The News: Fiber Connect 2024, organized by the Fiber Broadband Association, took place from July 28-31, 2024, in Nashville, TN. The event featured breakout panels that addressed key trends driving the fiber market including why telco cloud is integral to fiber operator journeys. Read the full press release on the Fiber Broadband Association website.
FC24: Key Takeaways from Just a Cloud Away Panel
Analyst Take: Moving telecom functions and services to the cloud needs to answer the key question of how cloud adoption can benefit telecommunication providers in major ways. At Fiber Connect 2024, the “Just a Cloud Away: Moving Telecom Functions and Services to the Cloud” panel explored the benefits and challenges of telco adoption of cloud technology and services. To improve business outcomes and customer experiences, telcos must administer complex architectures that provide greater capacity and fulfill evolving customer needs. Cloud adoption can enable telcos to streamline operations, optimize costs, and improve time-to-value.
Just a Cloud Away: Moving Telecom Functions and Services to the Cloud – Drill Down
At Fiber Connect 2024, the “Just a Cloud Away: Moving Telecom Functions and Services to the Cloud” addressed why the telco cloud model is crucial to ensuring competitive benefits such as:
- Flexibility, scalability, and resilience: How cloud technologies can enable more flexible, scalable, and resilient networks
- Cost reduction: How cloud architectures can help simplify operations and optimize costs
- New use cases: The role of cloud-native telco networks in supporting new service offerings
- Financial benefits: Why cloud computing can help telcos better predict and provision.
The panel consisted of topnotch speakers from VETRO, Nokia, Alianza, DC Blox, and Actifai, moderated by me. In my view, here are the key insights and takeaways from each of the panelist segments:
Speaker: Andrew Eubank – VETRO, Inc.
Topic: How telco cloud can play a key role in streamlining and democratizing geographic information system (GIS) mapping data.
Andrew addressed why platforms need to be purpose built to fulfill the distinct needs of fiber network operators by delivering intuitive tools, techniques, and the aesthetic of innovative software. VETRO FiberMap is known in the market for simplifying complex fiber network GIS, democratizing the ability of users to create and share data alongside increasing the efficiency and transparency of projects as well as improving speed to market.
Through a digital inventory modeling the physical layer of the Internet, coupled with Open APIs, network owners can operationalize their map and improve business outcomes. This includes using AI, machine learning, and virtualization as well as advanced analytics to extract actionable insights from network data to provide more network value to customers.
Speaker: Sireesha Kora – Nokia
Topic: How using the best data can drive better decisions, unleashing the power of AI/ML for access networks?
Sireesha demonstrated why cloud and automation are fundamental for every operator in supporting their open platform, AIOps, monetization, and cloud native objectives. For example, AIOps are crucial for better observability attained through advanced telemetry, predictive models, and AI/ML-driven insights. Through AI decisioning, networks can sense, think, and act, which is integral to autonomous networks. One main outcome is that real-world AIOps use cases for fiber operators become achievable:
Speaker: Jeff Wabik – DC Blox
Topic: What is driving the need for new telecom and digital infrastructure: AI, IoT, Digital Transformation, Social Media/Content.
Jeff showcased how hyperscalers, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Meta, are increasingly the owners of new telecom and digital infrastructure. Why is that the case? The hyperscalers are heavily investing in new fiber routes, subsea cables, and massive data centers to meet customers demands, including especially in areas such as AI workloads. In sum, the scale of hyperscaler investment is staggering.
Corollary to the swift expanding influence of the hyperscalers, DC BLOX provides connected data centers, from colocation facilities in growing markets to hyperscale-ready build-to-suit campuses. DC BLOX also provides integrated regional network services and dark fiber solutions to meet the connectivity requirements of modern business. In addition, users still must reach the cloud, and this also means that wireless capabilities such as cellular, 5G FWA, and satellite, provided by communications service providers, such as T-Mobile, AT&T, Starlink and Verizon, will play an increasingly critical role.
Speaker: Josh Moorman – Alianza, Inc.
Topic: Why the future is now regarding cloud communications platforms for service providers.
Josh addressed how telcos have faced challenges in managing legacy services side-by-side with the development and delivery of net-new capabilities. These realities undermined revenue growth and left telcos vulnerable to competitive threats from over-the-top (OTT) competitors that were not constrained by the need to maintain network infrastructure, optimize service reliability, and deliver full-service capabilities, often in adherence with regulatory mandates.
To address these mounting topmost challenges, Alianza’s portfolio can help business customers manage the full ecosystem and eliminate the need for them to juggle multiple providers and navigate the complexities of integration. The streamlined approach of the Alianza cloud-based telecommunications platform not only reduces operational complexity but also enables providers to differentiate, iterate, and innovate on a single platform. Particularly as customers are typically not concerned with the intricacies of managing third-party software, they simply expect reliable and effective services. Alianza can empower service providers to focus on delighting customers rather than managing all the different players. By embracing this transformation, businesses can overcome the challenges of integration quagmires, reduce operational costs and complexity, and position themselves for growth in a swiftly changing industry.
Speaker: Ned Brody – Actifai, Inc.
Topic: How cloud, AI software sales work.
Ned spotlighted how AI-enabled software purpose-developed for cloud environments can significantly boost the customer experience and happiness by better understanding the customers’ needs across all interactions and presenting well-matched products and services in response. Specifically, Actifai’s AI-powered subscriber acquisition software can bring practical technology to customer engagements, helping customers and providers find their optimal offer match faster and more frequently.
Actifai delivers AI and machine learning into sales and support engagements. As such, Actifai customers can gain an edge in acquisition, increase average basket size, retain customers profitably, improve online conversion, and win in new markets. Actifai’s AI-infused products can enable operators to take advantage of AI and cloud capabilities to improve business outcomes such as subscriber and ARPU (average revenue per user).
Key Takeaway: Telco Cloud Is Key to Enduring Competitive Success
Overall, I see that telcos are using cloud platforms to strengthen their investments in AI, including AIOps and machine learning, to meet major goals such as operations automation, improving customer support alongside workforce experience, advancing autonomous networks capabilities, boosting field tech efficiencies, as well as augmenting data processing and analytics. From the panel, I see progress in fulfilling the key telco objective of using cloud-native architectures to enable the delivery of experience-first network services and attain organization-wide agility throughout operations and business processes.
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.
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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.
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.
