Self-styled "Baltic Sea challenger" Tele2 has deepened ties with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Having already used the public cloud provider for "several years" as part of its own IT transformation efforts – leveraging compute, analytics and database capabilities – the Sweden-based telecom group, as part of a more extensive collaboration with AWS, has joined the AWS Partner Network (APN).

APN is a global community of partners that leverage AWS to build, market and sell services for customers.

According to Tele2, it's going to combine its own range of connectivity, security and managed services with the "broad portfolio of secure AWS capabilities." The idea, said the operator, is to create bespoke solutions for enterprises in the Nordic and Baltic region.

"We also add a strong go-to-market capability with this partnership," a Tele2 spokesperson told Light Reading.

Tele2 says its cloud developer community has "gained vast experience in cloud application integration and security" and it's now going to use that know-how to create new customer offerings that "seamlessly integrate its solutions with the AWS cloud."

Target markets are the public sector and different industry verticals.

Public cloud promiscuity

"As with many other operators, we are using more than one [public] cloud provider," added the Tele2 spokesperson, who would not be drawn on naming names or divulging which IT workloads have been migrated.

"We always try to work in the best and smartest way when it comes to all our operations, including locating workloads at appropriate compute locations, while respecting fundamentals like security, regulation and latency."

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Omdia recently ran a survey of 32 senior IT decision makers within telecom operators and found that AWS was the most popular for running telco IT workloads, followed by Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

"Operators are spreading their bets," observed James Crawshaw, principal analyst at Omdia, a Light Reading sister company. "On average they are using around three different public cloud providers for their telco IT."

Numbers up

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that across the main public cloud service and infrastructure markets, operator and vendor revenues for the first quarter of 2022 reached $126 billion, up 26% compared with the first quarter of 2021.

The biggest growth was seen in IaaS and PaaS. First-quarter revenues from these services grew by 36% to reach more than $44 billion.

In the other main service segments, according to Synergy Research Group, managed private cloud services, enterprise SaaS and CDN added another $54 billion in service revenues, an increase of 21% year-on-year.

— Ken Wieland, contributing editor, special to Light Reading