As mentioned above, many telcos are torn between the advantages of deploying key functions in the public cloud, to access the hyperscalers’ ecosystems and innovations and to reduce inhouse cost; and the risk of ending up locked into a certain cloud, and taking the role of very junior partner to AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
One compromise position is to rely on external clouds, but to select a large number of partners. Ensuring consistency across any cloud is something that open platforms such as Open RAN and ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) can facilitate in a telco-optimized way, and as the network becomes more distributed, it will be even more important that operators can access the best edge locations and platforms, from a range of providers including independents and other telcos.
Ireland-based BSO is an example of a cloud and network provider that aims to tap into enterprise and telco demand for a multicloud world, and for an ecosystem as open as the one operators are chasing for 5G networks. The model is not just to provide wholesale cloud and connectivity capacity, which could be rapidly devalued, but to include network functions and disaggregated services so that telcos gain a tailored, but pre-integrated solution that saves them cost and risk, while avoiding hyperscaler lock-in.
Founder Michael Ourabah says BSO reported 40% year-on-year revenue growth in 2020 and now has 240 global points of presence in its network plus its own public cloud capability. It provides cloud, hosting, managed services, fiber and radio connectivity and its differentiation lies in supporting mission critical and ultra-low latency services such as cryptography and, in future, 5G vRAN. It operates a Layer 1 optical transport network with a Layer 2 network from Infinera, plus IP and software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities.
“The big cloud providers will continue to grow,” Ourabah said. “They will capture even more of the mainstream applications. But I think we will see a drift away from them because it’s difficult to maintain this huge platform and be fit for purpose for everybody.” He believes that mission critical applications such as vRAN will need a more optimized and specialized platform.
He continued: “As a client, the minute you need to get something changed or some adjustment made, it gets impossible. I think you’re going to see some mission critical applications going out of the cloud because they’ve been subject to outages and that just can’t happen. Companies will keep most of their activity in the public cloud because it’s a huge cost saver, but they will increasingly delegate the critical applications to a provider like ourselves.”