Operators are increasingly seeking partnerships with hyperscalers to help them expand into new geographies and services, but vendors, too, know that alliances with cloud giants can be valuable tools of expansion. Nokia has been particularly active in partnering with US cloud providers to accelerate the growth of its cloud-based enterprise networking offerings, and to avoid direct conflict with such powerful stakeholders. Now NEC is looking for similar benefits, extending its strategic collaboration with AWS to target government and enterprise customers. For operators, there is a risk that their key vendors will be able to offer some services, such as private networks or hosted 5G cores, on their own, bypassing telco connectivity and placing the cloud providers at the center of…