The Telco Cloud world shook today as AT&T and Microsoft made what could be one of the largest announcements of the decade, at least in directional importance. Appledore believe that this deal has far reaching importance because it clarifies which assets, skills, intellectual property and expertise are most fundamental to telecom. On the flip side, it clarifies which are less telecom specific, and best served by public cloud infrastructure giants. If it’s not telecom specific, those public cloud giants have engineering and deployment scale that cannot be matched by any single industry. About a year ago we reported on Microsoft’s plans for “Azure for Operators”, in which they promised to bring the expertise necessary to operate high availability, highly scalable network workloads to the efficient shared resource model that is Azure. Not long after, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Affirmed Networks and MetaSwitch, claiming the intention of not only making these assets available “as a Service” but deeply learning from the specialized knowledge embedded in those acquisitions. We applauded both actions. Today AT&T and Microsoft announced a deal in which AT&T will transfer significant assets into Azure for Operators, and Microsoft will operate the AT&T 5G cloud assets on the […]