VMware and Red Hat are in “fierce competition” for the top 5G telco cloud-native platform, while Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are market followers, according to ABI Research's latest 5G telco cloud-native platforms ranking.

Platform providers in this market include incumbent network equipment vendors (NEVs) like VMware and Red Hat, and cloud computing platform providers that have recently broken into the telecom space thanks to the introduction of LTE and 5G networks, ABI Research analyst Kangrui Ling wrote in response to questions.

Those incumbent NEVs hold a majority of the market by providing operators with cloud platforms to host their network functions, but telecom networks are becoming more “digitized, cloud-native, and open.” That's helping cloud providers grow their popularity among communication service providers, Ling explained.

Cloud native is attractive to telcos because it makes processes more efficient and enables new business opportunities like network slicing, which is the use of virtualization to divide single network connections into multiple distinct virtual connections that provide different amounts of resources to different types of traffic. Cloud native also helps operators get services to market quicker — especially for operators “whose systems are siloed and development cycles long,” he said.

ABI ranked VMware and Red Hat as market leaders, with VMware narrowly ahead. “Their goals in telco are similar, and they are both positioning themselves to be multi-vendor, cloud native, and multicloud with the capability to service the core, edge, and RAN,” Ling explained.

Both leading vendors fulfill what ABI considers the basic needs of a telco-grade platform, but they also boast additional criteria required for ABI's market leaders. VMware stands out among the pack because of its multi-vendor certification program, which Ling described as “diverse and robust,” and Red Hat currently leads in multicloud deployments.

Mainstream vendors don't particularly shine in terms of innovation or implementation, Ling said. In order of ranking, ABI deemed Nokia, ZTE, Canonical, Huawei, Google, Ericsson, and Wind River mainstream. These vendors fit here because they provide more generic platform features, like multi-vendor capabilities, orchestration, “and telco-grade features for innovation, and the enablement of cloud native, modularity, and hybrid cloud/multicloud for implementation.”

And while Ling acknowledged these mainstream platforms have served the market well, they lack aggressive development and demonstration of excelling in at least one of the market leaders' emphasized criteria.

AWS and Microsoft Azure alone occupy ABI's followers category, with Azure in last place. Both cloud giants are newer entrants to the 5G market, and “public cloud is still quite different from the ETSI definition of NFV, which telcos are used to,” Ling said. Public clouds are really just platforms to host network functions, but operators require much more than that.

The entire telco stack is complex and includes network operations, service assurance, and management tools that the cloud giants aren't as strong in as the NEVs, which usually offer these telco necessities as pre-integrated solutions, he explained.

Ling expects Azure and AWS to quickly develop their capabilities and “slowly solidify” their market positions. Azure for Operators “has been seeing very rapid developments and acquisitions in the telco space,” which he says will definitely pay off in the long run.

But as 5G adoption continues to increase, incumbent NEVs will recover any lost ground by “demonstrating how their cloud-native platforms can help operators generate new revenues and services, by leveraging on their telco expertise, assets, and unique relationships with telco operators,” Ling said.