Think you’ve already lost to Twilio? Think again.

With all the attention on network APIs, and industry-wide agreement that 5G is about the enterprise use case, why haven’t telcos been able to win over developers, unseat software vendors like Twilio, and recapture enterprise messaging revenue? Totogi, where I’m acting CEO, commissioned a study to shed light on the situation. We found that telco leaders believe customers are ready to replace Twilio with something cheaper, but the switch has to be frictionless and the price needs to be right. Read more in my latest blog.

Can telco compete in CPaaS?

In this episode, Yesmean Luk from STL Partners talks about the future of CPaaS and 5G, and what telcos need to do to recapture lost enterprise revenue. Listen NOW to learn more: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TelcoDR website.

COMING NEXT WEEK! Don’t miss my latest talk airing on TelecomTV on September 5. You’ll be shocked to hear that I think Totogi has the answer to operator woes when it comes to CPaaS. Hear all about it, and get an exclusive sneak peek at a new Totogi CPaaS product. Circle the date on your calendar and I’ll see you there.?

My talk is part of TelecomTV’s Cloud Native Telco Summit, running September 12 - 14. I’ll be taking part in the “Cloud-native application development” panel, which will air at 15:00 BST / 10:00 AM ET on September 13. I’ll also be participating in a (LIVE!) Q&A on the same day. Sign up for the Summit here.?

I’ll be joining the Totogi team in Copenhagen on September 19 - 21 for TM Forum’s annual Digital Transformation World (DTW) event, this year called DTW - Ignite. We'll be showing off our new CPaaS offering and our game-changing Charging-as-a-Service in Hall C2, Stand 219. Pick up a fancy coffee drink at our Totogi / Supercharged Cafe (we’re making a donation to Unconnected.org for each cup served!), and then swing by for a demo. And don’t miss our very swanky launch party on Tuesday night, September 19—shoot me a DM on X or LinkedIn for details!

This year, TM Forum’s DTW event (in Copenhagen from September 19-21) is all about igniting industry growth in a climate of digital transition. Sessions will focus on achieving goals using today’s latest tech, and all three hyperscalers will be there making a pitch for your business. Remember back in the day when they didn’t attend these events? I do! Look at how much has changed in just a few years.

Each of the Big Three is bringing a team to staff a stand and to participate across all five conference tracks: Techco DNA, Cloud Native Software, Future Networks, AI at Scale, and Platforms and Partners. If you want to hear from all of them at once (a rarity—all three on one panel!),?check out Enabling the AI powered telco. It’s public cloud, telco, and AI all at once!

Microsoft?published this handy blog post that shares the company’s vision around the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in telco and includes a list of all the sessions where its team will participate. We know Microsoft is going to lead with it winning AI for the foreseeable future. That’s why Rick Lievano, CTO Telecom, Worldwide Media & Communications, will be speaking at?The rise of AI: What it means for today and tomorrow. Silvia Candiani, VP Telecommunications, will be one of the?Opening Headliners on Wednesday morning.?Luca Cassani, Technology Strategist and Account CTO, will be at?Becoming cloud native for growth and flexibility. Be sure to check out the TM Forum Catalyst projects Microsoft is part of:?SHINE: Simple hyperscaler integrated network experience and?Supercharge any activity in any metaverse.

AWS is a DTW Diamond Partner?(AKA the highest level) and it’ll have the biggest presence of all the hyperscalers. Catch Adolfo Hernandez, VP of the Global Telco Business Unit, first thing Tuesday morning in the?Opening Headliners session. Otherwise, AWS is bringing a team of mostly technologists in leadership roles, including: Jon Hammant, EMEA Head of Compute, speaking at?The future ready techco; Ajay Ravindranathan, Lead Solutions Architect, giving an update on the Catalyst project at?Digital carbon footprint optimization; and Ishwdar Parulkar, Chief Technologist, Telecom, speaking at?Enabling the AI powered telco. Be sure to check out the AWS stand and be on the lookout for Totogi—we'll be showing off our AI advancements in the world of charging.

Google Cloud’s new leader Ankur Jain will be in the house, also at?Enabling the AI powered telco. Google Cloud is a Silver Partner, and touts on the TM Forum website that it has “the cleanest cloud in the industry.” Could that be its answer to Microsoft’s lead on AI and AWS’s lead on customer deployments? Google Cloud appears to have a smaller team attending, with members participating in?Bringing the power of AI to your customers (Gabriele Di Piazza) and?The rise of AI: What it means for today and tomorrow (Navneet Sahani), as well as?Laying the foundation for monetizing the metaverse (Jen Hawes-Hewitt). The team is repeating its after-hour mixer that includes an “ice cream bicycle,” which was a big hit last year, so make sure you catch a scoop and cool off from all the hot stuff going on in Copenhagen.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Microsoft has been busy bustin’ a move. First,?Azure Operator Nexus is now generally available. After announcing the public preview at MWC23, the hyperscaler has added a handful of new features to its carrier-grade, next-generation, hybrid cloud platform for telecommunications operators.?Here’s a refresher on what it does, in case you need one. Need a reason to deploy it? How about the 38% lower total cost of ownership cited in this paper from Analysys Mason??Sounds great to me.

When it comes to AI, Redmond continues to lead the pack.?This whitepaper covers how the company’s AI for Operations (AIOps) is helping telcos monitor and modernize networks, delving into a number of use-case examples.

And that’s not the only place Microsoft’s AI skillz are transforming telco.?TIM, the Italian-Brazilian operator, has revamped its customer service with virtual assistant TAIS, supported by Azure. The solution has improved experiences, lowered costs, increased customer satisfaction by about 30%, and improved retention rates. I expect a lot of stories will be coming out over the next year where telcos are coupling AI with customer services for massive improvement AND cost savings. Yet another reason to use the public cloud!

Want some of that AI-powered awesomeness for your telco? Then you better get going, because South Korean telco SK Telecom is setting the pace by investing $100 million to develop a?telecom-specific large language model?(LLM) with AI startup Anthropic, makers of ChatGPT competitor Claude. The LLM will span various languages, be trained to handle telco-specific tasks, and integrate with Anthropic’s Telco AI Platform, which the company hopes will serve as a core foundation for new AI services in the industry. (Google is also a major investor in Anthropic.) I wonder where they will train the model—in a private datacenter, or in the public cloud? It will likely take some serious horsepower to run inference and train the model. Exciting!

In charging news, Vodafone Idea (Vi) and Ericsson?recently announced a huge charging consolidation project in India. The two partnered to replace three online charging solutions with Ericsson Charging, moving over 300-million subscribers to the new system. Sounds like a big win for Ericsson and a smarting loss for Vi charging vendor Optiva, which has?lost its flagship customer. Ouch.

Worried you’re behind on AI??This Breaking Analysis report from Wikibon’s David Vellante provides a current snapshot. Enterprises are moving budget to AI initiatives, but almost everyone is still in evaluation mode, investigating basic use cases like chatbots, code generation, text summarization, and writing/marketing assistance. The report also discusses public cloud vs. on-prem location for training, which I believe is a no-brainer case for using the public cloud and its AI-optimized silicon. It’s a super long read but don’t be lulled into thinking no one’s started; leaders in the space are making good progress, so get going.

Speaking of silicon—you know what Amazon’s plan is to catch up on generative AI? Chips! It’s not a bad idea, as AWS already offers two AI-specific chips (Inferentia and Trainium) that are great alternatives to Nvidia graphical processing units (GPUs), of which?there’s suddenly a worldwide shortage. Plus, it makes sense. Why own and acquire expensive hardware when you can just use the chips as you need them?

In a hyperscaler-to-telco jump,?Amol Phadke is making the leap from Google Cloud to Telenor. Formerly the managing director and general manager for Google Cloud’s Global Communications Service Provider Industry vertical, Phadke will join Telenor as group CTO, starting next month. A move like this sends a strong message: Telenor is serious about the public cloud.

As our industry shifts to 5G standalone core on the cloud, Google, Intel, and Nokia commissioned a survey to check in with CSPs making the move to learn about their experiences and challenges. This Forrester report covers top 5G use cases, business objectives, barriers to 5G core on cloud, and how partnerships smooth the process. My takeaway: it’s not easy, but the huge improvements in flexibility, responsiveness, and network resilience make it worthwhile to move to the public?cloud.

Besides the tech, moving to the cloud will change your company culture. Do you know who can help you with that? Your friendly neighborhood Human Resources department! Work with strategic HR thinkers to assess the impact on culture that the cloud brings and get their help to navigate organizational change. I’ve talked a lot about this in blogs (here,?here, and?here) and podcasts over the years (including?my first?and?seventh?ones). Plus?a recent poll from TelecomTV's DSP Leaders World Forum?shows that 75% of participants agree! I’m glad my message is getting through! Go get 'em!

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