Google has been rather overshadowed in the telecoms cloud world by AWS and Microsoft Azure, but it is starting to gain ground with some significant operator partnerships, often driven by its AI (artificial intelligence) expertise. Hard on the heels of an alliance with Telecom Italia (see Wireless Watch November 13 2019), it has announced a similar arrangement with Vodafone. Many operators are turning their back on inhouse cloud and AI developments, in favor of taking advantage of the webscalers’ heavier investments and more scalable solutions in these areas. Vodafone has been using its own on-premises system, based on the Hadoop open source technology, to analyze business data across 11 countries, but that system requires eight clusters of servers (600 in…