Microsoft Azure expands its telco solutions

New smartphones may get most of the headlines at MWC, but at its core, the annual trade show is still a telco event. It's maybe no surprise then that the large cloud providers, which are all vying for the lucrative telco market, also made a few announcements ahead of the event. AWS jumped ahead of its competitors by announcing its news a week early, and today, it's Microsoft's turn. The new features the company today announced for telco's using its Azure cloud services focus on four areas: network transformation, automation and AI, network-aware applications and what Microsoft calls "ubiquitous computing from cloud to edge."

"The future hyperscale cloud is going to look a lot different than the cloud we have today," Jason Zander, Microsoft's EVP for Strategic Missions and Tech, told me. "Our expectation is that it's going to expand; it will be a highly distributed fabric; it's going to span from 5G to space. That future -- this intelligent cloud, this intelligent edge -- has to be powered by a modern network infrastructure. And it's going to enable a new type of application and we need a new connectivity paradigm for that. We call that modern connected applications. Basically, we're on track to give you applications that can be connected anywhere, anytime on the entire planet. That's where we're headed and we want to make sure that we are part of that future. And it's a natural extension of the cloud and also an opportunity for us to partner with the telecommunications industry."

As he noted, Microsoft believes that a modern network infrastructure will drive a lower total cost of ownership for its telco partners while also helping them modernize and monetize their existing infrastructure. To do so, Microsoft is launching Azure Operator Nexus today, its next-gen hybrid cloud platform for communication service providers. It allows these companies to run their carrier-grade workloads both on-premises and on Azure.

"AT&T made the decision to adopt Azure Operator Nexus platform over time with expectation to lower total cost of ownership, leverage the power of AI to simplify operations, improve time to market and focus on our core competency of building the world’s best 5G service," said Igal Elbaz, senior vice president, Network CTO, AT&T.

It's not just about software, though. Zander explained that when Microsoft first approached this space, the company thought that it could simply apply the same technology it had built for Azure and apply it to the telco space. But that didn't work. "It's a combination of hardware, hardware acceleration and the software that goes with it," Zander explained. "This is important, because Microsoft has a set of edge cloud hardware -- but it's not built for it. When you see vendors talking about using the same thing to run an IT workload as they are planning on running a telco network, it doesn't work and it's exactly why we've made this multi-year investment."