Google Cloud takes third place behind Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS in the cloud world, but it has put concerted efforts, over the past year or two, to overtake them in the telecoms market at least. It has come up with a string of telco-friendly platforms and services, with a particular focus on edge compute. Now it has added a major alliance with Ericsson to develop new cloud-native, 5G and edge applications for enterprises and consumers. These applications will help operators to reduce the time and cost to deploy 5G and monetize it with new services, Google says, while the relationship with Ericsson will bring valuable 5G-specific expertise and established telco relationships. The focus of the agreement is “on supporting…