While the big news about Google Cloud’s billion-dollar partnership with Vodafone involves using AI to push the telecom giant more deeply into personalized TV content, the 10-year deal also calls for Vodafone to become a cybersecurity vendor with the help of Google Cloud technology.
If you want to see the true power of the cloud here in late 2024, you couldn’t get a better example than the juxtaposition of those two wildly different growth and innovation initiatives: On the one hand, AI-powered search for video content, and on the other, creating a cloud-native security service for business customers.
I will repeat something I’ve said many times across the seven years I’ve had the privilege of chatting with you about the Cloud Wars: For business leaders, the cloud is more of a mindset than it is a technology. And for Vodafone, the transformations it’s undertaking with Google Cloud on their 10-year and $1-billion partnership are the fruits of unfettered imagination:
- how can we use AI to create better experiences for our customers?
- how can we create new revenue streams based on technology we know and trust?
- how can we work more closely with strategic cloud vendors to blur the line between what’s impossible and what’s possible?
- how can we identify opportunities to become not only a consumer of technology but also a provider of technology?
- how can we use the cloud and AI to move as fast as the world around us?
- how do we focus on creating our digital future rather than trying to simply protect and perfect our physical past?
Here’s what Vodafone Group CEO Margherita Della Valle had to say about its extended partnership with Google Cloud: “Together, Vodafone and Google will put new AI-powered content and devices into the hands of millions of more consumers. Using these services, our customers can discover new ways to learn, create and communicate, as well as consume TV, on a scale we haven’t seen before.”
That’s an ambitious plan, and one that continues to push Vodafone into new markets and new opportunities. Founded in 1984, the company describes itself as providing “mobile and fixed services to over 330 million customers in 15 countries” in Europe and Africa; is a mobile-network partner in 45 more countries; and claims to have “one of the world’s largest IoT platforms.”
Like I said, pretty ambitious — so with cybersecurity having become one of the biggest challenges for the global economy, why not consider that as a growth opportunity?
And in close partnership with Google Cloud, that’s exactly what Vodafone has done. Google Cloud already powers Vodafone’s public-cloud analytics — everything from anonymized big data to business intelligence and marketing and network analytics — and on the strength of that proven capability, Vodafone will now use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Gemini to “build, deploy, and scale machine-learning models and AI applications.” (Full details in the press release.)
And by building on that experience and trust, Vodafone now plans to move into the cybersecurity business with the help of Google Cloud. Vodafone’s own team of 900 cybersecurity experts will work with Google Cloud’s Security Operations platform to deliver both internal and external value:
- “Vodafone will build a new cloud-native cybersecurity offering for its business customers utilising Google Cloud’s Security Operations platform so they can better protect themselves and respond in real time to cybersecurity threats,” according to the press release; and
- Vodafone’s internal team and Google Cloud’s cybersecurity experts will “further secure Vodafone’s operations at scale from external threats.”
Final Thought
While lots of technology providers can supply the stuff that customers want to buy, the big breakthroughs happen when the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies help their customers transform into not only superb consumers of technology, but world-class providers of it as well.
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