Telenor and Google may have curbed their enthusiasm for one another

Having established the partnership back in late 2021, the Norwegian incumbent is now preparing to launch a cloud-native data and analytics orchestration platform called Nova, powered by Google Cloud's BigQuery analytics solution.

The platform will integrate Google's Vertex AI, giving Telenor the means to develop generative AI (GenAI) applications that can leverage any one of 150 compatible foundation models, including Google's Gemini large language model (LLM), of course.

On top of that, Telenor will also avail itself of Google Cloud's business insights solution, Looker, providing it with the tools to interact with – and hopefully make sense of – all the data that Nova will collect and analyse.

Once up and running, Telenor says Nova will give it the means to provide what it calls "hyper-personalised" customer experiences, as well as optimise network operations throughout its Nordic footprint.

In addition to Nova, Telenor seemingly wants to collect, analyse and glean more insights from every scrap of data it holds.

To that end, it will also make use of Google Cloud's various real-time data collection tools – Dataflow, Data Fusion, Pub/Sub, Dataform and Dataplex. This will enable Telenor to generate deep analytical insights from terabytes of data in minutes rather than days, cutting development time for new products and initiatives.

It's good to see a bit more meat on the bones of Telenor and Google Cloud's tie-up, but a quick side-by-side comparison between this update and the 2021 announcement raises questions about whether the partnership is going according to plan.

A lot of bases were covered when the deal was first announced almost three years ago, and modernising Telenor's IT systems with Google Cloud's data and analytics solutions was just one of them.

The original announcement contained a pledge to collaborate on horizontal and vertical services through joint go-to-market activities, spinning up new revenue streams. But there's no mention of that in the update.

Similarly they also said they would enhance Telenor's existing and future products, and develop new industry solutions, which may or may not include next generation virtual network functions and edge compute capabilities, with a focus on 5G and IoT. The original word salad was sufficiently ambiguous that this might be applicable to the new announcement, but it's not entirely clear.

Telenor also said in 2021 it would leverage Google Cloud to offer digital transformation services and related solutions to business customers, with the ultimate aim being to "empower societies."

This part of the original partnership is also conspicuously absent from the update.

Judging by this announcement, there is either more to come from Telenor and Google, or they have decided – or been forced – to considerably narrow their focus.