Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:00:09):
Welcome to the first session of day two. It's another very, very topical area, unlocking platform opportunities with network APIs. A lot of industry momentum behind this at the moment, and we're going to find out a lot more about the issues involved, the challenges and the opportunities. But first of all, an awful lot has happened since we had our inaugural session on APIs this time last year. So to bring us up to speed, what's been happening in the past 12 months, I'd like to invite Alex Sinclair up on stage ct, the GSMA, and he's going to talk with me for a few minutes about what's been happening in this last year and set it up for our discussion. Alex, please come and take a seat. Good to see you again. It's been a very busy year and we've had various conversations over the year on this topic, but I thought it'd be a great idea if we could focus in on one of the major initiatives that's supporting this. The GSMA has been what for about a year and a half now, working on the open gateway. I just wondered if you could give us an update on the work that you are doing specifically on that and what's happened in this past 12 months.

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (00:01:27):
Sure. Well, as you know, we launched Open Gateway at Barcelona 23, so roughly 15 months ago. That time we had, I think 24 operator groups, 21 or 24 that had signed up to the MOU to deploy, and we had about eight APIs published in Kamara. If you fast forward to today, we've more than doubled that. So we've got 49 of the biggest operator groups. They cover about 241, I think it is network, so opcos and we've got 28 APIs published, so we've done quite a lot. We're also moving on now we're moving on to the sort of channel partner side, so we've got a new MOU, we've got 12 people signed up to that. So yeah, quite a lot happening in just a short space of time.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:02:11):
That's good to hear and some great progress there. Great numbers you revealed there. What would you say is different this year from a year ago, whether that's in terms of the technical work you're doing or just market appreciation and perception, what's different?

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (00:02:27):
Well, as I said, the first thing is we're starting to see a little bit of commercial traction, and that's really important because otherwise we'll lose priority and we all know what happens when that does. As I said, we're also focusing more on the channel partners this year. Originally it was all on our own members to get things started and we're still doing that, but it's an additional focus as well. Yeah, we're starting to try and reach out to developer communities. We've got small developer events at our own events, but they're very small. If you want to reach the developers, you've got to be where are, so we're doing 48, I think, external developer conferences this year alone. All the big guys like Google IO and AWS reinvent MS Build and things like that as well.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:03:10):
Well, I know we're going to get onto this in the panel session because engaging with developers is a big issue for telcos and hopefully we will spend some time during our PAL session looking at that. As you start developing APIs, and you said you focus on the core group of telcos to begin with, that was your first priority. Has the development of telecom APIs, network APIs, has it been shaped by other industry factors such as progress on 5G, 5G sa, et cetera?

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (00:03:44):
Well, inevitably, if you think about the original motivation for the open gateway, it was to monetize network assets and some of the best assets and the most expensive of 5G. But at the same time, we don't have a homogenous world, so we don't have 5G SA everywhere and we don't have 5G in a lot of markets as well. So we deliberately focused on the FinTech sector because the fraud mitigation APIs are broadly applicable just about anywhere on the planet. So that was an obvious thing to start with. Obviously we will now be looking at sort of more valuable APIs. I mean the one that's very much in vogue at the moment is quality on demand, and we'll be releasing a case study with China Telecom on that in a couple of weeks at our show in Shanghai, for example.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:04:23):
Great. Well, we look forward to seeing that over the past 12 months as well. We've seen the, well, not the emergence of AI, but a lot of interest in ai. Is that shaping the work you are doing as well?

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (00:04:36):
Well, it's certainly on everybody's lips, including everybody in the room. I suspect. We generally believe, genuinely believe that edge is going to play a pretty important role for ai. It's obviously early days, but training models and inference closer to the edge of the network is clearly an area we are interested in.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:04:54):
So before we start our panel, I'd just like to ask if we look ahead the next 12 months to have the next event, what do you think is going to be essential to maintain this momentum and ensure that the open gateway achieves what it sets out to do? I mean, you've outlined some of the steps you're taking, but what are the essential components you think?

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (00:05:14):
Well, we've got to keep people excited about the opportunity. McKinsey's done some research that suggests the opportunity by 2030 could be somewhere between a hundred billion and 300 billion. Very big numbers, which I'm sure we'll come back to with the panelists. But yeah, commercial proof points are pretty important. We've got some limited ones already with the deployments we've had, but again, to maintain the operator interest, we need that. The other big point for us is avoiding fragmentation as well, because that's the enemy of scale. If we start to fragment, then obviously we're not doing the developer world any favors, so there's still a lot to be done. I think. As I say, commercial proof points are the most important. We're starting to reach out to the other sectors outside in. We started with the FinTech guys, we've been working with the banks and the banking associations and that's been quite fruitful.

(00:06:01):
We've actually derived new APIs just from listening to their problems. We're starting to do that with other sectors. I was on a panel at the Amsterdam Drone week a couple of months ago and they were all getting excited about a Kamara API, which gives drone operators the population density under a proposed flight path. As I said earlier, quality on demand is another big one. We've got people like, I've forgot the name of the company now. I think it's Siemens Energy. They're using quality on demand for augmented reality maintenance of power plants, and we've got Von in Kazakhstan using geolocation and stuff like that for banks and emergency services, but also for targeted advertising for retailers. So we're starting to look at other sectors as well to try and understand what we might do for them because typically we do the kind of build it, they will come. It kind of helps if you get the outside in view as well and you figure out what they really need.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:06:55):
Well, let's hope the momentum continues and we hope the industry continues to support this. Alex, thanks very much for the moment for the update. We are going to get into some of those figures and the numbers you mentioned. We're going to really dive into those and we'll continue our discussion in just a moment. But before we do so, in case you weren't with us yesterday, we need to do some swift stage alterations to accommodate the panel. So whilst we do that, we're going to keep you entertained and we have some clips from some of our CSP partners brief video highlights of our online summit series, which we run year round as part of DSP leaders. So we're going to call our panelists the stage, we're going to fix the stage up and in the meantime we're going to play some highlights from this year's telco as a platform summit.

VT-Robert Curran (00:07:46):
A platform is not only something that contributes value to some other business process, but I think it's inherent in it that it also takes away some problem

(00:07:54):
Or complexity. We

VT-Terje Jensen (00:07:56):
See platform as one place to go in order to deliver different a number of different services and also supporting a range of customer needs and partner needs. So platform actually in that sense enables both the support and delivery of a number of components which then can be used, the components can be used individually or together in order then of course to deliver value to a customer. By

VT-Alex Sinclair (00:08:20):
Collaborating together, we can sort of realize our joint objective of exposing this new API NAS framework and that will make sure that partnerships and developers will have access to users across. Many, many operators and APIs have been there around for almost 15, 15, 20 years looking at what happened with C Os and from a telco perspective, we just were capable to really bring these capabilities to the market because at the end of the day we did not understand the developer blade, let's be honest to ourselves, and that's mainly because we as telcos are typically regional or national players. While this developer market is a global one, we have to be clear that this isn't necessarily our strong suit dealing with developers, but we have to listen more to what they want and what they need. Many operators have of course only adopter programs, developer programs, but at the end of the day, we want to reach as many developers as possible.

VT-Robert Curran (00:09:20):
There's a lot of opportunity to define what sort of platform you want to provide as a business proposition. So I think it gives telcos more room to do something innovative, do something different, and ultimately to try and extract more revenue from the infrastructure that they've built at different layers, different levels,

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:09:48):
Some familiar faces in that montage, some of whom are with us on stage today. Now you can catch up with all the videos from the telco as a platform summit on telecom tv. Now, a popular feature of all of our summits is the audience poll, which is why we have created a series of polls for this event this week. Now each session has its own polos one question, three answer choices and we are asking you to pick only one. Unfortunately, you can only pick one. It's not multiple choice. So here is a reminder of the question for session five. We are asking you the audience who will end up dominating the network API market, and the choices we're giving you is telcos, hyperscalers or aggregators. You've got to pick one of them. You will find the poll on the telecom TV website. If you go to the DSP leaders section, the agenda, all the polls are down there. So please do take part and we will take a look at the current state of the voting at the end of this session. Okay, let's get on with our discussion and let me first of all introduce our co-host for this session. Lauren la Boucher, who is group CTO and SVP for Orange Innovation Network. Lauren, great to see you again. Thanks very much for taking part in helping shape this session with us early start for you this morning. Yeah,

Laurent Leboucher, Orange Innovation (00:11:14):
Thank you for having me.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:11:16):
It's our pleasure. We will hear from you in a moment with the DSP address. But before we do that, I'd like to introduce all of our guests on the panel and I'm going to ask them all to introduce themselves briefly starting on my far

Laurent Leboucher, Orange Innovation (00:11:27):
Left.

Lee Myall, Neos Networks (00:11:29):
Yes, good morning. Thank you. Lee Mile NIOS Networks. We are the owner and operator of a substantial UK-based fiber asset.

Peter Arbitter, Deutsche Telekom (00:11:40):
Peter, Peter Arbiter, as you can tell from that beautiful color through it, I'm representing gotcha telecom and I'm heading a formed unit which is called Magenta API Capability Exposure.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:11:54):
Alright, sir, I've already

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (00:11:55):
Been introduced. Alex Sinclair, C-T-O-G-S. Mike,

Max Gasparroni, Liberty Global (00:11:58):
Hi everyone, I'm Max Caspar working for Liberty Global in the mobile and cloud team.

Ishwar Parulkar, AWS (00:12:04):
Good morning everybody. I'm Ishwar Perker, I'm the CTO for the telecom vertical at Amazon Web Services AWS. It's my first time here at this event and very excited to be here at the event as well as this panel.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:12:17):
Great, well good to have you. Good to have you all. We'll start our discussion very soon, but first of all Lauren, we are going to invite you to make your way to the lectern here for ODSP leaders Address.

Laurent Leboucher, Orange Innovation (00:12:27):
Thank you guy.

(00:12:36):
So good morning everybody and very happy to be with you today. It's really my first time at the Davos of telecom, but that sounds quite exciting and you know why I like it because I heard that we can talk in a very straightforward way about true challenges and not just about showing slides and I think that's the way I like it. So let's talk a bit about APIs. That's not new. Indeed. Some years ago they were already there and I'm sure you remember already more than 10 years ago we talked about GSMA one API at the time and it did not take off really. So the big question is why was it not successful? There are several reasons for that and I think it's really important that we reflect upon the failure of the past and think how we can mitigate that now today and how we can really make it a success.

(00:13:55):
Probably we as an industry we're a bit complex. In fact, we are numerous and it's difficult to behave as one platform and I think that's really part of the challenge. I'm sure that some of the panelists will explain how we can become more a platform, a united platform. So that's probably true, but I think there is also probably another reason, which is also an important reason on which we need to work. Maybe at the time it was not the good time and by the way, are APIs really the right angle? What problem are we trying to solve? In fact, API are just a mean to an end for API to work. First of all, what do you need? You need use cases and I think that perhaps we need to speak about use cases, not too much about APIs. Of course, APIs are important but they can unleash the use cases. So for many years applications used to be OTT off the top. OTT means you don't bother about the network, just assume it's there, it's invisible. If it's not there that doesn't work, but you don't care about the network and when you're a developer, life is much easier. But I think now things are changing.

(00:15:39):
I believe that we are really at the verge of a singularity. I'm sure that some of you watched the demo of GPT-4 oh a few weeks ago and that was quite impressive really I realized that we are entering a new world. It's no longer purely text-based LLM queries. It's become multimodal and it's very responsive. What is interesting is that in the way they present their solution, they describe it using latency and they say we are able to deliver a good latency approximately 320 milliseconds, which is good for audio, which is good for a conversation, voice conversation that that is almost natural like human beings speaking to human beings. It's not bad. But also think of future usages. It's multimodal, it's also video, but it's not watching video. It's capturing video and inferring video and it has to be in real time.

(00:17:00):
And I think that's the beginning of something very, very different that will have impact, a lot of impact on our network. Our network will have to become much more applaud driven. A link will become very important. Capacity will become very important because in fact it'll be a lot of people may be wearing glasses. Think of yourself in 2030 maybe you will wear glasses and you will watch everything around you and you will need to get your virtual assistant telling you, giving you recommendation and so on. But those recommendations will need to come in real time at the right place.

(00:17:51):
So latency will become very important. It'll have impact on the network. It'll have impact not only on the network, most probably we'll need also edge capacity somewhere we don't know precisely. So it's still a question we don't have all the answers. We need also to understand what will be the business model that's not completely clear. So are we prepared for that? Are networks ready for that? I think that if you think of all the new usages, you think that internet was designed for mainly for watching video. It was sized for watching video on the fixed network and on the mobile network, but watching video, Netflix and so on, that's good of course, but it can be buffered. So latency is not that important. When you think of combining at the same time, video, audio in both ways, symmetrical adding latency and so on, you start to think that there is a new set of capacities that needs to be revealed to developers

(00:19:11):
And you start to realize that quality on demand will be absolutely essential and not only for gene ai for many use cases, most probably perhaps at the beginning for B2B in factories for drones, for smart cities, for surveillance, for many kind of applications for stadiums that in France we'll have very soon the Olympics. And for the Olympics we have 60 places where we'll need to deliver huge capacity and it'll be mostly upstream capacity and it'll have also to be real time to some extent. Maybe not extreme real time but still. So that's really the beginning of something. So I think I just would like to conclude saying that as an industry we need to be outside in. I really like the word outside in. I think this is really how we should look at how we can unleash the capacity of the platform. We need to speak about use cases and we need to exchange a lot between ourselves about which are the good use cases.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:20:35):
Thank you very much indeed. Fantastic, thank you. Round of applause for the one great chat there. Great points you've made and as this is a platform for an open discussion and we pride ourselves on that and we really hope we can stimulate that and do that right now. And I want to start immediately by asking our other guests if they've got any points they want to pick up from what Lauren was saying there or anything, any to support or any different viewpoints anybody wants to quiz? Lauren, you start

Lee Myall, Neos Networks (00:21:09):
First. I think the point you made about the use case. So API is not for the sake of APIs and we've seen a buzzword become a buzzword and people gathering around it for the sake of being part of the conversation. But the use case, and I think for me in my world, which is not consumer facing but much more of a wholesale world, but it's the job of using anything including an API to make connectivity truly work in the context of the customer. So my interest and our interest in APIs is making connectivity work in the context of the customer and that drives the use cases. So that was a key point for me and resonates deeply for us as an organization.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:21:52):
Thanks Lee.

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (00:21:54):
Maybe I can pick up on one point because Lauren kindly mentioned GS A one API, which is one of the series of initiatives that didn't work. Mobile connect was the last one as well. Now we did get traction and some of those services are still running in some markets, but what we didn't get was the scale that we really wanted. The difference this time is we've already got 46 networks live in 24 markets I think within a year. So at the moment it's going faster. But as Laurel said as well, if you don't want to make the same mistakes of the past, you've got to understand what went wrong. So that's what we need to focus on.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:22:26):
So you are learning from what happened and applying it as you go forward. That's great. Peter, you want to come in?

Peter Arbitter, Deutsche Telekom (00:22:32):
Yeah, actually to these two points, I mean you've just brought in the mobile connect example. I mean they were defined 2015, we generated first revenues just last year, so it took us eight years from we had talked about them to bring them to market. So this is definitely something we need to overcome. But also to Laurens point that if we compare what's currently happening to what happened like 15 or 20 years ago in the IT industry with virtualization and public clouds, this disaggregation really drove a fully new market and it was really successful and we were always left out with our networks because we were so protective getting our arms around that and not opening up. And I think that we have learned, I think we have learned from things like mobile connect from looking at other industries where other players just took parts of the market and I think we are really entering now a new phase probably also looking at capital market developments in our industries where if we don't change we are in a problematic position.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:23:39):
Thanks Peter Max.

Max Gasparroni, Liberty Global (00:23:40):
Yes, very inspirational. Thank you so much Lauren. And I'm actually, I can echo all the points that were made. I think this time around we can do different than 10 years ago. There are many aspects that are very different from what it was 10 years ago. So we have application developers, communities that are large new, I mean the advances on the IOT devices that you have around the underlying network infrastructure and only if we work together and we listen to the customer because so far we've been on this crusade in evangelizing and effectively trying to educate some of the industries, as you said earlier, what the benefits could be and now we need to engage more with the customers, with the developers and understand what problems they have because we cannot invest in everything. So we need to focus the investments where the customers will see effectively the benefits later on. Probably we're going to touch upon some concrete examples. I see loads of green shoots that make me really much more hopeful that we are onto something to enable this new revolution, digital AI revolution and being part of the core of that if we don't do the same mistakes that were done 10 years ago, as Peter said, absolutely.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:24:58):
Thanks ma Ra, do you want to come in on Lauren's points that you made?

Ishwar Parulkar, AWS (00:25:02):
Yeah, so I totally agree with Lauren what Lauren was saying and the others have been echoing. It's important to learn from the mistakes and do things differently. There are quite a few things happening that are in the right direction. The operators getting together to abstract a common layer with kamara is one key factor there. Use cases are important but I think the most important thing here is to look at it from a developer experience perspective. Use cases is the value, but adoption requires a developer experience that developers are used to our comfortable with. If you look at technology transitions, especially from a developer perspective, things like moving from C to C plus plus to Java took more than a decade. These transitions don't happen often. They require an orders of magnitude value add to for developers to change. They don't change just with a little incremental improvement.

(00:25:58):
So I think it's super important to keep that in mind, to keep the developer experience consistent with what the largest developer communities are used to. That's number one. Second one is in most of this conversation I see the focus on network APIs but you can't build an application with just a network a PR, you need compute, you need storage, you need databases, you need machine learning stacks, you need IOT capabilities, other IOT capabilities. And so it's important to talk about it in the context of these other pieces that go into building applications and looking at how developers use those, how those are put together in building applications and then this becomes added value on top.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:26:39):
Okay, interesting. Thanks very much. Thanks everyone for those opening comments. Something Alex and I talked about just earlier there was touching on the potential market size of APIs because I'm sure a lot of you have already seen lots of figures bandied around and there's some incredible numbers that come out and when I say incredible, I mean in incredulous numbers, can we get a sense of what is the real world opportunity for all the different parties here for APIs? And I was saying the network API ecosystem, but I hear what you say ard, there's more elements to this, it's a bigger thing. And can telcos hope to make some meaningful revenues from exposing their networks? What sort of market are we maybe talking about? I mean Lauren, can we maybe start off with some thoughts from you because there are a lot of numbers going around and perhaps we're not comparing apples with apples here.

Laurent Leboucher, Orange Innovation (00:27:32):
Yes, I believe that there was some study studies published on the size of the market. I think it's very, very difficult to be honest and I'm not completely sure, but I will perhaps let Alex comment a bit because I know that GSMA published some estimates. I think that first of all we need to realize that for our core business already we expose APIs already today and let's say if we compare the situation between whether we would expose API or we would stay in a very static way of working not digital and so on, of course that would make a big difference in terms of revenue and so on. So I don't know exactly to be honest. And then we have a set of new use cases that we will unleash with camera, the telco APIs and so on. I think we need to be humble also, we don't know precisely what will be the size of the market, but perhaps Alex perhaps you would like to comment a bit the estimates

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (00:28:53):
That we done absolutely particularly reacting to the word incredulous. Thank you for that. So the numbers that we're talking about were done commissioned by the GSMA. McKinsey did the research and yes of course they come up with very big numbers. So the actual numbers they came up with were a hundred billion on the trajectory. We're already on 300 billion as like the high end, but that is based on a model that is broken down by market and sector. So it won't surprise you to know that the US was the largest market and media and entertainment were the largest sectors. When we showed those numbers to our board, we got a kind of so what reaction because a global number doesn't mean anything to any of the people because they're not in all markets. So we did do some analysis, we broke down some of the numbers in particular trying to compare it with what's going on now.

(00:29:39):
So I'll just mention one in Latin America, we took quite literally one API from one operator. We looked at how much money they're making now on the fraud mitigation side and how much McKinsey had said they should be making by 2030. And to be honest, at least it was the same order of magnitude. Now I'm with Lauren, you can't forecast the future. This is really about just making sure that people realize there is a big potential. The numbers aren't just based on API metering. It's not just the money you get from calling an API, that's not the value. So that's what we call enablement connectivity. Then there's enhanced connectivity is when you're doing things like quality on demand, you're getting a speed boost for gaming and you get more usage. And then there's beyond connectivity, a number of people have spoken about edge already, edge storage and compute. That's not even in the charts at the moment. I don't think it matters so much whether you believe the actual numbers. It's more about are you excited by the opportunity and do you realize that the value created particularly to the other guys, not just the value that we extract from that is actually significant and I genuinely believe it is.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:30:40):
Thanks for that. Some good clarity there Peter, please.

Peter Arbitter, Deutsche Telekom (00:30:44):
Yeah, I had the beautiful situation to discuss that with McKinsey and I think it's always the question of whether you sit more on the outer side and make people excited about topics or whether you own that business and you have to deliver on numbers. So now looking at the different roles, when we looked at this number, first of all, the 300 billion we're broken down into this is the overall market opportunity. We're also then the upper stack is included. If we talk about the telco market, that number was 30 to 40 billion. This for me is still overstated. So our number we are working with is more towards the eight to 10 billion side of the house because what we typically oversee by being that anti enthusiastic about this opportunity, you have these 12 to 18 months of sales cycle. Even if you'd love to get started, and I'm not talking now about a very small or startup company, I'm more talking about the larger ones.

(00:31:48):
This is what typically happens within their processes. And then you have a subscription based business. So that again takes two or three years for really this one to be picked up to generate then some subscription based remarkable revenues and then we are already in 2028 from all the things we know as of today, but just adding these timeframes. So I'm absolutely, as you can see on that chart, bullish about the market opportunity, but we need to be realistic in what that number is all about. And then there's another factor that we are seeing a lot of APIs and this is why we have put the CPUs business together with the network API business where we see a substitution. I mean if you look at all the financial services SMS send APIs which get converted into any kind of authentication mechanisms or even they move within the app without any API use it. I mean you see on the one side then your SMS business going down, it gets substituted by additional SMS business, but this one you had in your books is shrinking. Well then the network a P APIs grow. So if you look at that from an ad perspective in addition, this is another reason why in my personal business case I did not accept these high market assumptions.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:33:12):
Thanks very much Peter Max if you

Max Gasparroni, Liberty Global (00:33:14):
Want to come in. Yes. So for me, I mean we shouldn't forget that nas, the framework that we are all together trying to kick off is trying to address three major pain points of the telco sector. One is effectively is accelerating the collaboration as an industry, not just between the telcos but also getting closer to the likes of the hyperscalers that have created a fantastic cloud ecosystems with developers. Secondly is enabling us to accelerate our internal enablers and move to digital that is delivering already internal benefits. So we are seeing that through this which is essential also to be underpin with the AI revolution. We can provide the existing services much more efficient to our customers and we see this a way to then enlarge the customer base at which we can target. I'll just give you a very basic example. Let's take SD one, which is the new version of the traditional I-P-V-P-N networks still.

(00:34:20):
I mean in my previous role I was delivering this SD one in many markets and every SD one is a dedicated project. So you need to have to assign all the different people, project managers, the designers. What we have is an opportunity to make it much more accessible and much more software configurable to a larger scale, not just the large enterprise, but it could be a small SME soho, et cetera that will benefit from this with the extra security, the extra flexibility, the extra resiliency. And the third is effectively kind of combined. I would not see, there could be some APIs that will be substitutional, but I see basically the ability to overlay from the traditional model that we have today, which is undifferentiated services for undifferentiated pricing and overlay on differentiated services for differentiated pricing. How do we do that By listening to the customers where they see the value and then the customers will tell us where we should be investing additional, additional money in the advanced infrastructure as Lauren was rightly touched upon. It could be edge to enable this new massive wave that we expect on inference AI for different applications. But this is the markets that will tell us. So for me, we are onto something and I'm so excited that the GSMA take the lead I really see and we can provide some examples later of loads of green shoots where the end customer is starting appreciating the efficiency that this framework can bring to their business.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:35:58):
Thanks Max. I'm going to come to in a moment, but Lee let's just pop to you

Lee Myall, Neos Networks (00:36:01):
First. Yeah, very much chiming with you there on a customer-centric aspect to this and I think APIs are an opportunity in the world that we occupy. It's been very much focused around first portals and then APIs obviously meaning you can work around a portal and that's integrating other providers probably a bit more at the access level. So I think earlier on in Lawrence delivery there is definitely a bigger opportunity for us to create a much flatter homogenous landscape somehow across the world, across Europe, however grand you want to be. But I think making networks behave in the context of the customer is probably the big next opportunity, which I think is where that chimes for me. And so in our world, customers wrestle with a lot of legacy. I think we were talking about this a little earlier on and somehow via APIs and us as a provider, we can make the network behave and contextualize it so it's completely utterly relevant and exposed in a relevant way to the customer who then is dealing with this very, very diverse landscape. And that for me is the big next opportunity, ascribing revenue to it and the 100 to 300 billion and our slice of that pike, excuse me, I have no clue whatsoever, but building value for the customer where we might be able to trap a bit more margin and earn it is the opportunity for us. The number. I'll come back in a few years, I'll let you know.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:37:35):
That won't be all. Thanks Lee Ishma, I'd like to bring you in now because are telco's right to be excited about this opportunity?

Ishwar Parulkar, AWS (00:37:43):
Absolutely. If you look at the cloud from a hundred thousand foot level, it's a multi-tenanted, large scale global infrastructure for compute and storage. Primarily networks are the same. I mean they're infrastructure, large scale multi-tenanted for connectivity. Over the years we've built over 200 services on top of this compute storage. It started as risk renting servers and renting disks, but over the last 18 years we built over 250 services, a lot of technology innovation underneath, but everything is offered and consumed through APIs. All our customers see our APIs, they don't see servers, they don't see storage disk databases, it's all APIs. So we firmly believe that that's the way to offer infrastructure. It allows for creativity and flexibility in building applications but also different models of consumption. So we started with simply renting servers and disks, but over time, if I take the analogy of compute, we have a slew of consumption models from reserve to paying as you go to spot instances.

(00:38:52):
So it gives you much more flexibility in offering infrastructure. So we definitely see this as the way to go. In fact, this should have happened a lot earlier because it's a natural way of offering any infrastructure to us. From our perspective, if you see what the developers need, just I wanted to touch on the market size as well. We've also looked at modeling it based on our experience with APIs as to what the size of the market would be. But what we have learned over the years, it's difficult to really predict which APIs developers would pay for. There are APIs that they're willing to pay a lot for. There are APIs that they expect free, there are APIs that are just enablers to other APIs. So I think the more important thing is to make sure there's value that you're providing to developers and secondly putting it in the hands of the developers because that they will tell you they will guide where the focus should be and where the interest should be. So I think that's super important is just getting out of the gate, creating a developer experience, putting APIs out and learning from that.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:39:58):
Thanks. And as Lauren was saying earlier, timing has been a factor in the past here. Has timing been right? I think though, Lauren, we should move on a little. Another area I'd like us to talk about really is what position a telco can take in this ecosystem. Are they going to be aggregators, are they going to be, what are they going to be? Is their function and role going to change? What's the best channel do you think? And what's the best market approach

Laurent Leboucher, Orange Innovation (00:40:25):
To? Excellent question. Thank you. Thank you guy. I guess we need really first of all to reflect upon what Isra said, comparing compute, storage and so on and network. I would say that the big difference between hyperscalers and telcos is that telcos there is a huge number of telcos on the planet and not so many hyperscalers. So that makes a big difference. So if you want to create a platform, I would say if you're a hyperscaler, it's a little bit easier. Of course you need all the skills and so on, but it's a little bit easier. So we absolutely need first of all to create a very standard set of APIs and stick to the standards. So I think that really the foundation, the basis, and I really encourage all the operators, telcos and so on to stick with camera, open gateway and so on.

(00:41:25):
This is the first absolutely monetary requirement. Then on top of that, there are different options. Obviously telcos will be only a part of the value chain, a part of in fact the cake and we'll have to share the cake. So there will be aggregators. I think operators have worked with aggregators already for a long time. But I believe that we need also not to work only with aggregators. We need also to think of again, what is the end use cases, the end user use cases, and we need to capture value. If you want to sell the capacity behind an API, you need first of all to understand what is the value. For instance, think of geolocation. Geolocation can be extremely helpful. If you think of geolocation for instance, for drones, that can really add a lot of value. So we will need at the same time to go, I would say B2B, but also to work with aggregators. And we absolutely need to work very closely with the bigger cloud platforms, the bigger hyperscalers, because they're also of excellent way to increase the reach with developers. If you compare for instance, our reach, honestly today as a telco we have a developer community, but it is very small. It's it there, but compared to your developer community, there is a big difference in terms of order managed. So we need to work together.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:43:11):
Indeed. Thanks very much Lauren and Peter, I think you want to come in on this one

Peter Arbitter, Deutsche Telekom (00:43:14):
Straight away. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is where the dilemma kicks in and we have that discussion about we need to get access to the developers because they at the end of the day build in these APIs. We had not been successful over the past decades to do so. It's just a fact because the developer community is a global one. We are typically not, even if we have multi presences, we are not that global. So that's the first dilemma we need to overcome it. The second one is even if, and there again, I'm very self-critical. We have access to, if we look at our position in Germany, 60, 70% of the enterprise customers, but do we really know them or do we know the procurement department of these customers? So do we really understand the customer need from the line of business perspective? And especially if you are entering a new business where you have to create the demand first and not just fulfill a demand, which is pretty obvious, which is well known.

(00:44:16):
Can we really get access to those customers and this? And we looked at that and we translated it into our go-to market in saying on the one side we need to really get closer to the customer. This is why we entered the retail motion. We did not. So in the past as a c plus business, we were just on the termination play. So we entered this one in saying we need to better understand the customer situation and not the procurement department situation. That's the one thing. And in addition to really scale out that business, we have started four channels where we are now playing actively. It's the aggregators, the hyperscalers, theis and the svs. But still even and looking back and to overcome the challenges we have seen in the past, we need to step up to a certain extent, also do aggregation. I mean we should not leave that just open because there we see what happened, be it now CPAs where we left that field open to the aggregators or if we look at mobile connect, it took us these eight years, after eight years we somehow have standardized APIs, but just per country and from country to country, they differ.

(00:45:23):
So these are all the things we need to do better and this is where it also now it needs the telco industry to overcome that situation.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:45:32):
Thank you very much

Lee Myall, Neos Networks (00:45:32):
Peter Lee. First, I think it was an interesting point on aggregators you almost a situation of being an aggregator for aggregators, if that makes sense. And I think if I look at the UK landscape and you've got a lot of alt nets, we work with a large community of alt nets in this country and at an infrastructure level we provide a common plane for them to connect to. And I think more work between us than using APIs and other technology to create an homogenous landscape in which not just other aggregators but maybe even managed service providers can plug into something that becomes a service plane if you like, but leaves them plenty of scope to go further up the stack where they go beyond where we choose to provide a service and deep into the enterprise space. So I think you've got these layers of aggregation enabled by APIs and other technology collaboration and cooperation in a good old fashioned sense between providers. And we work closely with many, many alt nets bringing in the API technology and of course the mindset. And I think at that point you're starting to really create something that could become super interesting for people. Then they're getting very close to the enterprises at the end of the value chain or maybe the consumer too.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:46:49):
Great, thanks very much Max.

Max Gasparroni, Liberty Global (00:46:50):
For me, I mean I can echo what has been said so far and what we believe is that first of all, we should adopt the standard APIs. It has to be worldwide standard. And so far as I said, we had defined these 54 APIs, which is a great leap from the eight that we had a year ago. But again, it's been US operators believing, assuming that these are the APIs that the customers will value. So we need them to shift and start listening to the developers. How do we listen to the developers as said, there is a great developers communities that have been already created and we should try not to reinvent the wheel and engage with them because they are familiar with these environments. It could be the hyperscalers environment, we could be the aggregators and et cetera. And then we know that it's not going to be one size fits all.

(00:47:47):
There's not going to be one marketplace. It's going to be multiple marketplaces. Because like you see today on the hyperscalers, you don't have one single hyperscaler ecosystem. You have three or four and there's going to be different APIs suitable for the different commercial models that the different marketplaces have adopted. So it depends on four key points who basically interact with the customers, who has got the customer relationship, who's set the end price to the customers, and also very importantly, who is taking the risk and the upside because we can see engaging with some of the marketplace providers, there are some marketplace that say, actually don't worry about telco yourself. I will take the risk and I will give you, let's say a main commit of revenue. And this encourages the telcos to invest in the underlying enablers, but they take the risk that it doesn't materialize. So they have the engagement, they do APIs, enrichment. At the end of the day, we've been engaging with several of these and what I can see that there are some very positive things that make me believe that in the end of the day, the different percentages of the value chain will be based on who actually adds value. And I'm very optimistic about the telco because the situation is different from 10, 15 years ago where these advanced services will require basically the advanced communication infrastructure that we are basically bringing to the forum.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:49:20):
Great. Thanks very much. Max, any more comments about approaches to market or we should move on ish?

Ishwar Parulkar, AWS (00:49:26):
I agree. I think Max articulated it very well. In terms of the three pieces you mentioned, telco's, aggregators, hyperscalers. I don't see the aggregators as a very independent entity. I think it's, it's really about the developer experience and how much it cuts through the whole chain. I think there's the supply on one side, which is the owned by the operators and then there's the developer connection you want to establish. To me this is an enabling layer in the middle and if you really go deep into the developer experience, it cuts through that at a very simplistic reductionist level. You can think of aggregation as just aggregating, but if you look at some of the functionality that's behind it, metering observability, being able to troubleshoot root cause, all of that stuff that does cut into the developer experience. So I think it's just about the market segmentation B two, B2C or B2B type of use cases. And depending on that, you might want to have the aggregation done by a certain party, either the telcos or the closer to the channel.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:50:26):
Great, thanks very much Alex.

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (00:50:29):
I was just going to say the most important thing for me is you don't want to be too religious about this. We could spend the next 10 years arguing about who's going to win. You don't do that. You just need to do it and you need to do it right because several players have already mentioned the fact that if we allow fragmentation in, if we're not actually implementing the same thing, then we're already turning the developers off. It's a complete waste of time. So we're seeing all three of those archetypes in the market already. The most important thing is get out there and do it and make sure you're doing it correctly this time.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:50:59):
Thanks so much. And you know what? It's a theme for certainly yesterday as well just get out and do it. Let's get on with it, I think is a common theme throughout all these sessions. Let's move on because this leads nicely to another point, which was looking at the use cases. I mean Lauren, you talked about the need for focus on use cases rather than APIs, but if you look at maybe the current collection of APIs and Alex, you were saying this earlier on, you went through some of the early ones and then outlined some of the new ones that are coming up without being a bit harsh to start with. They might be seen as a bit basic, some of these use cases as we get going, but at some point we're going to move on and get developers and customers excited. What's going to do that? What's it going to take? Where's the innovation going to come from to move beyond where we are now to the perhaps more valuable use cases in the future? Lauren, do you want to have some thoughts first? Yeah,

Laurent Leboucher, Orange Innovation (00:51:56):
Of course. So obviously there are some APIs which are easier to expose and these are the ones that were mentioned leveraging what we already did in the past with CPAs like API, but also leveraging the identity kind of attributes and the mechanism that we can expose as CSPs and we can address already some very innovative and very interesting use cases combining, for instance, proof of identity plus geolocation. That can bring a lot of value, for instance, for the banks, for the finance industry to secure some transactions. But I think there are obviously some other use cases which are also very, very innovative. Just think of geolocation. Geolocation can be used in many different areas for B two P two C use cases, but also for B2B use cases, we spoke about drones.

(00:53:04):
Geolocation for drones will be absolutely essential. And combining geolocation and quality on demand and understanding observability also of the network, understanding what is the quality of the network in order to do the right travel pass, fly pass from point A to point B with drones for instance. But also in a factory indoor location, knowing where are your assets precisely also has tremendous value. So I really believe that geolocation can be extremely exciting for developers. But also knowing the quality of your network, understanding, observing the quality. I mentioned for instance, the new use cases that will come with gene I, gene I again think about what will come the virtual assistant that you will wear almost in your daily life in a few years. You will need quality on demand for that. And not just quality on demand for the radio segments, but really end-to-end quality on demand, quality on demand, understanding quality of service end-to-end on our network need a lot of observability. So we also need to understand and define how we expose those capabilities to understand what is the current capability of the network, so many opportunities in that area as well.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:54:47):
Thank you Lauren and Peter. Does this go back to what you were saying earlier about at the moment we have to make the case, we're not just delivering, we're making the case. So when I say where's the innovation coming from? What's going to get developers excited? Maybe they're not yet, maybe it's too early. We need to explain the possible

Peter Arbitter, Deutsche Telekom (00:55:06):
Yes and no. So first of all, I believe there's much more to come with things we don't know yet. But I have stopped investing too much time into looking at all these horizon three possibilities. We'd rather get started with things which are available as of today. And while I also believe that QOD really is a big thing, but it takes some time to get QOD, especially on a global scale rolled out. We are focusing on these tiny little things. And while everyone searches the killer app as we did years ago, there is not that one killer app. And my prime example is, and typically people get shot when I talk about the porn industry and the betting industry. But these are some very simple use cases where KYCH verification really solves some problems, especially if you look at betting and online gambling. This market in Germany is a 10 billion market, 10 billion euros market.

(00:56:01):
80% of that is somehow in that CRA side dark side and not legal. 20% are just legal and the reason, and it's very easy to set up an illegal business somewhere with being headquartered somewhere and then just offering these services on an online basis, overcoming all of these compliance rules you need to comply to if you want to run that business on a legal basis. Now the biggest problem of that industry is how can we get to these 80%? Because all these authentication and identification processes, and if I look at Germany and the post then process, that takes you almost a week to really get the identification done. If we as the telco industry sitting on the ton of a data can help the industry and also moving from that illegal part to the legal side of the house, and you can do then the addiction prevention and all the positive things too.

(00:57:00):
You can have gambling limits and stuff. Not that I'm in favor of that industry. I was just intrigued by the sheer opportunity of getting 8 billion of market potential, which is already there. Not that you have to win it, you just have to transform it. So this is why we are not spending too much time about the possibilities to come. It's good to see them and there are many people discussing about them, what are the things you can really bring to market as of today? We can really solve customer problems or enterprises problems. And there are tons of, it's really amazing to see. I had a bet with our sales team. So we had an all hands sales call with these 10,000 sellers and I said, okay, I'm going to invite your full team to a dinner if there's any customer where we don't find at least one and double it, two use cases to APIs, which they can deploy right away. I have not lost that back yet.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:58:01):
I hope this was not in the gray market. Thanks Peter. Really good points. Any other comments on this one?

Ishwar Parulkar, AWS (00:58:10):
So the way we are looking at it is from a industry perspective. So the cloud is essentially a horizontal platform. Anything we build is available and used by anybody. But in the past few years we realized that there are sectors that have specific needs and we've created verticals. Telecom is one of the verticals. There's energy, there's financial services, there's healthcare, automotive, and so on. The way we are looking at it is really what problems can you solve that for that particular industry? Where is network value relevant to that particular industry beyond just connectivity? So if you look at financial services to them, fraud is one of the big things that they look to the network and mobile devices for. If you look at gaming and media and entertainment, the quality of the network is super important for them. So it's really looking at it from that perspective and seeing where the network can add value beyond connectivity and then starting to have that drive the APIs and which APIs you need and how you can build applications.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:59:09):
That's interesting. Thanks Max.

Max Gasparroni, Liberty Global (00:59:11):
Yes, I have a couple of points. So to your point at the beginning, you're absolutely right at the moment, the APIs that are most successful are the APIs for the financial sector. Why? Because we started eight years ago in educating the financial system that through exposing these relatively simple APIs to expose so we don't have to basically invest huge amount of money to expose it could be very beneficial to them. So that was expected and I'm very glad to see in a market, couple of markets that we launched that the numbers that we expected to generate will be very similar to what you were saying, Alex in the South American. So I'm a true believer that there is a multimillion and then it could evolve into the hundreds and tens and the hundreds later on later stage. But you only works if we are all the operators are together and standardized because some of the customers said, look, I'm very clear.

(01:00:04):
I'm not going to launch this anti-fraud system. If not the main operators are there because then the user experience is absolutely abysmal. So that's one. The second new APIs, well we demonstrated the MWC this year a very good live use case. And why I'm saying very good because we actually brought together the whole end to end of the ecosystem. So we had the end customer, which is a company called Cfar. They operate the steer the vessels in the Port of Antwerp when the vessels come into the port and the port of Antwerp is 130 square kilometers. It's pretty big. And what they do, they operate these vessels using telemetry data, so sensor data and high definition cameras remotely from their location. So you have remote captains and what they do, they said, we are using the existing commercial networks for GM 5G, but the problem they were having is that in the busy area of the ports, they need to up the quality of the telemetry data.

(01:01:04):
And they say sometimes we can't because the network ingested. So the quality of the telemetry that we get is not good enough, so we need to slow down the vessel or bring the vessel to a stop. So then we had two APIs. One is the location as Lauren was saying, so that the vessel knows exactly where it is. And then when you enter a geofence area, which for the trial it was static by in the future is going to be dynamic. Then there was the mobile quality on demand, API that we were using the 5G slicing and gives them the quality, the demand. And they said with that we can be much more efficient in our operations, much more efficient means given that the vessels they basically 70% of emission is when they are more. If you can effectively make it more efficient, better planning on the route, they can save a lot of money.

(01:01:57):
And these vessels, they are like 4,000 tons vessels. They consume a lot. This also any percentage decrease, it makes a big difference they can pass on. The second aspect was the application developer, a company called Imec and the guy actually we have an animation where we showed the actual code as the vessel approach this area. And even I could understand the code, it was very simple. He said, max, it took me 10 days to develop this. If he was in the past, we complicated. I had to do integration with the network. It would take me months. It was so easy because I had to call this API that was exposed through in Nokia API gateway. I mean it doesn't matter. But he said the simplicity for me to basically use it and it's independent, so I don't care if it's operator one, two or three. I don't care if it's over mobile or fixed. I just say I want the pipe of X megabit per second X delay. That's it. So it was actually a very good, and we are just at the beginning, as I said, we need to continue the engagement that we are doing with the application developers community, leveraging what's already out there. So get closer to the likes of the hyperscalers and et cetera because they're close and understand basically what next APIs they will value.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:03:13):
Great. Well said. Thank you Max. Alex,

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (01:03:16):
First of all, we gave them an award for innovation for that particular application a couple of months ago in Barcelona. Very well deserved. The point I wanted to make was that we are dealing in the real world with a kind of supply demand mismatch. All the things we're talking about, we don't have perfect supply. So deliberately we picked the ones that were doable. Now we'd already shown the value. We've been working with banks for at least six to eight years and some had launched that. That gives you revenues now, and that's probably the target that Peter would sign up to. The kind of KPI you can see right in front of your nose. And the age identification one was another brilliant one. We talked to people like TikTok about that recently. They want it, but they want it now everywhere. And if they can't get that, they're incentivized to do it effectively via an app or buy something else as well. So you've got to have this combination of the tactical view, pragmatic view, which is this is what I have, I can make money now, but at the same time keep your eye on the ball of what will be possible when everybody's deployed standalone and everybody's deployed edge, et cetera. That's going to take years. Again, Peter made that point as well. We've got to keep, if you like, the money flowing or people will lose interest in this. So it's very important to do the tactical as well as the strategic.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:04:25):
Thanks so much. Did you want to come in on this point as well?

Ishwar Parulkar, AWS (01:04:29):
I think we did cover the use cases. Right.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:04:32):
Okay. I want to start you off on our next talking point really, because this has been a great discussion. It's been full of fantastic insights, but really this is only going to succeed if we get the buy-in from the developers. We need the developers to make all this work. And this is one of the things that I think telecoms has struggled with previous years. So how do we do it? How do we ensure this time that we actually get this working? How do service providers engage with the developers successfully and these communities want to engage back what's going to be different, what's going to be the optimal strategy? And ish, I did want to start with you on this one because this is a big topic

Ishwar Parulkar, AWS (01:05:11):
And that's I think where the hyperscalers can play a big role here, right? Because we have a very large developer community, we have other services that are required to build applications, as I mentioned earlier, compute storage databases that developers are very familiar with. And it's all about making that developer experience, keeping that consistent and folding this in as added capability or a new capability that they can leverage. So to us, that's one of the reasons why we believe we have an important role to play here because of the existing developer community and an environment that a large, very, very large set of developers are already used to. So if you keep that consistent and fold that in, there are options going to be quicker and it's going to get a larger footprint.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:05:57):
Thanks WAN Lauren. Even the largest telcos are small compared to the communities that the hyperscalers can engage with. What do you think?

Laurent Leboucher, Orange Innovation (01:06:06):
So I think that clearly we need, first of all, we need developer feedback. So we need to engage with developers but we don't have the same scale as hyperscalers. So as issuer said, I think we need, this is really a place where we need to partner, we need to work together, we need to create the right combination partnership where we can at the same time benefit from their experience but also their reach from developers and take the lessons. And I think we need to go through different iterations. We need to understand that the first version of an API maybe will be too complex and we need to change it. We need to refactor it, break it, accept the feedback. Because we know that by design we are a bit complex, we are too complex. And at the end of the day, what matters is whether the API is adopted or not. That's the only thing which matters.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:07:11):
Thanks Lauren. Let's start with Lee on the end and we'll come around.

Lee Myall, Neos Networks (01:07:15):
Yeah, I think there's a softer aspect to this as well and partly solved by getting closer to the hyperscaler community for telcos. And it's a bit of an image problem maybe in some ways I spent some time in IS and PAs quite a number of years ago. And then you sort of inject yourself into that community at hackathons and so on and so forth. And you're presenting people challenges that they love to then address. And I think we've got plenty of exciting challenges. I just think that the software and developer world probably doesn't look to us as a source of those, but boy we are. And I think we've got to work collectively to excite them because there's a vast amount of opportunity that they can then bring their talent into solve. And certainly to unlock that, I think working with the hyperscalers, because you clearly attract that community in droves already, but we are adjacent. So I think you could unlock that for us. But we've got to take on the responsibility of exciting that community and awakening it to the opportunity that we have. We have to be fully awakened to it first of course. And we are trying to understand it in debates like this, but it will come.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:08:26):
Thanks so much Lee and Alex. I mean collaboration is at the heart of what you are doing at the moment with open gateway. I mean this is obviously the way to go

Alex Sinclair, GSMA (01:08:35):
And again, we learned from past mistakes because look, operators do have developer programs and they're good developer programs. I'm not going to say a single thing about them, but they just simply don't have the reach and as Lee said, people have the problem, don't think of us as the solution yet. So we've got to get out there more. So what we've started to do obviously in a limited fashion we don't have infinite resource, is to start being present in those events. Like I was saying, an MS build or AWS re invent and it's not just GSMA stuff, we're tending to get people from the evangelists, from the operators to go as well. So people that are used to dealing with developers, we send them to these events and we're starting really small because they don't dunno who we are, but at least we get interest. We've got to get out more basically.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:09:19):
Thanks Alex Max?

Max Gasparroni, Liberty Global (01:09:20):
Yeah, I was going to make exactly the same point that, and I'm very pleased that the initiatives that the GSMA are doing. I think this year you are planning to be at 15 of these events across different type of scalers and then the hackathon and the devcon we have at MWC again and our role as operator, as I said, we started coming up with these ideas of APIs that could be useful to the developers present these examples like the one I said in the port is one example, you may know materialize, right? But at least we give inspiration on what it could be and then we leave effectively to the developers community and the customers to say, actually I have these issues and I would see a different API that will work for me. And to the point that Lauren was making, the current APIs may not be the best batch because we need to go out there and listen. So it has to be a much more customer pool model rather than operators push model. And by doing this evangelization and being present in these communities, it will take years, but we'll get there.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:10:20):
Thanks Max and Peter, what are your thoughts here?

Peter Arbitter, Deutsche Telekom (01:10:22):
Yeah, definitely you need to understand developers and if I look at our own unit, we also have developer evangelists in our team to ensure that we get their insights, but we had internally intenses fights whether we build our own developer community or whether we just rely on partners. And no doubt I was in that second camp because I don't believe that there's any chance that you can do that as a telco. So this is why that market opportunity is large enough. I mean if you do it right, everyone can win. Why would you build up something we do not have expertise in? Why don't you leave that to beat now the hyperscalers or the ISVs who come up with a community, that opportunity is so big that everyone can

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:11:12):
Participate. Great. Thanks very much Peter. We are approaching the end of our panel. There was an awful lot to get through so I hope our in-room audience will be able to engage with our panelists during the networking break and keep the conversation going. But we did have a quick question in film one of our online viewers and it's worth bringing this up and Lauren maybe I could start by asking that question to you. It's just popped up on our screen here. What does everyone mean when they talk about aggregators? Can you explain what an aggregator is?

Laurent Leboucher, Orange Innovation (01:11:44):
Well, an aggregator can be of different kinds. So generally an aggregator is a way to simplify. It's a way to simplify the life of developers because as we said, we are so many telcos and for a developer, when you develop an app, you don't want to develop it just for orange. You want to develop it to make it work across, I mean across the whole planet. So you need a way to be able in the same country to address the different telcos in a way which is completely hidden abstract. So the developer doesn't care. You need also to an aggregate can also simplify your life because in fact it's not just a question of having the network capacity, but you need also other capacities. So you need to bring that in a place where it's easy to consume. And as you said, in fact it's not just a question of network connectivity. So I think you will see that in this value chain. You will see different kinds of aggregators positioning themselves at different level. So very raw telco APIs at first, but on top of that maybe some added value and aggregators that will play a role in that space.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:13:08):
Laurent, thank you very much for clarifying that. Much appreciated. We are almost out of time, but we do want to look at the poll and look at the current stating of the voting because talking of aggregators, that was one of the choices we gave our viewers, who's going to end up dominating the network. API market telcos, hyperscalers or aggregators and the results are in, well, there we go. We're almost halfing, hyperscalers, aggregators, Telco's got a surprisingly strong showing there. Pleased to see that. That's quite happy. Yeah, we're happy with that. We are not closing the polls though, so if you haven't yet voted, you have plenty of time to do so we're keeping 'em open all week. So please vote, vote, vote and make sure your voice is heard. Right. That is the poll done. That's our discussion done. It's the end of session five. Our in room audience. Please grab our guests and ask your questions during the networking break. We'll be back at 1115 for the second session of today, which is all about leveraging cloud for advanced operations. In the meantime, networking break, pinball, coffee, charity tournament. So much to do and guests here to continue this great discussion about APIs For the moment please, let's thank our guests and yeah, thank our guests first. Thank you very much indeed.