The Public Cloud, Perfect for India: Danielle Royston, Founder CEO, TelcoDR, Acting CEO Totogi

 Public Cloud can provide the scale India needs at a low price. Because India has one of the largest subscriber bases in the world with over 1 billion subscribers. Any software an Indian telco chooses has to be carrier-grade and has to be able to handle the big scale and provide rock star performance.

Danielle Royston, the public cloud evangelist was a speaker at Voice&Data’s recently held TLF 5G conference under the flagship Telecom Leadership Forum. Ms Royston spoke on the theme, Vision 2030: New Age, New Needs- Demand New Approaches.

On a visit to Mumbai to meet one of her largest clients, Vodafone India, Ms Royston, then CEO of a charging company first had the idea to move the telco industry to the public cloud. “As an outsider coming in, I noticed something interesting. Telcos around the world were not using public cloud technology from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Instead, all of the charging and reading software was being run client server out of Vodafone's own on-premise data centers, the way software used to be managed in the last century,” she said. There had to be an easier way to do it, Ms Royston thought. “There's no way this is how telco deploys mission-critical software… To me, it was a no-brainer. The public cloud will come to telco.”

Since her last pre-Covid visit to India, Danielle Royston built Cloud City in MWC 21, and delivered two keynotes at MWC Barcelona. She founded her company, Telco DR, and raised a billion dollars fund to invest in software for telco exclusively for the public cloud, by telco software companies to pivot their products to the public cloud.

“Our industry is changing right before our eyes, the proof points of the public cloud are everywhere. For the first time at a Voice and Data conference, we're talking about the public cloud at an event where AWS is a lead sponsor. Seven years ago, there were no AWS, Azure or Google cloud data centers in India. Now there are more than five regions and cities like Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and right here in Delhi, representing billions of dollars of investment by the public cloud vendors.”

Telcos around the world are enthusiastically adopting the public cloud. Vodafone signed a strategic partnership with Google to move all of their on-premise analytical workloads to Google Cloud. In 2021, AT&T sold off its network cloud business to Microsoft, who will refactor it to run natively on Azure. And, the move by US company Dish to go all in on the public cloud, building their entire 5G network on AWS – news that rocked the industry.

Why is Public Cloud Perfect for India?

“The public cloud is perfect for two key reasons. One, It can provide the scale India needs at a low price. Because India has one of the largest subscriber bases in the world with over 1 billion subscribers. Any software an Indian telco chooses has to be carrier-grade and has to be able to handle the big scale and provide rock star performance. But India also has some of the lowest ARPU in the world at about $2 per user as compared to more than $20 in the United States. This creates a unique challenge for telco operators. And the technology that can tackle both is public cloud,” said Ms Royston.

Royston illustrates with an idea of the scale of operation possible with the public cloud. “When Amazon retail business outgrew its expensive Oracle databases, AWS built a new cloud database, Dynamo DB which could scale to more than 100 million requests per second to handle massive online shopping days, like Prime Day or Black Friday. And AWS invested in building their own custom silicon, Intel chips weren't up to snuff. So AWS created their own custom Graviton chip, which has a 40% price to performance improvement, and is faster.”

“The data centers of the hyper scalers are so much more than infrastructure,” she said. “It's chips, servers, databases, software. And you can use all of the services of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and pay as you grow. Using more one day and less than next. It's the world's best technology built and supported by the world's best technologists.” The only catch is that in order to take advantage of this technology and save significantly, tools architected to be truly cloud-native need to be selected. If so, would then amount to it being 80% cheaper and in the public cloud – making it perfect for India.