On the heels of Microsoft’s Azure for Telecom, last week’s announcement of “IBM Cloud for Telecom” confirms a major trend: the inexorable shift towards public cloud infrastructure hosting critical telecom functions. Last week’s IBM Cloud for Telecom announcement is the confluence of multiple threads of IBM’s corporate, product and market strategies. It represents further evidence of telecom’s fundamental transition to new software-centric, cloud-based operating model. And in particular, the increasing readiness of public cloud platforms for hosting telecom’s most particular applications. The last bastion against telecom’s move to software has been the concern that software applications and cloud platforms can’t deliver five-nines reliability that telco believes are its special responsibility (and burden). This concern has been steadily eroded in the last couple of years. As Appledore covered in early 2020, VMWare has had an early edge in giving conservative telco buyers confidence in meeting the demanding SLAs for telco functions. Now, under IBM Cloud for Telecom, IBM has pulled together an impressive ecosystem, aiming to convince those same buyers that an IBM cloud is the place to entrust the beating heart of telecom operations. The viability of public cloud for telecom is a trend we’ve been predicting since late 2016. […]