Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (00:16):
Welcome to Extra Shot with me, Charlotte Kan. We are live from Windsor for day two of the DSP Leaders World Forum and we just had a very interesting and very content rich session here on unlocking platform opportunities with network APIs. So to discuss it, I am delighted to welcome Vess Bakalov, love president at Pliant.io an IBM company and Robert Curran. Robert is consulting analyst at Appledore Research. Welcome to both of you.

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (00:43):
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much. Great to be here.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (00:45):
So I've just mentioned a very interesting first session to start day two of the DSP Leaders World Forum. What were the highlights according to youve? You

Vess Bakalov, Pliant.io (IBM) (00:53):
Know what, it was great to see the difference perspectives. Obviously we had a wide panoply of different stakeholders on the stage. Obviously GSMA who is doing an amazing job trying to bring together the community, organize it, have that single interface, which we all think is so critical to foster adoption. Having Ishwar on the stage representing AWS was great because it's such a different viewpoint from everyone else. And honestly, having the different telcos, I have some thoughts about that and some of their opinions, but it was just good to see their different focus, geolocation, QOS, geofencing, all of those were amazing use cases and we'd love to dig in.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (01:39):
Fantastic. Robert, your key takeaways of the API session?

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (01:42):
Yeah, key takeaways. So I'd echo the ecosystem part. That's kind of what we saw on stage today. De facto ecosystem all discussing the same topic. Think for me two key takeaways. The first is the confirmation. Everybody understands this is about money. At the end of the day, there's the whole value chain. We're looking as far up and as far down as we can to figure out the different areas of value. The second thing, which again is fundamental, which I think the industry the health industry is getting is this is all about developers. The developer as customers is a completely new idea for telco. And I think the references to some of the historical attempts to do work in this area I think is very important. It shows the industry can learn. It is prepared to look back at a little bit of history and say, actually you know what, we don't always get it right and when we don't, let's learn from it. But that point about this being developers as customers, which again, I think Ishwar from a s reinforced that he was the one guy on the stage who's got millions of developer customers. So that's a really important perspective. So that has to be in the room, it has to be at the table and that's who the telco industry is trying to reach to. That's really important. My takeaway,

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (02:49):
Robert, you've mentioned the money opportunity while in fact if Telcos opened their exposed their networks, the opportunity is valued at 34 billion US dollars. It's too good not to seize, isn't it?

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (03:06):
There's certainly upside opportunity here. I think again, even on today's panel, you heard a range of responses to some of the numbers that are being banded around the people who are at the front line doing it saying, we're not so sure about that number, but we're still doing it anyway. I think this whole thing is to some extent an experiment. I think when we talk about exposing networks, there are ways in which that can sound like a risky thing to do. That's not really the point. The point is exposing some of the value that's held within the network as an asset. Sometimes that value is connectivity. That's what we've been talking about for network APIs for a long time. Sometimes the value isn't something else, it's in things like the location data or some other information that's mediated via the network but comes somewhere else.

(03:46):
Behavior, for example. And if you're in a financial is the most obvious near term example, if you're trying to determine whether or not to send a substantial sum of money from one location to another location, that little bit of additional data will improve your risk scoring. It'll just make you have more confidence as a bank. But the same thing could be true for emergency services or anything else. Trying to understand how to respond to situations and using information that's in the network there to just extract that little bit of extra value, extra confidence. So that I think is what's the experiment here, which is how can we monetize those extra features of the network in addition to connectivity. Telcos talk a lot about beyond connectivity opportunity and that I think is what's partly what's going on here.

Vess Bakalov, Pliant.io (IBM) (04:33):
Yeah, no, look, that was a constant echo since yesterday, right? It's how do we take the sector, the telecom sector and evolve it and go from a net reduction in stock value sector, which was addressed yesterday to one that's actually growing. And the fact is our modern life relies on telcos. It's a shame that we haven't been able to monetize the network. And coming from a bit of a more enterprise world myself, one of the things that's always been frustrating about telcos is the fact that network is so closed, the fact there are no APIs, there is no devolution of control of an application to the enterprise. So taking that aspect of it, some of what we're working on right now within my unit in IBM is how can we extract the policies of an application from its deployment? So looking at, and I'm going a little bit into the enterprise line, but looking at your Kubernetes deployment, Ansible deployment, other factors figuring out what are the policies, what is the bandwidth requirement, what are the latency requirements of an application?

(05:40):
And then we provision the enterprise network to support those. The application controls the network, but that stops at the edge. I cannot extend those policies into the telco. And with these APIs now that is now a possibility we can now begin to work with. And again, some of the work I'm working on right now would enable them very easily to set up these APIs and abstract the network from the independent of what the network behind the APIs. We can provide a consistent set of services to the enterprise that will enable them with confidence to start pushing some of the same use cases, quality of service latency requirements, and pay premium for that. An enterprise often would pay premium. I think someone mentioned pay premium, differentiated premium for undifferentiated services. So latency in bid fine and at the right time, at the right place, at the right quality, people will pay a lot of money and it's just sitting on the table right now monetized.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (06:44):
So what are the limiting factors? Is it to do with technology? Is it to do with lack of leadership? Who knows? Is it to do with lack of vision, lack of innovation? I think we talked about it quite a lot, the fact that the industry has become this monolithic sector and how can we change it,

Vess Bakalov, Pliant.io (IBM) (07:05):
Right. Well, I mean I don't want to be, obviously what has been achieved by telecom, it's tremendous, right? Again, I mean I am in awe of what my phone can do every given day, but a lot of someone else mentioned that oftentimes product managers in telcos are tariff managers. And I think telcos are addicted to that business model. And I think it's time for them to look at what AWS is doing with the 200 services they have deployed on top of very commodity server and disgruntled as actually Ishwar mentioned, the telcos getting into the mindset of innovating and providing these additional services on top of the bids and latency that they provide over their pipes. That innovation jump and sort of taking the leap of faith in a way and it will let them get to that 34 billion pot of goat to the end of the rainbow. I mean, I'm a big believer,

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (08:05):
I think that point about experimentation is quite important. I think a lot of the technologies that we're seeing come through, obviously with cloud, other things, APIs, part of their end result is to make it much cheaper to experiment. And I think that's part of, again, that comment yesterday about of our product managers being just kind of bundle managers, something else, the next generation if you like, of telecom product managers will be and need to be much more creative and much more willing to get engaged in end customer problems and their context. Again, that was coming out in the panel a lot today. We've got to understand the end use case because we're right at the bottom of this chain. And that's again, it's a change in position for telcos. Telcos are used to getting most of a large medium-sized pie. This new world at global scale hyperscale so on is all about getting a small piece of a much, much larger pie. And that's where Epic APIs really fit in. So that ability to get close to customers, understand their business context business problem, understand where developers play and what's your part in it, that's really key. But reducing that cost of experimentation, increasing the velocity, reduce the cost, learn fast and make products that we actually want to use.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (09:17):
Yeah, we're going to take a short break, just five minutes and we are going to be back to discuss the session on APIs and maybe all the sessions you've attended yesterday that you want to share your feedback on. So stay tuned. We are back in five minutes live from with for the DSP leaders World Forum.

(09:51):
Welcome. Welcome back to Extra Shot Live from Windsor for day two of the DSP Leaders World Forum. Yes, lots of energy still despite the fact that, let's face it, we've had many conversations yesterday, more this morning, entertainment last night. There's not for yet, of course. And the session we've heard this morning was focusing on APIs, which according to various figures, but the one that we are quoting here during the forum is this 34 billion US dollars market opportunity. Okay. So how can the telco industry tap into it to discuss it? I'm joined by Vest Alof as president at Flying I and IBM company and Robert Curran, consulting analyst at Apple Door Research. Thank you for sticking with us because before the break we talked about the culture needed to unlock all this API potential and opening networks. We talked about experimentation, maybe we talked about leadership being a little bit more open. What about collaboration and having the right ecosystem in place? S

Vess Bakalov, Pliant.io (IBM) (10:54):
No, no, collaboration is great because as quite a few people on the stage mentioned, every country has multiple telcos. So developers engaging with these new APIs would have to, if every telco does their own thing, well every application would have to have massive amounts of work to support the different services from each telco. And that's obviously not sustainable, not something that the developer community would easily buy into. Now at the same time, the GSMA forum has done amazing things, creating standardization, which now the telcos need to adopt. It's on them a little bit and I think that as the initial use cases grow and some initial success comes in, that will be an easier and easier sell inside the company. Now I think the telcos also short sell themselves because they aren't that many telcos in each country. From the US there is essentially three, right? I mean there is more, but really three. And in every other region it's more or less the same. So I think telcos a bit more power than they giving us US credit for, especially with the power of the services they can offer. But nonetheless, I would definitely encourage the whole industry to focus on collaboration. I think that is immensely important. It can stupid differentiation, but as long as we have a standardized way to access those services that would make the developer community much more willing to engage.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (12:15):
Love

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (12:16):
It. Yeah, we're just publishing some research on ecosystems in open ran for example. And what's happening there is we're seeing the formation of more or less stable ecosystems. So not just the idea of disaggregating and abstracting from a technical perspective, but understanding how do you reassemble things back together again. We're certainly seeing increasing examples of real collaboration company to company operator to hyperscaler to network equipment vendor to ISV forming in the industry to do what works. And I think that it's part of the byproduct of desegregation and openness is you say, well actually we're going to be a specialist in our own area. And so when you look at what's happening, for example in the silicon market, that's becoming a more complex market. So now telcos are having to think, well, what's our silicon strategy going to be? Rather than just handing that out and making that somebody else's problem. So that means you've got to get in deep in your collaboration to understand who are you working with, what is their expertise? And also as a telco, what's your business and what are you expert in and what are you not expert in? We're seeing some shifting of the tectonic plates, I think, around what telcos and even what their suppliers believe they're best equipped to solve. It's really interesting. Collaboration is absolutely integral to that.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (13:43):
And what do you make of the various industry wide initiatives in place in order to open up networks? I'm thinking of the GSMA open gateway for instance. Surely that's the step in the right direction.

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (13:56):
You want to go ahead? Yeah, it's very interesting. There's a lot of momentum you saw from the GSMA reporting that today, again, something that we wrote about at the time when they launched it at GSMA 23. It's a really interesting step in the right direction. I think the learning points from previous attempts are important. Our context here is different things have moved on a bit. I think the introduction of cloud, the adoption of cloud and hyperscale, cloud that's become so much more mainstream than it was five years ago. And so things are different now. So it is a step in the right direction. I think there's a necessary and sensible sense of caution about this. Let's not get overexcited, we're not getting all hypey about it. But at the same time, people are coming on board, not just operators, but developers, major developers, seeing the involvement of systems. Integr, integr, major sis in that work is really important because they're not doing it for fun. They're doing it because they want to solve customer problems. So when they're engaged, that indicates that there's something here that people can see value in. So yeah, it, that's really important

Vess Bakalov, Pliant.io (IBM) (15:04):
From my perspective. It's one of those things that, as Robert said earlier, experimentation is such a big important part of this and open gateway, other similar products, foster experimentation by making that initial investment easier. And as long as that is not something that would take a lot of upfront resources, can show some return of the investment, that can then foster repeated investment. And obviously every telcos look at projects at scale, and that's always the fact. So I think in this case, allowing them to look at some of these services and see that initial success would justify the further investment.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (15:46):
So let's wrap up the conversation around APIs for now and then let's move on to other things we've been discussing here at the forum Telco. Sorry, I've been trying to crack the API market for many years now. We've had many years of conversations around how to do it, but has the momentum changed somehow according to you recently?

Vess Bakalov, Pliant.io (IBM) (16:05):
I think Robert made a great point with the success of hyperscalers. It's undeniable. And to what I said earlier, in many ways they have shown that yes, you can sell a fairly commodity service as long as you make it frictionless to developers. It's okay to give up some control. Now, telcos have challenges around regulation and other things that hyperscalers may not necessarily be facing, and we should be cognizant of that and not be that hard on telcos because they do have governments in other things that Amazon, Azure, et cetera don't necessarily have to deal with. But nonetheless, I think this has proven that adding a good set of new services in a rapid cadence with an engaged community can be extremely lucrative and maybe 34 is actually a low number.

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (16:54):
I think what's also changing the macro trend I the connectedness of things, I don't want to get all iot about the whole thing, but the reality is that more and more things are being connected and we're getting more used to it and we're becoming more expectant of it. Your watch, your trainers, your car, anything that's moving around your Amazon package or any other delivery company that you can track where it is and it stops away or whatever. I mean, that's just part of our rising expectation for knowing exactly what's going on, whether it's a person that's connected or a device that's connected or it's a prediction or it's a measure in time. I think that's part of a background thing and I think we underestimate just how far we've come even the last few years. So I think that's adding to the accelerating expectation for the kind of things that can be done with APIs and the role of telcos in that process. So I wouldn't want to underestimate that. It seems so intuitive now because we're used to it all the time, but it's happening just gradually increasing, gradually rising. We take it for granted.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (18:08):
Okay. We just have one or two minutes left before we go. I wanted you to maybe share some of the discussions, the points, the messages that you've heard so far at the firm that have either surprised you or really resonated with you.

Vess Bakalov, Pliant.io (IBM) (18:22):
You know what, the one thing that I did not expect to hear as much about was honestly the green energy transition impact on telcos. The zero bit zero watts message I heard yesterday, honestly left me a little stunned in my chair. I did not expect to hear that, and I certainly didn't expect to hear telcos taking it quite so seriously. This definitely going to affect the way I think about how in my own work we're going to be helping telcos provide visibility into this and then also provide control such that they would make the network even more responsive to its load and whether it it's hvac, whether it's power consumption or power mix. So that is something that I did not expect to hear and certainly I was happy to hear.

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (19:14):
Yeah, this is such an interesting event because you talk about lots of different topics that come up. We've been from Silicon and GPUs right up to leadership and recruitment and retention. I think that's part of what makes this event so interesting and so different is you're going to get all of that range. I think something that I take away is that telcos are maybe even a little less further forward than we normally hear. We're used to hearing at the big set piece events, the NWC and so on. How great we're doing, I think is a little more honesty here, that there's so much more still to go in terms of automation, ai, autonomy, energy efficiency. We really are just at the start of this. What we do know is that we pretty much got the tool sets. We pretty much have the capability now. We have to put it together and we have to fix some of the underlying data issues and complexities that are there. So we know the direction we're headed in. We kind of got the kit. We just need to take the first steps along the path.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (20:15):
So more visibility and now we need the delivery to happen. Indeed. Well, many thanks to both of you for an equally rich discussion and conversation compared to the panels we've had here at the forum. Many thanks to you S and Robert and stay tuned. We'll be back in around arms time for more discussions and feedback on some of the sessions happening here in Windsor and the DSP Leaders World Forum. And just a few more notes before we go. You can catch up actually with all the content produced here. It's all available for you on demand on the telecom TV website. You can also take part in some of our surveys. And finally, you can send in your questions. You can participate remotely. So please do send your questions for our leaders here in Windsor. Stay tuned back in an nice time for more extra shots with me. Charlotte Kan