Most Carriers Moving Operations to the Cloud, Seek Hyperscalers' Expertise

Carriers worldwide are moving to cloud-native networks in part because they have no choice, experts said Wednesday during a virtual TelecomTV forum on digital support systems. In addition, carriers, they said, increasingly want to work with hyperscalers, the large cloud service providers. Carriers seek access to their expertise.

Like many other industries, telecom “must consider the benefits that the public cloud offers,” said Amir Mehmood, director-solution engineering at cloud company Optiva. Operation and business support systems (OSS and BSS) “are critical IT systems” and “often the best candidates for quickly moving to the public cloud,” he said. OSS and BSS are in the network's “control plane” and are relatively easy to move compared to other elements, he added.

Public cloud “brings a lot of benefits like scalability, flexibility, cost-effectiveness,” Mehmood said. “You can benefit from the investments” hyperscalers are making, he noted. In North America and Europe, almost all providers have moved network elements to the cloud and the rest of the world is following, Mehmood said.

The telecom industry now sees the public cloud as “a safe environment” and providers are “really getting engaged with the big hyperscale cloud platform providers,” said Andy Tiller, executive vice president-member products & services, at the TM Forum. Cloud providers, including Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services, have become increasingly active participants in his group, formerly known as the TeleManagement Forum, Tiller said.

Carriers are seeking more than cost cutting -- they want “the skills and expertise of the hyperscalers, particularly in AI,” Tiller said. A lot of OSS and BSS is automated through AI, most recently generative AI, he said. The TM Forum is encouraging industry to “go cloud-native together, rather than everybody doing their own flavor.”

The tools hyperscalers offer aren’t designed to be used on the private clouds that telcos operate, Mehmood said.

Telecom carriers have systems built over decades, often interconnected through customized interfaces, said John Abraham, principal analyst at Appledore Research. “That’s clearly not the approach that we can carry into the future,” Abraham said. Customer preferences and what they accept of a service provider are changing, he said. “Competition is evolving -- you don’t have as much time as you had maybe a decade ago to go to market with new offerings,” he said. Carriers face a “need to rethink” their networks, he said.

Many carrier network systems are as much as 40 years old, though some were updated to connect to the cloud, said Beth Cohen, Verizon technology strategist. “There are a lot of complexities” and technology decisions “made 15, 20 years ago,” she said.

“Many of the systems were built with assumptions about telco services that are no longer valid or have changed over time,” Cohen said. The systems might be tied to a specific location, while Verizon is selling services in the cloud, she said. As a result of mergers, Verizon owns various systems that must interoperate, she said. “There’s also a lot of pressure from our customers” to access data “in new and interesting ways,” she said.

Carrier systems “typically have grown over time,” Cohen said. “They’re sort of blobs of applications that are stuck together to a certain extent with smoke and mirrors,” she said. Application programmable interfaces (APIs), a growing focus of carriers (see 2404160065), are “super important when you’re integrating these systems,” she said.

The “monolithic architecture” of telecom networks hasn’t changed for decades, said Soumava Dutta, principal enterprise architect for the Telecom Systems Business at Dell Technologies. Providers “need to pivot” toward newer technologies “and have that cultural shift” so that they’re not based on legacy systems, “which are often siloed and don’t talk to each other in a very coordinated manner,” he said.