Telcos often view hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft as competition, complaining that the digital natives have a distinct advantage because they aren’t hamstrung by regulation. But these companies are also potential partners, and they could help telcos crack the enterprise 5G market.
Microsoft partners with telcos to deliver 5G user scenarios
Telcos often view hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft as competition, complaining that the digital natives have a distinct advantage because they aren’t hamstrung by regulation. But these companies are also potential partners for communications service providers (CSPs), and they could help them crack the enterprise 5G market. That’s the message Microsoft’s Eric Troup, Chief Technology Officer, Worldwide Communications and Media Industries, delivered during a digital leadership session at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World last month.
“Leveraging 5G to deliver the next generation of enhanced user scenarios is a challenge we [Microsoft] cannot solve alone and the service provider can’t solve alone,” he says. “It really is a partnership discussion.”
Troup adds that this is not necessarily a technical discussion – it is often a business-level conversation between CEOs: “Oftentimes these deals are happening at a higher level, and that helps drive consistency across both enterprises. It helps us prioritize what we’re trying to do.”
Microsoft is addressing consumer and enterprise 5G use cases by enabling cloud capabilities, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), internet of things (IoT), video processing, facial recognition, game streaming and mixed reality, closer to the end user in order to optimize the experience. Troup talks about this in terms of the “Intelligent Cloud” and the “Intelligent Edge” connected through 5G.
Microsoft runs one of the largest IP (internet protocol) packet networks in the world, operating four discrete platforms – Microsoft Gaming, Microsoft Dynamics 365 & Power Platform, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure. These “Platform Clouds” provide reusable, building-block services consistent with TM Forum’s Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA), which is now part of the Open Digital Architecture about its work with Microsoft to develop 5G enterprise use cases) and multi-access edge computing (MEC). As described in the DSRA, various “tenant” applications request use of this platform infrastructure using Open APIs to enable business use cases. For example, an IoT workload will have different requirements for latency and availability than a workload for IT, gaming, media or network virtualization.
“You grab capabilities from one or two or three of those categories, and you build your business platform,” Troup explains. “It doesn't necessarily get deployed in one spot – that’s the dynamic nature of the actualization platform. You’ve got your hyperscale, the telco or enterprise that have data centers or central offices, and you also have the edge device.”
The point is to build an environment where optimization is possible – and to let partnerships be driven by use cases.
Troup gives examples of an enterprise that wants to offer a smart retail experience or a company that wants to use Microsoft HoloLens to combine their technological capabilities in areas such as 5G, AI and cloud to jointly promote IoT business including smart factory; AI technologies and services; media and entertainment services; and new ways of working for ICT companies under the SK Group umbrella. “They’re moving their 5G and all of their other operations to the cloud environment,” Troup says, which will help both companies learn how to create and support joint value propositions. Ultimately, Troup envisions using the experience gained operating private 5G networks (Microsoft is building its own private 5G network as part of its campus modernization project in Redmond, Washington) to define requirements for the orchestration, operation and management of services that leverage the Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge connected with 5G.
“We’re using the limited scope of private 5G to figure it out because there aren’t any real, written-down requirements,” he explains. “So, we’re building it – run-break-fix, run-break-fix – making sure we get edge computing (MEC/NEC) right.”
The learnings from these experiments can then be contributed back to standards-development organizations like TM Forum and open source communities, he adds.