James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hello and welcome to TelecomTV. I'm James Pearce and I'm at FutureNet World in London. I'm delighted to be joined today by Franz Seiser from Deutsche Telekom. Welcome, Franz. So let's dive straight in and talk about Deutsche Telekom's horizontal telco cloud. What are its component platforms and how does it differ from what DT has operated in the past?

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom (00:27):
Pleasure to be with you here again — talking about cloud, as we have quite a history on the topic already. So the horizontal telco cloud — we released a white paper on this shortly before MWC — this is our production architecture in the German network, which we are using for live network traffic already. Based on three layers basically, so a very clean architecture. The bottom layer, as is very typical in such an architecture, is the cloud layer together with software defined infrastructure. We built the Kubernetes layer ourselves based on plain vanilla open source releases. Then of course we have the network functions as cloud native as possible. Many of them are completely cloud native. We know some of them, because of databases and things like that, can only be cloud native to a certain extent. And on the top — and that's the big achievement — we built an automation layer, again based to a large extent on open source tooling, that replaces more or less all the network vendor proprietary network management systems. It has all the OSS functions, monitoring functions.

(01:39):
And this is where we build the automation. Now what's special about that is it's one architecture, completely horizontal, so we don't have different silos. We had that in the past. Now we have one cloud layer, we have one automation layer, and in between we have all the network functions — but they are all working in the same environment. They're all consuming the same cloud resources. They are managed by the same automation tooling, so we can easily scale and operate these functions across the board.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (02:10):
That's really, really interesting. So maybe we can talk about AI and the role it plays in horizontal telco cloud.

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom (02:17):
That's obviously the question of the show, so to say. So the horizontal telco cloud itself is not yet based on AI or using it, but it's the key enabler. If there was one thing we learned here on the show — and we've known for quite some time — AI needs data, AI needs very precise data and ideally AI gets real-time data. Guess what? That's exactly what you get out of this architecture, because we built the data ingress so that all the telemetry data, so to say, is streamed in real time into our data lakes. Today it's used by automation tooling. Tomorrow, that will also be used by all the AI-based solutions, agents, you name it. And because we have also put a lot of automation in, the whole thing is also run fully automated. We have our famous 3-2-1-0 goal that we are pushing for, and the important part is the 2-1-0.

(03:17):
Two days for a software upgrade — fully automated, tested and deployed. Patches, so in case something is really urgent, security issues, testing and deployment in one single day. And all done with zero human intervention. That tells you already this is a highly or fully automated solution. And of course, AI agents can then really make use of this automation tooling, and then building closed loop based on that architecture will be pretty straightforward.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (03:44):
If we talk about the development of the horizontal telco cloud, has it been made possible thanks to Deutsche Telekom's years-long adoption of cloud native practices? How important is a cloud native telco culture to enable a platform like this?

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom (04:01):
To the point. So the horizontal telco cloud is the result of many years of development. Deutsche Telekom — we have always been at the forefront. Back in the early 2010s on virtualisation, the most publicly known example is the NIMS project where we built a fully virtualised IMS solution. But we also had to realise the drawbacks and the limitations of virtualised solutions — mainly speed is a big topic there. And so this was developed further to cloud and cloud native, and that's what we then started to adapt and build. And what we realised rather quickly, and early on I have to say, is you can't run a cloudified environment with virtualised or even silo-type operating models. So you need to completely adjust. You need to completely change. You have to change the organisation. And most importantly, you have to change the mindset of the people. So this cloud culture — as you said — without that culture, we believe, or we are pretty sure, you would not succeed in such an environment.

(05:06):
So really, people have to understand they're working much more in a software-type environment — software speed, a different level of collaboration. You're not in your nice contained vendor silo with your own hardware, the vendor software, the contract, the SLA, everything. And if something goes wrong, by default it's the vendor's fault. We know these old models — this is not going to work in this new world. You need to collaborate much more. You need to collaborate with your own colleagues because the cloud is coming from your colleagues. The automation is coming from your colleagues. It's primarily the network function software itself that you get from a vendor, but all the things need to come together. In case of issues in operations, you need to know how things fit together. So this collaboration culture, this cloud culture, is the key enabler of running such an architecture.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (05:54):
It's good to know that culture plays such an important role because I think it's so important to a lot of organisations and a great learning for other telcos. So let's look at the bigger picture. How does it fit into Deutsche Telekom's overall sovereign services strategy?

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom (06:09):
The horizontal telco cloud is the architecture, the production environment for our network services. So we consume this internally. This is not something we offer to any customers as of today — we are building our network. But as said, it's based on open source to quite an extent. We integrate and build it together ourselves so we don't have any third-party integrators and things like that. It's hugely based on open source. So yes, it's a completely sovereign solution, if you want to put it like that, and we have full control over that machinery.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (06:43):
That's perfect. Thank you so much for joining us today on TelecomTV.

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom (06:46):
Pleasure.