Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
We are in Copenhagen for DTW 24 Ignite the TM Forum's annual event. I'm here with Danielle Rios Royston, better known as TelcoDR. But she's also the acting CEO of to Totogi. Danielle, here we are on the swings

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (00:22):
At Ignite. We're the swings.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:23):
We are the youngest swingers in town officially.

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (00:26):
I know for sure the

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:27):
Only swingers currently, and

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (00:29):
That's why, you know Copenhagen's famous for Legos, right? Denmark, the home of Legos. And what a better place to meet than on the swings.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:36):
Absolutely. So it's the first day here at the show and already there's a big focus on the TM forum's, ODA, the open digital architecture and the associated open APIs. Now Toto is one of the companies that's on the leaderboard for having certified open APIs and has been for a while. What do you think of ODA in general? How is that adoption going? How good is it for the industry?

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (01:04):
Yeah, I think we're still early days. We've seen a big uptick in adoption I think over the last probably three or four years, which is amazing. And the industry needs that interoperability. I mean, most telcos don't have one single vendor in their environment. DR think Lester Thomas was on a podcast a few years ago saying in the 24 opcos, each OPCO has 180 BSS systems installed, right? And I mean, that's like 4,000 that they're managing across their entire ecosystem. So absolutely these systems need to work together. They need to be interchangeable. And I think the ODA work and the open APIs are super key to that. But as you mentioned, we're on the leader board with 44. We feel like we jumped, started the revolution in the openness, but when we started to get into it, we realized that there was a little bit of a problem.

(01:57):
And that's because of computer science Underlying in all of these vendor systems is a data structure. And every data structure is a little bit different. And even though the open APIs really abstract the data structure and let the any coder make two systems work together, there's some semantical meaning in each of the data structures, each of the data types that even when we do switch out vendors, you still have to make sure everything still works together. And so while I think the ODA is a really, really great start and a necessary start, we still have some work to do to make this all work together and build a dream and the vision that TM Forum is trying to do.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:36):
So what you're saying is that ODA is a good start, but this industry needs a common data language and platform and that's something it doesn't have

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (02:46):
Right now. Yeah, I really do think that, and that's a little bit about what Totos BSS Magic is all about. We start by harmonizing data structures.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:54):
So BSS magic, this is something that we've talked about before in which you showed at M WC 24 and you are showing again here now.

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (03:03):
Yeah, we're up in the AWS stand. We have a partner kiosk there where people can see how we've been advancing BSS magic. You're right, I debuted at MWC 24. We had that really awesome avatar, which is really showing the beginning of where I think user interfaces are going over the next five to 10 years, which is zero ui. Apple just announced their Apple intelligence swinging on ai, which is really going to change how subscribers are interacting with the mobile phone, right? It's the beginning of that interface becoming invisible. And I think the same thing's going to happen at Enterprise Software and AI is really going to enable that. And so it begins with harmonizing the data structures so that now there is a system that AI that has a common language across Bill Lester Thomas at Vodafone Common language across your 180 vendors. And now there's one place where you have access to all the data and you can do whatever you want.

(04:03):
You can add a screen, you can add a field, you can add functionality, you can talk to it to solve a ticket. You can talk to it as a business executive and say, Hey, how do I make my business better? What are my best plans? How do I grow my subscribers? And that's what the true business value of A BSS is all about, is really extracting that business. It's not really about the data entry, that's an important part, but really getting those key business value insights so you can make your business grow and be better.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:30):
So I mean, how big do you think generative AI can be for the telecom sector? And also when people think of gen ai, they think of the public systems where you go on and ask a question prompt and the result might be a little old or a little dated or a little mixed up. But what can gen AI tools do for telecom? Well

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (04:55):
Just look at what's happened in the last 18 months, right? GPT-4 came out then 4.0, we've had clogged two and ANTHROPICS three come out. We expect five to come out in the summer. These systems are not getting incrementally better. They're getting a hundred times better with each evolution. So it's really just going to go vertical. And so yes, we're struggling with hallucinations or bad answers, but things like Perplexity Pro, which is this great new search tool that will give you the sources, right? I mean it's just massively improving. And so togi, Wayne Gretzky, the hockey great used to say skate to where the puck is going to be. And so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to skate to where it's going to be and we're building our tools in a way where they are LLM agnostic. We can switch out the LLM if a new one comes out, or even Elon Musk's new version, I think he's calling X AI comes out that's cheaper and faster and better.

(05:58):
We have the ability to switch out the LLM and keep going. The code generation capability of the AI is really the key here because we spend billions of dollars in the industry on CRS that take time. You have to have a good idea six months in advance in Telco to roll it out and get the service activated. But with the code generation capabilities of AI now we'll be able, I mean business people will be able to generate the functionality that they need and experiment much more rapidly. And I think that's what the ODA is really promoting that agility. I think when you go to MWC, it's all about getting things to market much more quickly. The biggest problem we have in the industry is generating more revenue. And so I think that rapid experimentation and smaller trucks so that we can get the data, does this work, and then keep going or toss it and try again, that we need to get to the speed of the tech industry, not Telco.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:58):
Now. So Togi was in the news recently. You won a deal at Zane Sudan and you replaced an existing system in a very short amount of time, just 18 days, I believe 18 days. Tell us a little bit about that. That's quite phenomenal. No,

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (07:17):
No. We were actually late. The team asked us to do it in two weeks, and this was in the middle of MWC. Literally we talked at MWC and my cool super futuristic booth. And in the back I had people literally coding and trying to get Zane up and running. There's been a lot of humanitarian crisises in the news. Sedan kind of gets lost. I think it's regarded as one of the biggest humanitarian crises in the world. And so electricity was cut to their two data centers just dead. No activity happened at MTN as well. And so, I mean this is the way people send money. This is the way people communicate safe passage, keep in touch with loved ones. And so it was very important to restore connectivity to that country. So I think Zane was very open-minded in terms of, Hey, let's cut the list short on what we need to move.

(08:19):
There was no electricity, so it was very difficult to migrate the latest state of the incumbents charger. But yeah, we got it up in 18 days. They wanted it in two weeks. They needed a couple extra days, but 18 days, I mean typically a charger of this size that's supporting 20 plus million subs, you're looking at at least, I mean six months would be considered fast and a year is about normal. And so I think the only vendor that could have done this was a public cloud vendor, a public cloud charger, like to Toki. And so they've just been amazed that team, the Zane team, amazing people, just so resilient, so positive. And now they're starting to see the capabilities that the to Toki charger has the ability to roll in features without a blip, adding AI capabilities for hyper-personalization. And so they were losing about 10 to 12 million a week and now they are growing again and they're so happy and we're so happy to partner with them. And it's been amazing.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (09:20):
And just very quickly, so it's not running in Zane's own data centers, it's running in a

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (09:24):
Popul WS region. Okay. Legit, right? I mean just it's like a plug your network into to Togi and we're up and running and so it's not running old school. My dream. It's everything I've been talking about. Well,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (09:41):
You have been talking about public cloud for quite some time and of course recently as well. So Zane Sudan, that's in Africa, but in Europe, in Germany, Telefonica, Deutschland, Telefonica, Germany, they announced that they were going to run their 5G core, at least part of it, working with Nokia on AWS. Is this the shape of things to come, do you think?

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (10:05):
I think it is. I've been talking about this for years and I mean, sure we had the dish story, but I think people were like, oh, that's Greenfield, whatever. This is a Brownfield tier one in a major market. I think Malik Rao, CTO of Telefonica, Germany, it's going big here. I think all eyes are on this. I think what you're going to see here is lower cost and more agility. I saw that Erickson's not going down with the fight. They signed a contract extension as they would. They're like, Hey, just a second. Not so fast. And so it's going to be a really interesting fight developments. But yes, this is the dream. This is what I've been talking.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:48):
Tanon is hedging. Its bets basically isn't to see how it goes. Yeah,

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (10:51):
I mean I think they're moving a few million onto the cloud. Malik's obviously going to be cautious to start, but this is big. I mean, this is exactly what I've been talking about. I think this is the future of networks. I think the friend or faux debate is ending. They're for enemies. You need them. I think the telcos just, they need that capability, they need that scale. So many other things that we need to focus on that we just need to give up the infrastructure fight and just say, Hey, we're not any less of a carrier if we're not managing the infrastructure, let's go build a great network, have a great experience, focus on our subscribers and actually grow our revenue. So there is a six G.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:35):
Well, any way to grow revenues,

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (11:37):
It's a good way. Yeah, absolute.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:39):
Yeah. Danielle, great to towards you again. Have a good show. Enjoy the swings and everything else that DTW 24 offers, and we'll talk again soon, I'm sure.

Danielle Rios Royston, Totogi (11:51):
Yeah, it's always great to see you. Thanks so much.