Service providers are swimming surprisingly well with hyperscale-cloud hammerheads. In fact, cloud technologies give them fertile new ground on which to build novel offerings. They’re looking specifically at the telecommunication cloud and 5G networking to alter their services and their delivery modes.

“The [service provider] market is going through a mass scale transformation — a transformation in the business model and the architecture, and how you take the services to the market,” said Santanu Dasgupta (pictured, left), distinguished systems engineer at Cisco Systems Inc.

Service providers are turning to the extensive virtualization typically seen in the telco cloud. They are virtualizing core functions to enable agile delivery of services and to transform the very services construct itself, Dasgupta added. The goal is to push the services element closer to business and consumer end users at the network’s edge,.

Dasgupta and JL Valente (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of service provider solutions, Cloud Platform & Solutions Group, at Cisco, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in San Diego, California. They discussed the emerging benefits telco cloud and 5G offer to service providers (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Telco cloud goes prime time for service providers

The standard information technology and telco clouds typically had some key differences. The applications that run on them are different, for instance. Telco apps tend to be highly input/output intensive, and there is heavy packet traffic going in and out. But they are increasingly blending together, according to Dagupta.

“We’re seeing a very clear demand or a journey towards a common goal of setting up our ONE unified cloud so that you can host IT and telco all in the same cloud,” he said.

The move from monolithic network architectures to distributed ones allows service providers to flexibly place services and applications where they best fit, Valente pointed out. This reduces latency and better serves end users. With the telco cloud model and fast 5G networking, end users can deliver services that rival those offered by public clouds, he added.

“We’re trying to mimic as much as possible the scaling capabilities, the flexibility, agility, the elasticity of a cloud so that service providers can reap the profit of, pretty much, a general cloud,” Valente concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE