By StarHub Dr. Volkan Sevindik, Red Hat Anand Venkat, Wilson Toh
Editor’s Note: This article is part of TechArena Executive Insights, a curated series featuring perspectives from industry leaders across Africa’s digital economy. The views expressed are those of the author.
The clock is ticking for communications service providers (CSPs). To survive in the telecommunications (telco) industry, every CSP should consider making steps to transition to a “techco” model, where CSPs don’t just provide connectivity but also software and platform innovation.
StarHub, a leading Singapore CSP, has been driving its own telco-to-techco transformation for the past three years by emphasising open source innovation, providing the backbone for polycloud agility and driving towards a future state as a trusted service provider (TSP).
Polycloud agility: The engine for real-time OpEx and QoE optimisation
In the past, telcos were primarily faced with cost-driven decisions about what workloads ran on premise versus what ran in the public cloud. But for a techco evolution, CSPs like StarHub need to weigh costs with what delivers the best user experience, and what combination of compute, cloud, and platform deliver this balance.
Enter polycloud.
Polycloud is more than just using multiple public clouds. Its applications and workloads run across different cloud environments with the built-in intelligence to select the right place for the right workload at the right time. StarHub sees this creating deeper AI-readiness, especially for agentic AI frameworks that can work across every environment and cloud provider.
StarHub envisions an underlying architecture that can, in real-time, select the best environment to run diverse workloads for their consumer and business clients. This could be moving low latency, demanding workloads to the edge, shifting data analytics heavy apps to a public cloud, or taking compliance-driven apps to a private cloud.
This polycloud foundation helps to fuel the next-level of platform security as AI workloads emerge by assessing risks throughout the model lifecycle. By applying the security principles of cloud-native supply chains to AI applications, StarHub can better protect production AI models from development to deployment. This also helps build fully autonomous, resilient networks, which helps reduce operational costs while delivering a quality user experience across all of StarHub’s businesses.
From CSP to TSP: The power of trust and identity
As an operator of Critical Information Infrastructure (CII) in Singapore, StarHub’s data sovereignty is paramount. Their network produces significant volumes of sensitive network and security data daily, which must be stored, processed, and made available to government authorities for forensic and threat management purposes. Not to mention, these capabilities must simultaneously adhere to the strictest national data governance and security policies.
To build the trust and transparency demanded by these operations, StarHub employs an open, democratised, and collaborative approach. Common data access and processing standards are applied across the company, and community engagement happens frequently to keep pace with emerging trends in open source security and privacy.
The trust placed in StarHub is highlighted by a subset of StarHub’s customers that require local, on-premise computing. StarHub meets their needs by deploying directly in customer datacenters, using its platform to manage and monitor services locally to deliver high levels of service assurance, orchestration, and cluster automation.
The transition from a telco to a techco, and, then, to a TSS, is no longer optional but a strategic imperative in the CSP industry. StarHub shows that tangible transformation starts by fitting the right workload to the right environment and building a trusted digital reputation, all built on the back of open source innovation.
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