Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (00:16):
Hi, Tony Poulos here at DSP Leaders World Forum in sunny Windsor. Today I have with me Chris Lewis from Lewis Insight and also Lasha, well, let me get this right. Lasha Tabidze from, he's the Chief Digital Officer at VEON. Welcome to both of you. We just had a fabulous session talking about the market perspective, the digital services opportunity. And I have to say, it comes up all the time, what are these digital services opportunities for telcos? And some of the things that came up really concerned me, and one of them was Chris, we talked, one of the first points that was brought up is what can hyperscalers teach operators or are they a threat to operators at the moment? What were your thoughts on that?

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (01:01):
I think in much analysis that's done around the industry, we see very much hyperscalers working with the telcos. I think one comment on the panel is they don't want to go all the way down to the network and the access side. And I can see why they don't. It is a very different discipline, what they're doing at scale. Hyperscale is great from an IT side, and I think the role of telco is very much additive to that. Now, of course, there's a multi-layer relationship between telcos and hyperscalers because many telcos are using those hyperscalers to do a lot of the transformation, both the infrastructure and people like AWS more on the data side with Google Cloud and so on. So yeah, it is a complicated relationship and they obviously come with scale from at a global level, the local reach of the telco and extending that local reach to hyper local services and hyper personal services is something that I don't believe the hyperscalers have on their agenda. They've got a lot bigger fish to fry at other parts of the market.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:06):
Is the last mile the real differentiator then for network operators actually in your case? Is that point?

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (02:11):
Absolutely. First of all, I would like to say that very good quote being hyperlocal. This is the most important and the most powerful tool telecomm operators have because we are very close with the regulation by law. So no hyperscaler will want to go in every market and become hyperlocal. So if we go and tap into the market of sovereign cloud sovereign services, hyper-personalized hyperlocal, using the local languages to deal with our customers, I think it'll be no competition, but it will be a very complex cooperation together with hyperscalers.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (02:52):
Well, I wanted to raise this point with Chris first because I know what your answer is going to be Lasha, but shouldn't CSPs or DSPs as we are now calling ourselves, stick to the business of connectivity? Or should they expand into digital services big time? Chris, what do you think?

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (03:06):
Well, I mean, let's face it. Connectivity is the bedrock is the basis upon which services are built. But let's remember that we come from the world of voice originally where we're allowing people to communicate. So the pure connectivity is not enough. And the other services that we can layer on top, as we've seen certainly in the UK with people like ee, trying to get more into the gaming market, trying to get closer to the customers, the notion of super apps was mentioned, and I noticed on the panel again as well. So they are trying to get closer to the customer, but fundamentally connectivity is a great business in markets where the ecosystem and the broader economy is mature, let's say in the areas of finance or healthcare and the like. Then it's unlikely that they're going to, telcos will break into those markets. But I'm sure Lasha, do you want to comment from your point of view?

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (03:55):
I want to raise the point with Lasha because he said in his session that customers are not looking for services, they're looking for solutions. I mean, that's a really hard solution. Solutions are completely different to services. You've got to offer something complete to them. How are you managing that with so many s in your varied markets?

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (04:13):
First of all, when we think about the connectivity, it's not about telcos. We have to step out of that. We just connect people. Connectivity also means how we connect with people. So having daily interactions, having lots of data behavior, their pains, their wishes. So that's how you step out of being just connectivity, as we all like to say as a pipe and you create the services which are meaningful for the customers. But to do this, first of all, you have to put at the center, the customer, you have to really understand what customer needs are. And that's how we transport Vion from telecom to service co, which happens to have the telecom license. So having the brilliant connectivity business, but on top of this, providing financial services, educational services, healthcare services, and just recently tapped into the right HA business, which is also very interesting.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (05:14):
I think you may be the exception because as an industry, we don't have a great reputation for delivering over the top services, to be honest with you. Chris, what do you think? Are we getting better at that?

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (05:24):
I think we are. I must bear in mind that the origin of this industry was to the point connecting not even people, it was connecting buildings. We saw a telephone on the hallway that if you're lucky enough, your butler answered it, Tony, rather than you people answering individually. Whereas actually now we've gone right to the end-to-end service includes connectivity, but it also includes the wifi, it includes the devices, it includes the apps. And we are gradually getting better. And I think one important point, which didn't really come up on the panel this morning was about the visibility that the organizations have with observability, what we used to call network management. But to Lash's point about the data that we have about customers, this industry has generally been fearful of using its data and the knowledge of customers. And I thought Chris Holmes raised the point about someone texting him from their service provider saying, do you want to double your amount of data? Well, in my mind, that's a ridiculous question, unless it's in the context that he's already overusing the amount of data he has.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (06:28):
Because in many cases, most of us only use a handful of gigs of data. But if it was in the context of actually saying, your usage has been this much for the last two months, why don't you double? It would contextualize it, I think. And the context was raised again and again, and I think the narrative in terms of how we describe the services rather than describing it in technology terms, which is what we've done traditionally. So move it on, make sure you describe what the outcome is, how it helps an individual or a business. And I think the problem we face there is that it's not just the connectivity, it's storage, it's compute, it's analytics, all of those things and the applications that we use to run our lives. So that begs the question actually, should we be a component of a solution in many markets, especially the B2B market, where we're not just delivering the connectivity but we deliver it via third party. And my question was really around channel and should we be using different channels to get to the customers and actually reduce the cost of serving the customers For telcos, especially in the SME segment,

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (07:34):
Lasha was dying to respond to that. Go ahead. We've got a few minutes left.

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (07:37):
Yeah, I'll make just one command before B2B. You just said a very good use case from today's panel. Yeah, like someone texting. If you want to double your data, do you know when it'll be really contextualized and personalized if the question would have behind not only how much data you use, but really going out of gigabytes and understanding on what you use your gigabytes.

Lasha Tabidze, VEON (08:00):
If you watch movies, suggest another 500 movies on specific tailored entertainment platform, or if you use it for some other services, bring that service to you. That's what the difference. And on B2B side, I fully agree with you, the more channels we have to go into the B2B. And today was a big discussion about enterprise solutions. Sometimes we forget that not every SME or even large account has the skillset or the people to implement all services from hyperscalers. They need someone who they trust to help them transform their processes operations and make them also successful. That's where telecoms can play the big game.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (08:43):
Telecoms can, but I think also anybody coming to the table with the other digital building blocks can also do that and take the telco partners. And I think there's also an interesting thing around the SME market where a lot of SMEs would like to work with smaller companies that don't want to feel as though they're a very small part of, served by a very big organization.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (09:05):
Chris, I'm getting wound up here.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (09:07):
Okay, let me just finish that. But the automation of processes within the telco should allow them to treat and to make everybody feel like a loved customer. As customers, we want to feel a bit loved. We, and I don't think we've been very good at doing that.

Tony Poulos, TelecomTV (09:21):
Well, I've got to thank both of you, Chris, and Lasha for this particularly vociferous session. I thought we got through quite a lot, but I just wanted to end up and say that Colin from BT raised an interesting point. He said, surely there would be no digital services without the network. So why are we not shouting that out to the world? We're the network operators. Everything depends on us from extra shot. It's Tony Poulos waving off, and we'll see you shortly for the next version. Thank you for being with us.