Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:16):
Hello there. I'm Tony Poulos and I'm a DSP Leaders World Forum in Windsor. We've had a fabulous session just now talking about the logistics and transportation industries and reducing the complexities of large scale, multi-domain solutions. It's a very interesting topic, and to help me out with this one, I've got Graham Wilde, who's the head of 5G business development at the three Group Solutions. Welcome again, Graham and Connor Lyons is the innovation technology leader at Lyons Consulting. Gentlemen, it was a really interesting session, but Graham, I'm going to hit off with you. It seems that transport and logistics companies have different priorities to telcos. Is that true?

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (00:56):
Tony, can you believe it? Can you believe it? I dropped the F-bomb on stage. I said, they don't give a f*** about telecoms, right? I've just done it again. Oh, no. So look, seriously, the reason for that is that it's easy for us as an industry to kind of talk amongst ourselves and get very excited about our own stuff. We have to remember that our customers, they've got their own objectives and principally in the kind of space that Connor and I are working in, those objectives are around safety, security, environmental concerns, and obviously efficiency automation, industry 4.0, whatever you want to call it. So those are the real drivers. Now we've got a ticket to that party in the telecom space because 4G and 5G is the answer to some of those problems. It provides a kind of base layer of reliable connectivity for some customers in some cases. So we've got a ticket to that party, which we wouldn't have had 15 years ago, but they don't think necessarily that we're the bees knees, right? They're focusing on their outcomes. If we can help them, that's fantastic, otherwise, forget it.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:09):
Well, do we really know their business? I would say the first question is, do we know their businesses or do we just provide them with network services and leave it at that?

Connor Lyons, Lyons Consulting (02:18):
Well, we in the industry think it's just network services, but you're getting better at convincing us through that consultation, talking to us, finding out about our problems, spending the time with us. I think there's a lot of room to go, but it's definitely started. Yeah, there's so much to go after. I think looking at the two industries side by side, I think you've been digitally transforming by nature and you're in this current stage of affairs in all the areas and all the acronyms that I'm still learning about even in the last two days or day, and then compare it to our industry that is very different in other ways, keeps the country running, but they haven't had that digital transformation and there's a vast divide between the two. How do we bridge that gap? And you can really help us or you can really hinder us. A bit of both.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (03:08):
Firstly, don't feel bad. We've been into 40, 50 years and we still don't understand.

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (03:12):
So don't think Tony do. We don't understand anything, do we

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (03:16):
We're getting better? But here's the thing, when we talk about, and we talked about ports in particular today because of the examples that you brought up, do they really need private networks? This keeps coming up in my mind. We offer particularly 5G private, firstly 4G now 5G private network. Do they need private networks?

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (03:34):
Okay, so let's start with before we answer that question, let's try and think about what are they trying to achieve in terms of their operational outcomes and their business outcomes. They have to deal with an aging workforce. People don't want to drive trucks. They don't want to sit in cranes 40 meters high where you can't get to the toilet, so they can't replace those jobs. So the people that they want to bring into the port, they're happy to sit in an office and remotely control a crane, but they don't want to be up that crane 40 meters high. Second, they don't want to drive trucks around. So the port, in order to keep things moving on the port, many, many ports are investing in autonomous vehicles. So those are the kind of outcomes they're looking for. In order to do that, often you do need a private network because you need a guarantee of low latency. Okay,

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (04:31):
There's the secret.

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (04:32):
There you go. You guaranteed low latency. You're not going to get that from just connecting to the local mobile network operator with their standard service.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (04:41):
And I think one of the comments that Ultan Mulligan made that is they're not just moving boxes, they're moving information as well.

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (04:49):
Yeah

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (04:49):
That's the critical part of

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (04:51):
Yeah

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (04:51):
Network capability. They'd be logistics companies. It's all about information.

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (04:57):
I can't remember who made this analogy, but I used it at an internal IT conference in a port provider. Somebody said, Domino's Pizza, is it a pizza company that uses it or is it an IT company that makes pizza? And increasingly, you could argue that it's an IT company that makes pizza.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:20):
Well, judging for the quality of the pizzas, it's probably correct,

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (05:24):
Right? The same is kind of true in our sector as well. So whether it's a port or an airport or a DPD or a FedEx or whatever it is so central to what they do. Applications are so central to what they do that they almost are becoming the main drivers of innovation in those businesses.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:48):
So my next question is, I'm not sure whether the telcos are very good at selling. The idea of a full solution to one of these companies and vendors as well are not necessarily going to, who is actually selling them? Who's capturing the market? Are they consulting companies or systems integrators, or is it big vendors that are making the solutions and going, bang, here's the solution for you.

Connor Lyons, Lyons Consulting (06:15):
I'll have a crack. So big vendors, so I guess we are lumping in the Microsofts and the Amazons, et cetera. They're right on that kind of application cloud layer.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (06:22):
And even some of the hardware vendors like Huawei in China, places

Connor Lyons, Lyons Consulting (06:26):
Like that. Yeah, certainly. And I think they've got various businesses building solutions within their stack. They often don't know who's building solutions within their stack. So I've talked to some of the big players and said, do you know, I mean, I know 10 solutions for this particular thing within a port and industry. Do you know any of them or do you know that's even happening? And they don't, right? So they're in the best place, but they still don't know. And then you've got the hardware providers of which they're selling by the bucket load, but again, they're selling bits of hardware. They're not necessarily hooked into where that data is. But yeah, going back to that data point, it's gold really. And I think that to enable automation and ai, and we've been talking about it for days, and it's that real buzzword. It needs to be built on good data.

Connor Lyons, Lyons Consulting (07:16):
And at the moment the data is very siloed in applications. It's often paper-based, poorly understood, and that kind of data cleansing exercise to even capture good data to enable the future isn't really being set up properly. And so we almost need to really get under the hood, set it up properly, and then run it for a bit so we can really start to do some clever stuff, I think.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (07:42):
Well, when you were building the solution for the Port of Felixstowe, it was an example today, who did you turn to? Who was your first port of call, so to speak?

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (07:50):
Well, so the question, I think your first question is we're not very good at selling, right? And I would accept that that's true. I mean, across the whole industry and many, many of our partners as well. The answer comes from listening first of all, right? Listening and asking intelligent questions, trying to get under the hood of what the customer is really trying to achieve. And only then kind of going, okay, so in our toolkit or in our set of partners or whatever, we've got these magical ingredients that we can put together that will deliver what you want or most of what you want.

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (08:29):
So the key is listen, listen, listen. And really, really try to understand what it is they're trying to do. People hate being kind of salty from an encyclopedia salesman, do you know what I mean? People just don't like that. It has to solve a problem for them. And the people who are the best at doing that generally are systems integrators. So whether it's Capgemini or tartar or those guys are good, if you are thinking about smaller customers, smaller customers often have a trusted generic IT supplier that they will go to, and they absolutely trust that business. And I question whether it's wise for us to try and supplant that business. Why don't we try and support those businesses because they have the great relationships. They're always going to have a better relationship with a smaller customer than we are.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (09:30):
Well, I'm guessing if I was a telco and I had a big customer came to me and said, I really want to do a port solution, I'd be going, I'm going to find somebody who's already doing that.

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (09:39):
Yeah,

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (09:39):
Exactly. You, that'd be the logical thing to do. And hopefully the partnership model is what our industry should be looking at in more detail.

Graham Wilde, Three Group Solutions (09:45):
Absolutely. I think there's another point that Connie made on stage as well, which is, and I'm about to steal your thunder here a little bit, but it was a really, really good point. So if you're looking at a fairly complex and expensive solution like a private 5G network, there are many parts to the business case that needs to come together. And getting everybody in the customer to work with you to do that is very challenging.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (10:17):
Well, I wish I had more time because we're only starting to get to the nitty gritty stuff, but Graham, and Connor, thank you for being with me.

Connor Lyons, Lyons Consulting (10:24):
Thank you.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (10:24):
And for those of you at home, don't forget if you did miss any of the extra shot sessions or even the main keynotes and speaker sessions, they are available on the TelecomTV website for your viewing at any time.