Boldly goes against the telco herd that puts complete faith in public cloud
Telefonica España has appointed Oracle to hasten its in-house cloud adoption and the development of new comms services for consumers and businesses. The contract is described by Telecom Drive as a multi-year collaboration.
The decision to go ‘on premise’ with its cloud computing could be interpreted as a bold move to keep strategic control of its IT assets, since many mobile operators are delegating control to public cloud operators. In March consultancy TelcoDR and hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure used Mobile World Congress to launch a major drive to convince mobile operators to follow enterprises and put their intellectual capital into the public cloud.
Telefonica will migrate the bulk of its Oracle Database systems to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and build a dedicated cloud platform ‘on-premise’ in order to provide new services. It will also run Telefonica’s vital functions, such as the operational and commercial systems sustained by its BSS and OSS platforms and applications, business intelligence systems, customer relationship management, billing and revenue management.
The collaboration is part of a multi-year infrastructure consolidation by Telefonica to underpin its communications network. The desired outcome is a shared, open-standard system to support an expanding digital services portfolio that will include new services using the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G and others co-hosted with independent software vendors and network partners.
Keep customers close and cloud closer
Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer is an on-premise option of Oracle Exadata Cloud Service that is delivered as a managed cloud service in Telefonica’s own data centres. This lets Telefonica consolidate mission-critical systems in one system while complying with data residency regulations and creating instant response times to application users. It also slashes running costs.
Oracle says it can build a secure and constantly available system on the foundation of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It should integrate Telefonica’s data across its operations in order to streamline the creation of new services while supporting the use of services such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
“We need to consolidate and simplify our technology infrastructure and this is where Oracle comes in,” said Fidel Jesús Fernández, Telefonica España’s director of technologies and IT transformation, “Oracle Cloud at Customer provides us with the flexibility we need.”
Albert Triola, Oracle Spain’s country leader, said all telcos are having to reimagine their business models Telefonica is one of the companies at the forefront of this change.