LIVE FROM MWC21 BARCELONA: Outspoken TelcoDR CEO Danielle Royston (pictured) urged operators to embrace public cloud infrastructure, claiming revenue and competition benefits while writing-off detractors in the vendor space as dinosaurs.

During Tuesday’s first keynote, the self-proclaimed public cloud evangelist outlined her belief adoption would offer an opportunity to undercut rivals, introduce new services and open fresh revenue streams including around digital identity.

“You’ll definitely have the Amdocs, Ericsson, IBM dinosaurs talking your ears off about how it [public cloud-based infrastructure] won’t work with their excuses of privacy, security, latency, lock-in,” she added. “But not me, I say go all in. If you use the public cloud the right way it’s an amazing technology.”

Pointing to examples of deals operators have already made with the big cloud players including US operator Dish Network, she outlined a drive to the new infrastructure alongside the trend towards open RAN.

The two in combination, she added, would allow operators to “offer customers more bandwidth at a cheaper price and improve your margins”.

In terms of new offerings, Royston made the case for new cloud-based employee applications to be sold to enterprises, while use of digital identity assets in consumer “super-apps” opened new revenue streams she estimated to be a trillion dollar opportunity.