Accelerating the digitization of telecommunications
Despite lingering CSP hesitancy over cloud migration of corporate IT, OSS/BSS, and network applications, the telecommunications industry decision-makers surveyed and interviewed for a recent TM Forum report were able to provide more reasons for deploying workloads in public clouds than against.
What’s more, those surveyed cited a number of specific benefits for deploying these workloads into the cloud that are now even more compelling, if not essential, as telcos retool their organizations for a “new normal” that continues to be defined in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Benefits such as an overall reduction in operating expenses; an accelerated time to market by speeding service design, testing, and deployment; streamlined operational workflows through intelligent processes and automation; and a reduction in the time it takes to perform network maintenance and upgrades.
The bottom line is telecommunications organizations now have no choice but to more aggressively drive their digitization efforts forward. Tech Mahindra, a leading provider of digital transformation, consulting, and business reengineering services and solutions, is partnering with Microsoft to accelerate the digitization of telco to streamline business workflows, improve responsiveness, realize business efficiencies, and accelerate time-to-market of innovative new services through automated processes, agile solutions, and the scale of the cloud.
“Tech Mahindra excels in the design, development, and deployment of an operational-ready public and private cloud platform upon which telecommunications organizations can build their business processes and networks of the future,” says Bob De Haven, General Manager, Media & Communications at Microsoft. Indeed, Tech Mahindra is laser-focused on helping telcos innovate across their entire business, including:
- New operating models to enable seamless remote/virtual collaboration and productivity across all lines of business—most importantly for customer-facing teams such as contact centers and field service.
- An intelligent cloud-based infrastructure with the scale to extend the power of OSS/BSS, reduce operational costs, and speed new service design, testing, and deployment fueled by automated processes and data-driven insights.
- Network technologies to capitalize on new industry-specific service opportunities enabled by 5G such as smart factories, retail operations, digital health, connected vehicles, and gaming.
Microsoft empowers telecommunications companies to achieve more through a trusted and secure platform supported by a global partner ecosystem with industry-leading solutions for collaboration and productivity, streamlined business operations, network optimization, marketplace insights, personalized customer experiences, and service innovation. And as recently announced, carriers, operators, and networking providers can build 5G-optimized services and applications for their partners and customers with Azure Edge Zones, taking advantage of Azure compute, storage, networking, and AI capabilities. For organizations that want an on-premises, private mobile solution, partners and carriers can deploy, manage, and build offers with Azure Private Edge Zones—a private 5G/LTE network combined with Azure Stack Edge on-premises delivering an ultra-low latency, secure, and high bandwidth solution.
Nowhere is the Tech Mahindra and Microsoft partnership more evident than in our combined work with AT&T. In July of last year, AT&T and Microsoft embarked on an extensive, multi-year alliance where the two companies will apply technologies, including cloud, AI, and 5G, to improve how people live and work today and in the future. An update was shared in late November on the first wave of innovation since this alliance was announced.
On a similar timeline, Tech Mahindra expanded its strategic collaboration with AT&T to accelerate their IT network application, shared systems modernization, and movement to the cloud. Under this multi-year agreement, Tech Mahindra will assume management of many the applications which support AT&T’s network and shared systems which will enable AT&T to focus on core objectives including having the most advanced software-defined 5G network, and the migration of the majority of its non-network workloads to the public cloud by 2024—with Microsoft as AT&T’s preferred cloud provider.
“Cloud has always been at the center of Tech Mahindra’s business strategy,” says Manish Vyas, President of Communication, Media & Entertainment Business and CEO of Network Business at Tech Mahindra. “Our focused strategy is to increase velocity to the digitization programs of telco operators while significantly reducing overall TCO in their journey towards 5G. We are in a unique position to leverage Tech Mahindra’s strong IP’s and vast experience of supporting CSP’s—coupled with compelling products and Azure cloud from Microsoft—to automate and transform the business processes and networks of our telco customers within the next few years. We have recently acquired Zen3 and are excited to take Zen3’s offerings in Azure cloud and Azure Cognitive Services to CSP’s to build great solutions and support their cloud digitization efforts.”
Learn more about Intelligent Telecommunications to see how the capabilities of Microsoft and our partners have enabled transformational business outcomes for the likes of Vodafone, Telstra, du, Telia, and Deutsche Telekom.
