Microsoft has unveiled a range of new features for its Azure cloud services designed to cater for the needs of the telecommunications industry. The company believes that a modern network infrastructure will not only drive down the total cost of ownership for its telco partners, but also help them modernize and monetize their existing infrastructure.
Jason Zander, Microsoft’s EVP for Strategic Missions and Tech, said, “Our expectation is that [the hyperscale] cloud is going to expand; it will be a highly distributed fabric; it’s going to span from 5G to space.
“That future — this intelligent cloud, this intelligent edge — has to be powered by a modern network infrastructure. And it’s going to enable a new type of application and we need a new connectivity paradigm for that”, he added.
As part of its announcement, Microsoft launched Azure Operator Nexus, a next-gen hybrid cloud platform for communication service providers. According to Zander, it’s a combination of hardware, hardware acceleration, and software. “This is important because Microsoft has a set of edge cloud hardware — but it’s not built for it. When you see vendors talking about using the same thing to run an IT workload as they are planning on running a telco network, it doesn’t work and it’s exactly why we’ve made this multi-year investment”, he said.
READ ALSO:
MRANTI, DNB, and Ericsson Extend Partnership to Accelerate 5G Adoption among Businesses in Malaysia
Former Deloitte CEO Punit Renjen Nominated as Chairman of SAP
Microsoft also launched Azure Communications Gateway, a service for connecting fixed and mobile networks to Teams, into general availability, and Azure Operator Voicemail, a service that allows operators to migrate their voicemail services to Azure.
Additionally, the company has launched two new “AIOps” services – Azure Operator Insights and Azure Operator Service Manager. Operator Insights uses machine learning to help operators analyze the massive amounts of data they gather from their network operations and troubleshoot potential issues, while Service Manager helps operators generate insights about their network configurations.
In terms of building network-aware applications, Microsoft is working on managing quality of service for specific applications. To achieve this, the company is partnering with vendors to create an open API standard.
Zander said, “They get it. They know they want to differentiate — but they also know that if there’s fragment in the app ecosystem, it’ll just stall one way or the other”.