Colt’s VP of Strategy: Why CSPs need to partner with hyperscalers
Half of enterprises anticipate they will make their biggest spend on the cloud over the next 24 months according to Colt’s third annual survey of technology and business leaders. Jaya Deshmukh, Executive Vice President, Strategy & Transformation at Colt Technology Services, discussed with Inform what this ongoing shift towards the cloud means for connectivity providers and their partnerships with hyperscalers.
Deshmukh is no stranger to how hyperscalers think and operate. She joined Colt in May 2021 from Google, where she was head of strategy, EMEA. Prior to Google she was at Microsoft in the role of Senior Director, Business Strategy, Digital, AI and Industry.
As Deshmukh points out, one impact of cloud adoption is the shift in enterprises’ connectivity needs. “Before it was building to building. Today, it's really different because people are working from home and workloads are in the cloud. So, in almost all cases, even if you're in a building, you're actually connecting into the cloud.”
But when it comes to ensuring application performance in a cloud-based delivery environment, telcos have not necessarily
been the innovators.
“What Netflix did with the development of microservices, the development of a CDN to ensure latency was super smart,” says Deshmukh.
The other big change that has taken place, says Deshmukh is that “enterprises have realized that they need to think about the entire data journey.
“If you really want to enable … [and] to democratize digital transformation, and value-unlocking, then it's critical that you consider how you're going to transport the data, how you will transport the applications. And that's why connectivity is so incredibly important.”
The other major shift has been hyperscalers’ role in the telecoms market, both as partners to telcos’ own cloud transformation and in their use of connectivity.
As Deshmukh states: “Hyperscalers are in connectivity. If you see what's happening in cities [with data centers] where they have been around for a long time, they tend to buy dark fiber. They're really doing the services and running the services on [fiber]... And Meta is laying right now the network that will support the metaverse.”
This, believes Deshmukh, requires connectivity providers to change how they view their business.
“I think it's an opportunity as well as a threat. If you see yourself as a connectivity player, obviously, you have to be as good as a hyperscaler. If you can see yourself as a digital infrastructure player, then you can see hyperscalers as a collaborator.”
Part of being a digital infrastructure player is ensuring that customers’ data and applications flow securely to wherever they are needed, according to Deshmukh.
“We tend to lose sight of the fact that enterprises think about how to make an application work,” says Deshmukh. ”The
mindset of partnership has to be about where customer wants to go, not a territory or a product. That's the shift that we really need to make.”
But it demands new forms of collaboration.
“When telcos are talking partnerships they are really talking OLO (other licensed operators) when … we should be talking about the digital infrastructure, and … look[ing] at the hyper scalars, the core players, connectivity, the application guys, all of us together as one infrastructure.”
Telcos are expert at collaborating to stitch together infrastructure to create global networks, says Deshmukh. “We have got to extend that mindset … (to) hyperscalers.”
However, it will require telcos to adapt to a digital first way of working.
“The challenge that we have is the hyper scalars are extremely digital-first. [Telcos] aren't, so we need to think about rapidly transforming ourselves physically, so that our systems … our APIs connect with their networks and allow those data flows. We have to create the same kind of APIs [to hyperscalers] … so that the data flows can be pretty simple and … almost seamless.”
When it comes to serving enterprises, Deshmukh stresses the importance of thinking about the outcome and how to orchestrate it for customers rather than in terms of point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, or Ethernet networking products.
When it comes to Colt’s own journey towards becoming a digital infrastructure provider, its first step was to build its IQ network, explains Deshmukh.
Another key step has been "to commit to automating ... provisioning, and looking at business models that are consumption based," explains Deshmukh.
"When it comes to the data side of things. I think a lot about provisioning processes. If you have legacy infrastructure it can take 90 days to provision. Now, I'm not saying that we can provision everything in seconds. But we definitely can provision in seconds to about 200 data centers, which today consists of 75% of the traffic flows in our operation."