterprise level security in all aspects of the workflows you manage, as well as for those of customers and partners. With an open hybrid cloud approach, you can safely monetise your data because you can continue to own the keys to it, maintain control over your own privacy settings and integrate security and compliance across the breadth of your IT workloads.
Ensuring a central role in the 5G future
The bottom line is these recent study findings underscore IBM’s continued commitment to helping telcos embrace platforms that keep the power of innovation in their hands.
We are firmly committed to stay on-side with the Telcos as they embrace open hybrid cloud strategies to power their transformation. Our work spans the globe, including recent collaborations with Telefonica Argentina, Telefonica Spain, Lumen Technologies, Vodafone Portugal, Telecom Egypt, Samsung and Colt Technologies.
Building on this momentum, IBM introduced the IBM Cloud for Telecommunications, and its ecosystem of 40+ partners. Built on IBM Cloud Satellite and leveraging Red Hat OpenShift, clients can deploy IBM Cloud services anywhere: on any cloud, on premises or at the edge, while addressing industry-specific requirements and data protection. And, importantly, they avoid lock into any specific vendor’s platform.
Also, on the automaton front that is becoming a pre-requisite for telcos in their transformation journeys to remain profitable and relevant, the AI-powered IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation enables telcos to evolve to zero-touch operations, reduce operating expenses (OpEx) and deliver services faster.
