Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:00:10):
Right. I see all coming in. Thank you very much. Well, the first session of this afternoon is focused on creating cloud native software engineering teams. We know that cloud native has now become established as a way of creating, deploying and managing software. We're seeing it in a lot of industries. We're seeing it in telecoms now. Yet there's still this uncertainty within the telco industry about why and how to adopt cloud native and the practical considerations for a telco looking to become a cloud native telco with a cloud native software engineering team. So we're going to talk about all these things in our panel session that's coming up in about five or 10 minutes time. Now, there are a number of cloud native initiatives within the industry and beyond the industry, many of which I'm pleased to say I've got a telco focus to them. But one of them I want to talk about now and to give us an update on this, I'd like to invite Anita Dohler to the stage. Anita is the CEO of the NGMN Alliance. Anita, please come on up.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:01:23):
So Anita, good to see you back at DSP leaders. You've been supporting us for a number of years now. It's great. Now last September, the NGMN published a cloud native manifesto. It's a white paper that provided a telco viewpoint of cloud native, but what was the rationale for the report? Because you've been advocating three pillars and then the cloud native manifesto comes out. Why was it needed?

Anita Döhler, NGMN Alliance (00:01:53):
Very good question, and first of all, thanks for having me. It's always very nice professional event with a lot of fun as well. So why did we publish the cloud native manifesto? So as an operator driven alliance, we focus on how to master the route to disaggregation. We are operating disaggregated networks, but also network automation part of it. Sustainability is another big pillar and then the next steps after 5G, six G. So network evolution, and I think if you go back a bit to think about why the industry embarked on the route to disaggregation, it was first of all, so several factors contributed, but one factor was is that we wanted to achieve a healthy ecosystem, so we wanted to enrich the ecosystem to facilitate innovation and also for being able to react more agile to customer demands. I think Yahu this morning summarized it extremely well that innovation is facilitated by openness, choice and competition.

(00:03:06):
But the other part is of course also to by driving a healthy ecosystem to go away from vertical monoliths and that of course demands interoperability, openness, and compatibility and operators obviously are in different phases in that route, but what operators already realized was that actually it is not really interoperable what at the moment is deployed, so tested, delivered, tested and deployed in the industry and that some of the operators who already embarked on that route actually spend an awful amount of efforts and also budget to achieve running systems. And if we want to go for network automation, then it's also even more important that for instance, we achieve a cloud nativeness and therefore our board of directors decided was actually a decision of the board of directors to publish this operator view on what actually cloud nativeness should look like. We established the seven principles and now we are working on the next steps because of course it's not just about publishing manifesto. I think there is a lot of work needed in the industry and it also demands all partners to work together to achieve such a status.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:04:44):
Well the publication which is well worth downloading and reading if anyone hasn't done so yet sets out a number of prioritized calls for action because let's face it, we are still as an industry, quite a long way from deploying cloud native workloads at scale and really embracing cloud native. Do you think that telcos now see the way ahead? Do they agree on these action points? Has the last 12 months brought us together in terms of what we need to do or do you find that as a result perhaps of creating this manifesto that we still lack a coherent approach?

Anita Döhler, NGMN Alliance (00:05:20):
Well, I think it depends on what we defined as a coherent approach. Operators of course have a choice how to embark that route and what we see is that they are not all doing the same. Of course, some already embarked on the route to cloud nativeness, others are still not really believing in it. That's also of course happening because of the problems and the issues we are seeing in the industry. And I think we all know that the route to desegregation anyway is also delayed. So now we think it'll happen probably in 25. So there are different approaches. Some operators reacting by reacting on the reality of the situation. They went with different vendors for different cloud network domains. So to kind of overcome the problem a bit because of course someone also tries to be pragmatic if you want to achieve something. But all in all, I believe, and that's also what we are discussing in NGMN amongst the operators, but of course also by involving vendors and research institutes, there is a strong consensus that we need to do something to really achieve a cloud nativeness. And that's something which we are currently also exploring with regards to how can we cooperate with other organizations to not reinvent the wheel. And I think it also needs to be meaningful to the industry because no one wants to boil the ocean, so the target and the steps to achieve that target need to be realistic.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:07:08):
You spoke earlier about desegregation. You've also got the Odin project as an ongoing project of the NGMN focus on disaggregated networks. Did you find that as a result of your work on the manifesto that there is a synergy between cloud native and disaggregation?

Anita Döhler, NGMN Alliance (00:07:27):
Disaggregation not necessarily needs to be based on cloud native, therefore we have this under the umbrella of mastering the route to disaggregation, but in reality they're not necessarily directly interlinked. So when it comes to how to operate as aggregated networks, it's also about how to achieve a complete change of the processes the organization. What does it mean to embark the different models either by using system integrators or some operators went to the root of the vendor plays an important role in integrating the systems. Other operators decided to do this in-house and that's something we are also working on in the future. It'll also continue in the next months to analyze what actually are the advantages, disadvantages, and what is needed to enable the different models. And of course it's also about best practice sharing. So alliances like NGMN are also a good place to exchange in a pre-competitive environment best practices.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:08:36):
Great. Well Anita, we look forward to seeing the next steps hopefully very soon. You are staying here because you're going to join us on the panel, but for now everyone thank you very much to Anita. Thank you. So time for another short video whilst we rearrange the furniture on the stage and caller power panelists for this next session and surprisingly the video is highlights from our cloud native Telco summit. So let's roll a video and rearrange the stage.

Matthias Fridstrom, Arelion (00:09:11):
In the beginning we said let's move everything into the cloud so we become cloud native and I think that's where many people make the mistake. You by default don't become cloud native just because you move it into the cloud

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom Technik (00:09:22):
Going cloud and cloud native requires the right skill sets, so you really need to make up your mind how do you get access to these skills? What can you do in upskilling with your own guys? What do you need to get from the market and then put them into a flexible organization.

Hasan Jafri, TELUS (00:09:44):
We should have releases daily, the larger release packages every couple of weeks and new product deployment within six to nine months. And we are moving down that path and the business is seeing significant improvement in our ability to deliver faster, reduce costs driven through reuse of things so that we don't have, we are reducing the complexity and simplifying our environment.

Luis Velarde Tazon, Telefonica (00:10:09):
This journey to the cloud native is not easy and requires collaboration support from different stakeholders that many partners involved. On the one hand, the cloud stack providers because we need them to incorporate the capabilities required by the telco operators for the telecom services.

Philippe Ensarguet, Orange (00:10:28):
I think that it's very, very important to highlight the scope of what we want to cover. I think that a lot of telecom operators today are already ready in terms of cloudnative infrastructure, but it's not because you have an infrastructure that you are able to run a network cloud native network function. So it means that it's a total ecosystem maturity that we need to

Colin Bannon, BT Business (00:10:58):
Develop. There's a lot of applications today that have been moved to cloud but doesn't necessarily mean they are cloud native yet. And that is another reality that we are dealing with and helping mitigate with our customers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:11:20):
Great insight there from our Cloud Native Telco summit, our very first online summit and is still our most popular one, so stay tuned for that later this year. Don't forget, that's going to be, when's that mid-September I think. So mark your calendars for that right time. For our next viewer poll, we want to remind you what the question for this one is and as again, we've got three answer choices and we are only allowing you to vote for one of them. And the question we are asking is, what is the role of cloud native in successfully provisioning digital services, essential, optional or not necessary? Go ahead and vote on the TelecomTV website. You'll find all the polls in the DSP leaders section on the agenda page and we will take a look at the state of the voting at the end of this session. So let's now introduce our co-host for this session. I'm delighted to say that Franz Seiseer is joining us. Franz is VP tribe lead TDAs at Deutsche Telekom Technik, Franz, good to see you again. Pleasure. Excuse me. I'm very pleased you're here talking about cloud native with us. We're going to ask you to give the address in a moment, but first let's introduce our other panelists. I'd like to get 'em to introduce themselves briefly starting on my far left with Neil.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (00:12:39):
Hi, I'm Neil McRae. I work for Juniper Networks.

Alfredo Musitani, Telecom Argentina (00:12:42):
I'm Alfredo Musitani from Telecom Argentina with sales of digital services.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:12:50):
Thanks Anita, we've met already and Mirko

Mirko Voltolini, Colt Technology (00:12:54):
Hi everyone. Mirko Voltolini I work for Colt Technology around architectural innovation.

Laura Murphy, BT Group (00:12:59):
Good afternoon everyone. My name is Laura Murphy. I work as a senior transformation lead at BT.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:13:05):
Great, thanks everyone. Well Franz, would you like to take to the podium and deliver the DSP leaders address? Thank you.

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom Technik (00:13:15):
Good afternoon. Pleasure to be here. Right from the screen down to reality. That's actually a very nicely timed event because people who may know me in here know that last couple of years I was talking a lot about ORAN. I'm not talking that much about Oran anymore. I changed in the tea recently to eat my own dog food. Now what does it mean? I'm pretty, I think I have a long history in the journey of first virtualization and then cloudification and always trying to advocate that this is the route to go, but always an architecture and strategy level. But now I got an opportunity which I took to operationally be responsible. So I am now responsible in Germany for engineering, building and running all our platforms to produce customer data traffic. It means mobile core, fixed control platforms and stuff like that. And luckily I have one team in there already which is cloud native because we are deploying 5G core for standalone and that has my teams when I was still doing that part, were very active in defining the standards.

(00:14:26):
Now we are implementing, we have an MVP running already and we are currently working to get it scaled for a large scale consumer launch most likely later this year. I also have teams which are still working a bit more in classical mode. So I nicely can see the differences and where you can go and where you are still stuck with mainly virtualized technology, which very often is still too close from my feeling to what we had in the past with appliances. So strategy going cloud native in DT, totally clear. We talk a lot about telco as a platform and the platform of course is cloudified production of network functions. Also, as I said already nicely. So thanks for putting that video skills of course is important. So you still need to have all your networking skills of course, but you need to amend that now with software skills to put things like a 5G core into your networks and make it to run it and to produce it.

(00:15:28):
What you also need and they couldn't resist. You need to have a proper architecture and if things go right, I managed to convince them that I'm allowed to show one single slide, which is the most complicated architecture picture you probably have ever seen and it's not done for here. We really use that picture internally in DT to explain cloudification. So this is really something we're using and how you need to read that. It's a burger, obviously, we didn't have burger for lunch and would've been even more fun, but it's still, I hope we all had lunch and you don't get hungry looking at it. So burger of course, sorry, I'm doing the network function, so I'm of course I'm the meat. The most important, the most tasty piece you can decide now if it's vegan or real meat, but we are the juicy part of the thing.

(00:16:14):
But you also have bread and things in between the bread. The lower one is the cloud layer, the upper bread is all the tools for automation management and orchestration and they are platforms. So one and more important thing architecture wise, we have one cloud platform to produce all the network functions. We don't have vendor specific silos, which we had to some extent in the virtualized environment. But for cloud one, cloud layer, all the network functions one set of tooling for automation to use for all the things and that's why they sell it. And the tomatoes are so important. They are always the adaption for the specific network functions to the cloud and building the automation solution. So in one burger you have more tomatoes on the other you have more only and to me or may not have cheese depending on what the meat in between requires, but this is the architecture we are following.

(00:17:07):
So that's very clear. That comes and that's super important of course is a fundamental change in operating model because you're not operating silos anymore, suddenly your operating platforms and to make that happen, that leads to from my practical experience, most important thing you need to work on, it's not skills, it's not technology, it's mindset. Mindset of the people making us up to now. The guys who are used to run their silo, they're responsible end to for everything. They don't need to talk to anyone besides the supplier which they need to beat all the time obviously. But other than that they went suddenly. They're depending on other people, they need to talk to other people, they need to ask other people for help. This is a barrier you need to work on. This is the issue you really need to work in the teams that they understand, they only can be successful together.

(00:17:55):
And that's the real essence in going cloud and really bringing people to work together, work as a team, split responsibilities that in the end you can bring the right operating model in place so you can run this whole thing and troubleshoot if required in the right way to still be able to produce the services in the stable manner. Why? And the left for Costa Hope will be also the key discussion we have here. Why do we do that? We don't do that to say who are we are. Cloudified cloud is not the means in itself. Cloud is a tool to get more flexible to become faster to enable automation. It forces you to do automation because it's so much more complex. You don't start to fool around manually to really drive us down that road to become more efficient on the one side which we had, but also to enable much faster innovation psychics because suddenly we're not talking three big updates a year. We are talking software update every second week. So you can adapt much faster and much smaller steps to adapt to requirements as they're coming from the market. Try it out. If it doesn't work, you roll it back to really come to this completely different level of flexibility. And I call it software speed even in producing network services for customers. Thank you.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:19:06):
Thank you Franz, thank you. Mindset. I think we'll get some interesting reactions from our guests here, skills, people and mindsets, not just the technology. Would any of our panelists like to quiz Franz on anything we've just heard? Now it's an opportunity to shoot a question at Franz if you'd like to do so. Otherwise we will go straight onto our first question. I've got a question for you. Good. Where did you get that burger from? Because the places I've been to for burgers, they never looked like that.

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom Technik (00:19:41):
I must admit this. I said I just changed the role a couple of months ago. The burger existed before I came into there, so I need to credit the guys. I really, when I saw it first time I really was laughing saying, are you serious? This is, but it works. It's much better to explain to people not deeply in technology what it's all about versus you come with these typical pictures with 10,000 of boxes and what is that, right?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:20:03):
Well, talking about explanation, it pains me to say this, but it feels like we have to once again define what cloud native is because number of times we've been here and we think we know what we're talking about and then we'll have a conversation going and then it transpires that some people don't get it and it's the part of cloud native, it's the first word, it's cloud, which seems to confuse a lot of people. Do we still need to get this sorted out or are you Alex, say, our panelists here, are you confident that we now understand cloud native or is this still some kind of concept that is still lost on a lot of people in our industry? Franz, do you want to start off first and then we'll go to our guests?

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom Technik (00:20:44):
I have a certain understanding. Obviously I hope I'm the only one with that, but it's like many times these terms are then misused by everyone say, oh, everyone wants me to be cloud native. So I somehow tweak it that what I have is also called cloud native, even though it's not even, I have to admit sometimes a struggle because not everything body, if you look at this narrow definition of cloud native, some of the network functions never ever can be cloud native. As long as you have state and need to keep states, then let's stop this technical stuff. But it's super difficult to make them cloud native. Most of the things can be done, but we are mixing it together. But I hope we have kind of a common understanding.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:21:29):
Any other thoughts? Yes,

Mirko Voltolini, Colt Technology (00:21:32):
I would add, I mean I think you can look at this. I would say that generally speaking, the industry now understand this much better than was in the past. I look at it from three areas, the technology and we spoke about it, but I think the paper actually has been published does quite a good job in describing that. There's the people skills and mindset and Fran talked about that, that's quite important. But also it's the commercial angle. The commercial angle is how do you change the picture with cloud native applications, bringing them to market much faster and also enabling network as a service or the ability to bring together different applications and glue them together with APIs and technologies that I support. I look at that, these three angles. Plus I think we also need to look at cloud native apply to the actual functions. So the core functions as well as cloud native apply to the control layer of the network and I think that's also much easier to address as we have more control on that side. Thanks Michael.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (00:22:34):
Neil? Yeah, I mean I really like the burger analogy because some people want more onions. Some people might want a plant-based burger, although I dunno why. So for me, cloud native actually started with how do we build the telephone switch for the modern era. And if you think about the telephone switch, which made all of us exist today, dreadful technology that it was you've effectively got a platform for delivering services and you could deliver lots of different services and telcos were super profitable at that point in time. So how do we move to the world of delivering those services and innovating, as Frank said, on a regular way that allows us to deliver services in a consistent manner that allows us to manage it without having to do heavy lifting. But for me the actual real goal for the cloud native was to build an efficient platform.

(00:23:34):
So very early on in NFV we could see that it was never going to be efficient enough. You had too much disc or not enough IO or too much memory or not enough CPU. And actually in my previous place I resisted it because all I could see was money being wasted from the point of view of can I really generate cash out of this and have a platform that's truly multi-service. So I think the innovation part and being able to deliver stuff fast into the customer's hands in the way that we used to do with a telephone switch and I spent most of my life ripping them out. So I'm not a fan of that technology, but it delivered a great set of services for many users for like a hundred years. So that's what I look at from cloud native and actually we're in the kind of almost I think the fourth generation of cloud native mythos back in the early days. If you think about Twitter, who remembers when you used to get the whale in Twitter? The way they solved that was mythos and moving into a cloud native platform where you can scale up, scale down, scale in scale out. And in our world in telco I see and the customers we serve, that's really what we need. You think of new year when you're sending that happy new year message, how many people actually get it? Well with today's cloud native technology, everybody gets it and that's the beauty of it.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:24:58):
Thanks Neil. Laura, can I bring you in because we focus a lot on technology, but we've known from the outset, cloud native also refers to a mentality, methodology, mindset, mindset. It's a people, Franz has mentioned it here, mindset with the work you do and your focus within telcos, what's your thoughts of the cloud native message getting through to teams?

Laura Murphy, BT Group (00:25:26):
I think this is where it gets tricky because cloud as a technology is not a static platform, right? It's an never evolving set of capabilities and so on and so forth. So that's a shifting target and then you're putting cloud into organizations that themselves shift. And I wonder if this is where the ambiguity around cloud native or cloud hosting comes from, that continually changing environment in which you're trying to enact it. I love the part of the video which the gentleman was saying actually just because I put stuff onto cloud does not mean it's cloud native. And that's something that I've worked through with teams a lot and I always use the furniture analogy as opposed to a food one. For me, cloud hosting is where I put my pre loved pieces of furniture in a new house and I can twist that and I can give them extra storage, I can give them more processing, I can decrease my reliance on physical infrastructure, I can access that remotely in some way, so on and so forth.

(00:26:23):
But there's the same quirky pieces of furniture that they always were and they're deeply intertwined with the environment in which they were created and they retain that dependency. Whereas for cloud native, I've moved into a new house on a new street with a new set of neighbors, I have big windows, those neighbors are waving through the window, it's a lot more flexible, scalable, I can add bits to my house, I can take them off, et cetera, et cetera. So that mindset shift of teams to really embrace the full spectrum of that technology and to see themselves as actually generating value for the customer and generating value in that particular part of the value chain is absolutely huge and absolutely significant if you're really going to generate the full value of the technology.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:27:10):
Thanks Laura. Any comments about the defining cloud native understanding of cognitive photo?

Alfredo Musitani, Telecom Argentina (00:27:16):
I really, really agree in this that you said that the cloud nativeness is not about technology mainly, and many of them tell is about the mindset, it's about the organizational mindset that I think we are as organizations are kind of a different animal besides ourself and this is much slower to change. And I love what Cheetos about the manifesto. The manifesto, it came from the agile manifesto, maybe came from the social manifesto, but besides politics, I get that there is a lot to be done into agility that I think it came from lean mainly before it was the lean and the Toyota is still working with lean manufacturing and I don't see this lean portion in the telco industry. I see a lot of energy into going to the cloud and making it cloud native in cloud native in the functions but not cloud native into the transformation, inside transformation and the inside transformation, it's agility and it's taking every portion that does not go into value to the client out. So if I have to make any report that is not giving value to my customer, I threw this report and this OKRI threw it every OKR away and just leave the one that gives value to the customer and I think this portion is not easily understood.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:29:15):
Thanks everyone. Anita?

Anita Döhler, NGMN Alliance (00:29:17):
Yeah, just quickly for me, of course it's easy because I just refer to the cloud native manifesto and unfortunately I cannot take the credit because it was written by our operator members. But I think now the important, the next important part as well is the definition, but how to really agree on assessments. So how do we assess cloud nativeness and how much of those validation processes and test processes is really needed in the industry. I think that's where we are currently. Also having quite some discussions with regards to the meaningfulness of processes. And then with regards to the mindset, I think it's also about building trust into own skills. So first of all, I assume that many of the employees France better than I, but in British telecom or telecom, are probably not necessarily the cloud native gurus. So even if you are upskilled as an operational specialist, how do you build trust into the technology? How do you build trust in your own skills and how do you manage SLAs and accountability?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:30:35):
Good point. Let's put Franz on the spot right now. You do represent a large telco and we know from our conversations over the years that telcos on this, there's a big range of cloud nativeness. Some are at the very beginning, some are just thinking about it, some aren't even thinking about it, some are pioneers. So to answer Anita's question there, when you've got this large workforce, how do you go about this?

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom Technik (00:31:00):
I said this workforce of course is not uniform and luckily there is already one team doing the 5G core, which is really data truth, DevOps. I have other areas, we still run a virtualized EPC. This is classical waterfall split between operations engineering as we have done it for decades. But there we do true DevOps. So fundamentally different setup, fundamentally different mindset in getting things done. They really think cloud. These guys, of course there are guys knowing three GP, but the majority of the team is not going to 3G PP. They're going to con Sure, yeah, difference. Very different way of thinking. Still the struggle with the cloud people because they're even more strict. We always have this, what can we do from an cloud native application side versus what cloud people expect and they tell you why shall I tell you that I changed the Kubernetes version?

(00:31:48):
You cloud native, you should be able to deal. Yeah, you know are not because you still have limits and certain versions of software only certified for certain versions of Kubernetes and if you change that then suddenly it doesn't work. So there are some of these learnings you need to go through, but it's about mixture. Of course it's not one single person, but you need to bring the right people together. The good thing is typically you always can get engineers with new technical challenges. So once you get them there and say, hey, you are working on the latest thing out there and on the hottest street, sorry for that wording, that's typically a certain huge amount of people I would even say they get intrigued by it and they're keen to explore. Of course there are some I have done that leave them alone that you need to figure out.

(00:32:34):
But most of the people really start to become interested and if you put the right mix together and look a little bit on the chemistry between the people, this is starting to fly because engineers typically, they're really keen. What they need to learn is to communicate, to communicate with the surroundings, to not see the other team as supporting them. And you throw something over the fence and you then wonder if one week later nothing is coming back. But you never asked if they understood what to do, if they can commit that they didn't know I told them they should. These kind of things that you need to build and that's the journey you need to go through but you can make it happen.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:33:11):
So this leads on to another point that I'd love us to cover. You've got a dedicated team and the 5G SA core work, there seems to be a strong case for focusing on the basics, get the basics right first, build that cloud native team correctly, get it working and then from that foundation you are then able to go off into whatever it might be, service creations in different areas and technologies, but you've got to get your foundations right first. Now that seems great on paper, but I'd imagine reality is a little bit tricky for a lot of telcos and you haven't got the luxury to sort of step back and think about this. It just all happens at the speed of light. Any,

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (00:33:56):
Yeah, so this is one of our biggest challenges. We've mentioned a lot about the people. How do we measure the people and their suitability for this? Because at least in, I've worked in just about every telco here in the uk, none of us were great at measuring how good our people were. Oh, Fred's a great guy and Sheila's brilliant, but actually what's the real measure and how are they as engineers developing the skill sets and the human side of capabilities to be able to flourish in this scenario? And what I've learned in this period is actually in people's careers they kind of learn a bunch of stuff and then they kind of stop learning. And then for me, cloud native, actually if there's a way I would describe it, it's centered around lifelong learning and if you aren't in that space, you're not going to make it in this world and it's about how you communicate but it's also about how you adapt and change.

(00:34:57):
So there's a lot of papers out there that are prescriptive about processes and pipelines. For me that's kind of, oh that's not cloud native. That feels like the old way, but how do you have a team that simply says actually what we're building here, it's cloud native but actually it's got such a high mission priority, we're going to put extra unit testing in, we're going to shift to the left. And without that sort of thinking, you'll just end up with your mess on a really horrible platform that's hard to manage. But I think the other thing to add to this is this world is about declaring an outcome and being very declarative in what you're trying to, and actually for me the genesis of writing stuff well is getting that declaration so that your engineering team build what you need and what you want and hopefully what the customer wants to buy. And actually in a couple of projects we've run at Juniper, so we have a Juniper cloud native router, you can log onto any of the clouds and press a button and you've got a Junos router, it runs on it's completely cloud native and we built that with our customers involved in the process and because of that we've got a way that it works that suits their needs both from a legacy point of view but also in adapting customers to adapting their teams and their platforms to move to the future.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:36:20):
Thanks Neil. This is really, and Laura, this is coming back to what we said at the very start of the day, let's not lose track of the customer and it is requiring a focus on the customer value that is driving all

Laura Murphy, BT Group (00:36:35):
This a hundred percent. I think there are so many Cs going round in my head at the moment. One is definitely customer value and that focus, and I completely agree with the declaration of intent in order to drive the value so that again you're using the principles and the ways of working effectively and you're not delivering stuff that doesn't have value because it's an awful expensive tool. I think the way, and again I build on the points around skills and aptitude and desire. I often think of it in terms of moving from a pyramid organizational or team structure to a hive in terms of the classic pyramid information goes up, decision comes down quite multilayers of hierarchy, big releases go no go decisions, et cetera, et cetera. Lots of kind of layers of decision making on there. And the way I'd encourage teams to think about themselves as they approach cloud is to think of themselves in that kind of more hexagonal framework in that you can see hexagons come off as you spin off microservices, they come on as you develop new offerings for the customer.

(00:37:45):
That incredible focus on customer value there but also as a team or as a person, you can imagine yourself in that structure. And actually where it's worked with teams for me is that it encourages that collaboration and that I actually will go and drive my continual learning in that process. I will go and drive the value, I will go and talk to that other team over there who previously I had nothing to do with because suddenly I see the link between my work and their work in a much more value stream led way of working, which ultimately, even though I'm working on this part leads to this overall framework. I think there's also a wider transformational point beyond that around leadership around, you mentioned teams working on MVPs, right? So there's a pilot approach here which I think builds teams in terms of delivering cloud native applications.

(00:38:38):
Let's create safe space for them to learn and grow and develop, but that also leadership needs to enable that safe space and that interplay between the teams. That needs to be a kind of new value driven output that we're going to go after and ride. And perhaps that's what you measure in terms of the richness of the collaboration. Do we deliver value, yes or no? Is the work that we're doing quality or is it full of defects, et cetera, et cetera. And actually how is the flow of the work working? Is it still as kind of up and down through the different decision-making forums as it used to be or is that actually the teams are humming together really nicely?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:39:14):
Thanks Laura, Mirko?

Mirko Voltolini, Colt Technology (00:39:16):
On a practical level, I'm just thinking about how we have approached this and how maybe we could learn from the past. If you look at the industry where at the beginning of a massive transition towards this model, assuming that this model is going to bring all the efficiencies we need and will help us take different services to market faster, everybody start from zero cloud native and traditional developmental and operations. If you want to move to the nirvana of a full a hundred percent DevOps, I think it's inevitable to start with a specific element of the stack. I like the knowledge of the burger and matel, but in the end what we all do is that we build another burger alongside the existing sandwiches and panini that we have. And so it is an area that is hard to expand from the initial deployment but it's inevitable because I think you want to bring the proof to the company about the fact that this type of a way of working will bring efficiency, will bring benefits from the service standpoint. So I think it's inevitable to start from that. The challenge is how you scale it, how you expand the burger to the right side and take away all the rest. And I think that requires a different approach. You cannot build another stack alongside the existing one but need to try and move alongside. And I think here is where programs and all we're discussing just now about empowering people and expanding the skills helps move this from this additional stack to a more general one.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (00:40:55):
I agree. I just build on the point about leadership. So in our team now, so if we hire him from a manager position or a director or anything, you get given a project that you have to build yourself and collaborate with the team and if you do it, you're in. If you don't adios, it was nice to know you but you're probably not right for us and that is lacking in telco. It doesn't exist today. We have that nowhere in the industry. I've been all over the world in the last year seen many telcos. We do not have that way of thinking. All of the hyperscalers, that's how they behave and we need to think about that so that it's not just about doing, as I say, it's about the leader being able to walk the talk and actually be a leader that they can look up to and be inspired from and that they're working and behaving in the way that the team needs to behave.

(00:41:46):
Lemme tell you, if we don't get that right, this cloud native thing will just be a thing we talk about forever and it is so important. It's kind of weird now having worked in telco for almost 30 years now, working for a valley company for the last year, things that we talk about here are just the norm and it such a, it was like a wow, this is insanely different. We have got to absolutely fix that and we need leaders across the board that know how to build this stuff. I made the point last year about if you were to have a hackathon between telco leadership and hyperscaler leadership, who's going to win it? That's one of the measures and tests that we need to have. And I think engineers, they're here to build and solve problems. They love to do it. You give them a floor space to do it and a runway to do it, bang, they'll solve any problem you've got. So that is the crucial thing, but having someone that they are working for that they believe in, at least in my experiences has been super, super important.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:42:52):
Thanks Neil. Fran, does that resonate with you?

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom Technik (00:42:55):
I fully support that The people need to see that leadership is able to listen and understand their problem and help them solving the issues they got stuck with. If they feel they talk to someone who I don't know did whatever else the day before and has no glue at all what's going on? It's super difficult. They see they can anyhow do what they like because until you recognize they're fooling you it'ss anyhow, we are moving so fast you cannot afford, sorry. It takes you two, three months to figure out that they fool you completely and what's happening here is far away from what you expected to happen. So you need to be able to meet your people on a certain eye level to really be able to have a meaningful conversation. Maybe not everything directly but you need to make sure also the newer structures in between that these guys know what they're talking about and not only sitting on the chairs and keeping them warm.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:43:51):
We've heard a lot, we've heard a lot of great ideas, some new insights. I think this is a good opportunity to ask our in-room audience if there's any questions for any of our guests. I've got to just shoot my eyes. The lights are really bright. Robert. Right in the front box seat. Can we get a microphone across? Thank you.

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (00:44:10):
Hi there. Robert Kern from ALU Research. Great conversation. Great sessions already today. Alfredo, I think you brought up just in passing the lean Telco idea. I think we've all been in the industry long enough to have seen that come. I'm struck by how common many of the ideas particularly around organization and leadership that you're having today are exactly the same as were experienced by the Lean Telco. I know we have Nick Willetts in the room as well. He knows very well all about the lean Telco idea. Why did we not as an industry fully take on board all of the principles of lean manufacturing? I know we're a different industry but the principles is very common. Multidimensional teams, different style of leadership, much more collaborative. Why did we not do that then? And why are we now looking to cloud native to provide the forcing function to make that happen?

(00:45:02):
Bravery.

Alfredo Musitani, Telecom Argentina (00:45:04):
I really think that this is about our history. We used to be the only one provider and then after then we've been overregulated and we will been the victim of the society because we were delivering the safe network and we did good. And I think this make into learning a lot how to just justify where we are. So we are very great at justifying what we are and justifying the investment in next year generation. This is what we did. But I think we are in the point that we can change that. May I bring one very different approach? Yesterday I was in a by chance I went to the Argentinian embassy in London. I was invited by a friend and it was a conference on a very much different thing. It was an organization, it's called anos and what I bring this to us, this organization is an organization that work with the prisoners at the maximum security, the telco providers now because we are the bad guys, the worst guys.

(00:46:39):
We don't do the thing, we have a little revenue, we cannot find the investment we are so we are the bad guys. No young guy come to us. So now I try to bring this because I think we can do by ourself change and change how we envision ourself. What they do is they try to change the mindset of the people and change into being a victim. As we all feel here, I think we are a victim of what we've been doing with 30 years and change into, we are full of engineers of everything and full of people that have a growth mindset like Carol Dwells essay into this growth mindset and fixed mindset and think we are the point of changing and what is the point of changing that is changing ourself, how we envision ourself and making value for the customer each time not making a better service that is very solid, making that makes any sense to the customer, to their final customer in what we are delivering. So go ahead.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (00:48:04):
So I think you need to step back, we've changed the world. This industry has changed the world in massive ways that only 20 years ago you wouldn't have flocked you imagine Covid in 2001, what it would've been like. So look, I think we do kind of you, I don't feel that bad. Have we got challenges for sure, but industry goes through challenges. Look at the car industry in the eighties and nineties. Where is it now? Right? I don't think we're quite at that point there, but I mean to come back to your question Robert, it is about leadership to some extent and what are we measuring and where are we measuring it? So I remember our lean project on data centers that I was part of and I was new to the organization, I was looking at it saying these guys are nuts because they're going to apply lean in the very thing that is the genesis of every single project in the company. And it went badly wrong because no one knew actually where they were in terms of actually how is this performing, is it good, is it bad? It was more like, hey we're doing lean, let's roll it out. And that's just a nonsense basically you can't run an organization like that. So what happened is the data center organization, unsurprisingly everyone left went to work for Equinix and the hyperscalers and everything stopped and it's like why is this project all of a sudden read?

(00:49:26):
And for me that is the genesis of cloud native, which is how do we ensure that that whole kind of process of the organization is joined up and the thing that you need, the objective that you're trying to get to is well understood, the organization's built into it. It's an OKR that really is adding value. I think that's the bit that went wrong on this. I think there's a real danger which is I suspect the reason for the question that we might repeat that mistake, it's done us in this room to not allow that to happen because we were lucky we had 4G that kind of arrived and billed us out of not a great time from 3G, six G looks pretty challenging to me right now.

Alfredo Musitani, Telecom Argentina (00:50:08):
I fully agree on lean, I fully agree on lean even though what the story you are telling, but I think you have to go to the value proposition of everything not mimicking what we do with, I will be doing agile, so I do every mimic of agile but not the end of the agile. It is delivering value to the client and failing and starting something else. No, I did the big room planning and everybody get there and stay for three hours altogether. I don't know.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:50:46):
Okay, thanks very much. Hopefully Robert, you've got a couple of pages of notes there. That's great. Not really. I think you might have got time for another question. I'm struggling to see your hand. There's a hand in the air somewhere in the air. Wasn't there Manish over there? Over there, over there. Over there at the back. Yes. Sorry, the lights here are really strong. Can you pass a microphone over please?

Alex Foster, BT (00:51:09):
Hi there. We said that the last session tomorrow will be about the customer, but perhaps we could actually talk about it a little bit today. So as we think about cloud native, how can it actually directly improve the customer experience for whom we all exist and service reliability,

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:51:29):
Right? Franz Mirko

Mirko Voltolini, Colt Technology (00:51:31):
Please. Yeah, actually I want to answer this one as I was kind of hinting in the beginning. So the commercial side of cloud native I think has got two angles. One is the speed of development can help us bring things to market much faster. So that's one of the angle that we can definitely leverage. The other one is the ability of cloud native applications to sit in the same environment. With that you can create a much more power proposition. I'm thinking about network as a service bringing together connectivity, cloud security, and maybe also value added applications on top of it. So obviously it's possible to do it even without a cloud native application or it's much easier to do it with application residing in this kind of environment where you can use APIs between applications, create a much more power capability. I think these are two angles, speed and capabilities.

Alfredo Musitani, Telecom Argentina (00:52:25):
Can I add one thing? The business scalability. I recently have the chance to meet between guy from Google and they grow with this, the scalability in their mindset. So I do not make any project that is not globally scalable. We do all the time in our company, we do, this is one project and I tell them, can you do in two month 10 of these projects with the same kind of people and then in two other months a hundred projects like this and then in the two other month thousand, this is scalability. And I know that cloud native is the basics, but it's not just the cloud native, it's just the cloud native way of

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (00:53:24):
Thinking. I completely agree. I think the other part is the continuous nature of cloud native. So Microsoft have done an amazing job at this. If there's one thing they've done right, it's this. So you think of teams, the first day you logged onto it in Covid and teams, the last day that you logged onto it is covid. And how different and more that was was because in their process they were constantly taking feedback and then okay, we can just add this thing, we can do this. That is where I think we as telcos can make a massive difference. So hey, and I'll give an example, right? And I saw this in Korea recently where the age population were being attacked with scams and all of a sudden the next day in the email system and on the platform, they're able to offer a security service for free.

(00:54:19):
Just press a button, we're going to turn this on and we're going to filter out all these scams. There's so much data that we've got in the network for things like that that we don't use it at all because it's too difficult. And for me, cloud native is unlocking that instant kind of customer need with data that we've got providing something on demand. And it's that service delivery platform for me that makes me excited about this as a solution for telcos to sell more things to customers, which if we're going to track more than a pound of share, that's what we really need to do.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:54:54):
Great, thanks everyone. More comments to answer the question about the customer facing question. Otherwise we'll move on. Thanks for the question. It was great. Just a reminder to our online audience, please keep sending questions in as well. We touched on this earlier, but the spectrum of where telcos are on their cloud native journeys because there's some telcos of excellent cloud native integrations and fantastic teams, experienced teams doing lots of great things, but there's many other telcos who either haven't started or still trying to, still trying to establish these teams haven't quite got that cloud native philosophy sorted out. So if it is to become important to successful service provision to the benefit of the customer, that's what we're here for these two days, what more can we do as an industry to help ensure telcos successfully make this evolution? Franz, have you got anything from your experience that we can do collectively?

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom Technik (00:55:55):
Yeah, what you always can and should do is lower the barrier of entries because of course if you're first faced with cloud native, you are standing in front of a wall of complexity, fact. So what do you need to do is great best practices standardized where you can, I mean it's relatively straightforward on the cloud layer. Cause almost everything today is plain manila Kubernetes, so that's fine. But there's of course also the top layer where we are classic oss. And now going in that area where it's much more difficult, there are no such string and standards we have. So sharing best practices and helping these guys to come over, you always can go of course and seek for some help, but in the end you need to understand, I think that you need to invest to a certain extent in your people and your workforce to move.

(00:56:58):
And there's always, if you do something fundamentally different and cloud native is fundamentally different to what you are doing today. There is a certain peak where you are running certain things in parallel for a certain amount of time. This cannot be avoided. So there is a certain that's the case you need to make for yourself. How much are you willing and able to invest in order to come over this barrier? Because afterwards, if things go work like we envision and we are working against, then you come to that level that you can become much more efficient. It's all about sharing and helping to move.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:57:31):
Any other thoughts about how we can overcome a lot of these apparent obstacles and challenges to make us more cloud native Anita? Well,

Anita Döhler, NGMN Alliance (00:57:41):
I think as Fran said, the more positive examples we have in the market, the easier it will be. Also for operators who maybe don't have this large number of employees and skills to embark on the same journey, I think there is no way out of technology development. So it'll come anyway sooner or later. And again, back to the topic of how to ensure a real openness and compatibility and interoperability. I think that's also something where the industry to altogether need to develop trust that this is possible to achieve because it's also about total cost of ownership. So that's another angle. So one thing is of course that we want to grow the top lines. We want to faster and better react to customer demand. We want to at the same time to improve the operational efficiency. At the end of the day, total cost of ownership also needs to be predictable.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:58:46):
Thank you. Anita. I

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (00:58:47):
Think let engineers be engineers. So how do you create a pre field for them to learn and break things without breaking the main network? I mean, are you giving them space in computer? Are you giving them space and time to think about these things? Are they getting together to do hackathons? Anything that gets to the point of doing rather than reading is just a must do basically. It's great to read about it, but hey, I've done this and by way I'm now writing on my cv.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:59:23):
Isn't that a barrier? This fail fast approach? Because it's like for telcos, it's a big no-no, no chance.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (00:59:29):
I prefer success first than fail fast. It's telco guide. You can have that. It's kind like give them the tools so that they don't have to feel fast, that actually we know this is going to work or we know that's going to work. And then occasionally I like to do this, which is actually we're going to change the team a little bit. I'm one of these weird people that loves watching people and how they behave. It's like, wow. But genuinely, I've just seen so many people that with the right support go from this person that was on a PIP to this person that's now winning awards. And that's by just giving them a space to perform and letting them fail. Let 'em come back and say, Hey, this was a nightmare. How can I fix it? And being that supportive leader when they need it, but challenging them when you want to get something out there, basically.

(01:00:27):
And I speak from my own personal experience. I was very lucky we set up the first internet company, we broke. No one noticed today you break the internet and your bosses on BB, C news. Hey Howard, sorry about that. But we forget how for many of us, we were able to learn through this industry. Now it's much harder to do that real live learning. But actually cloud native is beautiful because you can build something, change it, but not actually deploy it. And actually I wanted to plug something. There's a thing called Opnet that I'd encourage everyone to have a look at. We're effectively taking some of the genesis of Kubernetes and applying it to networks. Not a Juniper thing. It's a kind of industry thing that's come out of CubeCon and stuff. But it's using that sort of model to actually design and build networks, a lot of which are now anyway. And also in that kind of programmable thinking the biggest user of AI right now is programming by a mile. So that's another way of generating the skills by, hey, learn cloud there, but the same way you're going to learn AI at the same time.

Laura Murphy, BT Group (01:01:45):
If I can just build on that, I definitely support the idea of pilots in safe spaces, right? Get your hands dirty, muck in, start to play with the technology, learn that, build your own skillset, build your own confidence and so on and so forth. And how you interact with other teams. I think you've pointed to the importance of leadership and creating that space. I'd also point to the importance of leadership in modeling curiosity and going out there and interacting with us as an industry to develop solutions for your own particular organizational context. I think half the tricky thing is that actually whilst the is relatively standard, it's coming into an organization that has its own cultural suppositions around risks, scalability, interactions, collaboration, continual learning, innovation, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the more you can demonstrate that you as an organization believe those values, you're enacting them, the happier your path to cloud will be. Because actually you are demonstrating that mindset. You're demonstrating that this technology, you consider it to be valuable and you consider it to unlock customer value. And actually I'm modeling these behaviors which we need to do to go out and build to build the most of it.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:02:57):
Thanks a lot.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (01:02:59):
Sorry. But the thing is, so I agree with that, but actually here's what's true. If we keep going the way we're going, our industry's in super trouble. So the message I would say, if anyone who's got that kind of, oh, it's hard, well are we going to keep doing what we're doing? Or are we going to do something different? Because keep doing what we're doing. What was it? TSR minus 10, it'll be minus 20. We'll be like the industry that really got it wrong and business schools will talk about us forever. So I think there's never a better time to drive change because what we've done for the last 10 years hasn't worked. But

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:03:33):
Surely having a really good cloud native ethos is probably the only way telcos or the best way telcos are going to attract new talent or redirect existing talent. Surely that's the place everyone wants to work. If you are software engineer is in a good cloud native environment, what are you finding for recruiting?

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom Technik (01:03:52):
Guess, guess where I have the lowest average age in my teams exactly there. Because these are the guys where they're able to attract the people they see, they can work on something meaningful. It has a direct impact. You're not one of, I don't know how many in Europe, in a hyperscaler, you are working real state of the art topic and something that goes to life operation relatively soon. And this is something, this is really attracting people because they say the impact it can make working at an operator on cloud native is fundamentally different versus they're working at a hyperscaler because they're so, so much closer to the real product. And that's something that really resonates with people. They see.

(01:04:33):
And this suddenly me starts happening that people from other teams coming asking, how can I join that team? It seems what they're doing is so much more exciting. And then you have to drop the weight. Weight. I need you there because also what you are doing needs to move. So we always call, you also need to move into the burger to come back to the picture. So we need your skill there because you are also on a roadmap to move into that. So that cost, the goal is very clear. Everything will in the end be part of that nice. The burger will grow. But

Alfredo Musitani, Telecom Argentina (01:05:07):
You get to the point to diversity, because right now we mainly grow with the people that started many years in our communities, study long life learning. But what I see is that in our company is that we are bringing people from other companies that started much later than us so they don't have the problems, maybe have other problems, but making this push in diversity into our leadership teams also makes different vision of what we can do. For example, people from Amazon or from Google, maybe they don't have the truth, but they have a different view of how to solve things. And this fail safe and fail fast and go to DevOps and how to work with our partners in a safe manner I think is,

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (01:06:17):
But then if they're not on the bus deal with it. Everyone in this organization's got someone who's not performing. Why aren't you dealing with it? How you make space, right? So what's your bottom 20%? How do you support them to get out of that bottom 20%? But if they're consistently there, maybe this isn't for you. Maybe there's something better for you that you'd be potentially more happy on. And telco is probably one of, don't forget we all came from government organizations predominantly Telco has got that problem massively. And unless it goes back to my initial point, how do you know the people that you've got are great? If you're presenting about what you've built in some event, how can you stand up on stage and say, I have the best team. And I'll say, why do you have the best team? And you can put the metrics up there to say, here's why for that. The people in that team, you've got them forever, they will be loyal to you and they will build for you. And at four in the morning when you call them, they will pick the phone up.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:07:15):
Interesting. I think we'll just stick on this question. We will go to the poll in a couple of minutes because we've only got a couple of minutes before we're out of time. But I think we should maybe pick up on this, Laura Alfredo mentioned diversity there. This is another good chance for rejigging our workforces a bit and having more representative workforces.

Laura Murphy, BT Group (01:07:35):
Yes, of course. Because there's enormous excitement around cloud technology on an average compared to say really interesting reports from the UK government and TED in particular, which would indicate that girls in particular, though I'm sure there are other demographics we'd need to address, start to feel a lack of confidence regarding technology and computing in schools at roughly age 11. And clearly we all know the kind of different balance of workforce across technology, highly skewed towards men right across the board. And so we're grappling at the tail end in industry with a question that starts very young in the school system. And so how you can address that as well. Well, interesting work that we've done at BT with returner programs code first girls around the pivot of people from other sectors of industry. We've even had an opera singer, et cetera, et cetera, come in and start to work on code and start to work on cloud.

(01:08:37):
Because really it's that behavioral mindset that you're looking for the aptitude, the kind of curiosity, the actual technical brain as it were, as opposed to actually the detailed knowledge in the past, given that the rate of technical changes so rapid. So I'd just bring that angle in as well. Yes, there is widespread excitement, right? A guarding cloud, but actually some groups feel less of a part of that, and we're talking about going back years. And so how do we address that as industry? How do we role model those different groups at the top at leadership and how do we create industry events that seek to outline these incredibly exciting career paths to these different groups?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:09:15):
Thanks so much, Laura, Anita, there are a lot of different groups, there's a lot of different people working on different aspects of this. I guess we always call for collaboration between our industry bodies and you. Do you think there's room for all these different projects? Do you think there's more demand for communication between the two? So we're not duplicating work and that we're clearly identifying which areas we're focusing on?

Anita Döhler, NGMN Alliance (01:09:39):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's something I can really confirm that the different organizations that we speak to each other, and first of all, we do have also in many cases, shared board of director members. So that's one vehicle to avoid application. But also, of course we speak to each other because typically we have the same, we fish in the same pot of resources for the different works we are doing, and it needs of course to fit to each other and therefore that's something we will continue to do. So that's the only thing I can say.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:10:17):
Great. Thanks Anita. Well, we are almost out of time, but before we wrap up, I do want to have a look at our poll and see what the current state of voting was. Here was the question as a reminder of what we were asking our viewers, what is the role of cloud native in successfully provisioning digital services and the vote so far? Well, there you go. That's pretty comprehensive, isn't it? 79% so far say that is absolutely essential to provide digital services. Franz, any surprises at all in that so far?

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom Technik (01:10:52):
I'd like to talk to one of the not necessary. Here's the 11%. I'd really like to understand the reasoning. There's

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:10:59):
Always one or third.

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom Technik (01:11:02):
Great,

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:11:02):
Thanks. Right. Well that is the end of session three. We will return at 1550 for our final session today, which is building digital infrastructure from core to edge. In the meantime, we here in Windsor have a networking break. There's refreshments, there's pinball, there's coffee. And for the online audience, don't go away. We are about to start our next extra shot program with Charlotte in just a few moments and she'll be picking up the conversation on cloud native with her guests. So don't miss that. Please stay with us. But for now though, big thank you to all of our guests. Thank you.