Tales from the Real World - Leveraging Azure as a Telco provider
In this Tales from the Real World episode, Chris is joined by Ivo — a cloud evangelist who has led digital transformation at one of Belgium’s largest telco providers — for a fascinating look at how an industry most people never think about as a cloud consumer is rapidly becoming one of cloud’s most interesting use cases.
What’s covered
- Telco fundamentals — how traditional telephony works, and why the shift from voice to data changes everything for telco business models
- Cloud adoption drivers — the economics of scale, competitive pressure from streaming platforms, and the need to move from subscription revenue to value-added services
- 5G and IoT — how connectivity evolves from calling and messaging into smart devices, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and hospitals
- Azure Arc and edge computing — managing deployments from cloud to edge consistently, and why this matters for telcos owning physical network infrastructure
- AI and machine learning — how telcos can leverage the data flowing through their networks to create new capabilities and services
- Security and compliance — the trust challenges unique to the telco industry (data traversing their lines, regulatory requirements), and how cloud can help address them
- Transformation challenges — the cultural and organisational struggle of modernising while keeping existing revenue streams alive; the mindset shift required at all levels
- Business model evolution — connectivity → security → applications → manageability → services: the layered value stack Ivo recommends for telcos building on Azure
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