San Francisco, Feb 27 (IANS): Microsoft announced that it is launching its next-generation hybrid cloud platform "Azure Operator Nexus" for communication service providers.

The tech giant believes that modern network infrastructure will assist its telecommunications partners to improve and monetise their existing infrastructure while also lowering their overall cost of ownership, reports TechCrunch.

Azure Operator Nexus will allow these companies to run their carrier-grade workloads both on-premises and on Azure.

"AT&T made the decision to adopt Azure Operator Nexus platform over time with expectation to lower total cost of ownership, leverage the power of AI to simplify operations, improve time to market and focus on our core competency of building the world's best 5G service," said Igal Elbaz, Senior Vice President, Network CTO, AT&T.

Microsoft's EVP for Strategic Missions and Tech, Jason Zander, explained that the new hybrid cloud platform is a "combination of hardware, hardware acceleration, and the software that goes with it".

"This is important, because Microsoft has a set of edge cloud hardware -- but it's not built for it. When you see vendors talking about using the same thing to run an IT workload as they are planning on running a telco network, it doesn't work and it's exactly why we've made this multi-year investment," he added.

The tech giant is also launching Azure Operator Voicemail, a solution that enables operators to transfer their voicemail services to Azure as a fully managed service, as well as Azure Communications Gateway, a service that connects fixed and mobile networks to Teams.

The company will further launch two new "AIOps" services "Azure Operator Insights" and "Azure Operator Service Manager".

"Operator Insights uses machine learning to help operators analyze the massive amounts of data they gather from their network operations and troubleshoot potential issues, while Service Manager helps operators generate insights about their network configurations," the report said.