Telco cloud buying decisions are changing: a live discussion

“Cloud has become a working paradigm for day-to-day life, not just a commodity widget.”

Cloud decisions in telecom are shifting as operators confront operational realities of distributed networks, tight margins and pressure to move faster with more control.

In our first Zero-Touch Live episode of 2026, Rakuten Symphony CMO Geoff Hollingworth spoke with Rakuten Cloud SVP and global telco head Vivek Chadha about recent changes he’s seeing in customer engagements and why cloud is increasingly being evaluated as an operating model versus a deployment choice.

📺 Watch the replay now below.

Cloud is reshaping conventional approaches

Over the course of the discussion, Geoff and Vivek zeroed in on how cloud choices are reshaping the ways organizations design, control and run their businesses. Key takeaways from the conversation included:

• Cloud is being redefined as an operating model. Vivek explained that truly cloud-native organizations are no longer optimizing infrastructure alone. Today, they are designing for predictability, automation and resilience from day zero.
• Old trade-offs aren’t holding up. Operators are pushing back on the friction of legacy procurement cycles as they reassess TCO and control limitations of hyperscaler-led approaches. There is a growing interest in platforms that combine the agility of public cloud with tighter governance and architectural control.
• Control is becoming strategic again. Across regions, Vivek described customers deliberately reclaiming ownership of core design decisions (e.g., Data placement, lifecycle management and AI readiness), even when public cloud remains an option.
• Consolidation is replacing patchwork cloud estates. Several operators are moving away from multi-vendor, fragmented on-prem platforms toward more unified cloud foundations that simplify operations and improve consistency across geographies.

As Geoff summarized during the discussion, this shift reflects a broader realization:

“The original sin of many of these businesses is they gave up control. Reclaiming that control lets you design systems that put business outcomes back in the hands of the people running the business.”

New year, new perspective

Vivek emphasized that these changes in the telco cloud calculus are not theoretical. They are being driven by practical needs to operate distributed networks with smaller teams, tighter margins and growing AI demands, while still retaining flexibility and speed.

“If technology is truly instrumental to your business, you can no longer divorce yourself from being immersed in it. Outcomes and destiny become inseparable from how you design and operate your cloud.”

‍