Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:07):
So some people say voice is back. Some people say voice never went away. Well, VOIS is here with us at telecom TV today. So welcome to Gary Adey, CEO of VOIS, and Chris Meads, commercial director at VOIS. Gary, can you tell us what VOIS is all about in this context?

Gary Adey, VOIS (00:26):
So VOIS and thank you for welcoming us back. That's fantastic. VOIS stands for Vodafone Intelligence Solutions. We are the largest technology, business and customer services shared operations unit in the telco industry. So until recently we were a captive organization, so we only served internal Vodafone customers. And back in 2023, we decided to take our 30,000 employees that operate across eight countries around the world that have delivered over one and a half billion in value for Vodafone and see if we could commercialize that asset and then take those products and services to external telcos. Yesterday was our commercial launch here at MWC. It went very well. We've had lots of interest, and yeah, it's been a super exciting 24 hours for us so far.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:20):
Okay. And can you tell us a little bit more about the setup? Because this was formally just for Vodafone operating units and it was Vodafone staff, but now it's a joint venture, right?

Gary Adey, VOIS (01:33):
Yeah, so back in 2023, the industry was changing. As always, Vodafone was going through massive change. We had a new CEO, the strategy pivoted and that really was our opportunity to take VOIS to the next level. So we've operated, as I say, across state countries with 30,000 people. So we have true scale, but if you look at how the models work for captives today, how they work for outsource entities, we believe there's a sweet spot in the middle where we can sort of reinvent the model a little bit. We call it the open consortium model. And

(02:09):
what we're attempting to do is sort of reinvent how we take our services to the industry. So our portfolio is split roughly 50-50 between technology services, so everything from IT operations through to application development, application operation, cybersecurity through to maybe the more traditional business services, so finance, operations, hr, supply chain. We also support all of our B2B activities from VOIS as well. So

(02:39):
we have a very, very broad portfolio that's grown over the last 15 years, but it's born out of that rich sort of telco experience, which is a super solid foundation. What we didn't have as an internal captive is sort of that capability and the commercial edge of the SI and professional services ecosystem. So what VOIS is looking to do with our new model is combine the cost competitiveness and the culture that you get with a great captive with that commercial edge and the capability set of the si. And we've chosen to go to market with Accenture in a joint venture to take that to our customers and hopefully unlock more value for them and for the industry as a whole.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:24):
Okay. And Chris, can you talk about how it is that VOIS is going to engage with the broader market and what your role is going to be and who you expect to engage with?

Chris Meads, VOIS (03:38):
Yeah, sure. Maybe I'll do that through an example, I guess. So our strategy is to reuse all the capability, the products and services we've built in Vodafone over the last 10 years, capabilities that we've proven globally across all the different Vodafone markets and make that available to the industry at a fraction of the price. So a great example of that is digital. Vodafone's invested a lot of money over the last five years in a modern digital capability from experience design, CRO, all the way through to modern engineering and DevOps. It's a really leading capability that we can now take and actually reuse really easily. Just last year we put it into a new market. We took the web part of it, reused 80% of the code. We put it in a third of the time, and I think it was the first ever project I've seen where the status report was significantly under budget. That was a new one for us. So we know the model works and I think it's about harnessing that capability in the right way and offering it out to telco customers to smaller telcos. They can get a truly shared service for a fraction of the investment and a fraction of the setup time, and then also through our Vodafone business arm into other industries as a more end-to-end capability and end-to-end proposition.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:55):
So as some large enterprises start to bring more and more communications, digital services, cloud APIs into their business environments, they're going to need maybe some of the help that a communication service provider needed in the past, I guess. And with private networks, of course, it's becoming more of a big deal as well in the global sphere. So is it those kinds of companies that you think you might be able to tap into?

Chris Meads, VOIS (05:23):
Yeah, absolutely. I think obviously today we're launching into the telco industry, but I think beyond that, yeah, absolutely. I think just that theme of beyond connectivity, businesses want more than just connectivity now, and I think VOIS can be that end-to-end integrator, that end-to-end provider of service to those kinds of industries.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:42):
And so here at MWC, you've been having discussions with companies. Is there any kind of a trend you're seeing in those discussions? Any particular things that companies are looking for, looking to find out from what VOIS has to provide?

Gary Adey, VOIS (05:58):
I think two things I've found in the last day or so. One is wanting to understand their rationale. So what's wrong with the current model that you're trying to fix, which I think is a very valid question. And when you talk to the telcos, they tend to all align on a few common problems. The first is the speed problem. So telcos generally have restricted access to capital, and that really throttles back the speed at which they can grow and develop their capabilities. The second one is the potential problem. They don't have access to on-demand resources, diverse talent, the ability to take commercial risk, and our model sort of tackles both of those upfront. The conversation then has tended to move to, well, how are you doing that in real life with real deals? And we hope to announce one of our first big deals in the B2B sector this week, but as always, these things get a little bit delayed, which is a shame.

(06:58):
But one of the things that comes with the new propositions that we've developed that Chris can talk about is how we commercially structure these deals now leveraging our partnership with Accenture and the fact that VOIS is now an independent commercial entity. So we have our own balance sheet, we have our own P&L, and therefore the commercial structuring around the propositions and how we can help telcos break that cycle of securing the CapEx, the delays, spending the CapEx, and then the delay again in achieving the value in the P&L, we can speed up that whole cycle in terms of how we structure and fund these investments in these innovations. So that's really what's piqued their interest, the propositions, the problems that we're trying to solve, speed and potential, and then how we can use our balance sheet and financial flexibility to make that happen quickly.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:48):
Okay. And how does that engagement evolve? I mean, to what extent is this sort of a managed services operation from the sort of professional services side and the ongoing strategy side?

Chris Meads, VOIS (08:04):
I think it varies company by company and trying to understand their problems. I think the position we're in now is we can devise the right solution for them based on whatever's important. Whereas before, as a captive, it's a fairly rigid structure and way of working and it constrained by the commercial constraints. I think now those shackles are off to an extent, so we can really take the capability that we've got and how can we deploy that in the right way, both from a technical perspective, but also from a commercial perspective. One of our customers recently needed us to proactively try and drive significant efficiency into one of our customer experience services around 20 to 30%. Well, we knew how to do it with the right AI capability. We've got through things like AI called summarization agent assist, but the old way of doing that as a captive would've taken significant investment upfront from the customer, taken two years to deliver before they get any savings. Now we can invest in that capability, put the right deal structure around it such that they get immediate benefit, and then we'll handle that through our balance sheet over the time of the deal. So a very different way of showing up.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (09:12):
And if a company comes to you and says, this sounds interesting, can you sort out our data lake for us before we start with anything because we don't think we can do anything without doing that. Is that something that VOIS has? I mean, you must have experience of that from within Vodafone as well.

Gary Adey, VOIS (09:29):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and this is the key point of that, Chris, is making the ability to reuse that deep technology and pure telco experience and share it more broadly across the industry is super compelling. The irony of the shared services industry, we share very little, which I find crazy, right? So we've presented yesterday on our stand around AI and how we're utilizing that. Ignacio Garcia, our chief head of that space, is here today talking to customers, and this is all intelligence knowhow, ip and really experience of doing this in telco, which can be difficult that we want to share under the new model and create this sort of truly shared services environment. It's really exciting.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:21):
Okay, well it's always interesting to hear about new business models in this industry and sort of breaking the mold. So great to hear what's going on with VOIS. Gary. Chris, thanks so much for joining us on telecomtv.

Gary Adey, VOIS (10:35):
Thank you, Ray.