Data Centre Investment News
18 Nov, 2024
Hyperscalers and Telecoms: The right partnership and a recruitment surge
As stated in a recent Forbes article the first Hyperscaler can be traced back to 16 years ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Back then, the idea of hyperscaling was only just developing. However, fast forward to today and every part of life is affected by digital technology and connectivity in some capacity, be it smart technology or telecommunications. Over the last several years, more telecommunications companies are partnering with hyperscalers to grow and diversify their businesses, bringing greater opportunities to their customers.
So, what is hyperscaling?
Broadly speaking, hyperscaling can be defined as a data center operator that offers innovative, scalable cloud computing services. The aforementioned Forbes article states that “Hyperscalers provide network connectivity and the infrastructure to ensure the appropriate SLAs as required by Service Providers.” There are many hyperscalers currently in the market, companies such as Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, Huawei, IBM, SAP, Microsoft and Google to name a few.
Finding the right partnership is key for telecoms businesses and hyperscalers
As with any partnership, there must be benefits for both parties, and a good one between a hyperscaler and a telecoms business will provide cost-effective infrastructure and networking at scale for the latter, whereas the former can sell their tech into a multi-billion dollar industry – a win, win all around. The number of data centres has doubled in the past five years and their capacity has doubled in less than four years, according to this Forbes article, therefore showing the growth potential.
“Hyperscalers have become a powerful force in redefining how networks are architected, owned and operated, which is why communication service providers (CSPs), including cable and satellite broadcasting operators, content and application service providers, are partnering with them.”
Hyperscaling within telecoms: The current partnerships
Currently, there are many partnerships between hyperscalers and telcoms.
In Europe, Vodafone is working with Microsoft on a five-year collaboration to help SMEs to deliver a number of cloud-based services that will use 5G, edge computing and IoT capabilities, to enable growth for hybrid working.
T-Systems, a division of Deutsche Telekom, are using AWS cloud to authorise and manage access to data on behalf of its customers. They are creating store encryption keys enabling organisations in the EU to “benefit from the security, speed, innovation and breadth of services AWS offers, combined with the confidence that best practices for data protection in the cloud are adequately implemented,”
JMA Wireless, the disaggregated mobile infrastructure specialists, are going to deploy its cloud-native 5G XRAN solution on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to provide “enterprises, carriers, universities, and government agencies to simplify the process of building, managing, and operating private 5G networks.”
As reported back in 2021, DISH partnered with AWS to assist with its 5G network utilising an Open RAN approach. Dish’s aim is to have 5G covering 70% of the USA in 2023.
The list goes on and the above are simply four partnerships of the many that are happening right now, another excellent partnership to read more about is IBM Cloud for Telecommunications with a whopping 35 different businesses. All these partnerships are ensuring that recruitment within telecommunications will be very busy and very exciting for the next several years.
How Hyperscaling is boosting telecoms recruitment
Across each of our offices, our teams are seeing more jobs arising from hyperscaler and telecoms partnerships. Whether it’s a job for a Hyperconverged Infrastructure Engineer or Cloud Integration Engineer, our recruitment consultants are regularly asked by candidates about the different jobs in edge networking and jobs in the cloud they are working on. A simple search on an online job board shows that there are over 500 jobs for “Cloud Engineer”. We are actively working on many roles for hyperscaler which can be found on our website. As the information above shows and as you’ll read below about network edge, this section of telecommunications is going to be huge over the coming years, offering many jobs to telecom professionals who want to be at the cutting edge (pardon the pun) of the industry.
Network Edge is where it’s at
The value of the edge market is set to exceed $500bn by 2030 according to research firm STL’s practice lead, Tim Otto, and in a survey by TelecomTV, 41% of respondents said that Network Edge is the domain in which hyperscalers is most mature, followed by Private LTE/5G networks in second, and on-prem edge in third. However, it’s not all going according to plan as a previous forecast from STL predicted that telcos would have more than 4,000 network edge sites by 2025, but this has now been revised to around 950, reflecting a “quite significant slowdown”, said Otto in this article on TelecomTV.
How will hyperscalers help telecoms companies evolve over the next decade?
We look forward to seeing how things develop, but this is for sure, hyperscalers are going to help telecoms companies deliver more and will help them go beyond their current capabilities.
