New smartphones may dominate MWC headlines, but at its core, the annual trade show is still a telco event. It should come as no surprise, perhaps, that the large cloud he provider, which is vying for a lucrative telecom market, made several announcements ahead of the event. AWS got ahead of its competitors by announcing the news he was a week early, but today it’s Microsoft’s turn. The company announced today new capabilities for carriers using its Azure cloud services, including network transformation, automation and AI, network-enabled applications, and what Microsoft calls “ubiquitous computing from the cloud to the edge.” We focus on one area.
“The hyperscale cloud of the future will be very different from the cloud of today,” Jason Zander, EVP of Strategic Mission and Technology at Microsoft, told me. “Our expectation is that it will scale. It will be a highly distributed fabric. It will extend from 5G to space. And it will enable new types of applications and require new connectivity paradigms for which we call modern connected applications. We plan to deliver applications that can connect anywhere on the planet, at any time.That’s where we’re headed and we want to make sure we’re part of that future.This is the nature of the cloud. It is a significant expansion and an opportunity to partner with the telecom industry.”
As he pointed out, Microsoft believes a modern network infrastructure can help reduce the total cost of ownership for its telecom partners, while also helping them modernize and monetize their existing infrastructure. To that end, today we are announcing Azure Operator Nexus, our next-generation hybrid cloud platform for communications service providers. These companies can run carrier-grade workloads both on-premises and in Azure.
“AT&T is determined to reduce total cost of ownership, leverage the power of AI to simplify operations, speed time to market, and focus on our core competencies of building the world’s best 5G services. With high hopes, we have decided to gradually adopt the Azure Operator Nexus platform,” said Igal Elbaz, Senior Vice President and Networks CTO, AT&T.
But it’s not just software. Zander explained that when Microsoft first approached this space, they thought they could simply apply the same technology they built for Azure and apply it to the telco space. But it didn’t work. “It’s a combination of hardware, hardware acceleration, and the software that comes with it,” he explains Zander. “This is important because Microsoft has a range of edge cloud hardware, but it wasn’t built for it. When you see people talk about running their IT workloads in a 3D model, it just doesn’t work and that’s exactly why we made this multi-year investment.”
As part of today’s announcement, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Communications Gateway, a service for connecting fixed and mobile networks to Teams, allowing operators to connect voicemail (remember voicemail?) services to Teams. Start Azure Operator Voicemail, a service that enables migration. On Azure as a fully managed service.
On the AI front, Microsoft is launching two new “AIOps” services: Azure Operator Insights and Azure Operator Service Manager. Operator Insights uses machine learning to help operators analyze large amounts of data collected from network operations and troubleshoot potential problems. Service Manager, on the other hand, helps operators generate insights about network configuration.
With this announcement, Microsoft is also focusing on building network-enabled applications. In most cases, this is about managing quality of service for a particular application. It could be his 5G data from self-driving cars, or connecting next-generation flying vehicles like the Volocopter, with which Microsoft has long partnered, to the cloud.As Zander pointed out, this includes Communication is required between the carrier and the developer. Also, interoperability is necessary because no developer creates a service that works only on one network. The Linux Foundation’s Project Camara sees Microsoft, Google Cloud, IBM, Ericsson, Intel and others working with carriers like AT&T, Deutsche Telecom, Orange, T-Mobile US, Telefonica, TELUS and Vodafone to We create open API standards for the enterprise. of this work. “They get it. They know they want differentiation, but they also know that if there’s a fragment in the app ecosystem, it’s going to stall one way or the other.” he said Zander.
Also new today is general availability of Azure Private 5G Core and Microsoft’s Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) services.
