As Carriers Move to Cloud, How They Operate Must Also Change: Speakers

was organized, said Abby Knowles, vice president-information technology. “We needed to really specialize more and functionalize,” Knowles said: “We were able to actually scale faster. As we created infrastructure experts, as we created application experts, as we created folks who focus on the performance, we were able to learn it faster, we were able to turn it up faster.” Staffers had to maintain a focus on customers even as their focus narrowed, she said. The biggest challenge is getting employees with the right skills for the cloud, said Rahul Atri, Rakuten Mobile managing director. “We are in a transition stage with telecom where we need the expertise” of small and medium-sized enterprises, he said. Potential employees don’t have the intersecting skills for legacy telecom and the cloud, he said. Some employees were quick to learn the cloud and others took more time and resisted the change, Atri said. “The whole idea was to get your hands dirty,” he said. Standing up the technology platform is the easiest change, said Chris Hill, vice president global telco at technology provider VMware. “You really do have to focus on the people piece and the process piece,” he said. The focus has to be on being competitive “in a 5G-edge cloud world,” he said. “We are at the point now” where the cloud is “no longer a technology conversation,” said Kevin Shatzkamer, Google Cloud digital transformation officer-telecom. “We understand the technology at this point, the technology is well proven,” he said. “When you really start to see technology adoption ramp … it happens when you spend less time proving the technology is viable and more time focused on how do I organize myself to operate this technology at scale.” Networks are already complicated, “but we generally don’t think about the spectrum, we generally don’t think about balancing the 4G and 5G traffic,” said Sinan Akkaya, AT&T director-radio access network engineering. “We have a mix of customers” and 70%-80% don’t have phones compatible with a 5G stand-alone network, he said: “You need to think about balancing the spectrum usage. You need to think about optimizing your dynamic-sharing features in such a way that you should not hurt the 4G customer … while you’re giving your 5G customer a superior expected experience and you should keep both of them happy.” Service agility, the ability to monetize new services and network efficiency are driving carriers to make changes to their networks, said Chandresh Ruparel, Intel senior director-5G/wireless core infrastructure segment.