Summary Bullets:

• Telcos are increasingly repositioning themselves as cloud and AI providers, targeting the digital transformation opportunity from an infrastructure-led perspective.

• Strategic partnerships between telcos and hyperscalers are likely to drive the most successful business transformations.

Telcos have an important agenda during this week’s high-profile technology conference, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. They are going after the digital transformation space from an infrastructure perspective, addressing enterprises’ desperate need for improved operational provisioning, an issue largely ignored by cloud platform providers.

Telcos are working to rebrand themselves as AI, cloud, and edge providers, alongside long-established hyperscaler and platform services rivals. Operators are accomplishing this via connectivity with AI tooling (and necessary compute), leveraged through partnerships, and released as part of their evolving portfolios including edge cloud, sovereign cloud, and AI-injected connectivity. The infrastructure leaders are going after cloud giants’ customer base, including enterprises and the public sector.

The cloud ecosystem is evolving quickly and is more confusing than ever, because there’s so much competition and cooperation among players spanning the entire cloud stack. The early years of digital transformation focused on the app modernization part of digitization, now the industry is focused on infrastructure modernization. That means networking and telecommunications players are stepping up to fill in the gaps left by app platform services providers (or PaaS) such as IBM, Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, SAP, and others.

What this means for enterprises is an increase in hyperscaler partnerships to enable telco workloads in the cloud including edge compute, and a trend towards telcos being able to co-sell cloud services (think Red Hat OpenShift platform services). Those platform service providers opening up their Kubernetes container and GenAI service opportunities to new infrastructure partnerships will open the floodgates of opportunity for themselves and partners. Platform providers have been faltering in their ability to keep up with integration and consulting demands from enterprise customers. Telco/platform partnerships represent a win-win for the industry.

Telcos and network providers are leveraging GenAI and even AIOps to improve their network automation capabilities and to ensure secure connectivity. In this way, managed cybersecurity represents a top-shelf digital transformation offering that infrastructure players can lead with as they go after the cloud space. Enterprises know that telcos will handle the heavy lifting of infrastructure modernization requirements (e.g., redesigning network architecture) to support these technologies.

Finally, operators are exposing network functions through standardized APIs in order to build out enterprise developer followings and play a role in the application layer of the cloud stack. Popular network services include identity, fraud detection, location, and QoS. These activities are often associated with GSMA/Open Gateway.

In many ways, MWC is more important than ever to global enterprises and the evolving role of telcos in supporting their app and infra modernization efforts. Businesses are counting on digitization to provide new business opportunities to ensure their future success.