Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Learn how Telefonica’s
vision for delivering flexible cloud services capabilities to Latin American
and European markets has proven so successful. Here to explain how they developed
the right recipe for rapid delivery of agile Infrastructure-as-a-Services (IaaS) deployments is Joe Baguley, Vice President and CTO of VMware EMEA, and Antonio Oriol
Barat, Head of
Cloud IT Infrastructure Services at Telefonica. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What challenges are mobile and telecom
operators now facing as they transition to becoming managed service providers?
Oriol Barat: The main challenge we face at this
moment is to help customers navigate in a multi-cloud environment. We now have local
platforms, some legacy, some virtualized platforms, hyperscale public cloud
providers, and data communications networks. We want to help our customers
manage these in a secure way.
Gardner: How
have your cloud services evolved? How have
partnerships allowed you to enter new markets to quickly provide services?
 |
| Oriol Barat |
Gardner:
Joe, it’s as if you designed the VMware stack with customers such as Telefonica
in mind.
Baguley: You could
say that, yes. The vision has always been for us at VMware to develop what was originally
called the software-defined data center (SDDC). Now, with multi-cloud, for me,
it’s an operating system (OS) for clouds.
 |
| Baguley |
So, yes, entirely, it was built as
part of this vision that everyone runs this OS to build his or her clouds.
Gardner: To have
a core, common infrastructure -- yet have the ability to adapt on top of that
for localized markets -- is the best of all worlds.
Baguley: That’s entirely it. Like someone said, “If all of the
clouds are running the same OS, what’s the differentiation?” Well, the
differentiation is, you want to go with the biggest player in Latin America. You
want to go with the player that has the best direct connections: The guys that
can give you service levels maybe that the cloud providers can’t give. They can
give you over-the-top services that other cloud providers don’t provide. They
can give you an integrated solution for your business that includes the cloud --
and other enterprise services.
It’s about providing the tools for cloud providers to build
differentiated powerful clouds for their customers.
Gardner: Antonio, please, for those of our
listeners and readers that aren’t that familiar with Telefonica,
tell us about the breadth and depth of your company.
Oriol Barat: Telefonica is one of
the top 10 global telco providers in the world. We are in 21 countries. We have
fixed and mobile data services, and now we are in the process of digital
transformation, where we have our focus in four areas: cloud, security, Internet of Things (IoT), and big data.
We used to think that our core
business was in communications. Now we see what we call a new core of our
business at the intersection of data communications, cloud, and security. We
think this is really the foundation, the platform, of all the services that
come on top.
Gardner: And, of
course, we would all like to start with brand-new infrastructure when we enter
markets. But as you know, we have to deal with what is already in place, too. When
it came time for you to come up with the right combination of vendors, the
right combination of technologies, to produce your new managed services capabilities,
why did you choose HPE and VMware to create this full solution?
Sharing requires trust
Oriol Barat: VMware
was our natural choice with its virtualization technologies to start providing
shared IT platforms -- even before cloud, as a word, was invented. We launched “virtual hosting” in 2007. That was 10 years ago, and since then we
have been evolving from this virtual hosting that had no portal but was a
shared platform for customers, to the cloud services that we have today.
The hardware part is important; we have
to have reliable and powerful technology. For us, it’s very important to
provide trust to the customers. Trust, because what they are running in their
data centers is similar to what we have in our data centers. Having VMware and
HPE as partners provides this trust to the customers so that they will move the
applications, and they know it will work fine.
Gardner: HPE is
very fond of its Synergy platform,
with composable infrastructure. How did that help you and VMware pull together
the full solution for Telefonica, Joe?
Baguley: We have
been on this journey together, as Antonio mentioned, since 2007 -- since before
cloud was a thing. We don’t have a test environment that’s as big as Telefonica’s production environment -- and
neither does HPE. What we have been doing is working together -- and like any
of these journeys, there have been missteps along the way. We stumbled
occasionally, but it’s been good to work together as a partnership.
As we have grown, we have also both understood how the
requirements of the market are changing and evolving. Ten years ago providing a
combined cloud platform on a composable infrastructure was unheard of -- and
people wouldn’t believe you could do it. But that’s what we have evolved
together, with the work that we have done with companies such as Telefonica.
The need for something like HPE Synergy
and the Gen10 stack -- where there are these very
configurable stacks that you can put together -- has literally grown out of the
work that we have done together, along with what we have done in our management
stack, with the networking, compute, and storage.
Gardner: The combination
of composable infrastructure and SDDC makes for a pretty strong tag team.
Baguley: Yes, definitely. It gives you that flexibility and
the agility that a cloud provider needs to then meet the agility requirements
of their customers, definitely.
Gardner: When it
comes to bringing more end users into the clouds for your managed services
providers, one of the important things is for end users to move into that cloud
with as much ease as possible. Because VMware is a de facto standard in many
markets with its vSphere Hypervisor, how does
that help you, being a VMware stack, create that ease of joining these clouds?
Seamless migrations
Oriol Barat:
Having the same technology in the customer data center and in our cloud makes
things a lot easier. In the first place, in terms of confidence, the customer can
be confident that it’s going to work well when it is in place. The other thing
is that VMware is providing us with the tools that make these migrations
easier.
Baguley: At VMworld 2017, we announced VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX), which is our hybrid cloud connector.
It allows customers to locally install software that connects at a Layer 2 [network]
level, as well as right back to vSphere 5.0 in clouds. Those clouds now are IBM
and VMware cloud native, but we are extending it to other service providers
like Telefonica in 2018.
The important thing here is by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud.
So a customer can truly feel that their connecting and migrations will be seamless. Things like vSphere vMotion across that gap are going to be possible, too. I think the important thing here is by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud, because some of the fear is about getting locked in: “I am going to make decisions that I will regret in two years by converting my virtual machines (VMs) to run on another platform.” Right here, there isn’t that fear, there is just more choice, and Telefonica is very much part of that story of choice.
Gardner: It
sounds like you have made things attractive for managed service providers in many
markets. For example, they gain ease of migration from enterprises into the
provider’s cloud. In the case of Telefonica, users gain support, services
and integration, knowing that the venerable vendors like VMware and HPE are behind
the underlying services.
Do you have any examples where you
have been able to bring this total solution to a typical managed service
provider account? How has it worked out for them?
Everyone’s doing it
Oriol Barat: We have
use cases in all the vertical industries. Because cloud is a horizontal
technology, it’s the foundation of everything. I would say that all companies
of all verticals are in this process of transformation.
We have a
lot of customers in retail that are moving their platforms to cloud. We have had,
for example, US companies coming to Europe and deploying their SAP systems on top of our platforms.
For
example in Spain, we have a very strong tourism industry with a lot of hotel
chains that are also using our cloud services for their reservation systems and
for more of their IT.
We have
use cases in healthcare, of companies moving their medical systems to our clouds.
We have
use cases of software vendors that are growing software-as-a-service
(SaaS) businesses and they need a flexible platform that can grow as their
businesses grow.
A lot of
people are using these platforms as disaster recovery (DR) for the platforms
that they have on-premises.
I would
say that all verticals are into this transformation.
Gardner: It’s interesting,
you mentioned being able to gain global reach from a specific home economy by
putting data centers in place with a managed service provider model.
It’s also important
for data sovereignty and compliance and General
Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other issues for that to
happen. It sounds like a very good market opportunity.
And that
brings us to the last part of our discussion. What happens next? When we have proven
technology in place, and we have cloud adoption, where would you like to be in
12 months?
Gaining the edge
Baguley: There has been a lot of
talk at recent events, like HPE Discover, about intelligent edge developments. We are doing a lot at the edge, too. When you look at telcos,
the edge is going to become something quite interesting.
What we
are talking about is taking that same blend of storage, networking and compute,
and running it on as small a device as possible. So think micro data centers, nano data centers. How far out can we push this cloud? How much
can we distribute this cloud? How close to the point of need can we get our
customers to execute their workloads, to do their artificial intelligence (AI),
to do their data gathering, et cetera?
And
working in partnership with someone who has a fantastic cloud and a fantastic
network just means that a customer who is looking to build some kind of
distributed edge-to-cloud core capability is something that Telefonica and VMware could probably do over the next
12 months. That could be really, really strong.
Gardner: Antonio?
Oriol Barat: In this
transformation that all the enterprises are in, maybe we are in the 20 percent
of execution range. So we still have 80 percent of the transformation ahead of
us. The potential is huge.
Looking
ahead with our services, for example, it’s very important that the network is
also in transformation, leveraging the software-defined networking (SDN) technologies.
These networks are going to be more flexible. We think that we are in a good
position to put together cloud services with such network services -- with
security, also with more software-defined capabilities, and create really
flexible solutions for our customers.
Baguley: One example that I would like
to add is if you can imagine that maybe Real Madrid C.F. are
playing at home next weekend ... It’s theoretical that Telefonica could have the bottom of those network base stations
-- because of VMware
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), it’s no longer specific base
station hardware, it’s x86 HPE servers in there. They can maybe turn around to
a betting company and say, “Would you like to move your front-end web servers
with running containers to run in the base station, in Real Madrid’s stadium,
for the four hours in the afternoon of that match?” And suddenly they are the
best performing website.
That’s the
kind of out-there transformative ideas that are now possible due to new
application infrastructures, new cloud infrastructures, edge, and technologies
like the network all coming together. So those are the kind of things you are going
to see from this kind of solutions approach going forward.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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