The future of cloud as supply chain for modern telco services

If there’s anything we’ve learned so far in 2020, it’s that no one can predict day to day what is going to happen next. Therefore, we believe technology should be there to help developers and operators build for agility and manage for change. This is especially true for our customers in the telecommunications industry. Communications service providers (CSPs) have seen their network resiliency and service delivery put to the test as students, enterprise users, and consumers have all shifted rapidly to digital-only engagements to learn, conduct business, and stay connected. The trick for CSPs, however, is enabling agility and accelerating innovation across a globally distributed network without having to manage the complexity of running services on this infrastructure.

This topic and more are explored by Jennifer Lin, VP of Product Management and Chen Goldberg, Senior Director of Engineering, in “The Future of Tech” podcast hosted by Avishai Sharlin, Division President of Amdocs Technology, a Google Cloud partner and a leading provider of software and services to communications and media companies. They also discussed the evolution of open-source technologies and the role Anthos can play in driving application modernization and speed of innovation amongst Telcos.

Cloud’s role in the supply chain for modern Telco services

Telco networks and services have grown rather complex over the years. In order to unlock the potential of modern Telco services, CSPs may need to build more intelligent automation into their networks and remove some of that complexity. This is critical to support agile Telco IT and network services. One of the hot topics also discussed in the podcast was the rise of 5G/edge computing to deliver new services.

“This move from IT monolithic systems from single vendors to 5G/edge data-driven services is about delivering a customer experience,” said Lin. “The pace at which we can move in [the] cloud as the supply chain for new services is phenomenal.” 

Evolution of open-source and how Anthos speeds application modernization in Telco

There’s also been an enormous amount of change and development in the application layer over the past few years. Open-source technologies like Docker and Kubernetes helped developers achieve faster speed in innovation by making systems more composable and portable. However, according to Goldberg, there were still some things missing, and that was what drove the creation of Anthos.

“We went from building a product like Google Kubernetes Engine, which was just the container orchestration manager experience to something like Anthos [because] we have seen that just the portability of workload[s] is not enough,“ said Goldberg. “Our customers actually want us to take control and give them a managed experience wherever they build. That really gives them that engineering velocity.”

Furthermore, a few years ago, the industry was still missing a platform that would enable developers and IT to not only build but also manage applications consistently across on-premises data centers, cloud environments, and at the edge. A solution like this would be key because many CSPs still have a large percentage of their data residing on premises and they will likely continue to live on-premises. Therefore, Anthos for Telecom was also developed to help CSPs more easily manage day two operations for applications that run across mixed deployment environments. 

To learn more about how Anthos is helping modernize Telco IT systems and how we're working with strategic partners like Amdocs to modernize OSS/BSS, tune in for the full conversation on “The Future of Tech” podcast. To learn more about Google Cloud’s Telco strategy, as well as 5G/Edge strategy and solutions, check out the Google Cloud Next ‘20 OnAir sessions, “Accelerating telecommunications growth” and “Harnessing 5G/Edge: Enterprise opportunity, 5G/Edge solutions, road ahead.”