Telenor CTO highlights the role of ecosystem collaboration in driving growth and innovation
Communications service provider (CSP) Telenor recently expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a two-fold goal: to embolden Telenor’s ongoing transition from telco to cloud-native tech-co, and as part of the operator’s effort to build new data centers to deliver “sovereign cloud” services in its primary operating markets.
Speaking in Copenhagen, Denmark, at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World—Ignite event, Telenor EVP and Group CTO Amol Phadke discussed the company’s evolution from telco to tech-co, and how cloud-native technology and culture are imperative for growth. Another key component of innovation he called out is the need for collaboration with vendors and within the industry as facilitated by groups like TM Forum.
Driven by its own and its customers’ business ambitions, in March Telenor announced a joint venture with Hafslund and HitecVision to build secure, sustainable data centers in Norway. Telenor has said AWS “will collaborate to offer solutions to Norwegian enterprise customers…to address their key sovereignty and security requirements” while also “leveraging the same sovereign-by-design AWS infrastructure to host its internal workloads.”
Phadke said the goal is “to create a different platform within the Nordics to drive some of the sovereign propositions that we are thinking of driving. Sovereign, for me, brings together security, reliability, AI and cloud together.” As for Telenor also using these new data centers and the sovereign-by-design approach offered by AWS, “There’s no point in me going to the market and saying, ‘Let’s do sovereign cloud,’ if we can’t eat our own dog food.”
Joining Phadke on stage, AWS General Manager for the Telco Business Chivas Nambiar stressed the importance of defining an outcome then working backwards from that. He said there are some things CSPs do well and some things hyperscalers like AWS does well, which makes it simpler for the CSP to leverage that technology base to deliver differentiated services. “I think, over time, it leads to growth for both of us,” he said.
He continued: “For us, it is across the globe we are seeing a lot of demand for these types of sovereign solutions…There’s an ecosystem thing here, right. Just the GPU and the accelerated infrastructure is not all that you need. If you’re building any kind of solution, you need compute, you need differentiated storage, you need all of the AI services.”
Specific to the new data centers, Phadke said he expects the infrastructure to be in place by the first quarter of next year, but beyond the timeline, “It’s about really radically transforming [to] a cloud-native approach for Telenor itself.” Partnerships let us “innovate at speed,” he said. “That’s a huge part of this sort of puzzle, and you can’out really solve that without having partners like AWS in there. You need the infrastructure in place before you can start thinking about, ‘I’m going to build an elastic network,’ because really that’s the endgame for all of us.”
