AT&T really wants everyone to know it’s up in the clouds. The network operator polished its hybrid cloud strategy, a feat it’s been very vocal about for years, following a 30-day stretch wherein AT&T inked major deals with IBM and Microsoft, and bolstered support for the AT&T Network Cloud with an assist from Dell Technologies. 

“Today, we’re using cloud technologies to modernize and streamline our business applications, accelerate innovation and new services with customers, and quickly deploy SDN technology and virtual network functions to power our own network,” Chris Rice, SVP of network cloud and infrastructure at AT&T, wrote in a blog post. “All of this isn’t happening in the same cloud, though.”

There’s a private cloud for critical network functions and multiple public clouds for traditional IT applications like billing, customer care, corporate applications, and finance. The company has publicly committed to have 75% of its network operations controlled by software by 2020 and aims to become a “public-cloud first company” by 2024.

“They’ve been really leaning into this problem for a few years now,” said Paul Parker-Johnson, chief analyst at ACG Research. “I think you would have to grade their publicly presented cloud pursuit as an A…They’ve been forthright about their vision and more public than most.”

From a communications and public-commitment perspective, AT&T’s cloud strategy is “visionary,” Parker-Johnson said. However, the company’s execution of that strategy is more difficult to grade or compare to other operators, he explained.

“Most telcos are committed to virtualized network deployments, multi-cloud access, and introducing edge computing applications, Parker-Johnson said. “From the network cloud, there’s no doubt that every [major network operator] is working really hard on getting those transitions made.”

AT&T’s Network Cloud, a private cloud, is designed and tasked with managing network workloads and it’s powered by open source software running on white box hardware, Rice explained. “The foundation of our Network Cloud is an under-cloud platform called Airship [that] uses containerized software in a declarative way to automate what used to be the mostly manual process of building, managing, and upgrading our cloud.”

AT&T’s commercial 5G network was the “first network born in the cloud,” he claims. “The more we can work with others to fine-tune open source platforms like Airship, the faster we can improve our Network Cloud to quickly deliver new functions and capabilities into our 5G network.”

The operator’s strategy stands out among its competitors, according to Chris Antlitz, telecom principal analyst at Technology Business Research. “They are approaching this in a way that I have not seen another telco attempt,” he said. “[AT&T is] one of the furthest ahead, if not the furthest ahead in pursuing this type of transformation…They are walking the talk.”

Rice also explained how AT&T non-network workloads will move to the public clouds managed by IBM and Microsoft. “Moving these applications and workloads to the public cloud allows us to take advantage of the elasticity and cloud economics,” thereby freeing up talent to develop new network services and products for customers, he wrote. 

“We can deliver a faster, more reliable, more responsive, and more agile network, both in the core and at the edge. And, we can do so while simultaneously optimizing IT systems necessary to run it,” Rice wrote. “A hybrid approach lets us put the right workloads on the right clouds.”

It’s a strategy that major network operators are watching closely around the world, according to Antlitz. The foundational aspects of how AT&T is structuring its workloads, parsing them across different cloud ecosystems, and structuring their business going forward, has many operators “following in their footsteps,” he said. 

Parker-Johnson credits AT&T with taking a leading position in outlining its strategy, but he’s withholding further judgment until the outcomes are more clear. “It’s not obvious who’s ahead,” he said. “The proof will come when the really hard applications start getting introduced for low latency things and things that really rely on matching mobility with service intelligence.”