Deutsche Telekom (DT) and Orange want more telcos to join the Sylva Project, arguing that isolated, proprietary cloud-native stacks are fragmenting the ecosystem and making vendor diversity harder.
Philippe Ensarguet of Orange and Kai Steuernagel of DT used a Mobile Europe webinar to press the case for a common telco cloud approach, and both positions tie Sylva to Kubernetes-based reference implementation and AI-ready integration for telco and edge workloads.
DT and Orange push wider Sylva participation
Executives from Deutsche Telekom and Orange said more telco peers should get involved in the Sylva Project. Philippe Ensarguet, VP software engineering at Orange and a Sylva champion, said telcos need to stop building proprietary, cloud-native stacks in isolation because that fragments the ecosystem and makes vendor diversity harder.
Ensarguet also said he believes the era of the not invited here approach in the telco cloud has to end. Kai Steuernagel, VP cloud technology at Deutsche Telekom, urged telcos to get engaged in Sylva, and said the motivation for deploying a horizontal telco cloud is clear: it would increase agility, quality and resilience of both infrastructure and processes.
Sylva as an open, common framework
The Sylva Project is a Linux Foundation open source initiative aiming to create a common approach to the telco cloud. Ensarguet and Steuernagel represent their respective companies on the Sylva governing board and regularly provide updates on the project.
Light Reading also framed Sylvas intended outcome as reducing fragmentation of the cloud infrastructure layer for telecom and edge services through a common cloud software framework and an adjacent reference implementation.
For dates and early traction, the project was officially launched in November 2022. Light Reading said that launch involved an agreement signed by Deutsche Telekom and Orange as well as Telecom Italia, Telefnica, Vodafone, Ericsson and Nokia.
What Sylva provides: Kubernetes, GitOps and AI integration
Ensarguet said Sylva provides a reference implementation of a telco cloud platform built on Kubernetes, with GitOps as the automation background, and with security and observability as first-class citizens rather than add-ons.
He also positioned Orange Telco Cloud (OTC) as the downstream project of the upstream Sylva project, with the support of industrial partners. Ensarguet said the role of Sylva is to act as an integration substrate targeting modern pieces of infrastructure around 5G technology and other IT-related network services moving in that direction.
On AI specifically, Ensarguet said Sylva proponents are convinced that the Sylva core they designed and implemented is a perfect substrate for integrating components to bring AI capabilities to the most critical network workloads of the telco cloud.
Traction and targets: live nodes and 2030 plans
Ensarguet said there are more than 300 nodes live supporting network functions, and said the organization is speeding up very quickly, with plans for several thousand nodes by 2030.
A December 2025 Sylva update cited by Light Reading said ten countries were running the Sylva stack as telco cloud in live networks, and said the number of contributing organizations had risen to 36. The same update said 22 network functions had been validated on Sylva.
Steuernagel added that telcos should stop thinking in network generations and start thinking of continuous improvement of network functions, at least for core services. He also said telcos should stop thinking of AI as something that helps analyze log files and instead treat AI as becoming an integral part of network functions applications in the next couple of years.
Ensarguet said it is super important to start treating real policy-governed AI assisted automation as a first-class engineering discipline, not as an IT project.