Cloud puffs

In the kind of deal that hyperscalers really like, Microsoft and Vodafone said in mid-January that they had agreed on a decade-long deal worth $1.5 billion. It’s a multifaceted tie-up, which will see the telco shut many of its datacentres in Europe, and migrate its data to virtual ones in Azure. It will, however, keep running its core network workloads on its own infrastructure.

On the other side of the ledger, Microsoft will use Vodafone’s fixed and mobile services. Both companies were keen to talk up the GenAI part of the deal, which they said will “transform the customer experience”. This will mean using Azure’s OpenAI to serve up “frictionless, real-time, proactive and hypersonalised experiences across all Vodafone’s customer touchpoints”. There will, of course, be the requisite AI assistant with an adorable name, in this case “TOBi”, which will be available in 13 countries. The telco’s employees will also get to use Copilot.