Telenor (TEL.OL) and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud (GOOGL.O) have forged cooperation to digitalize the Norwegian telecom company’s global operations, and the two firms said on Monday that they are investigating methods to jointly offer services to customers.
According to their respective chief executives, the companies will not only employ Google Cloud’s services to strengthen Telenor’s own IT and network but will also collaborate to deliver digital tools to Telenor’s consumers.
Telenor, established in Oslo, has 172 million users and generates around half of its revenue in Asia and half in the Nordics.
The digitalization project will mean a big transformation for Telenor, but is also part of its ambition to find new revenue streams, Telenor’s CEO Sigve Brekke said.
“I think the future for telcos is to move beyond connectivity and to create value on top of connecting customers,” he said.
With networks increasingly reliant on software, Telenor needs to build a cloud-based business, and Google’s abilities in providing data management knowledge, machine learning, and artificial intelligence make it a good fit, Brekke added.
“To digitalize our operation is to make it smoother,” Brekke said. “You can predict outages before they happen… when you’re displacing some of your backend processes, you can smooth out customer experiences and make them better.”
Digitalising the core operations of a telecommunications company as large as Telenor is new to Google Cloud and so are the joint customer offerings, said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud.
Among the first services, the two envisage providing jointly is a platform to help small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) transform to digital operations.
“This is not just about optimizing data centers and moving data centers to the cloud,” Kurian said.
“The work that we’re doing with SMEs…we are not just offering as a technology supplier, but building a joint offering to a customer segment.”
