New smartphones may grab most of the headlines at MWC, but at its core, the annual trade show is still a telecoms event. Perhaps not surprisingly, the big cloud providers, which compete for the lucrative telecom market, have also made some announcements ahead of the event. AWS was ahead of its competitors by announcing its news a week before and today is Microsoft’s turn. The new features the company announced today for telcos using its Azure cloud services focus on four areas: network transformation, automation and AI, network-aware applications, and what Microsoft calls “ubiquitous computing.” from the cloud to the edge”.
“The future hyperscale cloud will look very different than the cloud we have today,” Jason Zander, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Strategic Missions and Technology, told me. “Our expectation is that it will expand; it will be a very distributed fabric; it will extend from 5G to space. That future, this intelligent cloud, this intelligent edge, must 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 apps. Basically, we are on the right track to bring you apps that can be connected anywhere and anytime across the planet. That’s where we’re headed, and we want to make sure we’re part of that future. And it is a natural extension of the cloud and also an opportunity for us to partner with the telecom industry.”
As he noted, Microsoft believes that a modern network infrastructure will result in a lower total cost of ownership for its telecommunications partners while helping them modernize and monetize their existing infrastructure. To do so, Microsoft today launches Azure Operator Nexus, its next-generation hybrid cloud platform for communication service providers. It enables these companies to run their carrier-grade workloads both on-premises and on Azure.
“AT&T made the decision to adopt the Azure Operator Nexus platform over time with the expectation of lowering total cost of ownership, harnessing the power of AI to simplify operations, improving time to market, and focusing on our core competency of building the best 5G service in the world.” said Igal Elbaz, Senior Vice President, CTO of Network, AT&T.
However, it is not just about software. Zander explained that when Microsoft first approached this space, the company thought it could simply take the same technology that it had created for Azure and apply it to the telecommunications space. But that didn’t work. “It’s a combination of hardware, hardware acceleration, and the software that goes along with it,” Zander explained. “This is important, because Microsoft has a set of edge cloud hardware, but it’s not designed for that. When you see vendors talking about using the same thing to run an IT workload that they plan to run a telecom network, it doesn’t work and that’s exactly why we’ve made this multi-year investment.”
As part of today’s announcements, Microsoft is also launching Azure Communications Gatewayits service to connect fixed and mobile networks to Teams, in general availability and is launching Azure Operator Voicemail, a service that allows operators to migrate their voicemail services (remember voicemail?) to Azure as a fully serviced administered.
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 the massive amounts of data they collect from their network operations and troubleshoot potential issues, while Service Manager helps operators generate insights into their network configurations.
With this announcement, Microsoft is also placing an emphasis on creating web-friendly applications. For the most part, it is about managing the quality of service for specific applications. It could be 5G data from autonomous cars or the connection of next-generation flying vehicles like the Volocopter, a company Microsoft has. was associated with for a time, to the cloud. As Zander pointed out, this requires back and forth between carriers and developers, and since no developer is going to build a service that only works on one network, there needs to be some interoperability here. With the Linux Foundation Chamber Project, Microsoft, Google Cloud, IBM, Ericsson, Intel, and others have been working with carriers such as AT&T, Deutsche Telecom, Orange, T-Mobile US, Telefonica, TELUS, and Vodafone to create an open API standard for some of this work. “They get it. They know they want to differentiate themselves, but they also know that if there are fragments in the app ecosystem, it’s just going to get stuck one way or another,” Zander said.
Also new today is the general availability of Azure Private 5G Core and Microsoft’s multi-access edge computing (MEC) service.
