Q&A with ZephyrTel’s CEO Michael Speranza: How to move from cloud-curious to fully cloud native

What are your priorities as CEO of ZephyrTel?

I took the helm at ZephyrTel four months ago and my main priority now is to accelerate our strategy to deliver solutions for the telco space which are based on the public cloud and stand to truly transform our customers’ businesses. We have acquired nine companies and serve 300 customers globally and our goal is to continue to expand the portfolio organically and inorganically to offer the largest breadth of solutions based on the public cloud. Today, we have a number of products in the core network areas offering services such as Wi-Fi offloading, network caching, network optimization and SMS; we have some products in billing and charging and finally we have another set of products which are aimed at gathering customer sentiment and contact center functions. We are investing to move all of them to leveraging the public cloud and I see a lot of potential for marrying these products with our charging and billing solutions by utilizing the data that we get from our customers. I’m looking at pulling this together into one holistic offering.

What are your thoughts about migrating your products to the cloud? And will you simply be making them cloud-ready or are you going full cloud native?

Concepts like “cloud-ready”, “hybrid”, “private-cloud” or “lift and shift” are really just euphemisms for legacy. They are not enabling you to change the cost structure for managing your IT workloads or access the true capabilities that are available in the public cloud to improve business agility. We are going fully cloud native and our approach will usher in a new cost paradigm for the industry, as well as a new level of business insight for our customers. We believe that our approach will revolutionize the cost equation for telecoms operators and make them more competitive; it is a transition that communication service providers cannot ignore.

And are you going multi-cloud or will you partner with one specific vendor?

In order to go fully cloud native and really benefit from the approach, you have to be engaged at the lowest level of the architecture of the provider’s platform and build your products to take advantage of it; to truly realize the benefits, you have to pick. We have selected Amazon Web Services because we feel they have the best platform, the most rapid pace of advancement and will enable us to deliver the maximum benefit to our customers. They may not be the most advanced in the space from a marketing perspective, but if you look at AWS from a capability, technology and investment level, then it is clear that they have by far the best platform. Furthermore, we have thousands of engineers at our disposal that understand in detail how to build software using their underlying capabilities.

How easy is it to persuade those operators who are still unconvinced about the benefits of the cloud to go cloud native?

When we dive into the reasons why telecoms operators have not shifted to the public cloud, often we find the arguments are based on momentum of the status quo rather than substance. The public cloud platforms are developing at a speed that cannot be matched by on-premise software. Conversations about a new technology approach and cost savings can be super challenging, especially if you are working with the technical teams. We’ll often find that an IT department’s immediate approach is to compare a public cloud solution to the current on-premise solution, and they will list a dozen features as reasons why they can’t use a specific service or capability in the public cloud. These reasons may appear valid, but it takes a business conversation to highlight the 50-80% cost savings that migrating to the public cloud is going to achieve. These cost savings offset the legacy business benefits of a specific functionality or capability.
Is the decision-making process for migrating to the cloud the same for small operators as for the larger operator groups?

When we have conversations, they are often stratified by scale and complexity and by decision making complexity. When we speak to an operator in a developing country, they often have responsibility across many categories of products and are quite eager to move a large number of workloads to the public cloud. They are not burdened by a bureaucracy of decision making or departmental silos; they are looking for every competitive advantage possible as they grow and scale their business. When we discuss our approach with larger, more complex organisations where the group company may cascade down decisions, the focus tends to be on a category of products which are most meaningful to their business in strategic value and/or cost profile and moreso attract the attention of the board room. These are often products which have a more direct connection to developing insights about their subscribers: billing, charging, revenue management and churn.