With greater connectivity demands at the edge, cybersecurity requirements evolving and the commercialisation of AI services coming to fruition, the agile telco will seek partners as part of its go-to-market. Antony Savvas looks at some of the latest developments.
Deutsche Telekom and secure cloud connectivity firm Cloudflare have struck a partnership designed to strengthen the security and resilience of digital infrastructure for enterprises across Europe. The two companies are directly interconnecting their networks, giving European organisations access to Cloudflare’s global cloud platform, combined with the expertise and services of Deutsche Telekom, including those provided by its consulting and managed business arm T-Systems.
The deal seeks to deliver secure digital services, from network and application security to the protection of modern cloud and AI environments, including addressing the needs of European digital sovereignty.
“We are aligning two platforms that are deeply important to how businesses operate and grow in Europe,” says Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer of Cloudflare. “By combining Cloudflare’s global connectivity and security platform with Deutsche Telekom’s infrastructure expertise and customer reach, we are helping organisations secure their networks, strengthen their resilience, and accelerate transformations at a global scale, supplying businesses with a highly innovative foundation for the next generation of the internet.”
“Our engagement lays the foundation for reliable and high-performance networks across Europe,” adds Kerstin Baumgart, the director for wholesale and a member of the board of management at Telekom Deutschland. “What unites us is a clear ambition: to help our customers across Europe advance their digital infrastructure and manage their services with a very high degree of security and resilience.”
Agentic workflows
Reco, the agentic security firm, has raised an additional US$55 million in funding, which includes a strategic investment from AT&T Ventures, along with other investors, that brings its total funding up to US$140 million. The money will support expansion across sales, partnerships, channels and customer support.
The new capital follows growing demand from companies as agents become embedded across the agentic enterprise, from applications and collaboration tools to browsers, copilots and automated workflows. Reco enables security teams to understand which agents are active, what identities and permissions they use, what data and systems they can reach, which workflows they can initiate, and how risky access can be reduced or revoked.
“Agents are gaining access to business applications and data faster than many organisations can map or govern those connections,” says Ofer Klein, CEO and co-founder of Reco. “AT&T’s participation as both a customer and strategic investor reflects the need for security that follows agents across enterprise ecosystems.”
“Reco helps AT&T strengthen governance across our enterprise apps and AI ecosystem by providing greater visibility into agent security risk, access management, and third-party integrations,” adds Rich Baich, chief information security officer at AT&T. “This insight enables better decision-making, improves audit readiness, and supports our commitment to securing innovation across the enterprise.”
Optical AI
Nokia and Orange France have completed a “successful” trial of network tomography, demonstrating how optical network intelligence can help operators better understand, manage and optimise their transport networks, to prepare for the growing demands of AI-driven services.
Network tomography works like a health scan for optical networks. It gives operators a clearer view of what is happening across fibre links and wavelengths, without the need to install intrusive probes throughout the network. Powered by Nokia Bell Labs algorithms, the solution imports and processes thousands of pieces of data sourced from coherent optical transmissions, to gain near real-time insight into the condition of the overall network link by link.
The trial helped identify issues such as fibre degradation, amplifier problems, configuration errors and other network conditions that could affect performance. By spotting these issues early, operators can validate their underlying network faster and take action before customer service level agreements (SLAs) are impacted, say the partners.
The trial also showed how network tomography can help operators make better use of their existing network capacity. By understanding the real condition of each optical link more accurately, operators can optimise performance, improve spectral efficiency and support more resilient services. “This is an important step toward more automated optical networks, including AI-assisted operations and closed-loop automation,” the two firms add.
“As network performance requirements become more stringent, operators need deeper visibility into the performance and condition of their transport infrastructures,” says Christian Gacon, vice president, broadband networks at Orange France. “With this successful trial, Orange is taking an important step toward the future of network operations. By using smart automation technology, we can better optimise the network and deliver more resilient services to our customers.”
Help with go-to-market
To help telcos tap into emerging opportunities easier, consulting firm Tech Mahindra has unveiled its Zero Gravity Telco Architecture, a strategic framework designed to help communication service providers “systematically overcome the structural barrier stalling their AI ambitions”, accelerating the transition to “AI-native, autonomous operations”.
The Zero Gravity Telco Architecture is said to reflect the evolving needs of operators as they move beyond connectivity-led growth toward intelligence-led operations. Tech Mahindra says it is committed to the development of AI-Native Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and advancing Zero Gravity Telco Architecture as an open, trusted and interoperable framework, enabling CSPs to accelerate and scale their AI-native transformation.
Tech Mahindra says that while investments in AI, cloud, and 5G are growing, “most AI initiatives are losing their momentum, unable to cross into core operations”. The reason for this, it says, is often the underlying architecture state that may be “too fragmented and semantically inconsistent” for agents to “reason about safely”.
For most CSPs, the challenge is the embedded business logic, rules, and meaning that has been “trapped” inside the systems for decades. Every AI initiative must first negotiate with the accumulated weight of these systems before it can deliver value. Tech Mahindra names this phenomenon as “legacy gravity”, the accumulated pull that decades-old systems exert on every new initiative.
Zero Gravity Telco Architecture promises to tackle this obstacle by simplifying technology estates, moving essential business rules and definitions into a shared, governed layer, and establishing trusted foundations that AI agents can safely draw on.
Central to the framework is the Zero Gravity Index, a maturity diagnostic tool that helps telecoms leaders assess their organisation’s readiness for AI-native transformation, while recommending a trajectory sequence from legacy environments to adaptive, intelligent operations.
“AI cannot be industrialised on top of unorganised legacy. The barrier is the gravitational pull of the existing estate,” says Amol Phadke, chief transformation officer at Tech Mahindra. “Zero Gravity Telco Architecture provides operators the guidance to externalise the context trapped inside their systems, build trusted foundations, and only then scale autonomous agents. The ability to organise meaning, context, and decision-making at scale will become the defining competitive advantage.”
Nik Willetts, CEO of TM Forum, supports the initiative. “AI will not deliver its full potential on fragmented architectures and inconsistent business logic,” he says. “Operators that want to become autonomous enterprises must first build trusted foundations, shared understanding, and governance, that allow AI to operate safely and at scale. Zero Gravity Telco Architecture aligns closely with the principles behind TM Forum’s AI-Native Open Digital Architecture and highlights a reality the industry can no longer ignore: AI doesn’t move from pilot to production without trust.”
Antony Savvas