Editor’s note: Coming out of Mobile World Congress 2022, we are excited to share key learnings from our partner ecosystem on how to leverage advancements in 5G technologies to power customer experiences that seamlessly blend our physical and virtual world into one. The original version of this blog was published by Optiva, Inc. Please enjoy this updated entry from our partner.

Telecom operators and communications service providers (CSPs) are elevating customer experiences (CX) across the customer lifecycle. Today’s digital customers’ expectations, needs, usage behaviors and choices are growing and evolving exponentially. Therefore, it is critical to deliver superior and personalized digital customer experiences at each customer lifecycle touchpoint.

To succeed, you need to deliver a dynamic customer experience. Operators are embracing the mantra — next-level CX is the new currency — from onboarding and instant offer provisioning to delivering enhanced self service and supporting subscription renewals, queries and billing actions, and in-session improved experiences. There are commercial benefits to adapting to this paradigm, too, as key customer segments may see added value in enhanced experiences. With 5G, the Ericsson “5G consumer potential” report found that half of early adopters would be willing to pay 32% more for 5G services. Consider the advanced experiences that 5G is able to support, such as:

• Low-latency connectivity and real-time network slicing capabilities, delivering an immersive yet reliable augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) experience. Imagine a soccer match with a rich 360-degree stadium experience from the customer’s choice of location that immerses a fan in the game excitement.
• AI-driven insights enabling operators to predict customer behavior patterns in real time and leveraging available network capacity to provide customers with personalized, just-in-time discounts and offers that can increase ARPU, enhance the customer experience and reduce churn.
• Proactive action, such as instantly optimizing 5G connectivity network slice bandwidth when the quality of service does not meet its promised level. This could include delivering assured, lag-free network performance to an online gamer for next-level gaming intensity or it could be about providing proactive, transparent reimbursements to end customers on the fly, preventing dissatisfaction complaints. Further, 5G with dedicated network slices also enables business applications that exceed an end-to-end SLA essential to a business-to-business (B2B) subscriber.
• Enabling immersive experiences across all services and touchpoints by redefining how consumers interact with offerings from anywhere, whether that’s a smartphone or tablet. What’s more, it’s about feeding intelligence gleaned from those customer interactions into a single view across all ecosystems in real time to gain a full picture of the customer.

How cloud shapes the future of telecom customer experience

Through cloud technology and cloud-native architectures, telecom operators and service providers have the opportunity to deliver such 5G use cases and differentiated offerings. Cloud maximizes the benefits and enables delivery, thereby dramatically improving and reimagining the possibilities for CX. This includes how customers connect, consume and buy services, and it strengthens customer affinity and loyalty.

Cloud and the technologies it maximizes, such as 5G, also present a wide range of innovative monetization opportunities beyond traditional telecom revenue streams and beyond connectivity. Thus, the highest priority for telecom must be on effectively and efficiently harnessing the potential capabilities for launching personalized service offerings for consumer and enterprise at a high velocity. As a result, the new customer engagement model requires agility, responsiveness and reliability to deliver these services across all touchpoints of the customer’s journey.

As such, Optiva and Google Cloud are engaging in a multi-year partnership to help CSPs enable faster time to innovation, flexible 5G monetization and operational cost savings, while driving strong customer experience. Leveraging the Google Cloud platform enabled by Anthos, which supports the deployment and operation of business support system (BSS) applications across public clouds, on-premises data centers and at the network edge, Optiva’s distributed solution deployment offers telecom operators new ways to monetize 5G networks through use cases such as private 5G, IoT and ultra-low latency edge solutions.

Gaining a competitive edge on the new playing field

The solution to these new BSS and monetization requirements lies in the cloud’s unique advantages. For example, to achieve agility, an essential cloud tool, the sandbox, allows operators to accelerate iterations to find optimal solutions. The sandbox shortens product cycles to a fraction of traditional timelines and empowers operators to reinvent their functionalities and service capabilities — lowering business risk and driving dramatic cost savings.

As a result, operators can increasingly explore, experiment, learn, launch and relaunch rapidly. This allows for the fast introduction of new and differentiated offerings, increased service velocity and cost-effective go-to-market opportunities. For that reason, a new competitive playing field is emerging and making the days of traditional and full digital transformations a thing of the past.

Instead, by leveraging cloud technologies, customer lifecycle opportunities and possibilities are born, such as:

• End-to-end digital onboarding experiences: Hassle-free digital customer onboarding in little time by leveraging next-gen BSS with embedded automation across the different modules. This digitizes the customer registration and ordering process, including customer verification, SIM allocation, and the selection and activation of a user’s choice of plans and more.
• Real-time offer optimization based on customer insights: On-the-fly optimization of offers based on AI-driven real-time insights to predict usage behavior.
• Handling ultra-low latency service quality with distributed systems: Delivering and charging for ultra-fast services from the edge rather than sending and processing them at a central cloud. This enables new business opportunities by leveraging new private 5G offerings.
• Assured service quality and complaint reduction through automated real-time network configuration: By consistently monitoring the network quality and application and taking corrective actions to match the SLA requirements, we can boost the user experience (e.g., if a user subscribes to an 8K video plan). Thus, if the bandwidth level drops below the agreed-upon resolution level, the service can push an update to the user and potentially offer them a complimentary added data bundle leveraging analytics, churn prediction models and insights.
• Maintaining a real-time single source of truth for customer data: Having a single, distributed repository of real-time updated customer data allows CSPs to deliver customer services more smoothly across all touchpoints.
• Expanding product catalog with a partner ecosystem: Leveraging open APIs to build and expand partner ecosystems to launch new products and services that enable CSPs to expand the services they provide customers and help increase their market relevance.

Cloud momentum accelerates, enabling revolutionized BSS and revenue models

Service providers are forging their paths and investing in and adopting cloud technologies. Cloud empowers operators beyond connectivity and volume offerings on data, text and voice. The technology offers more and unlocks the operator’s ability to meet specific user segment experience requirements in real time and differentiate offerings based on latency, capacity, throughput, speed and device type.

As a result, operators can shift to new product-driven monetization capabilities, allowing them to configure their BSS without heavy customizations or necessitating the expertise of their IT teams. Instead, they can now empower, for example, marketing teams — with minimal steps and product-specific expertise needed — to optimize rate plans in real time based on usage and experience analytics, roll out promotions and satisfy customer demand for a delightful experience.

The new currency across the customer lifecycle — next-level telecom BSS and CX

Operators need the capability to learn fast, fail fast, launch, and relaunch in quick cycles. This capability is growing more critical as Capex and Opex become challenged and protecting ARPU and increasing subscribers becomes harder in a cloud economy. Telecom operators are picking up speed for cloudification and reimagining the potential of their BSS systems. And with 5G, innovation driven by cloud-native capabilities and automation via machine learning, operators have a genuine opportunity to revolutionize customer engagement and deliver a next-level hyper-personalized CX — the new currency of 5G cloud.

Kohl’s is an omnichannel retailer focused on driving traffic, operational efficiency and delivering seamless omnichannel customer experiences.

Ratnakar Lavu is Kohl’s Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. He, and Kohl’s, are at the forefront of retail technology innovation, focusing on a frictionless customer journey across digital, mobile and more than 1,150 stores.

As part of this journey to more closely unify its online and offline experiences for customers, the company was looking for supporting cloud services that would continue to drive  best-in-class data center infrastructure; the ability to manage data at a very large scale; and industry leading analytics and machine learning tools to continually understand real time data streams and help personalize experiences for their customers.

Kohl’s recognized the opportunity to take on a cloud partner to help drive the improvement of the speed and reliability of their operations, while they focused on a number of innovations to deepen customer experiences.

“At the time, I was looking for an open and scalable platform to partner with our Kohl’s technology team as we transform our business by shifting to the cloud,” says Ratnakar.

“Google has great engineering talent as well as demonstrated experience solving stability and scale in its own Ads and Search business. At Kohl’s, we need to be bold and innovative in today’s retail environment, and therefore need partners who deeply understand how to manage risk.” 

Kohl’s leveraged several capabilities of Google Cloud. For example:

• They built applications to automate deployment, scaling and operations.
• They used monitoring capabilities to monitor for things like response time.
• Scalable technology provided an infrastructure to elastically scale to site traffic.
• They ran their infrastructure across multiple regions for high availability.

In 2017 and 2018, record-setting numbers of customers visited Kohls.com during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and the digital platform experienced high double-digit growth both years.

The capabilities provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google’s data center infrastructure supported Kohl’s servers and systems during these key timeframes.

In addition, the Kohl’s team partnered together with Google’s core engineering team and services organization to optimize applications and make them more reliable.

Google Cloud’s Customer Reliability Engineers (CREs) worked with them in advance of their peak time frames to test the infrastructure for performance, scaling, and fault tolerance.

“Google CRE and services teams collaborated with us as we ran drills and exercises during each phase of preparation for peak time frames,” Ratnakar said. “As we continued to understand better how to scale, monitor, and support our applications in GCP and we are pleased that we worked with the CRE team as partners on monitoring services, alerting teams, and triaging work.”

Organizations across industries are looking to AI to turn troves of data into intelligence, powered by the latest advances in generative AI. Yet for many organizations, there is a barrier to adopting the latest models because they can be costly to train or serve. A new class of cloud GPUs is needed to lower the cost of entry for businesses that want to tap the power of AI. 

Today, we’re introducing G2, the newest addition to the Compute Engine GPU family in Google Cloud. G2 is the industry’s first cloud VM powered by the newly announced NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPU, and is purpose-built for large inference AI workloads like generative AI. G2 delivers cutting-edge performance-per-dollar for AI inference workloads that run on GPUs in the cloud. By switching from NVIDIA A10G GPUs to G2 instances with L4 GPUs, organizations can lower their production infrastructure costs up to 40%. We also found that customers switching from NVIDIA T4 GPUs to L4 GPUs can achieve 2x-4x better performance. As a universal GPU offering, G2 instances also help accelerate other workloads, offering significant performance improvements on HPC, graphics, and video transcoding. Currently in private preview, G2 VMs are both powerful and flexible, and scale easily from one up to eight GPUs. 

Currently organizations require end-to-end enterprise ready infrastructure that will future proof their AI and HPC initiatives for a new era. G2s will be ready to be deployed on Vertex AI, GKE, and GCE, giving customers the freedom to architect their own custom software stack to meet their performance requirements and budget. With optimized Vertex AI support for G2 VMs, AI users can tap the latest generative AI models and technologies. With an easy to use UI and automated workflows, customers can access, tune and serve modern models for video, text, images, and audio without the toil of manual optimizations. The combination of these services with the power of G2 will help customers harness the power of complex machine models for their business.

NVIDIA L4 GPUs with Ada Lovelace Architecture

G2 machine families enable machine learning customers to run their production infrastructure in the cloud for a variety of applications such as language models, image classification, object detection, automated speech recognition, and language translation. Built on the Ada Lovelace architecture with fourth-generation Tensor Cores, the NVIDIA L4 GPU provides up to 30 TFLOPS of performance for FP32, and 242 TFLOPs for FP16. Newly added FP8 support, on top of existing INT8, BFLOAT16 and TF32 capabilities, makes the L4 ideal for ML inference. 

With the latest third-generation RT Cores and DLSS 3.0 technology, G2 instances are also great for graphics-intensive workloads such as rendering and remote workstations when paired with NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation. NVIDIA L4 provides 3x video encoding and decoding performance, and adds new AV1 hardware-encoding capabilities. For example, G2 can enable gaming customers running game engines such as Unreal and Unity with modern graphics cards to run real-time applications. Likewise, media and entertainment customers that need GPU-enabled virtual workstations can use the L4 to create photo-realistic, high-resolution 3D content for movies, games, and AR/VR experiences using applications such as Autodesk Maya or 3D Studio Max.

What customers are saying

A handful of early customers have been testing G2 and have seen great results in real-world applications. Here are what some of them have to say about the benefits that G2 with NVIDIA L4 GPUs bring:

AppLovin

AppLovin enables developers and marketers to grow with market leading technologies. Businesses rely on AppLovin to solve their mission-critical functions with a powerful, full stack solution including user acquisition, retention, monetization and measurement.

“AppLovin serves billions of AI powered recommendations per day, so scalability and value are essential to our business,” said Omer Hasan, Vice President, Operations at AppLovin. “With Google Cloud’s G2 we’re seeing that NVIDIA L4 GPUs offer a significant increase in the scalability of our business, giving us the power to grow faster than ever before.”

WOMBO

WOMBO aims to unleash everyone’s creativity through the magic of AI, transforming the way content is created, consumed, and distributed. 

“WOMBO relies upon the latest AI technology for people to create immersive digital artwork from users’ prompts, letting them create high-quality, realistic art in any style with just an idea,” said Ben-Zion Benkhin, Co-Founder and CEO of WOMBO. “Google Cloud’s G2 instances powered by NVIDIA’s L4 GPUs will enable us to offer a better, more efficient image-generation experience for users seeking to create and share unique artwork.”

Descript

Descript’s AI-powered features and intuitive interface fuel YouTube and TikTok channels, top podcasts, and businesses using video for marketing, sales, and internal training and collaboration. Descript aims to make video a staple of every communicator’s toolkit, alongside docs and slides. 

“G2 with L4’s AI Video capabilities allow us to deploy new features augmented by natural-language processing and generative AI to create studio-quality media with excellent performance and energy efficiency” said Kundan Kumar, Head of Artificial Intelligence at Descript.

Workspot

Workspot believes that the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is the most secure, accessible and cost-effective way to deliver an enterprise desktop and should be central to accelerating the digital transformation of the modern enterprise.

“The Workspot team looks forward to continuing to evolve our partnership with Google Cloud and NVIDIA. Our customers have been seeing incredible performance leveraging NVIDIA’s T4 GPUs. The new G2 instances with L4 GPUS through Workspot’s remote Cloud PC workstations provide 2x and higher frame rates at 1280×711 and higher resolutions” said Jimmy Chang, Chief Product Officer at Workspot.

Pricing and availability

G2 instances are currently in private preview in the following regions: us-central1, asia-southeast1 and europe-west4. Submit your request here to join the private preview, or to receive a notification as when the public preview begins. Support will be coming to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Vertex AI, and other Google Cloud services as well. We’ll share G2 public availability and pricing information later in the year.