Segments for potential synergy between CSPs and HCPs

Last month, my colleague Sue Rudd gave a video speech at the Carrier Cloud Transformation Summit of the Huawei Win-Win Innovation Week. She pointed out that “carriers can create and leverage synergy with the hyperscaler cloud providers (HCPs),” and in the B2B market, carriers have opportunities to create synergy HCPs in eight segments, including:

According to Sue, during the collaboration, communication service providers (CSPs) should take advantage of their unique network capabilities to complement HCPs in these market segments. CSPs should also work with HCPs to leverage their developer programs and find application-specific partners. It is also time to plan to use Cloud IT Toolkits and ‘Off the Shelf’ Software, e.g., from Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), to offer solutions that address Complex Multi-Domain, Multi-Cloud Environments.

Complementary rather than Competing

Sue’s speech represented the industry consensus on the digital transformation trend: cloud services have become an essential element of digital services. CSPs must leverage their own resources and/or collaborate with hyperscalers to build the cloud services portfolio.

Leading Chinese operators are actively developing their own cloud services. China Telecom’s e-surfing cloud and China Mobile’s industry cloud achieved 102% and 110% growths in 2021, respectively.  

Many leading CSPs in developed markets have decided to cooperate with hyperscalers such as Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, or Google Cloud, following a strategy of ‘if you can't beat 'em, join 'em’. As industrial players often need to manage their software and applications across multiple public cloud platforms, the “Multi-Cloud” is becoming an effective approach for CSPs to collaborate with hyperscalers. Telecom carriers can leverage their local or regional resources – connectivity, device portfolio, consulting and system integration, customer service, etc. – to help enterprise customers manage a range of leading cloud vendors, bringing them all together into a single, easy-to-use interface.

With the development of industrial digital transformation, more and more industrial applications are based on real-time data analytics, which requires data to be stored and processed near its source. Telecom carriers have a lot of infrastructure and resources close to where their customers use their mobile devices, the edge data center. These capabilities can be a value-added layer between mobile devices and public cloud providers.

As Vodafone Group CEO Nick Read pointed out in his MWC keynote speech this year, telecom carriers need to fully leverage “regional scale whilst nurturing local grassroots.” CSPs can leverage their local or regional resources, such as connectivity, edge, and regional data centers, sales channels, local service centers, etc., to strengthen their positions in collaboration with hyperscalers and add more value to their B2B service offerings.

“Smarter use of the cloud for networks, services, and operations”

Therefore, the synergy of carrier and cloud services will be crucial for the business success of telecom carriers in the long term. Converged infrastructure solutions will play a key role in the synergy. To meet the demand, Huawei unveiled scenario-based cloud solutions for carriers in its Win-Win Innovation Week. According to Huawei, the solutions can enable

• Network + Cloud to expand the scope of network monetization
• Service + Cloud to accelerate service innovation
• Operation + Cloud to drive operations efficiency

Huawei has provided these solutions to customers in China and overseas markets, such as a mobile wallet platform in Africa, an integrated Cloud + Network + Security solution in China, etc. As pointed out by Mr. Chen Xuejun - Director of Huawei Carrier IT Marketing & Solution Sales - "the key to carrier cloud transformation lies in smarter use of the cloud for networks, services, and operations. Huawei Cloud will work with global carriers to transform and open up new growth space."

In summary, carrier-cloud synergy is becoming an industry consensus to meet the growing requirements for cloud service access and networking in the digital era. One-stop services are required to implement the fast deployment, elastic bandwidth, and performance visualization. CSPs must accelerate the progress and consider their visions and roadmaps for carrier-cloud synergy in the next decade.