AWS is working to help operators understand use cases, assemble an ecosystem and accelerate time-to-value
Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars operators around the world have pumped into deploying 5G networks, service revenues have largely remained stagnant. While there’s industry consensus that there’s no single killer 5G app that will drive material revenue lift, the idea of 5G as a platform for broad innovation seems real but has yet to become real. AWS, a powerhouse cloud provider and lynchpin in many important software- and application-centric ecosystems, sees a way to (and need to) change this status quo.
Speaking with RCR Wireless News during the RCR Live: Telco Reinvention event in London, AWS Director of Solutions Architecture for Telecommunications Chivas Nambiar weighed in on how (and why) legacy telcos should move away from selling commodity connectivity and hasten their evolution to technology-enabled solution providers.
“A lot of telcos have this ambition to become tech-cos,” he said. “We’re seeing green shoots of that with some of our forward-facing telcos.” These firms are less focused on the “utility nature of a telco and more about what do their customers—the consumers and the enterprises—really want. They’re deeply invested in understanding the use cases they want to build. They’re invested in finding partners and technology choices that allow them to serve that need, and to do it in a much faster fashion than they’re used to.”
As AWS has grown its telco-facing business, it’s tapping into two parallel trends. The first, as referenced above, has to do with helping operators generate new enterprise service revenues primarily through standing up private 5G networks in support of advanced use cases requiring high capacity, low latency, localized computing and hybrid-cloud operating models. To the hybrid cloud point, operators are simultaneously investing in their own cloud-native journeys to realize opex-saving cloud economics and scale, while also distributing compute in service of latency-sensitive applications.
In this sweeping seachange, Nambiar highlighted how AWS can help operators quickly develop, iterate and commercialize enterprise solutions with a balanced approach to what’s practical as well as what’s possible.
Looking at his own firm’s organizational DNA, Nambiar said, “Everything we build is built for a customer…We work with our telco operator partners to say, ‘What is this enterprise use case?’ for example…’What are you trying to provide?…How do we build a first iteration that is fast” and leverages standardized infrastructure and access to AWS’s ISV community.
He continued: “To think big in this industry is to say, ‘Where do we want to place bets longer term?’ But to get to those bets, I think we have to move away from a world where those were large, capital-intensive bets, and that’s where thinking small and practical comes in.” Perhaps more importantly than the underlying technology, Nambiar sees the necessary reinvention as more focused on culture and people.
During the RCR Live: Telco Reinvention event, Nambiar also participated in a big-picture panel alongside Khaoula Slaoui, vice president of technology and strategy at Orange, NTT DoCoMo Global Head of Open RAN Solutions Sadayuki Abeta, and Telecom Infra Project Executive Director Kristian Toivo. That full panel session is available on-demand here along with the entire RCR Live: Telco Reinvention program.
