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ANKUR JAIN: Hi, and welcome to the Google Cloud and Nokia
series on cloudification of telecom provider networks.
Why now and how?
I'm Ankur Jain, Head of Engineering
for Google Cloud for Telecommunication,
Edge, and Container Networking.
JITIN BHANDARI: I am Jitin Bhandari,
Chief Technology Officer for Cloud
and Network Services at Nokia.
ANKUR JAIN: There's a difference between cloud and cloud native.
JITIN BHANDARI: There is a difference
between the [INAUDIBLE] of cloud and cloud native.
I happen to have a deep conversation with Dr. Lester
Thomas, where he was elaborating on using
the cloud-native principles, how Vodafone
was able to create value, and especially business value,
for their networks.
Today, I have a great pleasure of having a service provider
perspective from the same topic, and I have with us
Dr. Lester Thomas, who heads new technology and innovations
for Vodafone Global.
And what better way to ask such a broad operator,
a global operator like Vodafone, and their perspectives
about why cloud native, and why now?
In the broader context of Vodafone's 5G strategy
and the way Vodafone is transforming their networks,
why cloud native, and why now?
What's your perspective on that?
LESTER THOMAS: Yeah, a big part of our strategy around 5G
and IoT is actually offering services
beyond humans and smartphones, and we
believe there's a real opportunity
to offer new services in multiple industries
and generate new revenues.
And we think there are some critical services that
can be addressed by connecting and making
smart things in society in lots of different industries
like energy, manufacturing, agriculture, health care.
And we believe there's lots of opportunities to innovate
on top of 5G services.
So imagine the ability to make ever
thing on the planet a smart, connected thing.
So for example, having factories full of smart, connected
robots, connecting all medical diagnostic devices--
the data is instantly captured and analyzed.
Like, the opportunities are endless.
I like to think of it of--
you take the innovation over the last couple of decades--
there's been a massive amount of innovation in the internet.
And I think about taking that innovation limited
to the internet and actually bringing it
into the real world.
But first, there's a couple of challenges.
So one of them is, as we move into these vertical industry
platforms, we believe we're going to drive a greater
functional complexity.
So if you think about our current business--
so currently, we sell fixed-line, mobile, broadband,
TV, and we've made selling actually quite complex.
Our internal systems are quite complex.
But as you move forward, we think
we're going to move from these four basic services
to hundreds or thousands of services addressing
all these different needs of these different vertical
industries.
The other challenge is these new opportunities
could have a massive scale but often have very tight margins.
And one thing we see in cloud native
and what the hyperscalers have achieved is we
think we can use that as a mechanism to drive
an order of magnitude greater operational efficiency
by adopting these cloud-native approaches,
open-source technologies like Kubernetes,
things like an API-first approach.
So we see there's an opportunity,
and we think that this is the right approach
to address those opportunities.
JITIN BHANDARI: You're saying that the verticals are already
out there, but they are very tightly
integrated siloed verticals, the way
you are operating in your business paradigm today.
And you think cloud native is just
a perfect tool, if I may say, of transforming your networks.
Would you like to dig deeper a bit
on the kind of challenges you are seeing around cloud native?
Why now?
I mean, from a perspective that, is this a technology enabler?
Is this a business enabler?
Is this both?
I know you talked about the business enablement
aspects of it and how it can do new verticalization at scale,
the true promise of 5G.
But are you seeing technological challenges out there?
LESTER THOMAS: I think about the opportunity of cloud native
versus a cloud migration--
and we've invested in cloud for quite a long time.
You know, we've only started our cloud journey
five or six years ago.
And when we started, some of the things,
we were just migrating to the cloud.
And you think about it, when you migrate existing systems
and applications to the cloud, almost
like the tendency is to take all your operational processes
with them.
And so you can almost question, what real business drive,
what real business benefit does that give you?
Whereas the cloud-native approach is literally
doing the opposite, saying, actually, I'm
going to adopt these cloud-native technologies.
I mean, a lot of these cloud services,
and it caused you to rethink how you actually develop software.
And our cloud-native approach is typically coupled with agile
delivery methods, DevOps--
so you can take reliability engineering
as the way in which you operate it--
and things like much more focused on data and open APIs.
In fact, the Vodafone, sort of the Tech 2025 strategy
is called the Vodafone Open Digital Architecture Strategy,
and it's about how do we open up and use these technologies
to drive the platforms on which we can rapidly innovate
in the services we build--
because of the scalability, we can rapidly scale them--
and also, they're an order of magnitude
more efficient than the old way of doing things.
JITIN BHANDARI: Oh, this is a very interesting view,
and I must say that here at Nokia from a vendor community
standpoint, we are seeing tremendous join
between networks, operations, assurance, and analytics,
if I may say, of how we build, operate,
and manage our networks.
And we are seeing from our perspective
from the ground-up principles of cloud native of how
we can transform that space not only just on the network
side of things, but also from the operations
assurance and overall experience that we
bring to our services, the new way
services that gets built on.
Are you seeing that opportunity behind cloud native
and redesigning, rebuilding these networks
behind the movement of 5G and cloud?
Do you see it's broader than network's role?
And if so, how so?
How so the operational simplification
that you touched upon?
Would love to hear Vodafone's view from a global perspective.
LESTER THOMAS: Yeah, well, what we did in Vodafone--
like, you could see the sort of approaches hyperscalers were
using, and a few years ago, we didn't really
have the in-house capabilities to really adopt
the same approaches.
So we actually decided to start by almost
building in-house solutions more in our digital experience
layer.
We often describe our digital transformation
as having two phases.
And if you think about our current business--
so creating a digital version of our current business.
So we did a lot of work in the digital experience layer,
all the digital channels that we engage with our customers with.
And so in all of our markets, we've
built what we called a digital accelerator, so in-house
agile DevOps teams building out those digital channels,
building a Vodafone experience, using
all these great technologies.
So we have Kubernetes deployed in our digital channels
in all our markets around the world.
And again, and at the same time, we've adopted
agile DevOps processes.
In some markets now, we have a full site reliability
engineering approach, where actually the operations
itself is run by--
the operators aren't human operators.
They're pieces of software.
So you have a site reliability engineering
team who write the software that runs the operations.
And it completely removes the ability or the opportunity
for human error to be introduced into our production systems.
So we started there, and that's the first phase
of our transformation.
But the second phase is what I mentioned earlier about
how do we become digital enablers of this ecosystem
model.
So how do we turn--
like 5G is a platform, like a cloud-like platform,
on which other people can innovate.
So how do you offer those 5G services
through open standard APIs that other people can build
in these different industries?
It's not going to be Vodafone in sort of medical industry.
It will be one of the medical industry enterprise partners
building the solutions.
But what enabling services can we provide to make that happen?
JITIN BHANDARI: Oh, that's actually
a very fantastic point.
So look, I mean, I'll be honest, right?
From both a vendors' community and if I may say it
from a CSB side of it, collectively, we
have struggled in the last decade
of creating more value of what we see in the telco networks.
And I'm glad that you are nodding your head
and agreeing to my conclusions here.
And one of the biggest challenges
through this era of NFV and virtualization
is we could never open up our networks and operations, right?
The way it should be.
And the IT domains, the web-scalers
have done a fantastic job of opening up the APIs,
creating a value ecosystem of partners, building a platform
that actually fuels innovation.
What should we be doing collectively
different to create more value in that ecosystem play?
You know, how should we approach this differently,
and would love to hear your views on that.
LESTER THOMAS: Yeah, like, I agree.
Like, the last decade or even slightly longer in the telco
space were made very tough.
Like, our revenues have been flat,
and the underlying use of our network
has been growing at a compound, a tremendous rate,
so almost like we've been giving away far and far
more data every year for a flat revenue.
It's been really tough.
But this is why most of these 5G opportunities are--
we look to them with sort of a--
it's so important because we genuinely can see--
and we're already starting to deliver them--
that there are lots of opportunities
to use this great technology.
So the question is, if you're an enterprise customer,
what do you actually want from a telco?
And I believe that it's not just connectivity or devices.
Often, almost like the service they want,
they want to abstract all of that complexity.
And if you think of it, this is what
the cloud plays have done with infrastructure services--
they've abstracted the complexity of building
and operating them and make it very
simple with intent-based APIs, where you just
demand what you want.
We think need take the same sort of approach.
I think for a lot of these, the actual--
the service lots of our enterprise customers
want is actually a data service.
You know, they don't want to manage
thousands or tens of thousands of devices
and collect that data themselves.
They effectively want that to be done
as part of the telco service.
They really want the ability to have that data
and to then really drive use cases,
and analytics, and having digital twins
on those services.
So I think that's the key.
It's, like, abstracting the complexity, open standard APIs.
Like, all of the APIs that we're developing,
we're delivering effectively in open source communities,
a lot of them through standards much like the TM Forum.
So collaborating even with our competitors
on the open standard interfaces, intent-driven models,
and actually often gone beyond just the connectivities,
the service you're offering, so offering
things like digital twins or even offering
data and analytics services back to these enterprise customers.
JITIN BHANDARI: Fantastic.
Thank you, Lester.
ANKUR JAIN: Jitin, it was great to hear
Dr. Thomas's point of view.
What were your key takeaways?
JITIN BHANDARI: Not only he was talking
about how the workloads are moving into cloud,
but he was very elaborate in talking about how they're
using cloud-native design principles when we talk
about agility, open APIs, and creating business values
for their networks.
ANKUR JAIN: Thanks for catching our discussion on clarification
of telco networks.
Next time, we'll see you in the Cloud.
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