Telenor And Google Cloud Form Partnership To Provide Digital Network For Customers

JAKARTA - Alphabet Inc's Telenor and Google Cloud have formed a partnership to digitize the Norwegian telecommunications company's global operations and are exploring ways to jointly offer services to customers. This was confirmed by both companies on Monday, November 15.

Telenor will not only use Google Cloud services to improve Telenor's own IT and network, but also collaborate to provide digital tools to Telenor customers, their respective chief executives told Reuters.

Oslo-based Telenor serves 172 million subscribers with about half of its revenue generated in Asia and the other half in the Nordics.

"The digitization project will mean a major transformation for Telenor, but is also part of our ambition to find new revenue streams," said Telenor CEO Sigve Brekke.

"I think the future of telecommunications companies is to move beyond connectivity, and create value, beyond connecting customers," he said.

With networks increasingly reliant on software, Telenor needs to build a cloud-based business, and Google's ability to deliver data management knowledge, machine learning and artificial intelligence makes it a good fit, Brekke added.

"Digitizing our operations is making it smoother," said Brekke. "You can predict outages before they happen... when you change some backend processes, you can streamline the customer experience and make it better."

“Digitizing the core operations of a telecommunications company as big as Telenor is new to Google Cloud and so is the shared customer offering,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud.

Among the first services offered by both parties jointly is a platform to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) transform to digital operations.

"It's not just about optimizing the data center and moving the data center to the cloud," said Kurian. "The work we're doing with SMEs ... we're not only offering as a technology supplier, but building a shared offering to customer segments."