The double bubble is NOT double trouble

When transitioning to the public cloud, there are two approaches organizations commonly use for moving workloads: lift and shift, then refactor in the public cloud; or refactor first, then move the workload to the public cloud. In?my latest blog , I argue one way is better than the other, and even if it means spending more money initially, it’s totally worth it.

Drumming up ways to increase ARPU with McKinsey

McKinsey & Company Partner Ferry Grijpink shares what research reveals about monetizing 5G investments and how data analytics can help personalize the subscriber experience and boost ARPU. Listen on?Apple Podcasts ,?Spotify , or the?TelcoDR website .

My dudes! I’m going to India! On September 16 I’ll be speaking at?Voice&Data’s 5G Conference ?in Delhi, where I’ll explain (probably very emphatically) that the perfect place for telcos to use the public cloud is in India. With regions from the hyperscalers popping up everywhere and the massive cost savings, using a charging system like Totogi is PERFECT for CSPs on the subcontinent.

Deutsche Telekom (DT) is the latest Tier 1 telco to move its core to the public cloud, and it has?picked Google Cloud . I wrote a?Twitter thread * about it because?this is big news not only for DT, but also for Google Cloud, which is trying to move from being good just for analytics to being good for network workloads, too.

About 15 people sent me Ray LeMaistre’s?TelecomTV article on AT&T ?about CTO Andre Fuetsch retiring and how maybe AT&T is not as enamored with the public cloud as, say, I am. But soon after that article was posted, AT&T announced replacement CTO Jeremy Legg, and he did?a great interview with Protocol ?in which he gives a peek into what he has in store for the US giant. Again, I wrote a?Twitter thread * about the interview, and my conclusion is that he really gets the public cloud. I think he’s going to move mountains, change AT&T, and do it with Microsoft Azure. So, before you get your hopes up that the move to the public cloud was a bad one for AT&T, let’s see what Jeremy can do!

As faithful reads are aware, we’ve been tracking Vodafone’s big data project with Google Cloud. It announced another advancement earlier this month – this time with?AI Booster ?– as the next step in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to improve customer experiences, network performance, and research. And again, I wrote a?Twitter thread * about the evolution of that partnership. It includes all the milestones they’ve announced since 2019.

After all of that Twitter reading, it’s time for a picture. Remember, it’s easy to say an application is cloud-native (a topic?I recently blogged about ), but telco execs need to understand it’s more of a spectrum than a binary state. Check out this super awesome?graph in this LinkedIn post ?promoting Gartner’s “Decision Point for Choosing a Cloud Migration Strategy.” The?paper is paywalled ?unless you're a Gartner customer, but the graph is free! Use it the next time a vendor says its application is cloud native – make it choose a point on the graph to show you how it’s made its system cloud-native.

Back to talking about Vodafone ... a HUGE benefit of moving to the public cloud for telco is being able to?use?subscriber data to create hyper-personalized plans and other services . Behavioral data and analytics can identify lots of different audiences within your base, and help increase satisfaction and retention rates in our “highly saturated, poorly differentiated” industry. That’s what Vodafone (and?Totogi , where I’m acting CEO) is doing. A great way to learn about this way of thinking is to catch the latest?Telco in 20 podcast with McKinsey & Company’s Ferry Grijpink ?– we talk about this exact idea.

Shit, this is turning into a Vodafone newsletter. Looks like it is making progress on its goal of hiring 7,000 software engineers by 2025,?having already hired 1,400 ?since it made the announcement just eight months ago. Competition for top talent might get even more fierce in the coming months, as?BT Digital plans to hire 2,800 of its own software professionals ?by April 2024. If you’ve got telco and cloud skills, expect pay raises as telcos start to dish out more money for your expertise.

Don’t worry if you don’t have cloud skills… yet. Start studying now with Forrest Brazeal’s?updated Cloud Resume Challenge Guidebook ?that aims to help technologists level-up their careers. It now comes in three flavors: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.?Get a book ?and?join a “sprint” cohort ?to start learning new cloud skills. Do it for the money! You’ll get paid more once you know cloud, and maybe it’ll help you out with all this inflation talk going on.

Last but not least, it was a little over a year ago when?the TelcoDR team took over Ericsson’s space at MWC 2021 and launched CLOUD CITY . (Remember that? It was EPIC!) Before that event, no one was talking about the public cloud in telco. Look how far we’ve come in just one year! But the key to that marketing coup was the realization that the cloud is changing marketing events as much as it’s changing telco. Now booths and stands have to be 1,000% better than they were pre-pandemic, otherwise people will just stay at home and attend virtually. Make the in-person experience GREAT, and people will come.?Bon Jovi , anyone?

?*I am a bit like?Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls, ?trying to make “fetch” happen (or in this case, Twitter). It’s not all bots, as I’m sure Twitter will contend in Twitter vs. Musk. To prove it, why don’t you follow me on that platform,?@TelcoDR ?

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