Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hi, Tony Poulos here and today I have the pleasure of meeting with Carsten Rasmussen, who is the VP of Applications, Architecture, IT Enablement at TDC Net right here in Copenhagen and with me also, Gabriele Di Piazza, who is the VP of Product and Partners at Blue Planet, a division of Ciena. Welcome gentlemen. Thank you. Welcome. Let me start with Carsten and could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role and what TDC Net does?

Carsten Rasmussen, TDC Net (00:31):
And as you mentioned, it's a very long title that I have and there's a little bit of history to that because when I was brought into TDC Net a couple of years ago, that was with the IT enablement. So effectively building the new IT to support our large scale business transformation. We're very much focused on making this a business transformation that therefore I'm not head of IT transformation, I'm head of IT enablement. So to enable the business transformation. And then during the time I was then also given the role to take responsibility for all the IT application development and maintenance, all the existing applications also. So now I need to put in place the new and I also need to make sure that we take good care of the existing applications and eventually clean up the, well the legacy mess that I'm sure everyone else can also recognize that they have.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (01:18):
And you can still sleep at night, can you?

Carsten Rasmussen, TDC Net (01:20):
Well, yes, now it's a good daytime job. I would say quite busy. And the good thing is then that there's only one throw to joke. That's me, I need to fix it.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (01:32):
And about TDC Net, for those that don't know the company.

Carsten Rasmussen, TDC Net (01:35):
Yeah, so you can say our story goes back 140 years ago we started with the first copper line in Copenhagen. We connected that and that means, and then we've had a long history of merging telcos and acquisitions like most incumbents. So effectively we became the incumbent telco. So covering the whole nation initially with Carbo we moved into mobile. We have the best mobile network in the country and I would even say we probably have one of the best mobile networks in Europe. It's easy because the country's a bit flat. But anyway. And then a few years ago, or it's actually now five years ago, the company or the owners decided to split the company in in a service provider part and in a network provider part. So an infrastructure provider and TDC Net is the infrastructure provider part. So we run the network, we don't have the end customers as our customers, we have the service providers in the Danish market as our customers. So my focus is then therefore to make sure that our business is supported by the best IT to run a very efficient operations of the network and supporting the service providers.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:52):
And Gabriele, tell us about your role at Blue Planet.

Gabriele Di Piazza, Blue Planet (02:56):
Yes, I head up the product management function at Blue Planet. We actually consolidated product management partners and also the ai, artificial intelligence and data scientists in same group, which is core to most of the messaging that you hear around these days. And as you know, Blue Planet is a division of Ciena. We provide intelligent automation in the operational support system space, so including inventory and they will be talking about but also orchestration and service assurance as well.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (03:29):
So Carsten, you were here at DTW to talk about TDC's transformation program. Can you tell us about your objectives and how the transformation is actually going?

Carsten Rasmussen, TDC Net (03:39):
Yeah, absolutely, I can do that. We talked a bit about already that 140 years of history building, a lot of legacy and like many companies, we haven't been that good at cleaning up the legacy. So we have a lot of siloed IT systems. We have a lot of siloed network and that just means that we have a lot of manual processes, a lot of compensation, a lot of complexity in the way that we run our business from an operational perspective. So when I came in and joined the team, one of the things that we had a look at was what is it that we need? What do we need to do to be able to support the business in a better way? To streamline the processes and to increase the automation of what we are doing, both in terms of when we do the fulfillment.

(04:27):
So when we take in orders and we activate new fiber connections, that's a very big thing now that we are, I mean like many others, we are rolling out fiber, we are building fiber very fast in the country. And I mean I don't know how it is in other places. I'm sure it's very much the same as here that I mean it'ss a complicated process to roll out fiber. And I still remember one of the first things that happened was one of my friends sent me a picture of the fiber rolled out outside the building and said, can you fix this then? So this is a very good example of processes that are just complicated and difficult. Same with our assurance processes when things go wrong, lots of manual work. So what we are doing is we are then looking at the processes we looked at, what kind of IT applications should we consolidate on, simplify on in order to be able to build a new and more automated and targeted and best for best fit for the future platform. And that is what we're doing now focused on the OSS.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:31):
That's everybody's goal. I know, but Gabriele, could you tell me, when you talk to service providers like TDC Net, what do you see are the challenges that they need to overcome during their transformations? And there are many challenges.

Gabriele Di Piazza, Blue Planet (05:44):
Yes, I think I've never seen so much pressure as now in these markets. Carsten mentioned transformation, but transformation also means changing, rethinking other processes, looking at the overall cost, both OpEx and CapEx. But I see that, I find there's a lot of attention right now in doing things these things, right? In fact, I say that there's a positive in the negative pressure, yes, but this pressure, and there's always been pressure in the telecoms industry, I think this is stimulating a different thinking. It's actually stimulating the fact that you cannot just incrementally do change, but you need to rethink some of the core systems core process as well. We've seen some customers where they've been asked to have some significant reduction in cost in provide optimization and you don't achieve that just by doing some incremental thinking and so forth. So that's actually, I think it's a positive aspect because it's finally creating an environment of modernizing some of these many silo system, which has been there for a while.

Carsten Rasmussen, TDC Net (07:08):
Absolutely.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (07:09):
Carsten, how has Blue Planet assisting and supporting TDC Net's transformation and what role does Blue Planet inventory play in this transformation? Because not many people talk about inventory these days.

Carsten Rasmussen, TDC Net (07:20):
No, that's true and that's one of the decisions that we made very early that we could see that one of the root causes of the challenges that we have in our business is that we don't have full control of our inventory. We don't have a single place where we can go and see a full overview of our network and our services and that is effectively what Blue Planet is helping us with. So we are really starting from the bottom here, we're building the foundation because in my view, we cannot really automate, we cannot reach the level of autonomous networks without having a very clear and single source of truth for the network information. And that's key with Blue Planet. And I'm also happy to say that we actually already went live with the first release with Blue Planet that happened already Monday morning here. So that was a little bit of a crossing the fingers in the morning, a little bit nervousness around that, but I was so happy to see some of the, we're using SY as a transformation partner and I met some of the colleagues in the corridor and they looked awfully relaxed and I had to ask them, so how are things going?

(08:26):
Yeah, we were ready and nothing happened, so now we're going for a coffee. So fingers crossed we have first go live in place with Blue Planet.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (08:36):
And You don't hear that very often.

Carsten Rasmussen, TDC Net (08:38):
No, no, no. I mean we still have a lot of work to do, so I'm still cautiously optimistic, but starting on the right foot. Absolutely.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (08:48):
But Gabriele, from your perspective at Blue Planet, what are the best practices you see at TDC Net and other customers adopting at the moment?

Gabriele Di Piazza, Blue Planet (08:56):
Yes, first of all, I'm glad to hear thanks for bringing that up. We like to make Carsten sleep good at night. As you said before, what I really like about the approach here, we started our journey maybe a little bit over eight, nine months ago, and I think there was very clear set of objectives and even avoiding some confusion sometimes the systems IT systems and operational support system and business support systems in Telco, they all touch each other. Customer and team always being very close. This is the scope and these are the interfaces that we need to put in place and that creates initial clarity. Second aspect is, and this is I have to say TDC probably more advanced in the thinking than other customers. They're really trying to limit the amount of customization to the products. And I see the long-term benefit of this because this provides you a much better supportability.

(10:06):
And that's something that surprised me because you took me through the processes of if you even want to implement a specific change or we need to go through a very stringent type of change request. So I think that is the best practice. And for me, the other thing I have to say is that we are working with TDC, but we also working with Infosys as a systems integrator, which is actually great as Blue Planet, we provide software platform, but keeping this relationship, this three-way relationship very close where we can constantly update and get input and feedback from TDC about product roadmap. At the same time keeping our partner assist integrator in developing understanding the progress. So these three things, sometimes there's an hospital who's responsible for what has been a cross relationship.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (11:04):
That could be a very great challenge in some implementations, I know. Look, Carsten, final question for you. Is there anything you learned that you weren't expecting? I'm sure there was. And are there any insights you'd like to share with your peers who are considering or are in the middle of their transformation?

Carsten Rasmussen, TDC Net (11:19):
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things is, I mean now I started saying that we are building a foundation here, but of course we also have a vision about where we want to go with this. We want to go autonomous and we want to leverage ai. But what I've been really, I mean everyone talks about ai, but I've been really surprised about is how fast that moves right now. So when we had a roadmap update with Gabriele and the team earlier this week, and we can just see leapfrog ahead on new capabilities in the product, and I mean we are running a little bit behind that right now because we're still working on building the foundation. And that has been surprising for me to see how fast that moves. It gives us obviously also some opportunities in leveraging that going forward. But that is really something that has been a bit of a surprise to me.

(12:12):
I know that it's moving, but that it's moving that fast. On the other hand, what I would then say is building on that is stay close to your software vendors. That is what we are doing. We are really following the roadmaps and that is also the way that we can stay within, as Gabriele was also mentioning, using the products out of the box, not doing the customization. So we keep interacting with all the software vendors, both with Blue Planet, but also others to make sure that we stay on the roadmap and that we stay close to that.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (12:44):
So the two pieces of advice definitely stay on the roadmap, avoid diversions. Absolutely. And you've got to include AI in your planning now. For sure. Great advice. Thank you very much Carsten and Gabriele, thank you so much for being with me today.

Carsten Rasmussen, TDC Net (12:56):
Thank you.

Gabriele Di Piazza, Blue Planet (12:57):
Thank you.