Google was firmly overshadowed by Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure in the telco cloud market – until the past couple of months, when it has been closing on its rivals, with a rear-guard action that hits two current telco sweet spots, edge computing and the desire to avoid a cloud lock-in.
The latest operator to sign up a strategic partnership with Google Cloud is Telefónica, which said the cornerstones of the deal are Google’s newly announced Mobile Edge Computing platform and services, plus its development of a multicloud strategy. Google will extend its cloud services using Telefónica’s infrastructure in the Madrid region, initially. That will enable the telco to use Google Cloud to expand its own services, especially for enterprises.
Telefónica said it will use Google Cloud services to boost its digital capabilities in areas like machine learning and big data analytics, to enhance its services for its global customer base, especially in 5G.
CEO José María Álvarez-Pallete said in a statement: “With our alliance with Google Cloud we want to fulfil our social commitment and foster the recovery of the economy helping companies, the public administration and all types of organizations not only to recover the ground lost by the crisis but also to promote their digital transformation and strengthen themselves for the future.”
The new Google Cloud region will include three zones to provide for redundancy. At launch, it will offer a selection of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services including Compute Engine, App Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Spanner and BigQuery.
Telefonica’s Tech Cloud business, which was set up late last year, will use the platform alongside other public clouds. The unit is centralizing Telefónica’s cloud, security, IoT and big data activities and aims to generate over $2.2bn in revenues from 2022.
Earlier this year, Google unveiled its Global Mobile Edge Cloud platform, aiming to provide a more open approach to the telco edge than rival offerings like AWS Wavelengths and Azure Edge Zones. The platform brings Google and its developer ecosystem together with network operators and their partners, to develop applications jointly. Telefónica has also signed up for Azure Edge Zones.
AT&T was Google’s launch partner for its edge platform, and the public cloud provider has also recently announced alliances with Telecom Italia, Germany’s T-Systems and others.
While Google Cloud lacks AWS’s ubiquity or Microsoft’s huge enterprise incumbency, it does look attractive at the 5G edge. Its model and infrastructure are less centralized and more network-centric than those of its rivals and that may enable it to form more multi-faceted collaborations with operators. After all, it does have the vast Android mobile developer base to bring to the party.
Under its edge banner, Google says it aims to deliver
- a portfolio and marketplace of 5G solutions built jointly with telcos
- an open cloud platform for developing these network-centric applications
- a global distributed edge for optimally deploying these solutions, which will be developed rapidly by “lighting up thousands of edge locations that are already deployed in these telecom networks” rather than building all the sites itself
To help achieve the second objective, Google offers Anthos for Telecom, which brings its Kubernetes-based Anthos cloud platform to the network edge and optimizes it to support telecoms-centric applications such as AI-enabled customer service or personalization systems.
“We’re basically giving you compute power on our edge, where previously it was only for Google use, through the Anthos platform,” said Eyal Manor, VP of engineering for Anthos. “The edge is very powerful, and I think we will now see substantially more innovation happening for applications that are latency-sensitive. We’ve been investing in edge compute and edge networking for a long time in Google over the years for the internal services. And we think it’s a fairly unique capability now to open it up for third party customers.”
The Global Mobile Edge Cloud looks notably different from the common platforms with which AWS and Azure lure telcos. It is more collaborative and more of a two-way partnership. The new cloud platform is billed as one on which Google will work with operators to develop applications and a distributed edge through joint efforts.