Bringing the cloud to telecommunications has been a lengthy process, but Amazon Web Services Inc. is collaborating with telephone companies to complete their transformation from connectivity providers to digital service providers.

“We have 240 services built using thousands of [application programming interfaces], and all the developers see, all that our cloud users see, are APIs,” said Ishwar Parulkar (pictured), chief technology officer of telecom and edge cloud at AWS. “It’s a sea of APIs, and one piece that was missing was the connectivity piece. Now [developers] can … build applications that are network-aware.”

Parulkar spoke with theCUBE Research analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at MWC Barcelona, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how cloud computing is transforming telco operations and what’s next for APIs. (* Disclosure below.)

Navigating the ‘sea of APIs’ with Open Gateway

Cloud adoption for telcos consists of stages, according to Parulkar. Managing the workload of operations support and business support systems is one of the first, while the radio access network is more demanding. Since MWC 2023, AWS has been collaborating with the Global System for Mobile Communications Association’s Open Gateway initiative to bring more cloud services to the edge.

“What Open Gateway is doing is standardizing [APIs] across telcos,” Parulkar said. “Even though it’s coming from a different operator, it has to be the same API, same format that can be integrated into the application.”

Security, bandwidth control and location services are three areas that Parulkar describes as low-hanging fruit for Open Gateway. For example, APIs could help with fraud detection for financial services by detecting whether a SIM card has been swapped. Reinventing telco services will also be crucial for the next wave of artificial intelligence.

“If you look at most machine learning applications, there’s training which needs to be done [with] large compute capacity. There’s inference which can happen at the edge,” Parulkar said. “We are looking at how we can apply generative AI and our other artificial intelligence and machine learning services to help telcos really transform their businesses.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of MWC Barcelona: 

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the MWC Barcelona event. No sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE