Telco cloudification poses a huge systemic risk

Telcos these days supposedly detest single-vendor deals. It’s hardly a surprise – if something happens to that vendor, the network could fail. Trapped in the bear hug of a big supplier, an operator can be squeezed on payments and as shabbily treated as a Ryanair passenger with no escape. All this is a problem because many telcos – besides grumbling about “lock-in” and poor vendor diversity – also want to virtualize or cloudify their networks. And one reason for that is to have a single platform for managing all workloads.

The industry is very far from this today. Another complaint made by the likes of Laurent Leboucher, the group chief technology officer for Orange, is that networks are littered with silos and management systems. Take Nokia, for instance. The Finnish vendor has two cloud-management platforms, Nokia Container Services (NCS) and Nokia Cloudband Infrastructure Software (CBIS), designed largely to support its own applications. That is not what telcos are now demanding, as Nokia itself recognized back in June.

“For a long time, what our customers have been doing is essentially building vertical – albeit, yes, virtualized and cloud-native – but they’ve been building virtual instances or stacks for the different network functions,” said Fran Heeran, Nokia’s general manager of core networks, cloud and network services, during a call with reporters.

“We’re seeing a change in that market now where customers increasingly want to build a horizontal solution, so a standard architecture, standard cloud infrastructure, for all applications coming from all suppliers into their network,” he continued. “And that’s not a market that Nokia was pursuing.”

It is jacking in NCS and CBIS (clearly preferred to the more logical NCIS abbreviation to avoid a mix-up with the crime series about US naval investigators) and instead betting on Red Hat, an IBM subsidiary. Around 350 Nokia employees were transferred to Red Hat as part of the deal announced in June. Henceforth, Red Hat is Nokia’s cloud platform of choice, and it goes much further than the core network that Heeran looks after. The radio access network (RAN) was identified as a big opportunity in June by Darrell Jordan-Smith, Red Hat’s senior vice president of telecom, media, entertainment and edge. Today, Nokia announced a cloud RAN trial with Elisa, Finland’s biggest telco, where Red Hat’s platform is used.

Get off of my cloud

This does not mean Nokia can’t or won’t accommodate other platforms. AnyRAN, the strategy it announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress, is all about showing its RAN software can sit anywhere. That includes other platforms typically associated with private clouds, such as VMware and Wind River, as well as the systems developed by the big public clouds. “The hyperscalers are merging into this space as well,” Heeran previously noted.

The point is that an operator must go all-in with a single horizontal platform for this to add up. Talk of “hybrid clouds” or the “multicloud” is usually a nonsense. Retaining more than one negates the benefits of this cloudification and means an operator still has silos. And it does not bring redundancy because each platform looks after a separate domain.

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