DTWS: AT&T and Amdocs on accelerating the move to cloud

Telcos’ move to cloud is urgent because of unprecedented demand from users now working from home, but there are plenty of other drivers as well. Andre Fuetsch, President of AT&T Labs and CTO of AT&T, and Anthony Goonetilleke, Group President of Strategy and Technology at Amdocs, discussed them at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World Series this week. AT&T has been moving workloads to public and internal clouds for about six years and this includes both IT and some network workloads. Public clouds, Fuetsch said, are growing not only in scale but capability, making the choice to move to public cloud easier. In addition to the economics of better scaling, AT&T is realizing greater agility and is getting better exposure to develop ecosystems of partners. Reminding listeners that the genesis of the cloud 20 years ago was about how to scale software rapidly on very cheap, commodity hardware, Fuetsch said this approach did not jibe with operators’ long-held internal standard of five-nines reliability. Over time, cloud players have gotten better at developing the equivalent of five-nines software running on three-nines hardware. “As it has matured, it has become more resilient, and that’s kind of opened us up to some things that we can try,” he said.

Choosing what to move

Still, while the cloud itself is good at transactional processes such as application access, it is not necessarily the best at moving huge amounts of bits and bytes.

“That's basically the business we’re in,” Fuetsch said. “We see that evolving and changing. It’s not just general compute [anymore.] That’s where we see a bigger opportunity to move…some of our network workloads over there. Many of the IT workloads we have in our internal cloud are very ripe for moving to the public cloud.”

Fuetsch said AT&T is still being very selective about what it moves to the cloud. It is not just about migration. In migrating existing solutions, it makes sense to see if there is an opportunity to improve them or modernize them, he explained. However, not every instance of legacy software can be taken further, and not every service being supported has a lot of shelf-life left. AT&T will eventually sunset those. He added: “The ones with growth opportunity that can take advantage of the elastic and dynamic capabilities of the cloud can be refactored in this migration process in a way that takes advantage of the cloud native ecosystem.”

Careful consideration

Goonetilleke said Amdocs is starting to see the cloud market for telcos accelerate, but as a support system supplier, the company still must meet telco reliability standards.

“Every move to the cloud has to be carefully considered,” he said, and during the pandemic, people have been motivated to consider accelerating their journey or investing in local data centers.

Goonetilleke added that the decision to move to the cloud relies on two key factors. The first is return on investment: Is there a financial benefit to moving workloads? The other is about finding a compelling event for moving, such as having a set of applications that could really benefit from the elasticity or self-healing capabilities of the cloud. “There is going to be a period of hybrid cloud movement where you’re going to keep stuff on premise and move some to the cloud,” he said. “And as the hybrid cloud evolves, you will see people moving to multi-cloud, balancing workloads between AWS [Amazon Web Services] and [Microsoft] Azure or Google. But service providers also bring some things to the table that are needed, like powering the edge.” Fuetsch agreed, saying there are a lot of aspects of telco networks and cloud data centers that are very complimentary.

“In the end it’s all about connecting customers to the resources that they need,” he said. “And obviously the telco companies have that last mile endpoint connection… When you start thinking about what 5G brings – latency sensitivity, virtual reality, augmented reality, autonomous cars and drones, applications that are really going to be dependent on resources that can’t necessarily be 500 or 1000 miles away – you really need to have a strong network.”

Working together with cloud players is the only way of stitching together solutions to bridge those gaps, Fuetsch said, acknowledging the competitive aspects of the relationship but adding, “For the most part they’re fairly complimentary, and that is what’s going to be new and exciting as we go into this new decade.” Both speakers agreed that the pandemic has accelerated people’s adoption of new technologies both from an end-user perspective and within the industry. Not all that behavior will revert to some previous normal. For example, cloud native networks, automation, analytics, continuous development/continuous integration (CI/CD), and self-healing capabilities will allow companies to increase remote maintenance and installation. “So will we ever go back to normal? I always asked myself this question,” Fuetsch said. “And I think the answer is no.” Watch the Digital Transformation World Series now, live and on-demand! Not registered for DTWS yet? There’s still time. Join 12,000 of your peers online through November 12. CSPs receive complimentary passes. Sign up here.