Telecommunication is one of the most high-demand and strongest technology markets, tapping into the never-obsolete need for communication and information exchange.

In the past few years, the world of telecom has seen significant progress with the introduction of 5G technologies and as telecom companies increasingly begin to adopt cloud native infrastructures.

“I believe over a period of time, you will see the notion of cloud native capability for both the IT side of the house as well as the network side of the house is becoming mainstream,” said Shailesh Shukla (pictured), vice president and general manager of networking at Google Cloud. “It does something unique, which brings together the cloud capabilities, right around elasticity, flexibility, intelligence and so on with the enterprise customer base that most of the cloud providers already have.”

Shukla spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent Mobile World Congress event. They discussed cloud developments in telecom, end-to-end viability, innovations with the edge and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Maintaining visibility

Routing packets across multiple networks is a difficult but critical task, with end-to-end visibility crucial for security and workload management.

“First and foremost you need global infrastructure,” Shukla said. “Second is to be able to abstract away that underlying infrastructure and make it available to applications through a set of application programming interfaces.”

Google Cloud is utilizing open-source technologies, such as Kubernetes, creating a common control pane and exposing APIs, fostering developer creativity as well as transparency. The edge is also an emerging game-changer in telecom industries, acting as a driver for innovation, according to Shukla.

“The power of edge compute and the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning can be utilized to create completely new immersive experiences,” he said. “Similarly, in a factory or an automotive environment, you can use AI/ML and the power of the edge and 5G coming together to find where the defects are in a manufacturing environment.”

These applications in the edge world grow increasingly prevalent and mainstream, driving innovation, employment and ultimately the economics, Shukla concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mobile World Congress event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Mobile World Congress. Neither TelcoDR Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE