Euro telcos eye up cloud market

Just as major hyper scale cloud providers – such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft – are having a significant impact on fostering European cloud development, the region’s telcos are playing an increasingly important role in their business development, according to a report from analyst GlobalData.

The Cloud computing in Europe telco cloud offers, best practices and market opportunity report reveals that European companies are increasingly demanding hybrid cloud systemss due to the number of benefits such as cost, performance, security, compliance and workload portability.

This has also meant international cloud players are facing a number of key requirements in Europe relating to data security, localisation and regulatory compliance.

As a result, said the analyst, this has opened up opportunities for local and pan-regional telcos to partner with the global hyper-scalers and further position themselves as local trusted cloud service providers to European enterprises.

The telcos are very keen to snap of these opportunities, said GlobalData. It added that within the enterprise segment, telcos are keenly aware of the slowing growth of conventional voice and data services, and that they need to diversify their sources of revenue. Therefore, telcos are looking at datacentre and cloud services as potential growth areas, increasingly positioning themselves as hybrid multi-cloud service providers.

“European telcos will play an important aggregator role, becoming a one-stop-shop for cloud services, leveraging their direct customer relationships and cloud players’ network infrastructure,” said GlobalData senior director Joel Cooper.

“By providing hybrid multi-cloud solutions, European telcos have the potential to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation while taking the burden of managing multi-cloud suppliers away and leveraging their proximity and expertise.

“Telcos are therefore able to better position in the market versus the pure-cloud players with end-to-end solutions across their full telecom footprint.”

Looking to 2020, GlobalData forecast that the industry may see an increasing amount of collaboration to improve cloud enablement and services. It noted that in 2018, BT, Vodafone, Orange and TIM announced their participation in the Blade Runner Catalyst with other telcos and suppliers to produce new enterprise cloud services such as multi-access edge computing.