The new offer – Azure for Operators – is said to “provide operators with the agility they need to rapidly innovate and experiment with new 5G services on a programmable network.”

There are a lot of moving parts here and the story will evolve, so we’ll keep covering it. Microsoft continues to move from enterprise cloud specialist to credible telco cloud leader in the eyes of network operators. The company’s cloud and IT competitors all want a piece of the ongoing 5G buildout and the IoT explosion that some are expecting to follow shortly thereafter.