The expert panel – Analysys Mason, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Red Hat – shared detailed and sometimes surprising insights at Mobile Europe‘s recent The Briefing
Görkem Yiğit, Research Director at Analysys Mason orchestrated this fascinating conversation between Kai Steuernagel, VP Cloud Technology at Deutsche Telekom, Philippe Ensarguet ,VP Software Engineering at Orange, and Alessandro Arrichiello, Senior Specialist Solution Architect – Telco Center of Excellence, at Red Hat.
Topics they covered include:
• what we mean by cloud in 2026 in telecoms
• the maturity today of IT, network and customer-facing cloud and what’s holding which back
• we see so many variations of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, on-prem, public and private – is this pragmatism or an industry yet to address fundamental architectural and commercial questions?
• we’ve seen cloud-native transformation in the mobile core, and to a lesser extent in the RAN – what were the main drivers behind this acceleration?
• what’s needed to move today’s deployments to genuine cloud-native maturity at scale?
• Deutsche Telekom’s massive cloud-native transformation with Horizontal TelCo Cloud
• Orange, and Philippe personally, has been contributing foundational work in Sylva with partners – how will Sylva and Orange tackle automation challenges in cloud-native networks including alongside legacy estates?
• defining AI-native in practice – a natural evolution of the cloud-native foundations operators have been building, or is a more fundamental rethink needed of architecture, data and operating model?
• How is Red Hat positioned to accelerate the adoption of AI-native networks?
• The key drivers behind the Horizontal TelCo Cloud were to improve network reliability, resilience and time-to-market for new services. How quantifiable has DT’s success been?
• Telco cloud and AI infrastructure are being commotised – how can operators build on them to create new market opportunities, especially within the cloud and edge continuum?
• Which customer use cases are gaining traction on cloud-native telco platforms and what key building blocks need to come together for telcos to differentiate, at scale, in the cloud in the AI-native era?
