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5G SA is indeed the first telecom component to be thought of as fully cloud-native.
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Now, operators’ attention is turning toward applications in three categories: business support systems, OSS and network functions.
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Different operators are taking different approaches.
It’s no secret that telecom operators are looking to utilize the cloud, but how exactly? What workloads are they moving first and what, if anything, is staying on premises? Silverlinings posed those questions directly to Ankur Jain, the new head of Google Cloud’s telecom business, and Gabriele di Piazza, Google Cloud’s senior director of product management for Telecom and Edge, at last week’s Google Cloud Next event.
For the record, di Piazza said while standalone 5G is indeed the first telecom component to be thought of as fully cloud-native, operators aren’t just looking to cloudify 5G SA but also dual-mode applications like voice and access functions.
Both Jain and di Piazza said that different operators are, of course, taking different approaches. But generally speaking, IT systems tend to be the initial target. The migration of IT applications to the public cloud “has been happening” for some time already, di Piazza said. Now, operators’ attention is starting to turn to applications in three categories: business support systems, OSS and network functions.
Check out a clip from our chat with Ankur Jain in our Lunch Ladies podcast, here!
According to di Piazza, the former refers to applications related to billing, charging and support. OSS functions, meanwhile, include applications used to manage network inventory and provisioning. Network functions software includes software from telco vendors like Ericsson, Nokia and others who the operators rely on for services. And they’re developing multi-year roadmaps to transition all of these to the cloud.
“We’re starting to receive requests from partners, ISV partners: ‘Hey, carrier so-and-so called us [and said] that we should be ready to run on Google Cloud. Not for this year — for 2024, 2025,’” di Piazza said.
“Some of these projects span over the course of five to 10 years,” he continued. “They have hundreds of operational support systems, so this is not an easy switch.”
Jain and di Piazza both pointed to data as another trend in telco cloud. Basically, operators are looking for ways to move their data to the public cloud to make it more accessible and to leverage more analytics tools. Di Piazza stated data is “probably the fastest growing or fastest moving type of workload.”
Network workloads
But the pair indicated there’s another migration trend emerging: the movement of network workloads.
“On the network workload side, that is where we are seeing a lot of traction over the past few quarters. So I expect that to also pickup more and more in the coming months and quarters,” Jain said. He added that Google Cloud has seen particular interest in moving packet core workloads.
While some of these workloads may run primarily on premises today, “people are looking at backup” in the public cloud as an early use case or even running the packet core IMS” in the public cloud,” Jain said.
Applications staying on-prem
There are a few use cases that will remain on-premises, Jain and di Piazza said, among them radio access applications and those subject to government regulation. But the cloud still has tools to offer.
Jain said in certain countries, voice data must be kept on premises, so some operators are looking to pre-process data on prem to send customer call transcripts to the cloud where they can be further analyzed. And on the radio access front, di Piazza said operators can adopt a distributed cloud model to manage deployment, upgrades and security for thousands of cell sites in a more simplified way.
“The new model allows for a way more flexible deployment of software but at the same time brings the issue of how to manage the compute and that’s where the cloud comes into play,” di Piazza said. “We are able to basically bring the cloud operating, cloud lifecycle model across those different locations.”
What’s next?
Jain said over the next 12 to 24 months, Google Cloud will focus on scaling both with existing customers and to include new ones with a three-pronged strategy built around meeting demand for artificial intelligence solutions, monetization tools and cloud-based network software.
More on that can be found here.
Check out all of our coverage from Google Cloud Next 2023 with our dedicated news hub here.