Microsoft Expands Telco Offerings at Mobile World Congress 2023

Microsoft has announced several new cloud tools at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The new features for telcos using its Azure cloud services, and, according to Microsoft, focus on “ubiquitous computing from cloud to edge.”

The new offerings include two new AIOps services: Azure Operator Insights and Azure Operator Service Manager. The former allows users to collect and analyze large amounts of network data via machine learning, delivering insights for “operator-specific workloads” on the health of telecom networks, and their customers' experience. The latter provides “seamless management” of services across hybrid cloud sites.

Microsoft is also launching its new generation hybrid cloud platform Azure Operator Nexus, as well as its Azure Programmable Connectivity interface that is compatible with partners including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, Rogers, Telefonica, and Singtel. 

“One of the key benefits of a hybrid cloud infrastructure is its ability to provide harmonized observability for both infrastructure and applications,” said Yousef Khalidi, Microsoft corporate VP of Azure for Operators. “[Azure Operator Nexus] collects logs, metrics, and traces from network function virtualization infrastructure and network functions. 

“It also offers a rich analytical, AI/ML-based toolset to develop descriptive and prescriptive analytics. Our goal with this observability architecture is to securely bring all operator data into a single data lake where it can be processed to provide a global-network view and harvested for operational and business insights.”

Finally, Microsoft is also making its Azure Communications Gateway, a service for connecting fixed and mobile networks to Teams, generally available.