Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) incoming CEO Adam Selipsky this week made his big-screen debut at MWC Barcelona, underlining the telecom industry’s growing importance to the world’s largest cloud provider.

“The telecom industry has traditionally thrived on connectivity services, and that is a very technically complex as well as a capital-intensive exercise,” Selipsky said during his keynote. The industry is built on networks and data centers, and the infrastructure in those data centers is expensive, “almost always very slow to build out, and it can oftentimes prevent agility.”

These infrastructure complexities compounded by financial constraints place a “limit realistically on the number of projects and the amount of experimentation that a telecom operator can undertake,” he said. By bringing the cloud model to telecom, operators can shift more money from capex to opex and deploy new, on-demand services with flexibility, according to Selipsky. 

“AWS has the most experience and the most large customers around the world in all of these areas, and we're really becoming the underpinning of so many telecom operators around the world as they go about these services,” he said. 

Swisscom CEO Urs Schaeppi joined Selipsky virtually to announce a partnership with AWS and said the companies will “work in the IT space together to simplify, to standardize, to lose the complexity in the IT space,” and advance 5G network infrastructure. AWS also announced plans to build a new AWS region in Switzerland in the second half of 2022 with multiple availability zones that Swisscom and others can tap into. 

5G is “the backbone for digitization, for the next wave of digitalization. We will have a technology which is faster and more reliable, but also with lower latency and I think these features in combination will boost a lot of new use cases,” Schaeppi said. 

Data volumes are expected to grow as new services are deployed and used by enterprises, and this requires more flexible infrastructure, he added. “Together with AWS and our mobile partner Ericsson, I’m convinced that we can even improve these networks, these ecosystems for digitalization, more virtualization, more optimization on the mobile networks, and this is a big potential.” 

Swissom is a longtime Ericsson customer, including the deployment of an Ericsson-powered cloud platform in late 2017, network slicing tests in 2018, and Europe’s first commercially deployed 5G network in April 2019. 

AWS’ efforts with Swissom and other operators including Bell Canada, Dish Network, KDDI, SK Telecom, Telefónica, Verizon, and Vodafone are varied and exceedingly broad. 

Outposts, Wavelengths, and Local Zones are the low-lying and more distributed clouds AWS is deploying to bring its compute, storage, and infrastructure services to enterprises that require hybrid architecture at the edge and connectivity delivered via wireless 5G networks. The cloud giant also provides multiple customer service platforms. 

“AWS has built services such as Wavelength and Outposts, which are a couple different ways of deploying at the edge,” Selipsky said. “There's such a need for low latency, and a very high throughput, and massive connectivity; and putting the compute, and the artificial intelligence (AI), and the ability to really run micro infrastructure all the way out at the edge is starting to unlock brand new services.”

Selipsky formally returns to Amazon as AWS CEO next month, following a nearly five-year break as the CEO of Tableau, replacing Andy Jassy, who will vacate the position of AWS CEO when he takes the reins of Amazon proper. 

During his honeymoon phase, however, Selipsky said he and his new colleagues have been talking “with really virtually every telecom operator around the world.” An increasing number of operators are working with AWS, “and particularly we see that around the 5G networks, both ones that have already been deployed where AWS is being put in, as well as in some cases AWS being baked into brand new 5G networks,” he said.

AWS’ expanding pool of partners includes independent software vendors (ISVs), including Amdocs, Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung, he said. “We know how important they are, and we’re committed to work with all the ISVs that telecom operators find to be important. We view ourselves very much as enablers.”

Selipsky joins AWS during an exciting time in the wireless industry. “I think telecommunications is being reinvented in front of us,” he said, pointing to the rise of 5G and the use of AI and machine learning in network infrastructure.

“AWS is being used as an enabling piece of those efforts by so many telecom operators around the world, really the largest and most sophisticated telecom operators,” Selipsky said. 

The global public cloud infrastructure market grew 40.7% in 2020 to $64.3 billion and AWS claimed $26.2 billion, or 40.8% of that revenue, Gartner concluded in a new report. Amazon’s commanding lead in public cloud remains unmoored, but its 28.7% growth rate in 2020 was less than half that of its closest competitor Microsoft at 59.2%, and it lost almost 4% in global market share between 2019 and 2020.

Microsoft ended the year with a 19.7% market share at $12.65 billion in revenue, followed by Alibaba with a 9.5% share on $6.1 billion, Google with a 6.1% share on $3.9 billion, and Huawei with 4.2% of the market on almost $2.7 billion in revenue, according to Gartner.