Last year on Single’s Day, 180 Peta Bytes of data was processed to generate $18 Billions in GMV within 24 hour-frenzy of online shopping at Alibaba. In other words, $1 was generated for every 10 MB of data processed over cloud platform running on customised FPGA chips and containerised software solutions. The Single’s Day record was smashed further this year by a whooping $25 B in GMV, handling 1.48 Billion transactions, and processing more data in 24 hours than by a small Telco over years!

The remarkable part is not just the volume, but the value. Telcos typically make $1 by processing 100 MB of data, while a Platformer such as Alibaba generated 10 times more value for the same amount of data processed. Although some would argue that for the money spent on Alibaba customers also got products, while for a Telco the earning comes purely from data consumption. But there is an analogy as for Telcos the products are packs and plans, and they do have shops and deliveries.

And that takes us to the key point of this article. Telcos provide Gateways for data to flow mainly towards services hosted on the Internet, while Platformers process, analyze and forward data towards their most suitable hosted service.

And to make it more visual, here is another example. When the same Telco infra is used as a Platform, hosting an IMS, and serving HD voice call, it generates 10 times more value than when it let it pass to the world of VoIP Apps, who by the way do analyse data and generate the same value, missed by the Telcos.

A Platformer such as Alibaba serves demand using stronger analytics tools and hosted services, in real time, thanks to it’s power to process; at peak this year Alibaba cloud processed 13 million transactions per minute, or a country’s population in a matter of minutes! The future is all about Platformers, who will have an edge, as they can expand their horizon by collecting and processing data, serving in real-time, and exerting their dominance across an array of industries, hosting and interconnecting them. 

But it’s not all over for Telcos, rather a new front has just opened up. Network slicing provides this edge to Telcos as well, who apart from creating various slices for UHD, Voice and IoT, can also add a slice of PaaS over the under-utilized cloud platform built to handle the yearly traffic peaks.