As 5G networks start to move to the cloud, phrases like ‘radio access network’ (RAN) and ‘RAN intelligent controller’ are being uttered by companies that would seldom have concerned themselves, until recently, with the mobile network. Vendors from the IT world, such as Oracle, VMware and IBM, have been taking gradual steps towards the telecoms network market for years, often on the back of virtualization. Having helped introduce virtualized platforms, ‘as-a-service’ models and cloud-native concepts to the data center and enterprise IT, these companies are transferring their expertise to a telecoms world that is well behind the data center in all these key trends, and where native skills are in short supply. It started, of course, with operators’ IT and…