In this episode of the 5G Factor, our series that focuses on all things across the 5G ecosystem, we review the recent key 5G-related moves made by the hyperscale cloud providers including Google Cloud and Motorola announcing a new multi-year relationship to bring GenAI to Motorola phones, AWS works with SK Telecom to test outbound roaming across its global infrastructure, and Oracle debuts Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Telco Landing Zone aimed at optimizing telco workloads.
Our analytical review drilled down on:
Google Cloud and Motorola Bring GenAI to Razr Smartphones. Google Cloud and Motorola announced a new multi-year relationship to bring GenAI to Motorola phones, including the brand-new series of Razr smartphones, starting with the brand-new flagship Motorola Razr+ and Motorola Razr 50 Ultra. Moto ai technology, built using Google Cloud Vertex AI, Gemini, and Imagen models, is now integrated across native smartphone applications and prioritizes bringing users an elevated smartphone experience, including the ability to complete tasks, provide relevant suggestions, summarize information, plus more. We examine why Moto ai can augment the smartphone experience by becoming context-aware, personal, and collaborative throughout the phone and ecosystem through main features such as Magic Canvas to create on-device images and Style Sync, to align the customer’s device to their personal style.
AWS Prepares Outbound Roaming Across its Global Infrastructure. AWS is hosting a network function for outbound roaming subscribers, using AWS’s global infrastructure and enabling enhanced user experience. We assess how the use of a reference architecture, including IP Exchange (IPX) connectivity options, can allow integration with existing roaming networks without changes. We review how the test results from SK Telecom’s proof-of-concept deployment of User Plane Function (UPF) and Packet Data Network Gateway User Plane (PGW-U) on AWS global Regions, help demonstrate the practicality and benefits of this approach.
OCI Telco Landing Zone Targets Accelerating Time to Value. Oracle announced the availability of OCI Telco Landing Zone, a deployment tool designed to establish a scalable and secure foundation for telco workloads. We assess why installing OCI services and telco-specific components can catalyze the setup and operation of all telco workloads, including 5G core cloud native functions (CNFs) and virtual network functions (VNFs). This can result in speeding up project timelines and time to value deployments that improve business outcomes.
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Ron Westfall: Hello and welcome everyone to The 5G Factor. I’m Ron Westfall, Research Director here at The Futurum Group, and I’m joined here today by my distinguished colleague, Steven Dickens, our Chief Technology Advisor here at The Futurum Group. And today-
Steven Dickens: You say all the nicest things, Ron. You say all the nicest things.
Ron Westfall: Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, it’s been a little while, but it’s great to have you back. And that’s because we’re going to be focusing on the major 5G ecosystem developments that have caught our eye. And today that includes, for example, the fact that we have Motorola and Google Cloud getting together on a partnership. And naturally we’ll drill down on that. Also, we’re seeing Oracle Cloud infrastructure basically throwing its hat into a new telco offering. And then finally AWS basically rolling out a global roaming capability. And so I think all these things are going to be things that people want to know more about. And so with that, thank you again, Steven, for joining the 5G Factor. Welcome back. How have you been bearing up with the onset of summer?
Steven Dickens: Well, it’s good to be finally in these four walls. Good to be home and not on the road. We got to hang out recently at a couple of events, which is always good. But yeah, just a busy schedule. Not traveling now until the 4th of August. Well, traveling with the family for vacation but not traveling until the 4th of August. So very glad to be home.
Ron Westfall: Well amen to that. Likewise, I’ll be doing a bit of travel in July. We have a network field day event coming up with Tech Field Day team, so that’s NFD35 in Silicon Valley, July 10th, 11th. And I’m glad you mentioned August 4th because this is an opportunity to plug why you’ll be on the road. If I’m not mistaken. It’s Tech Field Day Extra at Share Kansas City, and that will include key players such as Pop-up mainframe. And I’ll hand it back to you Steven, what else is going on at this Tech Field Day Extra?
Steven Dickens: Yes, it’s the first Mainframe Field Day, Mainframe Field Day One. So bringing the Field Day format to the mainframe space. We’ve got a few vendors who are looking to commit still, but it should be a good event, should be a good event. Different community than where we’ve taken field days before, but that community’s crying out for it, so it should be good.
Ron Westfall: Well, I agree and I think the timing is pretty good. And I know we talked about this before. July, August, many people are on vacation, but it’s not going to conflict with say five other events, the only people who won’t be able to join in the real time since people happen to be on vacation during that two, three days. But otherwise, the people who are on vacation, you’re going to have I think a pretty good undivided attention and that will be most welcome. And speaking of something that’s most welcome, we saw that Google Cloud and Motorola have announced a new multi-year relationship to bring GenAI to Motorola phones and that includes their brand new series of razor smartphones. I think when you hear Motorola smartphones, you automatically think the Razor brand name. And that’s not just the smartphone itself, it’s really the new flagship Motorola Razor Plus and the Motorola Razor 50 Ultra.
So this is pretty interesting and I think exciting as we talk more about it. But I think what’s also important to note here is that Moto AI is playing a leading role here. This is technology that’s built using Google Cloud Vertex AI, Gemini and Imagine models. So this is really, I think cementing why the relationship is going to have, I think legs going into the future and what is I think important detail wise. It’s now integrated across native smartphone apps and it also prioritizes bringing users an elevated smartphone experience, which you expect with a Google GenAI enabled capability and also the ability to complete tasks in a more efficient manner, provide insightful suggestions, summarizing information, and so much more. And so what I think is also important to take away is that Moto AI is looking to augment that smartphone experience by enabling that context to where personal and collaborative throughput throughout the phone and the overall ecosystem and naturally that can improve throughput as well.
But what I think is going to be important is that first of all, there is Magic Canvas which creates images from basically the user’s imagination and can turn descriptions into graphics. That can be used in messages, on social media as wallpapers, and more. So this is actually futuristic stuff. Things like we’ve seen on sci-fi movies and so forth and like Minority Report and so forth actually becoming reality today. And this is thanks again to Motorola and Google Cloud’s collaboration. And the second one is called Style Sync, which syncs your phone’s look to your personal style and that creates wallpapers and themes that quite simply matches the user’s preferences. And so with that, I don’t want to steal all the thunder, Steven, what are your initial impressions about Google Cloud and Motorola getting together on the smartphone side of things?
Steven Dickens: Well, I think there’s a couple of key trends that stand out for me here, Ron. Small models. We hear a lot about large language models as the backends to cloud and SaaS services. I think where I see a lot of perspective going, I’m seeing this with granite from IBM as well, and I was literally just getting briefing from those guys this morning. I think this is on trend as well from Motorola and Google here, the ability to execute a small, maybe that’s a 2 billion, 3 billion parameter model on the device. Very fast turnarounds. We’re seeing this with Qualcomm and those guys as well with some of the stuff they’re doing at the silicon level. So I think the first piece is small language models as opposed to large language models on device. That’s the key kind of technology thread that comes through for me. Then you’ve got to factor in that Motorola is a huge name with a US frame of reference.
We think of Samsung and we think of Apple in a pretty big dog fight between those two. You go to other parts of the world, Motorola is number three in market share. So go to other parts of the world, it’s not an Apple-Samsung duopoly. Motorola has, in some markets, got second place. So I think you’ve got to sort of take yourself out of the US centric view. Then the other piece for me that’s sort of, yes, this is consumer focused. Yes, there’s a consumer component to this and making these devices cool and interesting is fun in a consumer context. But what’s the enterprise thread for this? Motorola is part of Lenovo, that pocket to cloud type of story. There’s a lot of devices in the Motorola portfolio and the Lenovo Edge portfolio. So the tie-up for me strategically important. What are you doing in retail use cases, putting devices in the hands of associates in retail? What can they do with smart retail, smart shelf edges?
So whilst this is a consumer focused announcement and it’s great to see, and I think there’s a lot of cool things that you can do, I’m supposed more of an enterprise guy. I’m thinking what does this mean from a tie-up between Motorola-Lenovo at the edge and a collaboration with Google? And I think there’s some good trend lines there. So I think whilst I need to get my hands on one of these Motorola Razor devices, whoever’s watching this in the Motorola team, Ron and I need some new kit to play with. But all joking aside, I think whilst the consumer side of it’s really interesting for me, I’m looking at the small language model. I’m looking at the pocket to cloud integration from a Lenovo wider edge portfolio and I’m thinking global market share versus US market share.
Ron Westfall: Excellent point, Steven. I think it does underline just that. On device AI is going to be integral.
Steven Dickens: We’re seeing that with BC right now. I think you’re going to see it with edge. This is pushing it to the far edge, if you will, with consumer device. You’re going to see it across the whole. So I think the smaller model versus large model is the really… And I mean Qualcomm have been big on this. Few others have started to come out. We’ve started to see the first shipments of the copilot PCs. There’s a whole trend line here and this is definitely on message.
Ron Westfall: Oh yeah, it’s definitely gathering momentum, grabbing headlines. And I think to your point, Steven, yeah, it is consumer centric, but I think it immediately impacts, for example, small business owners basically who have to use a Razor smartphone to conduct business on a regular basis. Uber driver, you get the whole idea, anybody who needs a smartphone is going to benefit from this and it includes employees of enterprises, bring your own device scenarios and so forth. So I think this is something that has clear upside because Google Cloud can present a full stack in AI capability, i.e it’s native and it’s all in-house. And the other concluding observation I’ll make here is that I’m seeing Google Cloud stepping up its telco focus and marketing. And you might ask why that might be. Well, recently we saw Microsoft basically pull the plug on Azure for operators. And so as a result, this can be an opportunity for Google Cloud, for AWS, for Oracle Cloud and others to step up and say, “Hey, we can address telco needs. You don’t have to worry about us basically pulling back when some of the going goes tough.”
But I think the other part is the perception is that those telcos who are relying on Azure for operators, i.e. The Metaswitch and the affirmed networks technologies will not be pleased about that development. And that’s I think something that’s understood. It’s just a sales and marketing opportunity for folks like Google Cloud who also, for example, partnering with OCS on its AI and data platform to again push out GenAI to telco specific capabilities. And we saw Google Cloud announce its relationship with Indostat. And so we’re seeing I think Google Cloud quite simply gaining more momentum here. And to underline it all, Google Cloud and Oracle announced a breakthrough alliance. That is multi-cloud capabilities that are native and genuine, i.e if you’re a Google Cloud customer, you can get Oracle say database capabilities native late on Google Cloud and you can use a single interface to do that, i.e. answering what the customer actually prefers rather than having it to go through the complexity of multiple interfaces and so forth to get that same capability.
Steven Dickens: Well there’s a couple of things, Ron, I’d add to that. You mentioned retail. One of the clients that we work with is a vendor called Scandit, really innovative retail software vendor that does smart data capture. And what they’re doing is innovating on how the store associate captures information about restocking a shelf. And that’s increasingly becoming AI driven. It’s using the device and largely a BYOD approach. They’re maybe giving the retail associated phone or they’re installing an app on a phone that they own. There’s an opportunity for innovation here, connecting that, having that sort of AI capability. Is there a partnership opportunity, a Scandit, a Google, a Motorola to create an enhanced experience, do something innovative, get that technology into the hands of the store associates? So I think we’re starting to see that become real and there’s some really interesting things you can do. I was at a NRF back in January. The innovation in retail is huge and that’s largely innovation at the far edge.
Ron Westfall: Yeah, those are excellent insights, Steven, and I know we can spend more time on it. However, as promised, we have additional topics that we want to take a closer look at, and that again is along the cloud theme. The fact that we’re seeing AWS basically offering an outbound roving capability across its global infrastructure. And I think what’s an interesting use case is that they’re actually working with SK Telecom, that is South Korea Telecom’s proof of concept deployment of user plane function and packet data network gateway user plane on AWS global regions to demonstrate really the practicality and benefits of this approach. And that includes AWS assets such as the IP exchange or IPX connectivity and as well as the reference architecture needed to make all this work. So as a starting point, what they’re doing, SK Telecom and AWS is naturally conducting a proof of concept.
And what the test is doing is using Samsung’s cloud data 4G, 5G core network of again, that PGW and UPF capabilities as well as Samsung’s network functions that are compatible with running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes services or EKS, which uses our friend Multi Support for separating networks for each purpose such as signaling and user traffic. And now that’s important because it helps ensure a high availability of network functions as well as EKS worker node groups that are needed to deploy across the multiple availability zones. So if you’re roaming, say in Spain and you’re say from Korea, you can definitely get a much better experience with your roaming. And that I think is going to be more popular because for the inherent reasons people would like to have a roaming capability that they have confidence in that’s predictable, that’s deterministic, and AWS global coverage I think can make a big difference here.
And there’s more. It’s not just about, “Okay, how can I achieve cost savings through this approach?” It’s also I think encouraging that the proof of concept results are showing improvement in access speeds to really important global websites such as a 76% plus improvement on Google. That is from having to wait 2.3 seconds to less than one second in order to actually use this capability on a global basis. Likewise, Apple, you’re going down from 5.7 seconds to only 1.3 seconds. And finally, Facebook from 4.0 seconds to 1.4 seconds. And so with those details, Steven, what do you think about this combination? What do you think is going to really come out of this in terms of AWS being able to offer a global roaming capability?
Steven Dickens: Well, I mean I’ve got some history going way back now. 20 years I’m starting to show my age. I think if you’d have said what you’d have said in a telco context 20 years ago, you’d have been laughed out of the room. I think the lines are blurring for me for sure. So we’ve gone from an Ericsson and Nokia sort of centric world with infrastructure in carriers, in data centers, in specific data centers in 24-inch racks. Going back to those points and we’re seeing those lines blur. So from a cloud infrastructure point of view, we’re seeing the lines blur of where is that infrastructure? Is it in the cabinet, in a telco provider? Is it in a cloud data center? Who owns that infrastructure going all the way through to something like EKS, which is a Kubernetes service. I think what you’re seeing… And you track this space more than I do with sort of something like ORAN and these sort of…
Generally, the trend I see is those lines are blurring between where is that infrastructure, who runs the infrastructure, and where in the services stack is the control point for the operator. I think telcos have always been one of the more technical and had the bigger in-house teams are we starting to see that trend kind of move and then being… Not outsourcing because not outsourcing in the traditional sense, but be able to put more confidence in the likes of a cloud provider like AWS. You mentioned Google. Being able to move that sort of ownership. It’s not a telco managing their own Kubernetes stack. It’s an AWS managed stack with EKS. I think you’re seeing just some of those trend lines start to move because telcos. Because telcos, do they want to be in the business of running infrastructure or do they want to be in the business of providing value add services to their clients?
So I mean I’ve maybe stepped back a little bit. You are closer to the actual tech stack in the operator than I am, but I see this just as part of an overall trend of just cloud adoption, finding its way into telco. I think the two standout industries for me would be financial services and telco where they’ve been more tech heavy. And if you look at cloud adoption in financial services, it’s still sub 10% of their total infrastructure. I don’t track it so much from a telco perspective, but I’m assuming it’s around the same. This is just on that broader trend line of telcos being more comfortable to provide services via cloud stack. That’s what I’m looking at more thematically at that level rather than the sort of deep level, deep in the stack about the IP gateway level that you are talking about.
Ron Westfall: Yeah, no, those are great insights and I think, yeah, it hits on a couple of key points. Telco cloud relationships, on, off. It’s going to at the end of the day come down to the individual operator and how much they want to entrust a cloud partner to basically run important stacks and applications. … we could take a quick snapshot. AT&T has already entrusted Azure to basically run some core capabilities, i.e. Crown jewel type of features working with them. Now on the other hand you have Verizon saying no, “We would not ever seriously consider that type of relationship.” But I think what’s important here is that as we know telcos, many of them are dialing back CapEx and that is something that’s impacting quite simply how much influence they can have in some use cases, in some areas that they can control simply by themselves. What that means is working quite simply more with clouds. I think that’s something there is a consensus there. From my view, I think that we’ll see more of this hybridization, if you will, of telcos and clouds partners getting together. And I think there are a couple of underlying factors that I’ll spotlight.
There are many of them, but one is the time to value aspect. Yes, working with a cloud provider like AWS with the global infrastructure can save that ability to get a new application of service out not only within a native customer footprint, but also potentially be able to support customers in other parts of the world with a better value proposition. The other part that I think is interesting that it’s still misunderstood is that 5G is still in its nascent stage. And why do I say that? Well, if you look at GSM stats, basically most of the deployments that support 5G are still in their non-standalone implementation. That is 4G and 5G are combined together in order to get at least initial 5G radios out there up and running, but they’re running on 4G cores. And if I recall correctly, less than 10% of the operators out there who have a 5G implementation are basically not on a 5G standalone basis. That is they’re combining the best of 5G core with 5G radios. The rest of them are still in non-standalone, but are vesting and kicking the tires on getting to that 5G standalone.
And that’s going to make a difference for something like global roaming and all these other capabilities we’ve heard a good deal about over the last few years, things like network slicing and so forth. And so I think that actually can help the SKA telecom and AWS relationship, but also bringing on more operators to say, “Hey, global roaming is something that can be really broadly available and it would work on a more efficient basis with better value.” And so I think that also is tying into the next announcement that jumped out and that is Oracle announcing the availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI, Telco Landing Zone. And what that is, it’s a deployment tool designed to establish a secure and scalable foundation for again, telecommunications workloads. And so it’s specifically geared to the needs of the telcos. So why now? Well, what it’s doing is installing OCI services and telco specific components that are needed to support the setup and operation of telco workloads. And that includes 5G core cloud native network functions or CNS as well as virtual network functions or VNS, which have been around longer.
Now OCI Telco Landing Zone deployment and capabilities can make it easier to accelerate project timelines, ensuring that time the value that we touched on. Now of note, the packet core, which in this case comprises the user plane function, has specific requirements that are important to note here. That includes single route IO virtualization or SRIOV, Multus, which we’re already talked about, which is A CNI plugin for Kubernetes and Data Plane Development Kit or DPDK. An acronym that’s been around for a while now. These requirements are addressed during the Oracle container engine for Kubernetes cluster deployment phase of the OCI Telco Landing Zone setup. So in other words, Oracle Cloud can basically offload a lot of the pain of actually getting telco workloads onto a cloud. So lessons are being learned. They’re coming up with ways to streamline and make this easier by including again, the Kubernetes management piece, the CNF and VNF support, basically having all this more thought through. Now the key features, the benefits are like, “Okay, great, that’s in place, but what will the telco gain from this potentially?” Well, first of all, it helps with structured compartmentalization. Say that five times real quick.
Steven Dickens: Easy for you to say, Ron. Easy for you to say.
Ron Westfall: I would’ve been better off just saying tenancy. It’s another way of saying tenancy.
Steven Dickens: Compartmentalization is a stretch for any of us.
Ron Westfall: Right on. Yeah, we’re getting closer to holiday, you can tell. And so this setup ensures again that separation of ownership and control over resources. Obviously every telco out there wants that control over the resources, over the brand identity and so forth. Also, it’s helpful for flexible VCN configuration. That’s the virtual cloud network capability that it can be done in a standalone mode. And basically again, ensuring that there’s granular control over network traffic, isolating all the capabilities and so forth. So again, the telco has the confidence. They’re controlling their own destiny, working with OCI. Also, it’s important to have the orchestration of cloud native workloads with OKE or OKE, that is the OCI Telco Landing Zone architecture. That includes that as a core component for orchestrating the cloud native workloads. And that can’t be emphasized enough.
It’s like, okay, it’s basic checklists to have these capabilities, but you had to have an orchestration platform in place in order to ensure that all of these moving parts can work together in an efficient and capable way, secure way, and that is obviously required. And finally, on performance optimization, this is where it can make a real difference because it’s combining those capabilities we talked about, but it’s also enabling that efficient network input output that allows for that high performance data processing and lower latency, crucial for delivering and a better 5G experience. So this is actually kind of looking at AI in terms of the back office, the operations side. Yes, AI that is non GenAI AI is making a difference in terms of automating these operations and so forth. And so yeah, this is I think a very important announce because we’ve been following Oracle Cloud, certainly OCI. And so from your perspective, Steve, and what do you find about this announcement that leaps out?
Steven Dickens: Well, it’s interesting you mentioned we’re tracking OCI. I mean, I think if you’d have gone maybe three years ago, it was three hyperscalers that we were talking about. Maybe IBM would’ve been in that equation in certain places, but I think the Oracle cloud Infrastructure team are doing a really good job. There’s a lot of deployment going on. I’ve been tracking them from a Sovereign Cloud perspective. They’re doing a good job of bringing those local instances. But the big trend line that I think is sort of hitting for me with where Oracle is, there’s a sort of tension of do I bring the AI to the data or do I bring the data to the AI. I think if you were sort of looking at Oracle over the last 30 years, they’ve been the home for a lot of the data. Their database platforms, Heatwave, Exadata, Exascale, whatever, just Oracle 23, Oracle 23 AI, whatever it is from their portfolio, there’s a lot of data. A lot of telcos will have that data deployed into an Oracle database, whether that’s a backend for a billing system, an OSS, a BSS system, whatever it is, there’s likely to be an Oracle database in there somewhere. So as these telcos look to expose AI to that at a really high level, “Well, do I take all of that data and move it to a public cloud service?
Egress fees, ingress fees. There’s a lot of data sovereignty. Where am I going to move it? How am I going to secure it?” I think Oracle’s benefiting from the overall trend line here, which is let’s move that AI toward the data. Maybe we need it connected to the cloud because that’s where maybe some of the inference and training is happening. But if we’re going to run the database and we’re going to put that AI maybe more from an inference point of view against that data, I think there’s a trend line here. And where I see OCI is more generically progressing is because they’re tethering those Exascale and Exadata platforms to the OCI platform. And it’s really saying to enterprises, “Don’t move that data towards the AI. Move the AI towards the data.”
So I think when you overlay that with a telco lens and say there’s some huge systems from an OSS and BSS perspective that have got Oracle backends, you can take that overall trend line of what’s got going on with OCI and moving data and moving AI to the data. And then you can put a telco lens on and go, one of the biggest sources of data is these big telco companies. So it just makes more sense for me and that’s what I’m seeing from OCI. And I know you track the telco space more than I do, but one of the areas we overlap is around Oracle. So I see that trend line coming through and I know we’ve done some good stuff recently with our coverage of Heatwave and Oracle 23 AI and those types of things. So I don’t track the telco space as much as you do, but I see from an Oracle and Telco and a data and AI perspective, I see that same trend line that I see across a lot of the rest of their announcements.
Ron Westfall: Excellent points. Yeah, I think these capabilities in the Oracle portfolio basically impacts every enterprise organization out there in telcos are no exception. So it’s good to see them spotlighting the telco capability. Certainly the new capability that came out, Heatwave GenAI that could be distributed across the Oracle portfolio across different platforms and basically turbocharge the price performance benefit from using GenAI with that existing data. To your point about bringing AI to the data and so forth. And so-
Steven Dickens: Well, we’re seeing that with stuff like they’re bringing vector capability, RAG capability. Not having to change the underlying database structure, but bringing new AI feature function to that existing data. That can be huge for teams. Is it, do I deploy a new vector database to get AI or do I bring vector into my traditional Oracle database? That’s huge for a lot of people. Once you have to move data, it’s almost game over from a security and cost perspective. If you can bring that capability into the existing database, you’re in such a better shape.
Ron Westfall: It’s painful and yes, you’re right. Basically, it’s vector data basically done right. So this is something I think will again prove a differentiator and a competitive advantage. But I think what’s also interesting about this announcement is the, and part. I think this is going to be intriguing. You touched on the fact that OCI has definitely invested in Sovereign Cloud. So I anticipate that there will be quite simply situations, countries where there’ll be overlap of OCI Telco Landing Zone with Oracle Sovereign Cloud capabilities, so stay tuned on that. But also what I think is interesting is what about the role of Oracle communications, the unit that is developing the telco applications capabilities as well as the partnerships with multi-cloud implications?
You already touched on the Google Cloud relationship, but also they have the same thing with Azure. And I think that’s, to your point, Oracle Cloud has been a welcomed entrant into the overall cloud space because they basically, I believe, have energized the segment by saying no egress fees. Well, guess what? Now almost all the hyperscalers are not doing egress fees anymore because that pain that we talked about in terms of moving data around and having to pay for your own data. Running a storage unit and having to pay every time you takes something out of the storage units, that was pretty egregious for some-
Steven Dickens: Glad we’ve seen that change, for sure. The market certainly needed that.
Ron Westfall: Exactly. And we touched on the multi-cloud aspect. Really Oracle’s been integral in driving that. Customers say, “Hey, why can’t we have multi-cloud implementations that are common sensical and that work like enterprise networks and so forth?” And so I think we’re much closer to a… I don’t want to say universal multi-cloud, but certainly a broader multi-cloud ecosystem that is responding to customer demands. And with that, thank you so much, Steven, for joining. It’s always great to have our cloud guru on and providing insights on the latest developments in the 5G ecosystem.
Steven Dickens: You always say the nicest things, Ron. I love coming on your show. No, it’s a pleasure to be here. I think for me, some of the intersection of telco and cloud’s crucial to talk about, so always a pleasure.
Ron Westfall: Yeah, I think we’re already queued up our sequel here. What about next steps for Oracle Cloud?
Steven Dickens: Always glad to come on your show, buddy. Always glad to come on your show.
Ron Westfall: Well, always most welcome. And with that, everybody, thank you for joining the show. Don’t forget to bookmark The 5G Factor as well as The Futurum Group in terms of being able to view our show with convenience. And with that, everybody, have a great 5G and multi-cloud Day.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
5G Factor: BT, Vodafone, Altice Show Deft CSP Moves
Oracle and Google Cloud Finally Tie the Interconnect Knot
Navigating the AI-Fueled Future: Insights from Google Cloud Next ’24
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
He is a recognized authority at tracking the evolution of and identifying the key disruptive trends within the service enablement ecosystem, including a wide range of topics across software and services, infrastructure, 5G communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, security, cloud computing, revenue management, and regulatory issues.
Prior to his work with The Futurum Group, Ron worked with GlobalData Technology creating syndicated and custom research across a wide variety of technical fields. His work with Current Analysis focused on the broadband and service provider infrastructure markets.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
