Transcript of a discussion on why Telefonica’s vision for delivering flexible cloud services solution capabilities to many Latin American and European markets has proven successful.

1. How VMware, HPE and Telefonica
Together Bring Managed Cloud
Services to a Global Audience
Transcript of a discussion on why Telefonica’s vision for delivering flexible cloud services
solution capabilities to many Latin American and European markets has proven
successful.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation
success stories. Stay with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off
disruption -- in favor of innovation.
Our next optimized cloud design interview explores how a triumvirate made up of
VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Telefonica together brought managed
cloud services to a global audience.
We’ll now learn how Telefonica’s vision for delivering flexible cloud
services capabilities to Latin American and European markets has
proven so successful. Here to explain how they developed the
right recipe for rapid delivery of agile Infrastructure-as-a-Services
(IaaS) deployments is Joe Baguley, Vice President and CTO of
VMware EMEA. Welcome, Joe.
Joe Baguley: Hi. Nice to meet you.
Gardner: We’re also here with Antonio Oriol Barat, Head of Cloud
IT Infrastructure Services at Telefonica. Welcome, Antonio.
Antonio Oriol Barat: Hello. Nice to meet you.
Gardner: Antonio, please describe the unique challenges now
facing mobile and telecom operators as they transition to being
more managed service providers?
Oriol Barat: The main challenge we face at this moment is to help
customers navigate in a multi-cloud environment. We now have
local platforms, some legacy, some virtualized platforms,
hyperscale public cloud providers, and data communications
networks. We want to help our customers manage these in a
secure way.
Gardner: How has your cloud services vision evolved? How have
partnerships allowed you to enter new markets to quickly provide services?
Baguley
Oriol Barat

2. Oriol Barat: We have had to transition from being a
hosting provider with data centers in many countries.
Our movement to cloud was a natural evolution of
those hosting services. As a telecommunications
company (telco), our main business is shared
networks, and the network is a shared asset between
many customers. So when we thought about the
hosting business, we similarly wanted to be able to
have shared assets. VMware, with its virtualization
technology, came as a natural partner to help us
evolve our hosting services.
Gardner: Joe, it’s almost as if you designed the VMware stack with customers such as
Telefonica in mind.
An OS for clouds
Baguley: You could say that, yes. The vision has always been for us at VMware to develop
what was originally called the software-defined data center (SDDC). Now, with multi-cloud, for
me, it’s an operating system (OS) for clouds.
We’re bringing together storage, networking and compute into one OS that can run both on-
premises and off-premises. You could be running on-premises the same OS as someone like
Telefonica is running for their public cloud -- meaning that you have a common operating
environment, a common infrastructure.
So, yes, entirely, it was built as part of this vision that everyone runs this OS to build his or her
clouds.
Gardner: To have a core, common infrastructure -- yet have the ability to adapt on top of that
for localized markets -- is the best of all worlds.
Baguley: That’s entirely it. Like someone said, “If all of the clouds are running the same OS,
what’s the differentiation?” Well, the differentiation is, you want to go with the biggest player in
Latin America. You want to go with the player that has the best direct connections: The guys
that can give you service levels maybe that the cloud providers can’t give. They can give you
over-the-top services that other cloud providers don’t provide. They can give you an integrated
solution for your business that includes the cloud -- and other enterprise services.
It’s about providing the tools for cloud providers to build differentiated powerful clouds for
their customers.
Learn How HPE and VMware
Solutions
Enable a New Style of Business
Gardner: Antonio, please, for those of our listeners and readers that aren’t that familiar with
Telefonica, tell us about the breadth and depth of your company.
We have had to transition
from being a hosting
provider with data centers
in many countries. Our
movement to cloud was a
natural evolution of those
hosting services.

3. Oriol Barat: Telefonica is one of the top 10 global telco providers in the world. We are in 21
countries. We have fixed and mobile data services, and now we are in the process of digital
transformation, where we have our focus in four areas: cloud, security, Internet of Things (IoT),
and big data.
We used to think that our core business was in communications. Now we see what we call a
new core of our business at the intersection of data communications, cloud, and security. We
think this is really the foundation, the platform, of all the services that come on top.
Gardner: And, of course, we would all like to start with brand-new infrastructure when we enter
markets. But as you know, we have to deal with what is already in place, too. When it came time
for you to come up with the right combination of vendors, the right combination of technologies,
to produce your new managed services capabilities, why did you choose HPE and VMware to
create this full solution?
Sharing requires trust
Oriol Barat: VMware was our natural choice with its virtualization technologies to start
providing shared IT platforms -- even before cloud, as a word, was invented. We launched
“virtual hosting” in 2007. That was 10 years ago, and since then we have been evolving from
this virtual hosting that had no portal but was a shared platform for customers, to the cloud
services that we have today.
The hardware part is important; we have to have reliable and powerful technology. For us, it’s
very important to provide trust to the customers. Trust, because what they are running in their
data centers is similar to what we have in our data centers. Having VMware and HPE as
partners provides this trust to the customers so that they will move the applications, and they
know it will work fine.
Gardner: HPE is very fond of its Synergy platform, with composable infrastructure. How did that
help you and VMware pull together the full solution for Telefonica, Joe?
More End-to-End
Solutions
From HPE and VMware
Baguley: We have been on this journey together, as Antonio mentioned, since 2007 -- since
before cloud was a thing. We don’t have a test environment that’s as big as Telefonica’s
production environment -- and neither does HPE. What we have been doing is working together
-- and like any of these journeys, there have been
missteps along the way. We stumbled occasionally,
but it’s been good to work together as a partnership.
As we have grown, we have also both understood
how the requirements of the market are changing
and evolving. Ten years ago providing a combined
cloud platform on a composable infrastructure was
unheard of -- and people wouldn’t believe you could
Ten years ago providing a
combined cloud platform on
a composable
infrastructure was unheard
of – but that’s what we
have evolved together.

4. do it. But that’s what we have evolved together, with the work that we have done with
companies such as Telefonica.
The need for something like HPE Synergy and the Gen10 stack -- where there are these very
configurable stacks that you can put together -- has literally grown out of the work that we have
done together, along with what we have done in our management stack, with the networking,
compute, and storage.
Gardner: The combination of composable infrastructure and SDDC makes for a pretty strong
tag team.
Baguley: Yes, definitely. It gives you that flexibility and the agility that a cloud provider needs to
then meet the agility requirements of their customers, definitely.
Gardner: When it comes to bringing more end users into the clouds for your managed services
providers, one of the important things is for end users to move into that cloud with as much ease
as possible. Because VMware is a de facto standard in many markets with its vSphere
Hypervisor, how does that help you, being a VMware stack, create that ease of joining these
clouds?
Seamless migrations
Oriol Barat: Having the same technology in the customer data center and in our cloud makes
things a lot easier. In the first place, in terms of confidence, the customer can be confident that
it’s going to work well when it is in place. The other thing is that VMware is providing us with the
tools that make these migrations easier.
Baguley: At VMworld 2017, we announced VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX), which is
our hybrid cloud connector. It allows customers to locally install software that connects at a
Layer 2 [network] level, as well as right back to vSphere 5.0 in clouds. Those clouds now are
IBM and VMware cloud native, but we are extending it to other service providers like Telefonica
in 2018.
So a customer can truly feel that their connecting and migrations will be seamless. Things like
vSphere vMotion across that gap are going to be possible, too. I think the important thing here is
by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud, because
some of the fear is about getting locked in: “I am going to make decisions that I will regret in two
years by converting my virtual machines (VMs) to run on another platform.” Right here, there
isn’t that fear, there is just more choice, and Telefonica is very much part of that story of choice.
Gardner: It sounds like you have made things attractive for managed service providers in many
markets. For example, they gain ease of migration from enterprises into the provider’s cloud. In
the case of Telefonica, users gain support, services and integration, knowing that the venerable
vendors like VMware and HPE are behind the underlying services.
Do you have any examples where you have been able to bring this total solution to a typical
managed service provider account? How has it worked out for them?
Everyone’s doing it

5. Oriol Barat: We have use cases in all the vertical industries. Because cloud is a horizontal
technology, it’s the foundation of everything. I would say that all companies of all verticals are in
this process of transformation.
We have a lot of customers in retail that are moving their platforms to cloud. We have had, for
example, US companies coming to Europe and deploying their SAP systems on top of our
platforms.
For example in Spain, we have a very strong tourism industry with a lot of hotel chains that are
also using our cloud services for their reservation systems and for more of their IT.
We have use cases in healthcare, of companies moving their medical systems to our clouds.
We have use cases of software vendors that are growing software-as-a-service (SaaS)
businesses and they need a flexible platform that can grow as their businesses grow.
A lot of people are using these platforms as disaster recovery (DR) for the platforms that they
have on-premises.
I would say that all verticals are into this transformation.
Learn How HPE and VMware
Solutions
Enable a New Style of Business
Gardner: It’s interesting, you mentioned being able to gain global reach from a specific home
economy by putting data centers in place with a managed service provider model.
It’s also important for data sovereignty and compliance and General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) and other issues for that to happen. It sounds like a very good market opportunity.
And that brings us to the last part of our discussion. What happens next? When we have proven
technology in place, and we have cloud adoption, where would you like to be in 12 months?
Gaining the edge
Baguley: There has been a lot of talk at recent events, like
HPE Discover, about intelligent edge developments. We
are doing a lot at the edge, too. When you look at telcos,
the edge is going to become something quite interesting.
What we are talking about is taking that same blend of
storage, networking and compute, and running it on as
small a device as possible. So think micro data centers,
nano data centers. How far out can we push this cloud?
How much can we distribute this cloud? How close to the
point of need can we get our customers to execute their
workloads, to do their artificial intelligence (AI), to do their data gathering, et cetera?
We are talking
about taking that
same blend of
storage, networking
and compute, and
running it on as
small a device as
possible.

6. And working in partnership with someone who has a fantastic cloud and a fantastic network just
means that a customer who is looking to build some kind of distributed edge-to-cloud core
capability is something that Telefonica and VMware could probably do over the next 12 months.
That could be really, really strong.
Gardner: Antonio?
Oriol Barat: In this transformation that all the enterprises are in, maybe we are in the 20
percent of execution range. So we still have 80 percent of the transformation ahead of us. The
potential is huge.
Looking ahead with our services, for example, it’s very important that the network is also in
transformation, leveraging the software-defined networking (SDN) technologies. These
networks are going to be more flexible. We think that we are in a good position to put together
cloud services with such network services -- with security, also with more software-defined
capabilities, and create really flexible solutions for our customers.
More End-to-End
Solutions
From HPE and VMware
Baguley: One example that I would like to add is if you can imagine that maybe Real Madrid
C.F. are playing at home next weekend ... It’s theoretical that Telefonica could have the bottom
of those network base stations -- because of VMware Network Functions Virtualization (NFV),
it’s no longer specific base station hardware, it’s x86 HPE servers in there. They can maybe turn
around to a betting company and say, “Would you like to move your front-end web servers with
running containers to run in the base station, in Real Madrid’s stadium, for the four hours in the
afternoon of that match?” And suddenly they are the best performing website.
That’s the kind of out-there transformative ideas that are now possible due to new application
infrastructures, new cloud infrastructures, edge, and technologies like the network all coming
together. So those are the kind of things you are going to see from this kind of solutions
approach going forward.
Gardner: Truly dynamic and responsive architecture, it’s very interesting.
Baguley: Yes.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how a triumvirate made
up of VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Telefonica has brought managed cloud services
to a global audience.
We have learned why Telefonica’s vision for delivering flexible cloud services solution
capabilities to such markets as Latin America and Europe has proven so successful.
So please join me in thanking our guests, Joe Baguley, Vice President and CTO of VMware
EMEA. Thanks, Joe.
Baguley: Thanks. It’s been great.

7. Gardner: And we have been here also with Antonio Oriol Barat, Head of Cloud IT Infrastructure
Services at Telefonica. Thank you.
Oriol Barat: Thank you.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this
BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana
Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this content along to your IT community, and do
come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on why Telefonica’s vision for delivering flexible cloud services
solution capabilities to many Latin American and European markets has proven
successful. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.
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