Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:24):
Welcome back to the Digital Support Systems Summit, part of our DSP Leaders Coverage and Time. Now for our live q and a show, I'm Guy Daniels and this is the first of two q and a shows. We have another one tomorrow. At the same time, it's your chance to ask questions on the future of OSS and BSS solutions for telcos and especially their integration with cloud services. Now, earlier today we held a panel discussion that investigated next generation OSS and BSS solutions. We have already received a number of questions from you, but if you haven't yet sent in one, then please do so now using the q and a form on the website. Well, let's now meet our guests who have all returned to help answer your questions. And joining us live on the program today are Beth Cohn, SDN Network product Strategy for Verizon Business Group.

(01:30)
Soumava Dutta, Principal Enterprise Architect Telecom Systems Business Dell Technologies, and John Abraham, Principal Analyst with Appledore Research. Hello everyone. It's good to see you all again. Thanks for coming back and joining us. Let's get straight to our first audience question for today and the viewer asks, legacy O-S-S-B-S-S systems can have lifetimes of up to 25 years or more. A rip and replace is therefore not realistic. It's way too complex and challenging. Do next gen DSS vendors understand this problem and what is the best way to introduce new cloud-based tech that interoperates with legacy? Well Beth, perhaps we can start by going across to you for your thoughts as an operator on this.

Beth Cohen, Verizon (02:24):
More than happy to talk about that. It is very difficult and 25 years is probably a short time. I've interacted with systems that I know that the company has had for closer to 30 or 40 years. So what ends up happening is we just layer things on top of things and I think some of the cloud-based operators are pretty good at it and the majority are not very good at it because I think that they don't live the day-to-Day operational nightmare of the integration of the systems that's needed and the delicate balance of developing new features and adding them in and how much the fundamental decisions about how the underlying systems were designed. It's not so much the applications, it's really about the databases and how the databases were designed. And some of them, or many of them, probably all of them, have biases about how they approach the records and what the elements of those records mean.

(03:43)
And as telecom has changed over time, it has been difficult to make those changes. And I'll use as an example, virtualization virtualized data centers. The whole concept of a virtualized router is not something that's built into many of the older databases because it just didn't exist. So the concept that a customer's router might not actually be at the physical location is kind of a foreign concept. And so we have to work around those fundamental, I wouldn't even say they're flaws, I would say they're just biases and these newer systems have to take that into account and I'd say some of them do, some of them don't. So we've had really mixed results. I think the ones that are more focused on the overlay and the APIs I think are more successful at integrating with the older systems because you have to make the assumption that the telecoms are not going to rip out their databases because those are the most expensive part of the system and the least affecting the bottom line if you take it out and replace it.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:05):
Great, thanks Beth. That's very interesting. So possibly a mixed bag so far, John, lemme come across to you. Do you see similar things from your perspective?

John Abraham, Appledore Research (05:17):
Yes. So what I'll say guy is that I mostly agree with what be just said and in my view, most operators do not consider rapid replace as a viable option to transform their deep rooted, well entrenched systems, especially ones that have been deployed to work three decades ago, that's just considered to be way too expensive and too risky a proposition. So how do they do that? Well, there are a couple of options. One is to try and look at these different systems. Most of them are dispared silos without much interoperation or interoperability. And to try and attack it function by function and try and replace the older monolithic frameworks with something that's more modern, something that's microservices and cloud native compliant and so on. Now, a couple of caveats there. You usually that involves the incumbent vendor leading that initiative. So if the operator is actually thinking about bringing in an all new vendor, that often multiplies the risk.

(06:25)
The other caveat is one expectation of an exercise like this is that the infrastructure or the operations framework becomes more fungible, more compostable so that it can theoretically at least swap in and swap out. I don't think that's actually within the achievable limits yet. So there's still a lot of work to do. And the reason for that is even when you, at least so far for the deployments we have seen and even when an operator actually shifts from a monolithic framework to one that is microservices oriented, it still requires a lot of custom interfaces, especially to interact with silos that might be still in use in sub Conor of the organization. So that is still a lot of work to be done there and I think we see more and more operators really wondering whether there is actually some other way to get to a complete transformation of their underlying support systems.

(07:27)
And I'll just talk about two other approaches might be a bit left-sided and that is parallel brands and parallel stacks. Parallel brands is essentially what we are seeing now with many leading MNOs trying to launch all new brands usually as a sub-brand, mostly as an MBNO that is to begin with targeted at specific niches, maybe college going kids or something like that or some kind of a football team fans or something like that. And then try and it's actually an experimentation to try and see how that takes off. And for that particular initiative, what they usually do is they don't try and rely on the legacy stacks, they try and bring an all new stack and that gives them an opportunity to explore how different the operations are running of an all new stack. How does that impact their operations metrics, their customer experience, how does that impact their margins?

(08:26)
And so on the other approach parallel stacks and that's way more common. That's when operators consider stacking a cell rolling out all new stacks for niche use cases. And this is usually when the operators want to experiment in some segment that is not core to their business like iot. What they do is they buy and deploy it as a greenfield stack and then over a period of time they try and scale it by adding more lines of business all to that particular stack and they experiment and see where that is going. So I think back to the point Beth made, some of the legacy systems are not designed to actually evolve and support modern use cases. So I think we might need something quite innovative, but left field like a PAL brand or a panel stack.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (09:19):
Great, thanks for those alternative ideas there John. We might develop those in a future program. Well worth exploring more. Soumava, would you like to come in on this point raised by our viewer there about you are our vendor representative on the panel today. I guess you're going to say yes, you understand the needs of the telcos with next generation and systems, but it is complicated, isn't it when you're faced with entrenched legacy silos and equipment.

Soumava Dutta, Dell Technologies (09:49):
I totally agree with what Beth and John came up with and what they set the points that they set forth. I just wanted to add or build two things on top of it. The legacy already has a database and like Beth said, it's the biggest chunk where CSPs are layering on top of it year on year and it has grown to such huge lengths that it caused arm and a leg or even more than that to even replace it. So CSPs just cannot take a bulldozer and just crash it all out. They need to take a scalpel approach and take chunks of it. Now, based on that approach, we can see an hybrid option coming into the picture. Now what do we mean by this hybrid option? It's leveraging a hybrid model between both where the data resides on the cloud or on premise. It's not just extracting the data, it becomes like part of the data, but you have a middleware return on top of it which gives you that option, which gives you, builds that flexibility so that you can come to the newer stack, newer scales that helps you grow. Next piece is the API LED connectivity and that's how the modern systems are getting built and that's how you talk to someone which actually don't want to talk to you, but at least will give you a placeholder to have a communication between the old systems and the new systems which are coming up.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:28):
Great, thanks Soumava. I like the hybrid approach there. Beth, do you want to come in quickly to give us some additional comments here?

Beth Cohen, Verizon (11:37):
I do. Soumava brought up a point about the hybrid stack and the fact is is telcos are already experiencing that because of mergers and acquisitions over time. So I know that Verizon has several stacks that have come in from various mergers that have happened over time, and so we have already experienced that need for a bridge and I can tell you it is extremely difficult. We are struggling with that every day.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:16):
Great, thanks very much Beth. It's interesting you've mentioned that because we've just had a question in the past few seconds about the impact of mergers on OSS and BSS. We may not get range of answering that today, so we will look at that for tomorrow. Also to our viewers, any questions we don't get to answer today, we will consider them for tomorrow so they're not wasted. Right. Let's move on quickly to our next question and our viewer asks, do telcos now have a different set of vendor selection criteria when they look at new digital OSS and BSS solutions? How have the requirements changed over the past few years? John, I wonder if we could maybe pop to you for this one and with your tracking and insights into the wider picture here, what are you seeing changing over the past few years?

John Abraham, Appledore Research (13:09):
Well, first step, let me point out that geopolitical factors still exclude some vendors from participating in certain type of transformation deals. That is, I suspect that's well understood and that can very far by region, by region. And the second factor maybe worth calling out before we get into it is that for large full stack transformation, especially for a larger or mid-size telco, we still see the incumbent here what our large tier two vendors considered ahead of the rest of the pack. And that's mainly the way. So you can almost say that that's not changed too much. What has changed in some of those engagements is that operators want someone who can even take care of the professional services side of things. And again, it's not new per se, it's not a new trend per se, but it's more about operators wanting toengage less with someone like a Prime SI that just brings together different solutions and then stitches us up together in a way that the operator wants, that the operations team expect.

(14:19)
Operators understand that is far too much risk having too many actors in the mix and it would be better if one vendor who can offer the product and the services together can stitch it all up and serve the final solution as a full stack solution. But going beyond that, I think where there has been a lot of interesting activity is how operators engage with a really small vendor. So if you go back a few years, there was a time when operators of a certain size would not even consider really small vendors. I've heard of stories where certain vendors actually had to show their cashflow previous year before they would even be let through the gates even before the assessment team have had a look at their solutions. They had to show all that information and I think the biggest shift came with cloud. So cloud has evened the playing field a lot and the biggest factor in that has been that it has lowered the cost of experimentation.

(15:21)
So in the past there was a lot of sun cost upfront before the telcos would get to a point where they recognize and appreciate and can track the value of some of these projects. And oftentimes that CapEx was significant enough for them to say, well, let's not take a risk here, let's go with the big guys, the established guys. What cloud has done is that has completely neutralized that one factor. It has allowed operators to buy and experiment and if something doesn't work the way they expected, the cost of moving away is insignificant. So that gives them greater confidence to go out and experiment with a number of small vendors. But even in these engagement, let me point out, the big assessment conditions are to look at what is the time to market, what is the time to value, what is the total TCO, what's total cost of operating this and how do you scale, right?

(16:19)
So those factors still matter. Operators continue to assess these things based on a case by case basis, but there is far greater confidence in working with some of the smaller guys. I'll also mentioned that especially for some niche opportunities and when we are talking about a tier two or smaller operator, some of the larger vendors are just not interest. So that also gives more reason for operators to widen the scope of who they're looking at. We have even seen some cases where even for large deployments for really small sub use cases where they want a really small system with a very limited budget, it's impossible to fit in a tier one vendor into that scope. So only option if they have to even make it work is to try an experiment with startups, so to speak. So that's how it is. I'll say one last thing, which probably is a factor in holding back how quickly we see the emergence of startups in telcos and that is a long sales cycle. Startups, especially ones that are exposed to enterprises, they appreciate how quickly the turnaround times are from the time you make a pitch till the time the deal is signed. Whereas for telcos it can take anywhere between 18 to 24 months. So that makes it even more tougher for some of them. But in its favor, I think what is actually changing and maybe we are actually seeing a cross-pollination of executives coming over from the enterprise into senior leadership roles even within Telco, and that's actually bringing in a shift in mentality that's also probably a key driver and why we see more and more of smaller vendors be considered for even important mission critical functions.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (18:12):
Great. Thanks very much John and interesting perspectives. Let's go across and hear from other guests as well. Soumava, let's start with you and then we'll go across to Beth, but Soumava, let's hear from you first.

Soumava Dutta, Dell Technologies (18:24):
Thank you guy. I would like to agree on some points with John make, but typically one point which caught my attention cloud does helps us experiment faster, but it depends much more on the application and how the application is built. If the application is not built with a multi-cloud approach where I can lift and shift it to any place, then it doesn't matter on where the application is hosted, right? So at the end of the day, it depends on which use case I'm driving towards and how I can get a better TCO, even if I drive it on-prem, if I have an hybrid approach or if I don't build my application geared towards specific cloud for all the other points. Like John said, I do agree that experimentation and the way the landscape moves does help us syn getting to this DSS journey much quickly.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (19:26):
Great, thanks Soumava. And Beth, let's come across to you for your thoughts about how this relationship has changed over the past few years.

Beth Cohen, Verizon (19:34):
So I want to pick up on two points. One from John and one from Soumava mentioned about the cloud. I totally agree that the cloud has really opened up things, but multi-cloud is the name of the game, not all the telcos. I know this has been a topic of conversation, but not all the telcos are jumping over to the public cloud. We still have substantial resources and will for the foreseeable future in our own data centers in our own cloud. So multi-cloud and support from multiple platforms is the way to go. I know that I'll put in the plug for anique, which is the open source project under LFN that's working on its reference architectures and reference models for supporting cloud native type workloads for the telecom. But I also want to pick up on some of what John said related to the support of startups.

(20:45)
I think there's a recognition particularly for the large telcos such as Verizon, that we need to support these startups and in fact we have an entire arm of the company that does just that. So we have invested in what we consider promising startups and promising technologies because we recognize that the big r tier one vendors that we work with all the time aren't necessarily the ones that are going to be generating the new ideas. Now obviously it's not uncommon for these startups to be bought by these upstream companies such as Dell, but we do recognize that the startups do need support. And I'll use an example, we were working with a company, they're not a startup anymore, but they were at the time and we asked them to do homologation because we were planning to use them for a global deployment and they really struggled with doing homologation because homologation is not cheap and they were not really ready to go global at the time and we sort of forced them into it because that was what we were planning to do with their product. So it can be synergistic in the sense that if you have the right relationship with the startup, you can really push them to the places where you need to go and often they need to go as well.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (22:29):
That's very interesting. Thanks very much Beth. Thanks everyone for those answers. A lot more questions to get through. So let's look straight away at our next viewer question. And this one is as follows, report suggests that Telco investment in OSS and BSS is outperforming other network areas in an age of cost savings. Why this focus on customer engagement investments as well as automation and orchestration tools? And I think this question refers to a report that came out from an analyst firm around MWC earlier this year. Soumava, let me come across to you for your thoughts on this one, please.

Soumava Dutta, Dell Technologies (23:11):
I totally do agree with the report. That is what I would start with Guy, not only Mason's report, I think ARO came up with their own analysis of similar output with fiscal 2028. I think OSS/BSS subsystems in their digital transformation journey is trying to grow towards around 78 billion in term market revenue spend. So that's a huge lot from where we are today and why the question said why this trend is emerging, if we understand our thought process, we as consumers, if we see that, okay, where we get the best bang for our buck, if I see a customer or provider is going to give us some bundled value, which brings my charges down for the month over month, I would tend to go and ship. So what the operators are doing is they are engaging heavily to ensure that the experience, the customer who is already a part of their ecosystem is having the best of the experience that they can get and they do not look for other offers, they do not shop for other offers if they don't have to, and hence customer engagement becomes paramount. That's reason one. Next pieces, the oss, BSS subsystems, the digital subsystems itself, it helps in operational efficiency like the OSS systems for efficient management of the telecom networks. We are in the era where we are talking about network slices, we are talking about digital gaming platforms and on basis of user subscriptions and how do we achieve that? It's based on this next generation digital subsystems that we can have and that's where the investment needs to go in so that we can enable those use cases. It's all depends on the use cases.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (25:21):
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Soumava. And you're right, I think there were a couple of reports came out about the same time on this subject. John, lemme come across to you next and then we'll hear from Beth. But John, let's hear your thoughts.

John Abraham, Appledore Research (25:33):
I agree with the sentiment here. We just published our last report earlier this year and we also forecast quite a robust healthy growth, well not a 4% CAGR over the next five years in this particular segment. Look, the key takeaway here is that from a network perspective, we are just towards the, at least as far as some of the larger operators are concerned, the end of a major investment cycle. And at the same time that is also growing recognition that for most telcos customer experience is not where it needs to be, especially when you compare that with some of the new OTT experiences. Yeah, it falls well short of that seamless intuitive experience that a customer has grown accustomed to when they engage with other digital native players. So that makes transformation of the customer experience a boat room priority as far as telcos are concerned.

(26:32)
And at the past for most operators it was all about, hey, this helps us reduce costs and it helps us improve the overall experience. But increasingly that is also that it also helps us unlock all new opportunities that in the past was not accessible to us. For example, when it comes to working with enterprises for instance, you need to be able to respond in a certain heated of time timeframe for you to actually continue and win that. And especially when you're talking about large complex orders, multi-site orders, but the traditional way of doing it within most telcos was there to have number of Excel sheets open people actually calling other departments to confirm whether they actually have the assets in place to deliver so and so and so on. Whereas with a completely digital end-to-end stack, especially maybe for the concept to cash flow, you have far more flexibility in responding to that in a matter of minutes or even hours rather than days or weeks.

(27:37)
And that actually make a big difference in your ability to win up these seats. I'll also call out one other thing, which is how impactful some of the customer experience functions can be in reducing cost. I think it was Vodafone when they launched Toby a few years ago, this was pre gen ai. They actually called out one particular sample deployment where they said that having a digital assistant respond to a customer costs them just 5% of what takes an actual agent to respond in the same way. So that is a substantial amount of cost savings also add.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (28:14):
Good point because it's not one or the other, is it? It's definitely both. Thanks very much for that John and Beth, let's hear from you.

Beth Cohen, Verizon (28:20):
So I want to pick up on a number of things that both Soumava said as well as John. So one, I think we're sort of mixing up two things here. Automation drives down costs in many ways. So that's around the cost savings for operations, but digital experience and the experience of the customer, customer experience is also extremely important. And making that translation between the messy tangle of legacy mishmash that we've been talking about underneath and then presenting it to a customer in a seamless way. There's a lot of work that needs to go on behind the scenes to make that happen. And what's important is that I think we've learned a lot over the years from the digital retailers,

(29:19)
The big retailers that have pioneered Amazon, Walmart, target, and all these companies that run huge online e-tail operations and the digital experience that these customers are used to. That's something that our customers are expecting from when they go online to buy a phone system or buy a whatever and that's a consumer experience which is simpler than a business experience. And Ava pointed out those large complex enterprise orders where they might have thousands of sites that need to be delivered with the right stuff. And that's very complex and I know that we've done a lot of work on improving that piece as well because it's a very different customer experience when a customer is ordering thousands of sites or hundreds of sites and they don't necessarily, you can't expect them to know all the equipment that needs to be involved. So we kind of need to do that work for them. So we've done a lot of work around creating network as a service, bundles site-based bundles where customers, they go online and they're given a choice of three bundles which are already pre-integrated. So all the parts that they need are there and they don't need to know the details, they just need to know that this amount of bandwidth for this amount of money is, and you have a choice of three. So that makes it a whole lot easier, but there's a lot of complexity that goes on behind the scenes that makes that happen.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (31:17):
Yeah, indeed. Thank you very much, Beth. Your answers here really lead into our audience poll because we asked our audience a question as we always do, and it's a good time now to check in on this poll for the Digital Support Systems summit. As I say, we always ask a question to our audience during our summits and the question we've been asking this week is, what are the most important requirements do you think for next generation digital support systems? And the real time votes have just appeared to my right hand side here and it's quite interesting of those seven answer choices, the two at the bottom there with quite significant lead on the rest building around AI and a focus on service creation. Now if you have yet to vote, then please do so now because we're going to take a final look at the voting and tally up the votes during tomorrow's live q and a show.

(32:19)
So before we get to our next few question, a question for me and looking at those poll results so far because it's not finished, it's clear that as I mentioned, the most important requirements look to be a focus on revenue generating service creation and ensuring it's built around ai. Those two are leading by quite a wide margin. I'm not surprised by the strong support for ai, very topical, but I am pleasantly surprised by the support for revenue creation over a host of other more operational options we give to our viewers. So very quickly I thought if anyone's got any views here, Beth, have you got any initial thoughts on those results so far from our poll?

Beth Cohen, Verizon (33:01):
I do. So what struck me about that and I answered the poll myself and I did not put those at the top. Again, I was putting, I'm an operator, so I put it in from the operator's perspective and I'm wondering that it might have more to do with the audience than it would, I would look at the audience and who's answering the poll because I'm a little surprised that ai, which is really nascent is so high. And also I noticed that cloud native is also at 40%, which is pretty high as well. So we're really talking about people who are responding with a very much next generation point of view and maybe they're not living the day-to-day reality of dealing with 45-year-old systems.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (33:56):
Good points. Beth. Yeah, you could be onto something there. John, did you want to quickly come in on the initial observation of those results in progress?

John Abraham, Appledore Research (34:07):
Sure Guy, as you pointed out, gen AI is no surprise. I think that's partly because there's a lot of focus at the senior leadership level of telcos to try and translate an AI into value within the organization and the teams are running around trying to look what best way to do that. And that's probably reflected in that survey outcome there. New revenue creation. I think that Kui telling, isn't it? We just spoke about all the different types of transformation, different ways, how it's evolved and so on. And I think from a telco perspective, it's bad news. If the reason, if the only reason or the biggest reason for transformation is just some efficiency gains, there has to be clear, tangible, new revenue opportunities that they can embrace that was not accessible to them previously. That comes out of just having these transformations and there's clearly a big factor there because a lot of monies being bet to transform some of these legacy systems and operators hope that they won't just be talking about how much cost they save, but they'd also have a story about how much money, new money made through that exercise.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (35:18):
Yeah, absolutely. And it'd be interesting to see if the results or the trends change this time tomorrow, but tuning again tomorrow to find out. Okay, let's get back to our actual viewer questions. We've got a few more I'd love to get through. Let's have a look at our next one. Infrastructure management appears to a key driver more so than revenue assurance. For example, are we seeing a renewed interest in network wide support improvements? Beth, could I please come across to you for your thoughts on that? Are we seeing a renewed interest in network-wide support improvements?

Beth Cohen, Verizon (35:56):
Totally, yes. And among other things we're looking at improving the efficiency of the deployment operations end to end billing efficiency. Also, more importantly, I mentioned mergers and acquisitions earlier. Verizon was created as a merger from its beginning 20 years ago. And so we still have systems that were from the previous companies, so we still need to make sure that those systems are smooth and fully integrated with each other and it cannot affect the customer to say, well, this used to be an MCI circuit, this used to be a GT circuit. They don't care, totally don't care. And so we are doing a lot of work around making sure that the customers, it's just a single, it's rising.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (37:07):
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much, Beth. Moving on, I think to another viewer question, and we've already seen in our poll results the importance of ai. This is a question specifically about gen ai. What are the breakthroughs we are expecting from Gen AI for OSS? So what are the breakthroughs that we should expect to see from the implementation of GenAI with regards to OSS? Soumava, could I maybe start with your thoughts on this one?

Soumava Dutta, Dell Technologies (37:40):
Absolutely, guy, and I was intrigued to see that audience is also saying that GENAI is one of the pool positions for this next generation transformation. There are multiple of trends and capabilities which gen AI would bring. And like all of our panelists today have established that the legacy O-S-S-P-S-S system has a ton of data. What gen AI brings is the visualization and analytic capability of that data. And what will that enable us to do? That will enable us to do predictive maintenance. It'll help us analyze those patterns. It'll help us go through that historical data that we have and understand what are the pitfalls, what are the potential failures that I would yet going to hit or going to occur in my network and how my subsystem can help me cater to that more efficiently or even not let it happen. That's one of them.

(38:47)
Secondly is network optimization. AI will help me analyze the traffic patterns and automatically adjust the configuration of the network elements to optimize the performance. It's not only the bandwidth and the OSS system layer would help me achieve that, not only the bandwidth latency, but it'll also ensure the quality of service. And lastly, and most importantly, it's the fault management capabilities. It can quickly help diagon those faults in the network and resolve them, help resolve them. And if we build towards this with AI and the mindset, it helps us. But again, I know we need to have our mindset clear. This is a very new technology we are on and working towards it, there is still some way to go towards it. It's not like we are done as of now, but gen ai where to assess is the future

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (39:52):
Indeed. And thanks for those comments. I like this question because you could ask it in a month's time and the industry has moved on so much and there's so many advancements it's going to change, it's developing at a rapid rate of knots. Unless there's any other comments from our guests on this question, Beth would like to come in.

Beth Cohen, Verizon (40:10):
Yeah, definitely. So I've been find the gen ai, or I like to call it intelligent networking. I think that's a better term in the industry. It's still absolutely very nacent what we're finding more success with large language models using in operations for ticket management aggregation, ticket sentiment, looking for those angry words for prioritization. So there's a lot of things we can do with gen AI on that end of things, certainly chat bots. But I still think that there's a lot of work to be done to be used so they can be used for predictive analytics fault tolerance. I have every reason to think that that will happen actually in one of the authors of a white paper that's coming out next week. In fact, on this topic that was sponsored by the Linux Foundation Networking Group, and this is actually the second white paper on this topic.

(41:33)
There was one that I helped write a couple years ago that sort of really focused on what's going on in the industry today. And one of the big things that's holding back the use of gen AI in the industry is the lack of standard data models and data sets. We quickly discovered that absolutely every telco has a different way of thinking about jitter, a different way of thinking about network latency and present it differently that we need to have a set of standard models. So then we test the algorithms against them because in live production systems, you cannot have fantasies that gen AI has become quite famous for. So you can't just throw it in and test it in the same way that a lot of gen AI is being done today because there's a lot of consequences if it doesn't work properly.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (42:42):
Yeah, absolutely. There certainly are. Thanks very much, Beth. We just about have time for one more question. I think from our audience. Let's see if we can get this one in. As part of the move to cloud native architectures, some of the DSS vendors are also pushing a move to a SaaS model, a software as a service model. What are the pros and cons of this approach from the DSP point of view? And John, I wonder if I could start by getting your views on the incorporation of SaaS here.

John Abraham, Appledore Research (43:19):
Sure, thanks guy. So firstly, let me point out that SaaS and cloud native compliance are two separate things. Cloud native or microservices based architecture refer specifically to a number of tenants or architecture traits that has to be reflected versus SaaS necessarily or doesn't necessarily have to comply with that. So at least from a BSS perspective, we see a lot of compliance with cloud native computing when it comes to well entrenched legacy systems and versus when it comes to SaaS, we see a lot of greenfield deployments or for functions that are not mission mainly customers facing functions. So that's the distinction between those two SaaS and cloud native. Now, in my view, at least in the segments I cover, there is a lot of adoption of SaaS based solutions. Now remember, this is starting from a very small base, but we are seeing really strong growth well over property in the mid to late teens in terms overall industry adoption of SaaS-based solutions.

(44:34)
And it is usually, or it begins, most of the operators begin by trying to adopt it in non-mission critical non latency sensitive applications. Usually that's customer experience and the reason why it's customer experience related as there is a lot of other deployments in industries outside telco. So that is a degree of confidence in actually embracing the same practices and trying to replicate that within a telco environment. So over a period of time, I think this is actually, in fact, we are already seeing even early deployments of mission critical functions even within Telco. There is a substantial, or I would say there is some cost savings advantage. But the key difference here is that there is also a significant time to market advantage and there is also some advantage in terms of actually deploying in areas where you don't have easy access to or it's actually in a conflict zone and so on.

(45:34)
We recently saw a big deal in East Africa where a SaaS provider actually deployed their charging solution just because it happens to be an area of conflict where you can't know, it's too risky to actually have a personal onsite. So overall I think SaaS is gaining ground. I'll just call out one other point, which is that by and large, the biggest stumbling block in the path of SaaS is not a technology issue, but it's rather, there's a lot of pushback from telco finance teams who are concerned about how the CapEx budget is actually getting operationalized. And that has big implications, especially from a public markets perspective. Public markets in general, like the C telcos continue making heavy CapEx investments here on here. And if that moves into an OPEX budget, that has implications. So therefore, especially for deal sizes about a certain value, we see a lot of pushback from the telco finance themes on SaaS deals.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (46:37):
Great. Thanks very much, John. It is certainly an interesting approach. Well, I do believe we are out of time now. Very sorry about that. But thank you to all three of you for joining us for this live program. And do remember to send in your questions for tomorrow's live q and a show as soon as you can. Don't leave it too late. We've already got a number of questions that have come through during this show that we're going to consider for tomorrow's q and a show, so tune in for that one same time tomorrow. And please take part in the poll. There is still time for you to have your say. Right Here is the agenda for tomorrow day two of the summit, and among the highlights we have panel discussion for you on the merits of deploying next gen OSS and BSS on the public cloud. Until then, thank you so much for watching and goodbye.