Summary Bullets:

• NVIDIA has unveiled a swath of solutions that reinforce its commitment to making high performance and edge computing more accessible and applicable to specific use cases.

• Differentiation will be crucial as NVIDIA doubles-down on efforts to target emerging opportunities in supercomputing and edge computing.

At its recent GPU Technology Conference (GTU), NVIDIA unveiled numerous solutions that reinforce the company’s commitment to becoming a provider of high performance computing (HPC) solutions to industries such as healthcare, automated vehicles, and robotics. The solutions announced at GTU also illustrate NVIDIA’s strategy to make its HPC solutions more accessible and available to a larger number of customers, and in different geographical locales, including traditional and cloud data centers, edge locations, and within the Omniverse, a platform developed by NVIDIA for hosting virtual 3D simulations of real physical world environments.

Summary Bullets:

• GlobalData’s latest edge computing forecast provides an optimistic outlook for operators aiming to monetize recent investments in edge-related technology and services.

• Operator alliances in 2021 are aligned with edge investments, and include products and services from a broad ecosystem; they can extend telco capabilities, and lead to upselling opportunities for adjacent services.

The opportunity for operators that are making investments and forging alliances to leverage edge computing along with their 5G and fiber networks is expanding. Although much has been said about the dangers of striking partnerships with hyperscalers and SIs that may end up with the lion’s share of revenue, operators are discovering an assortment of advanced services and upsell opportunities by using edge as an enabler. GlobalData’s latest edge computing forecast) includes revenue forecasts for edge-related hardware, software, and services and reflects optimism about the ability of vendors and service providers to monetize investments in edge computing. Not only is there an opportunity for telcos to generate revenue directly from edge-related managed and professional services, but ultimately the service providers hope to draw enterprise customers that will be using edge resources to deploy advanced latency-sensitive applications, and offer them new IoT services, security and privacy enhancements, and end-to-end vertical solutions. Business customers can benefit from optimized workloads, using local or nearby computing and storage resources. They can save money on connections to remote clouds or data centers, secure private data, and take advantage of the high bandwidth and low latency enabled by operators’ 5G and fiber networks by using compute and storage resources at the edge of the operator network or on the customer premise.

Continue reading “Telco Edge Still a Nascent Opportunity but Forecasts are Encouraging” →

Summary Bullets:

• Telstra is looking to build a commanding lead in the enterprise edge platform solutions marker in Australia, announcing the roadmap for its platform and early use cases.

• While Telstra’s offering is comprehensive and unique in the market, like cloud, edge will have room for all kinds of players and Telstra will see more competition as the market matures.

Telstra recently updated the market with its roadmap for its new “Telstra Edge Compute” platform that launched its first solution. Telstra Edge Compute is comprised of various existing Telstra products as well as new ones developed through partnerships made over the past several years. Essentially the company is stitching together the results of the last few years of product development (Telstra Adaptive Networks, Telstra Adaptive Cloud, and Telstra Adaptive Edge) and partnerships (Ericsson/Cradlepoint, Microsoft Azure, and AWS) to provide an all-in-one “edge” solution to the market. In this case, “all-in-one” includes network and connectivity (Telstra 5G, NBN, or third party), SD-WAN, security (next generation firewalls, secure cloud gateways, endpoint security, secure network architecture, and monitoring), storage and compute infrastructure from Telstra, AWS Outposts or Microsoft Azure Stack, and Telstra IoT capabilities wrapped in professional services and service management led by Telstra’s consulting arm Telstra Purple.

Telstra’s edge is an extension of existing customer cloud and data center environments. As such, the Telstra Purple professional services component will be key. Like the cloud migration journeys many enterprises have undergone over the past several years, Telstra envisions a similar edge migration journey. Customers will undergo application, infrastructure, and security architecture discovery with Telstra guiding customers towards a mix of on-premises, edge and cloud deployments, and connectivity types based on application performance requirements.

Continue reading “Telstra’s Edge Platform Is Set to Lead the Way in the Australian Edge Market, but May Have Company Soon” →

Summary Bullets:

• Vodafone has announced a new partnership agreement with Telekom Srbija covering Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia & Herzegovina.
• What differentiates Vodafone’s partnership strategy is its focus on what it can bring to the partner’s customer proposition and where there are mutual benefits.

Vodafone has added to its partner base through an agreement with Telekom Srbija, where Vodafone will share its knowledge, experience, and procurement capabilities to help Telekom Srbija digitalize its product and service offerings.  The new partnership adds to Vodafone’s base of partners and markets across Europe, with the company stating that it has mobile and fixed networks in 21 countries worldwide and partnerships in 49 more. Continue reading “Vodafone’s Successful Partnership Strategy” →

Summary Bullets:

• The telecom industry has ambitious targets to lower carbon footprint. Environment and social governance (ESG) is becoming inextricably linked to overall corporate strategy and will be reported in financial results.

• Strategies differ by operator, but metrics like network carbon intensity (NCI) will help carriers to better understand, report, and improve energy consumption.

The Internet played a significant role in improving social cohesion and mental health during the pandemic. It has helped keep schools and hospitals open, and allowed for the high-street stores to move online. However, there is also an equally tall task of maintaining the health, welfare, and sustainability of the planet. The shift from offline to online has dramatically increased traffic on carrier networks and operating models for virtually all businesses. While the network is bringing many positive societal gains, spikes in network traffic upwards of 40-60% in 2020 alone is also increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs). With dramatic traffic increases, so does the need to reduce energy costs. Recently Huawei hosted the Better World Summit in Dubai to bring operators from the industry to discuss their sustainability goals. ESG is becoming as important to corporate strategy financial performance. The two are becoming inextricably linked.