AT&T made some big cloud waves this week when it announced two significant public cloud deals with some of that market’s largest players. Those deals themselves were significant for all the parties involved, but more significantly included a proclamation by AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan that the carrier would become a “public-cloud first company” by 2024.

The cloud news involved two announcements. The first is that AT&T’s Business unit will be IBM’s primary provider of SDN and for IBM to help AT&T improve and migrate its business applications to IBM Cloud. AT&T will also use Red Hat’s open source platform to manage workloads and collaborate with IBM on multi-cloud capabilities around 5G, edge computing, and IoT.

The second is a new deal with Microsoft to provide AT&T with cloud services in support of non-network applications and the carrier’s deepening push into the cloud. The multi-year agreement is reportedly valued at more than $2 billion.

The significant part for me at least is that AT&T has historically been very vocal in providing updates as it progresses toward a more software- and cloud-centric world. Just take a look back at how its executives offered up a constant flow of updates as it has continued to push its plans to have 75% of its network operations controlled by software by 2020.

Taking out my own selfish inclinations, the public-cloud moves are also significant as they continue what has been an ongoing cloud rethink by AT&T. This is a company that has sold off its cloud infrastructure while at the same time increased its embrace of cloud services that run on that infrastructure. This is standard operating procedure for many organizations but is something completely different for the traditional telecom space.

I know many of you are very familiar with how traditional telecom operators work, but for those that aren’t I can phrase it in one word: slow. Wait, maybe two words: very slow. No, one word is fine: glacial.

These are organizations that are still proudly rocking IBM 7000 series mainframes and have engineers on staff that will only give those things up once there is no longer warm blood flowing toward their digits.

And that pace is to be expected. These are companies that are highly regulated and are providing services that people rely on in life-or-death situations. Sure, a five-nines mentality might seem like a great idea in the cloud world, but for these operators five-nines is a minimum target. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.

Now, for AT&T, it has already taken a big step into the cloud with its SDN plans. This move has been highlighted by the fact that its oft-touted 5G network is mostly running in a virtualized environment on top of what was initially called its AT&T Integrated Cloud (AIC) platform. That has since taken on a more cloud-native approach with the infusion of greater Kubernetes control of that environment.

The idea of this actually happening would have been crazy 10 years ago, but here we are.

For AT&T to now start the process of adopting the public cloud for what are admittedly “non-network applications” is a big move. It shows that even the most stodgy industry verticals are on board with moving to the public cloud. This will provide a significant new revenue stream for those cloud providers but at the same time allow for greater scale that could drive down pricing models.

I am sure other telecom operators have either made similar moves under the radar or are looking to do the same thing. But to at least have a carrier as vocal as AT&T begin this process is a significant stake in the ground that should provide telling signposts on how these sort of moves will progress.