Microsoft and AT&T announced a partnership late 2019 to combine AT&T’s 5G network and Microsoft’s Azure cloud to deliver converged mobile and cloud services at the network edge. Bob De Haven, General Manager – Communications and Media, Microsoft and Igal Elbaz, Senior Vice President Wireless and Access Technology, AT&T Services, shared their perspectives of the edge market for communications service providers (CSPs) and how AT&T and Microsoft are working together to seize it in a session at Digital Transformation World (DTWS) on November 4 called 'The cloud native advantage'.Aiming for the enterprise
De Haven explained that Microsoft is helping AT&T to move its infrastructure to the cloud to “enable them to respond to customer needs at a much more accelerated rate.” He said their collective goal is to put “solutions at the edge of the network and go after enterprises [because] we think that the 5G roll-out will initially be funded by enterprise opportunities.”
Igal explained that because 5G is advancing so rapidly, CSPs face several common challenges. “Demand is growing exponentially,” he said, adding that video already accounts for 50% of AT&T’s traffic and will reach 75% in a few years. Also, IoT introduces many new devices, all of which “behave differently,” he continued. Immersive technologies, such as mobile gaming, virtual reality (VR) and driverless vehicles create new categories of requirements. “We have solid networks today, but that starts to create new challenges for how you grow the network,” Igal explained.
Becoming cloud-first
Igal said AT&T’s partnership with Microsoft stems from its desire to be a “cloud-first” company. Adoption of cloud technologies in its IT environment started with “non-network workloads” that could “take advantage of Azure’s scale.”
The next step is to combine cloud and network. “Go 10 years back. LTE [began] and public cloud started to pick up. This is the foundation of the mobile economy,” he said, pointing out that most of the experiences we now take for granted depend on both, which operate “completely parallel to each other.”
The power of the 5G edge, however, is “the ability to converge compute, storage and networking much closer to our customers…When the network is one place and the application is riding on compute in another place, you can’t satisfy those ultra-low latency requirements,” Igal stated.
Implications for enterprise
A major advantage of integrating compute, storage and network at the edge, according to Igal, is enabling more complex industrial use cases. AT&T and Azure are able to provide everything on-premise for these enterprise customers. “Sessions don’t leave the premise,” he added, and while private wireless enterprise networks are not new, the enabling technologies now greatly ease both the effort and the economics.
AT&T believes the market will adapt to the new types of business models and use cases enabled by 5G. “No one thought anyone would watch a sporting event on a mobile phone, yet here we are,” Igal noted. Having edge capabilities embedded in the enterprise customer experience is important, he added, as it raises questions as to how best to “expose network capabilities and APIs in a different way than in the past that can really inform the experience.”
TM Forum’s
Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open API manifesto both provide answers to many of these questions to help CSPs converge cloud and networking technologies as they adopt open platforms and APIs.
