By Partha Seetala, President of the Cloud Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony.
We’ve seen three areas where telco cloud-native is making headway.
The first is transitioning network functions to be cloud-native, where the requirement is to support a specific set of performance guarantees on performance, latency, security and energy efficiency.
We’ve also seen a strong move to migrate IT planning, building and business applications to the same private cloud platform, storing historical data and making it much more available and actionable towards the automation of the networks, as well as to customer-facing business units. This creates a consolidated and combined operation with the core and regional network functions. We call this phase one of the horizontal telco cloud.
Third, we have seen a move to those stateful edge use cases, where the network state is processed closer to the point of use, rather than pulling it back to a centralised location. One driver for this has been the deployment of the distributed RAN baseband. We’re also seeing that momentum in the creation of private wireless networks and traction in the enterprise edge.
To this end, Rakuten Cloud is an integral part of the edge solution that supports the largest fast food retailer in the world.
We see a great deal of commonality in the cloud capabilities required across these three use cases, enabling operators to deploy a platform that supports all of them. This approach allows for a unified talent pool with standardised skills, simplifying procurement and inventory management while reducing costs. For instance, Rakuten Cloud has simple licensing that reduces the cost and complexity of evaluating cloud expenses.
By building a distributed edge compute network, telcos will be able to take advantage of those same benefits within their own businesses
Why now?
Telcos know there is an urgent need to build the technical and operational capabilities required to create and address new business opportunities, whilst radically cutting their own operational costs.
Across the sector, the story is of flat or sluggish topline revenues, with thinning margins. Manoeuvring out of that position has been made difficult by underlying structural issues. Operators have built and now rely on a complex, domain-specific network architecture that is in turn tied to a siloed operational structure. That combination not only creates inefficiencies, it acts as a natural anchor that slows attempts to introduce more agile systems and thinking, even against the will of those working within it and wanting to change it.
Telcos look at how other businesses are structuring infrastructure, taking advantage of new technologies and deploying on a Cloud Ops basis of continuous integration and development. In many industries such as retail, hospitality, sports and entertainment, businesses have seen the benefit of moving compute capability to the business and network edge, giving them the analytical capability and ability to maximise revenue per customer and reduce operational costs.
By building a distributed edge compute network, telcos will be able to take advantage of those same benefits within their own businesses. Not only that, they can offer those benefits downstream to customers and partners that can use them to improve their own customer experiences. Networking, compute and storage have become business differentiators, and that can be good news for telco operators.
Building a distributed cloud architecture
The correct play for telcos is to migrate those heavily centralised and siloed networks to a horizontal distributed infrastructure that is highly automated in the infrastructure layer and also enables the automated deployment of the workloads that run on top of that infrastructure, reducing the overhead on control and management. That automation between infrastructure and application enables the underlying infrastructure to be run in a common way whilst enabling operators to deploy in an application-first manner, not dependent on an infrastructure-led deployment.
This will also, in parallel, generate big energy and cost savings, by collapsing network infrastructure layers and hardware onto a common platform. A third benefit is the elimination of operational drag of those domain silos, creating a unified operational capability and purpose across RAN, core, backhaul, OSS-BSS and service functions. Finally, by building a network to support your own functions, with simpler and harmonised operations, a fabric is created that enhances the businesses of customers.
We know this is true because this is what we did at Rakuten Mobile, developing a horizontal cloud network where applications run as automated containerised workloads, with a light control channel. This enabled us to run an automated and highly efficient distributed Cloud-Native RAN, which we have replicated with other customers.
We can, for example, update and refresh our entire RAN software continuously, rather than waiting days to deploy an update that is already out of date before it is in production. In traditional operators, we see a rapid collapse of IT and regional data centres with radio following as the second wave of change. Operators appreciate working with us because we know what is required for the second phase in terms of platform capability and ensuring decisions today do not lead to immediate change after.
The biggest shift now is the operator mindshift, so that operators no longer outsource skills and thinking to large network equipment vendors or systems integrators, but build the skillsets and capabilities to run and manage their own platforms.
The next shift is the mindshift
Technology is no longer the impediment.
At Rakuten Cloud, we have first-hand experience of running production workloads from RAN to core. Our platform was designed from the start to support a horizontalised, distributed infrastructure with a very low overhead on the control channel, supporting network and storage from the outset, which creates benchmark winning performance.
The biggest shift now is the operator mindshift, so that operators no longer outsource skills and thinking to large network equipment vendors or systems integrators, but build the skillsets and capabilities to run and manage their own platforms.
Another area of insourcing is that operators see the benefit of owning their own cloud compute infrastructure, giving them control of data sovereignty and cost.
We know that network flexibility and the ability to automate processes and delivery – such as building a new cell or edge site – are now part of the differentiation of a business, and the experience delivered by that business. That’s true for mobile operators and their customers, and that is what Rakuten Cloud is uniquely capable of supporting.
MORE ON RAKUTEN CLOUD & RAKUTEN SYMPHONY
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About the author:
Partha Seetala is the President of Rakuten Cloud and formerly Founder and CEO at Robin.io. He has conceived, designed and built products in Scale-out distributed storage, File Systems, Networking, Distributed Systems, Big Data, and Information Analytics and Containers/Kubernetes space.
* This is a sponsored article
