Telco to Enterprise and Back

Strictly speaking I did not actually leave the Telecom domain, instead I expanded my scope 3 years ago to cover other verticals and look at how emerging technology from Red Hat such as Red Hat Openshift and Red Hat Openstack can help enterprises with their digital transformation journey leveraging the learnings in the Telco vertical.?

After spending 2 years with the enterprise, I moved back to focus on the TME (Telecom, Media and Entertainment) sector within Red Hat and took on a customer-facing role working with service providers in the GEMs (Growth and Emerging Market) region.Through my journey, what strikes me is the commonality between telco and the rest of the enterprise validating Red Hat’s approach of a single horizontal platform serving the needs of multiple verticals.?

In my new role, I have been talking to multiple service providers across the region and interestingly most of them are looking at becoming more like technology companies (techno) and capitalising on the edge and enterprise use cases.?

Unlike the adoption of Openstack for NFV, Service providers generally lag behind enterprises in the adoption of containers and Kubernetes. Most of them within the regions have done some pilot roll out mainly using vertically integrated stack for 5G core. They are now looking at building a more open platform often looking at multi vendors. Beside the transformation in the network, Kubernetes are increasingly being rolled out as part of the OSS/BSS modernization journey.

The investment that service providers are making is huge hence most of them are looking at how to monetize the new infrastructure, what are the new services that can be rolled out to generate new revenue streams. These often will come from outside the traditional network services from areas such as Enterprise edge solutions. Despite the interest, there is still quite a lot to be worked out including the business models, the ecosystem around it etc.

This is certainly an interesting time to be back. Red Hat being the leader in Open Source Technologies is well positioned to help service providers leverage these? innovations from the Open Source community to help them with their transformation.???