Victoria Klesty

OSLO (Reuters) – Telenor (NASDAQ:) Inc’s Google Cloud has formed a partnership with Telenor to digitize Norway’s telecom companies’ global operations. The two companies also explored ways of offering services jointly, they said Monday.

Their respective chief executives stated to Reuters that the companies will collaborate with Telenor to give its customers digital tools and not just use Google Cloud’s services for Telenor’s IT network.

Telenor, a Norwegian company based in Oslo, serves over 172 million customers. About half of its revenues are generated in Asia while the other half is in Nordics.

Telenor’s digitalisation initiative will be a major transformation. However, it is part of Telenor’s aim to discover new revenue streams. Telenor CEO Sigve Brakke explained.

He stated that he believes that telcos will have to go beyond connecting customers and create value in the future.

Telenor is increasingly dependent on software and Telenor has to create a cloud-based enterprise. Google’s data management capabilities, machine learning and AI make Telenor an attractive option.

Brekke stated that digitalizing our operations is a way to improve the flow of things. It’s possible to predict outages ahead of them. When you displace some of your backend processing, it can help smoothen customer experiences and improve their quality.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that digitizing core operations for a large telecoms company like Telenor was a new concept. So are joint customer offerings.

One of the services that the pair envisages collaborating on is a platform for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) to transform into digital operations.

Kurian stated that it is not about optimizing data centers and moving them to the cloud.

“The work we are doing with SMEs… we offer technology as a supplier but also build a joint offering to a customer section.”