The Road To Telco Cloud
The Road To Telco Cloud
The Road To Telco Cloud
01 Introduction
In the summer of 2019, we spent time with senior
telecoms industry executives from around the globe
with the aim of understanding where the industry is
on its journey towards cloud - cloud in the sense of
leveraging cloud and its associated technologies to
build a new generation of telecoms infrastructure to
support the new generation of services being demanded
by customers. Thanks to all of those involved who gave
us their time and shared their experience and thoughts
on the subject as it relates to the network, IT and overall
operations. We followed up these depth interviews with
an online survey to put some more flesh on the bones
of the emerging story. In total we interacted with 65
different stakeholders. This paper is a blend of both
research streams. We promised to keep all participants
anonymous, so we identify companies by their region
and the type of role represented.
Figure 1 Who were our research respondents?
(Source: CSP Migration Research, Lewis Insight Ltd, October 2019)
Survey Interviews
02 Summary
As analysts, we always hope to find a clear story about the
market and the journey the industry faces. The cloudification
of the telecoms industry is certainly not a single journey. It is
coloured by the individual organisation, even individual parts
of the organisation and by the country and region in which
it operates. Cloud is, of course, about a shift in technology
“
supporting a business (as it is for every other industry).
For the telecoms industry it is flavoured by organisational,
commercial, cultural as well as the technical step-shift Many would say that they
suffer from a lack of a CTO
moving from legacy, self-defined technology to the more with a real technology
open cloud-based technologies. architecture and big picture
vision. It’s not just all about
The telecoms industry is at the beginning of this journey, how to execute.
(EMEA Tier 1 Head of
“scratching the surface” for most companies. The goal of
”
Transformation)
moving to be cloud native is clear in the minds of the vast
majority but bringing the many different journeys within
“
the organisations together into a coherent strategy still
requires some considerable work. It is noticeable that the
more senior executives driving the cloud transformation Over time the culture has
have a clear picture of the architecture and direction of the been shifted through a series
journey but, at OpCo and Lines of Business (LOB) levels, of workshops and senior
there is still a great deal of skepticism about the journey. management educating the
teams. It is more transparent,
Early movement can be seen as ‘cloud adoption; where
people are getting feedback
new projects, especially relating to the increasingly real-time and it should be used to help
customer interaction are going straight to cloud. Interestingly, demonstrate how people’s
the perceived cost savings relating to much of this early contribution fits into the big
movement to cloud are not being realised, at least not in transformation picture…This
came through setting up a
the short term. A fragmented approach to cloud in different separate unit whose job it
parts of the CSP can only help emphasise this lack of return was to evangelise the shift to
on investment. In the mid-term there will be a lot more of a more agile approach and
leveraging the cloud.
”
this as systems and products come to the natural end of
(EMEA Tier 2 CIO)
their life cycles, but some legacy areas (mainframe-based
“
in particular) will be ring-fenced and data extracted through
APIs to feed into the more open environments of the rest
of the IT and network components. In order to achieve this
major transformation several key activities must be put into The pain isn’t bad enough,
place: there isn’t enough urgency to
try new things…And, it may
not be painful enough for
Education of all stakeholders, especially at the Board some time yet. I used to plan
level where the understanding of what cloud can do to the in weeks and months (when
business as a whole appears to be limited working cloud native) and
now it’s in years! My cloud
timeline now starts in 2022.
Reskilling of the workforce complemented by more A new platform in 2019 isn’t
partner-like relationships with suppliers and specialist even cloud ready let alone
‘augmentation’ services. The lack of appropriate skills cloud native.
to make the jump to a more agile environment is (EMEA Tier 1 Head
”
of Transformation)
exacerbated by digital natives not wanting to work for the
telecoms industry, which is seen as being old-fashioned,
conservative and not a digital place to work
03 Market backdrop
The telecoms industry has had the luxury of dictating the Figure 2 Market
terms of engagement both with the supplier community but Calibration
especially with its customers during most of its history. The
Revenues: mobile, fixed, TV
changes currently running through the sector can be seen and other
as the democratisation of the industry. Demand and supply 1,500
are beginning to find some form of equilibrium rather than Other
TV
the supply side dominating. This is taking place through a
number of convergences: 1,000
Fixed
$ billions
Fixed and mobile communications have had very separate
evolutions over the past decades with new technologies 500 Mobile
$ billions
which may be delivered through cellular/Wi-Fi or fibre/
copper connections
500 Opex
“
‘Cloud’ is one of those terms that everyone thinks they
understand. But, when people are questioned in detail, it is
Some C-levels think cloud is
evident that the range of definitions are very wide and very
going to be the way they save
varied. Perhaps the fact that the Webscale players have a lot of money; others think
had such global scale success compared to the telecoms it is the way they are going
industry has shaped how we view cloud. The architectures to transform the business.
and processes that Amazon, Facebook, Google and Others think it is Office 365!
We are just at the beginning
Microsoft have built to underpin their many and varied of the journey. So much data
activities comes many years after the telecoms industry to be analysed and used
emerged from national ownership and attempted to shake throughout the organisation
off the trappings of civil service bureaucracy! What is clear for operational efficiency but
also for customer experience.
from the research is that these new ‘digital’ options landing
”
(North America Tier 1 CIO)
on peoples’ desks at the operational level are not well
understood at the Board-level.
“
based services but they don’t fit into the overall corporate
architecture or approach. What is more concerning is the
In my last CRM project at a
lack of understanding at the upper levels. One disillusioned
tier 1 EMEA telco, despite
departmental manager said the Board thought cloud was the CEO driving the change,
Office 365 and they weren’t the only ones to point out this the second and third tier
lack of understanding. In fact, others pointed to the lack of management didn’t care
financial rigour throughout the CSP inhibiting the shift to a what the CEO said! They
knew that nothing could
more cloud-based environment. be done against them so
aimed to maintain the status
With this lack of a holistic understanding of cloud’s role it quo. Some of those middle
is not surprising that the main driver for cloud migration is management will lose power
and position so are not for
seen as cost savings. We suspect that the higher levels of
change.
management see how the cost base appears to be lower for
”
(EMEA Tier 3 CTO)
the Webscale players and they immediately assume they
can move towards a similar cost base through cloud. Hence,
they push down the savings mantra to the network and IT
parts of the business.
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
We do not make We are tending to We will continue to We are developing We are leveraging We still have some
extensive use of favour public cloud use on-prem and cloud agnostic the cloud platform concerns about
public cloud for most of our private cloud where capabilities capabilities that are using public cloud
requirements latency and security specifix to different (please specify
are important cloud providers below)
We have had some success but the majority of our IT estate remain on-prem
Both the in-depth and online interviews show that CSPs are
just at the early stages of the cloud journey. For example,
EMEA tier 1 CSPs talked about the work that had been
done internally and with their peers. They felt ahead of the
game but were no more than 30% down the road to where
the Webscale players are today in terms of cloudification
“
of their systems and processes. Many thought they were
just ‘scratching the surface’ of what cloud was and what
it meant to their organisations. Interestingly, few seemed DevOps is something to
be pushed for but CICD
to see the significance of the fact that one of their leading
works as you don’t actually
suppliers, Salesforce, was a cloud-native company. Once need cloud to go DevOps.
again, the telecoms industry has been obsessed with the And many find a blend of
inner workings of technology rather than focused on the DevOps and Waterfall, so-
outcomes. called ‘Hybrid DevOps’ the
ideal mix given the range of
systems and platforms in the
In reality we observe multiple cloud journeys within every organisation. In this way, as
organisation. The lack of Board-room drive means that and when cloud becomes an
individual efforts are rarely pulled into a coherent framework options, it is not a big change
for us. It is an area where
of how it can help the CSP. The survey results included here
you can catch up relatively
are, of course, just indicative of the direction these CSPs easily. The right change
are taking. The verbatim quotes from industry leaders are, management is essential in
in many ways, much more revealing about their personal order to take teams with you.
journey. The direction towards cloud is clear in most, if not all Doing DevOps is much much
easier than doing cloud.
of their minds. The journeys are, to say the least, very, very Leaving legacy in place and
different. More of this later. extracting data through APIs
is an ideal approach.
”
What is worth noting is that the organisational complexity (North American Tier 1 CIO)
of Tier 1 CSPs in particular may mean that cloud native
migrations will take place, but in in different pockets of the
organisation. One EMEA Tier 1 CSP reported that they had
built a fully cloud native telco stack. It was ready to go but
managerial changes and the Board’s reluctance to embrace
such a disruptive approach meant it never saw the light of
day.
“
In terms of what is already moving to the cloud there seems
to be a clear pattern:
On a scale of operational
readiness, the Webscale
The adoption of cloud for new initiatives, especially
players are at 100% whilst
customer facing ones, new brand launches, new lines of we’re at 30% today. It isn’t
business such as IoT and apps which touch the customers just our peers (who are 20%)
in the mobile world are the first to move to cloud. Indeed, we need to worry about in
we can call them cloud adoption; as they are not migrating the future, it’s the broader
ecosystem. We think we
from the former CSP systems but going straight into cloud know what we need to do and
and are cloud native where to go, but it’s just such
a complex transformation.
The next wave is other CRM / customer experience A bigger issue is the lack of
roadmaps, almost ambition
applications. (There seems be little appetite for putting
across most parts of the
OSS in the cloud with the possible acceptance of service company.
”
assurance.) This wave also includes elements of the (EMEA Tier 1 CTO)
network being virtualised and brought into the cloud
environment where appropriate
Having received input from the in-depth interviews as well Migrated to date
as the online survey, we attempted to build some Word
Clouds around the responses. The wide variety in peoples’
responses shows just how diverse a set of perspectives
exist out there across the CSP community as to what cloud
is, what is shifting initially and the journey as a whole.
Figure 5 Cloud migration journey
(Source: CSP Migration Research, Lewis Insight Ltd, October 2019)
What have you migrated What other applications Which applications and Will migrate in next 7 years
to cloud so far? and workloads will you workloads do you have
migrate to cloud over the NO plans to migrate to
next 2 years? cloud?
“
There should be no doubt that this is a major shift in
direction for the world’s CSPs. The engineering-centric
approaches of past decades are to be replaced by the Spent a lot of time with the
LOBs. We have sat down and
software-centric approaches of the relatively more recent mapped out new customer
‘upstarts’ from the Webscale world. A more IT-centric journeys. In the past people
approach replacing the classical network engineering were told that zero human
approach of the telecoms industry is a major change to touch was not doable.
”
(AP Tier 2 CXO)
embrace. It is for this reason that most CSPs we talked to
“
have adopted cloud for new projects and the customer-
facing parts of the business. Justifying a major ‘Lift and shift’
of existing systems into the cloud environment just doesn’t
seem to stack up. And, since the cost savings are what When everything was on-
the organisation is looking for, this represents a bit of an prem everyone thought there
was unlimited capacity. Dev
impasse. teams did not see how much
their apps were costing the
Success stories from different parts of the organisation are business. Now, every month
also challenging as the multiplication of their individual costs there is a bill coming in
and the dev teams have to
up into the broader picture show that this is an expense that
settle these bills at director
could potentially get out of control, if it hasn’t already. level. Phenomenal for me to
see the change in culture.
The goal of cloud migration for all areas of the CSP is clearly Change in behaviour. I only
understood (given the eventual retirement of the older have this instance up and
running when I need it. (North
mainframe-style systems and applications). How to get from
”
American Tier 1 CIO)
the early adoption of cloud for the more customer-facing
“
areas to embrace all other activities requires the joined up
thinking that must not only come from bringing together
the IT and networking organisations but must also get the
blessing of the Board. The CEO needs to drive the message A blend of DevOps and
Waterfall, so-called hybrid
throughout the company that this is a major initiative to
DevOps, is the ideal
change the shape of the business. It is a a modernisation combination given the mix
and a recalibration of the business. Not only will it give of systems and platforms in
them a fighting chance of competing in the emerging digital the organisation. We are
services marketplace, but it will provide a platform for the thinking of pipeline at code
and containers as a service.
next decades of providing broadband services into all In this way, as and when
markets. This is a new message for the CSP employees. No cloud becomes an option, it
longer is it the right of the telecoms industry to decide what is not a big change for us.
services, and at what price, they are delivered. Competitive It is an area where you can
catch up relatively easily. The
pressures from device, content and Webscale players all
right change management in
impact the role of the connectivity provider. Re-aligning the place is essential in order to
product, systems and processes activities in the CSP are take teams with you. Doing
important streamlining. No longer can the industry afford DevOps is much much easier
to have isolated departments making decisions but all than doing cloud. Leaving
legacy in place and extracting
decisions, technological, process or systems must fit into data through APIs is an ideal
this broader picture. And, if it is all brought into focus every approach.
”
step of the journey can see its relevance to supporting the (Tier 1 North American CIO)
customer and their experience.
09 Measuring progress
“
Management speak is rife with Critical Success Factors
(CSFs), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and doubtless
other management acronyms. The aim is to have 80%
configuration and 20%
customisation.
”
Throughout the research we tried to delve into what ‘agility’ (EMEA Tier 3 CTO)
means to the different levels within the organisations and
“
from a business perspective. We didn’t get a convincing
answer from anyone. Once again, cost savings seems to be
the key driver but the lack of financial rigour throughout the
world’s CSPs is a hindrance to the most basic tracking of Operations are still reeling
from the rapid changes
Return on Investment (ROI). The benefits of agility will only required to support the new
be realised once CSPs can draw a line that connects their environments. They have
central technology function right into the lines of business. not entirely bought into the
Agility can bring huge benefits to an organisation that is DevOps model and struggle
to support it properly.
”
constantly taking feedback from the market, launching new
(Tier 2 AP CEO)
products and services and tweaking old ones. But we did not
“
see evidence that this was driving the need for agility in the
CSPs that we spoke to.
We’ve done a little bit of
The adoption of DevOps rather than the traditional Waterfall scratching on the surface.
approach to deploying major systems does appear to have We really need to shift
made inroads into the CSP world. Interestingly, it is not an the thinking towards the
all or nothing approach. Many talked about the move to products. If we focus on
technology we will miss what
DevOps but settling down around a hybrid approach. Some
we need to deliver to the
of the main systems just needing to be developed in a more customers
”
rigorous way and longer term, hence still using more of a (EMEA Tier 1 CIO)
waterfall approach.
“
The impact on the operations environment is also still
muddy to say the least. Perhaps this can be put down to the
relatively early days of cloud migration hence not impacting No Ops may well happen
at some point in time.
the broader operational environment. However, you cannot just
throw people at the problem
Figure 6 Which of the following best describes your IT cloud
of sorting out the operations
migration story?
and deploying AI. You have
(Source: CSP Migration Research, Lewis Insight Ltd, October 2019) got to pick your battles and
deal with the merits of each
I don’t know / not sure
case. Cloud and operations
We do not have any specific is in this position where more
metrics but are strategically hands just doesn’t solve the
committed to cloud migration
problem.
We are still assessing how to
(EMEA Tier 2 Head of
”
measure the benefits
of cloud Transformation)
We measure the benefits of
cloud in terms of customer
experience
10 The impact of 5G
“
5G is such a ubiquitous issue throughout the industry that it
was inevitable that it would crop up in these discussions. In
many cases it is almost synonymous with cloud. Early hype 5G will allow the telcos to
wrestle back control because
around 5G with its enhanced bandwidth and lower latency
of the compute, storage
is not meeting with an equivalent uplift in revenue. Business and networking moving to
models are diverse between North America, Asia and the edge. 5G and the edge
Europe. Interestingly, many of the interviewees saw cloud are the key battle ground
and 5G evolving together, perhaps putting a more realistic and will allow telcos to get
involved in the applications
timeline on 5G mass market revenues in line with cloud that drive industries. And,
native migration in the five years plus timeframe. part of that getting back
control is having a software
The reason for this related evolution is that the early driven organisation that can
react to the demands of the
emphasis on Radio Access Network (RAN) activity, giving us
customer with a more agile
blistering speeds does not in itself do enough to create the infrastructure/platform.
”
more radical business models that end-to-end 5G will need (EMEA Tier 2 CEO)
to support in order to drive both consumer and, perhaps
“
telecoms industry. It is only by bringing all components into
alignment, fixed, cellular and WiFi that the future telecoms
Talking to the Operations
service opportunity can be supported. They have all evolved
teams about orchestration,
in their own environments. This was inevitable given the containers and DevOps is like
structure of the industry. However, now that the telecoms talking a foreign language.
contribution to the broader digital economy is subject to They just haven’t been
non-telecoms pressures such as the Webscale players, the challenged yet. Management
understands the need for
industry must unite its different streams. Cloudification of the skills transformation and a
IT and network elements is a vital contributor to that holistic skills transfer programme is
approach. under way.
”
(EMEA Tier 1 Head of
Transformation)
This is perhaps best described as a 180-degree shift from
being an ‘inside-out’ model to an ‘outside-in’ one. Under the
“
old regime the industry defined its technology and services
and eventually exposed a service to the customers. Under
the new regime, the outside influences such as smart There are two Power Houses
devices, content owners, applications developers and their [network and IT] in the
associated value and distribution chains are much more company. They are however
influential on the way services from the telecoms side are trying to have common
value streams and common
defined and consumed. Telecoms becomes a citizen in the release streams this is all
digital society and has to play by those societal rules rather part of the product iteration
than trying to impose its own value system on other sectors. and planning. What they
are trying to improve upon is
synchronising the different
The good news is that the explosion of end points in terms
road maps, functions getting
of new devices sensors and business models will contribute virtualised and what services
to the telecoms/broadband component remaining absolutely might be going into the
relevant. The bad news is that the former scarcity that we all cloud.”
experienced in terms of bandwidth and service is no longer (EMEA Tier 2 Head of
Transformation)
the case and hence prices for connectivity have become
subject to ‘normal’ economic pressures.
“
Figure 8 When it comes to bringing new cloud skills into
your organisation, which of the following
approaches have you taken? We have adopted the Scale
Agile Framework. That has
(Source: CSP Migration Research, Lewis Insight Ltd, October 2019) been a real asset when it
comes to recruitment. We
Relying on expertise / skills
from our vendor partners may look like a telco, and we
are, but when recruiting we
Using temporary specialist
staff / outsourced / can show graduates that they
augmentation services work in an agile environment,
Recruiting new employees leveraging the skills that
rather than retraining
existing staff
students pick up around new
methods of working.
”
Retaining existing staff
rather than recruiting new (AP Tier 2 CIO)
employees
“
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70%
”
are indeed setting such programmes in place. However, (Tier 1 EMEA Chief Architect
acquiring new skills is proving challenging given that the
“
CSP world and traditional telecoms players in particular,
are struggling to attract that new talent. As Figure 8 shows,
the CSPs have a variety of approaches to bringing these We are lucky having such
skills into the organisation. Not all are as radical as setting strong engineering skills in
up a separate digital services business which serves other our home country but we
industries as well as its own telecoms needs. But, combining still have some problems
internal retraining, strategies for recruiting new talent, competing with the scale
players of FaceBook,
leveraging the so-called augmentation services as well as Amazon, Google etc.
relying on the talent inside different partners all add up to By using opensource
filling the skills gap. technologies we are able to
find people. We are using
agile frameworks, DevOps
One major area of aspiration when it comes to cloud and etc as everything is built on
DevOps is that Operations itself will be simplified. Indeed, microservices in the digital
the discussion of No Ops was often raised. This is, of space. We are bringing new
course, a dream from where we stand today but the promise features onto the market
of cloud and new offerings from the ecosystem partners will through the DevOps cycles
every two weeks. So we are
accelerate this particular aspect of the journey. able to bring something new
to the customers every three
Adopting approaches like the SAFE agile framework do weeks on average. We are
bring thinking together at a management level and bring all doing most of this in-house.
”
(AP Consumer CEO Tier 2)
stakeholders together. However, the fact that different cloud
providers have their own tools and approaches, combined
with the CSPs general wish not to get tied into a single cloud
platform, leaves the CSPs needing to embrace a number of
cloud development approaches rather than a single one.
“
The skills gap also reflects the need for every step of the
journey from the customer into the core of the network
and data centre to be clearly defined. Teams require data I’m under-staffed in this tier
3 organisation. In my former
scientists, behavioural experts, design-lead specialists as
tier 1 telco I was over-staffed
well as the appropriate communications technology people. with over 3,500 people. I
What this does emphasise is the need for information tried to take a hundred
systems to flow throughout and be available to everyone. people who worked on SAP
Nobody doubts that the CSP community has the data to and convert them to Java – it
didn’t work! At the end 80%
help make the right decisions. The problem has been that could programme in Java but
the data has resided in so many different systems siloed with very low productivity
”
in different business units and that this fragmentation has (CTO tier 3 EMEA)
negated the possibility of improving operational efficiency let
alone the actual customer experience. The shifting nature
of the digital ecosystem all means that this knowledge
will almost certainly need to be shared with third parties
in the B2B2X business models as well as, of course, the
customers themselves – all within the regulation of data
protection.
12 Ecosystem dynamics
“
Given the background to the cloud journey, it is not
surprising that the world’s CSPs see this as an opportunity
to rebuild their own supplier ecosystem as well as reposition Over time the culture has
been shifted through a series
themselves in the broader digital marketplace. The
of workshops and senior
accusation of CSPs being ‘conservative’ is often talked about management educating the
in the supplier community. Allegations of ‘lock-in’ from the teams. It is more transparent,
CSPs towards the more traditional suppliers is ironic given people are getting feedback
the way the CSPs have helped those companies to evolve and it should be used to help
demonstrate how people’s
into global players, having started life as local suppliers to contribution fits into the big
national organisations under the old PTT regimes. The fact transformation picture…This
is that the CSP world is starting to take a software-centric came through setting up a
approach to its systems and services. Hardware, wherever separate unit whose job it
was to evangelise the shift to
it sits in the cloud or on the premises, is commoditising,
a more agile approach and
hence, traditional telecoms-vertical suppliers need to change leveraging the cloud.
”
their products and services to satisfy this desire of CSPs to (Tier 2 EMEA CIO)
become more software-centric.
The danger for the CSPs is, of course, that they move from
one form of lock-in to another just with a cloud or digital
label.
13 Conclusions
“
The CSP industry clearly understands the direction of travel
when it comes to cloud and the transformation of its IT and
network environments. This understanding comes from the I’d be lying if I said I had a
strategy in place. I haven’t
fact that the role of telecoms in the broader digital economy
had the bandwidth to do it.
must be to deliver against a vastly shifting set of devices and
”
(EMEA Tier 3 CTO)
applications demanding new levels of connectivity from fixed
and mobile networks.
”
will include more of this customer experience-related but CIO)
will also bring in more of the network side. Older systems,
especially mainframe-based, will remain outside of the cloud
journey. Building abstraction layers will allow the CSPs to
extract the relevant data through APIs to begin the journey
towards the exploitation of all relevant data.