Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:00:10):
Good morning everyone. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the Great Telco debate. Please come on through, take seats, make sure you've got cups of tea, cups of coffee. Come on through and sit yourselves down whilst you're all sorting yourselves out in this room, this packed room. Just like to welcome you. It's our birthday, the great Telco debate was 10 years old a month ago, maybe on this day, a month ago, November. So this is our 11th annual event, so we're feeling quite chuffed. Welcome all of you. Thanks for joining us in the room in person. We do appreciate you giving us all your time and also to our online audience. We have got a large online audience watching us live, so welcome to you. Thanks very much. Please stay with us through the day. We've got plenty of goodies for you. We have several motions throughout the day that we do want you to vote on.

(00:01:01):
We want to know whether you agree or disagree with the motions. And Chris and Graham, I'll introduce it in a moment. They'll be talking you through those motions. And last year we launched the world's most advanced AI enabled voting system and this year we are launching version two of the Paddle Pro. This is the Paddle Pro. It's highly sophisticated device. Please don't run away with these. These are really sophisticated. There's only a few of them in the world. We have a new version because they're coming a new colorway, apparently that's a word slightly used white. We're calling this very fetching and also it's quite interactive. You can use it with your right hand and also works for left-handed people. So that's quite an advancement there unless you're on the back table in the corner there because I'm afraid, very sorry, you've got the cheek knockoffs there, so apologize for that.

(00:01:48):
We haven't got the budget. So activate your Paddle pro. Hold it up in front of you like this at the right moment. If you want to agree with the motion, please use compliant green and face us the front there. We'll count the greens if you disagree with the motion raging red. So point the red towards us and we'll take a vote. That's really awesome. Now we love the motions and we love the voting and it's a bit of fun, but it's also serious because it does help us really get a few feedback as to how the industry is thinking about certain key topics. It's really, really useful to us and we want to hear a range of views from you. I want to hear different views. We want to hear different opinions. We want to hear different ideas. We've got a broad range of expert witnesses.

(00:02:32):
They're all going to be giving you a three minute presentation before the conversation starts. Get you in the mood, provide the debate with some context, and you may agree with them, you may disagree with them, it doesn't matter, but we want to hear why because the absolute last thing we want to see is this. No thank you. What a snore fest. We do not want that. That helps. Absolutely nobody. We don't want that nonsense. We reject the great Telco consensus, right? Enough of that nonsense. We have a real agenda for you. We have five debates once more and we're going to pop those on the screen there so you can see those three debates this morning. Then we've got a lunch break at one o'clock for an hour and then we're back with a couple more debates. We've also got a really interesting, hopefully chat with our onstage special guest who's Colin Lee of JLR, Jaguar Land Rover. Did you see their new concept car launch this week? Well, he's not talking about that. We are going to be talking about the real relationship between the automotive industry and the telecoms sector. So don't miss that. And we do conclude at 5:00 PM sharp when we will retire downstairs. You're all invited to join us in the bar for a spot of networking here to ensure once more that we do have a heated debate are Chris Lewis and Grw. Welcome back both of you. Thanks so much for joining us again, looking forward to today.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (00:04:03):
Always, always guy, just the variety of perspectives. I mean getting all those different views out and discussing them is I think all too often, especially in conferences, you get that one corporate pitch from the stage 45 minutes long, probably 40 minutes too long, and yeah, the three minute witness statements I think get people thinking and then hopefully Graham and I'll then introduce the motion and speak either side of it and get those questions coming in from the floor. Have we got the throwaway microphones today?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:04:29):
We do have the boxes. Don't throw them dangerous boxes. Yes, we're not throwing them anymore, we're just handing them out. I'm insured. We're grown up in sensible these days, right? We're here for you very soon. We have some expert witnesses to hear from first though, so we shall start with our first debate. And our first debate is delivering a telco as a platform model. So can we have our first panelist, expert witnesses on the stage if I can invite the six of you to come up on stage, hopefully you know where you're sitting. Please come up on stage, give 'em a round of applause while they come up on stage just in. So let me quickly go through the rules while our guests get seated here. As I said, we have three minute expert witness statements, three minutes, that's all. There's a screen at the back of the room and there's going to be a countdown clock on there and it's going to count down at three minutes and then it will turn red.

(00:05:27):
There we go. Look at that. Three minutes. No one wants to see that turn red, so please don't make it turn red. Please respect your fellow speakers. Once we've heard from our expert witnesses, we are going to go across the Graham and Chris, we're going to hear the motion and then we're going to have a 30 minute or so conversation. So get your questions ready on with the first debate, then delivering a telco as a platform model. And this concept has been gaining interest of late and we held our first online summit on this topic this, but how exactly will such a business model lead to new service opportunities? Who benefits and how would it exactly be used? Well, we're going to find out. So let's invite our first witness to the lectern please. And Geoff, if you could do the honors as our first witness. Our first witness is Geoff Hollingworth, who is the CMO of Rakuten Symphony.

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (00:06:22):
Good morning. I'd like to open this wonderful event with something completely different. I want to speak about telecom success stories and I want to start by speaking about a company called Lumen. Lumen Technologies in North America. Lumen this year has closed over $5 billion worth of business with hyperscaler companies and internet companies because Lumen understood that hyperscale companies and internet companies needed high performance, reliable fiber connectivity to where their enterprise customers are and they engineered their internal organizations and technology to deliver on the SLAs required to do that business at very good margin. I now want to speak about what enabled Lumen to do that. They were approaching bankruptcy in January. They got restricted, they removed all of their leadership team and they got rid of anybody in the organization that said that's not how we do that here.

(00:07:54):
And they removed their lack of quality of double digit performance issues that would stop them from meeting the requirements of the hyperscalers and they interface with the hyperscalers the way the hyperscalers and the internet companies want to interface. So that's one example of a telco who has become a platform for customers. And please notice I've never mentioned technology, APIs, platforms, any of the things that we get excited about, but they all exist because that's how you deliver value to customers and we are here to deliver value to customers. The second example is one closer to my heart where Rakuten has a platform that delivers value to internet companies and Rakuten Mobile now receives 50% additional revenue from business enablement above the network as well as what they get paid for the network work to close. We can be successful as a platform, but we must focus on customers first.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:09:26):
Perfect. Goeff, thank you very much. Wonderful pleasure, Geoff. Alright, set the bar high there. Three minutes. Exactly. That's incredible. That was very, very good. I think you did practice that, don't you? Thanks very much. Well our next expert witness is Nathan Rader of Deutsche Telecom. So Nathan, we're going to skip a witness. So please coming up and delivery a pitch.

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (00:09:52):
I didn't have an extra three minutes there to think about what I'm going to say. So no, I want to talk about collaboration. When it comes to telco as a platform, we compete as operators quite a bit, but typically we compete on connectivity and that's what we've been competing at for a long time. But if we really want to move forward, if we really want to be successful with creating a platform, creating new services that are offered to potential customers, we actually need to stop competing and start collaborating at least in those areas. We need to ensure that we can create common products across our networks to be able to offer developers and others the same things with APIs and that's where we're putting a lot of focus in from Deutsche Telecom. We've recently launched a whole team that's focused on just building out new capabilities in the network to offer as platform type services and we continue to build that out, but we're also spending a lot of time focusing on creating this collaborative environment.

(00:11:00):
And it's been a difficult challenge and we've recently launched or announced I should say a joint API type venture to collaborate with operators. We've got, at this point in time, 10 of the largest operators signed up and there's 60 plus operators in discussion currently that are being talked to. And that's the kind of collaboration I think we need to get to if we want to be able to build new technologies, new ways of monetizing our network and ensuring that we have a means to deliver this platform to all of the operators and all of the customers and developers out there. But there's still some gaps in this platform play.

(00:11:43):
There's a lot of work to build out a platform to be able to monetize our network and right now I still see huge gaps in the industry. There are no off the shelf solutions to help operators create these platforms. There's a few groups working on things, there's a few places being tested, but ultimately we do not have a great solution for creating a platform for monetization of capabilities of our network outside of connectivity. And so I guess I would sit here and challenge the industry that that's a place we need to look at. We need to start thinking about how we develop it, but we also need to make sure it's easy for others to, right now we have with this venture, 10 of the largest operators in the world that maybe have some budget to create such a platform. But when we try to bring on smaller tier two, tier three operators to get that global coverage that we need to make a platform available, we need to have solutions out there that can work for all. So in the end, we just need to start collaborating and drive this forward. Thanks

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:12:51):
Nathan. Thank you. Terrific. Thank you very much Nathan. So can we have our next expert witness in please Fahim from Colt Technology Services team? Come on, please join us at the lectern

Fahim Sabir, Colt Technology Services (00:13:06):
Three minutes. Hi there. So the whole idea of a platform in the telco environment, sorry, the whole idea of a platform in the telco environment is actually really, really interesting. So the fact that we have customers that can consume services, that can drive services, can automate services in a highly programmable way is where the industry really needs to get to. And that's something that our customers have been telling us for a very, very long time. But I'm going to sound probably sound a little bit negative when I say this, but I think we're going to fail at this now. It is not normal for people to say that in events like this, but I think as a community of service providers, we have a little bit of a mindset issue that we need to get over and that is all around the same thing. Collaboration, we compete with each other.

(00:14:02):
If you're ever in a telco, there's a lot of conversation about owning the customer share of wallets and all of these such topics. And the question is how are we going to put together a platform which encourages participants to join when there are going to be so many platforms out there? Every telco wants to own the platform. The major thing that we have at the moment is the industry is really interested in standardization. There's a lot of conversation about standardization, but if you look at implementations of standards, everybody has their own implementation standards as standard as they're meant to be, are not actually standardized enough to be interoperable. And that's kind of a major problem. So we have this whole idea whereby we want to compete and we want to be able to operate just like the cloud providers have operated. But if we think about it from a platform participant's point of view, in order to reach a big chunk of the world, I need to hit or be able to be deployed onto effectively three different cloud providers.

(00:15:08):
I mean there is a bigger market than that, but once you get past three you're kind of at 90% or so. Now the challenge that you have is if a participant of a platform wants to hit 90% of the telco market, well then we're not talking about three providers, we're talking about thousands of providers. And the thing that we don't do at the moment in the industry is make it easy for participants to actually join platforms. They'll have to do work for every single platform that they want to join. And that to me is a real issue. So I think what we need to be doing a little bit more of is all around the area of federation alliances and the such. You can look at the airline industry, which is a kind of good example whereby I can buy a ticket from one place to another. The alliances work together. I dunno which airline I'm going to actually end up flying with, but the reality is I can go to one place to actually buy a ticket and at the moment we don't have that same sort of thinking in the telco world and that's something that needs to change.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:16:12):
Great. Fahim,

(00:16:13):
Thank you very much. Wonderful. This is what the great telco debate. It's all about range of ideas and views that we can discuss. Thank you very much. So our next please come and join us at the letter and present the next expert witness statement. Thank you.

Erez Sverdlov, Nokia (00:16:27):
Perfect. Thank you guy. Hi everybody. You know what this is of course. But this is the value of all you can eat subscription in Italy for months in France, it's the size of a cappuccino. This is of course not sustainable. Now, original world where developer can access the power of the 5G Edge computing, slicing and build their innovative application to make the life of the customer easier and much more around the customer experience. Telco as a platform is the key for all of this. It's enable the telco to open the systems, the network system by using the APIs. It's a very much a fundamental shift. We're talking about enablers and not anymore just provider. CSP will finally will be able to break free from being only a connectivity and moving I would say to Apple chain to give more value and better customer experience. Now I know it sounds a bit too good to be true, maybe even a science fiction, but there was a recent IDC research that shows that while in 2020 the value of the API of the network API was 700 million, only by 2028 it'll be 6.7 billion euro.

(00:18:01):
To my belief, this is the way we can monetize the network, the 5G network, this massive investment we we've put inside the network. Now it's a fully new ecosystem. We're talking about telco as they generating new revenue strengths, businesses leveraging new type of platform, new product, new services developers can create innovative application and consume. We're able to consume new services, improve their experience and even control better the data they own. The CSP need to get ready for this. So they have to think a bit more strategically about how to use the APIs about having a network as a fully cloud native addressable by application, by having the operation be automatic or automated and of course address the security topics which are very, very important. It is not just a technology shift, it is a mind shift that you have to take. Thank you. Thank you

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:19:05):
Very much. Yeah. And we reclaimed 30 seconds. Fantastic, thanks very much. Great. We've got one more expert witness statement to do so Nik please come to the lectern. Nik Willetts, CEO obviously of the TM forum.

Nik Willets, TM Forum (00:19:20):
Well good morning everybody. It's fantastic to be here. Always feels very seasonal. I feel like when Christmas starts this event in a strange way. Now I've had the benefit this time of not going first but going last, which is very helpful actually because I can try and avoid repeating folks. And I have to say I agree with many of my fellow expert witnesses but would like to expand on what they've said because this notion of being a platform business I think is ultimately misguided. We as an industry will struggle if we go into this thinking about us owning or controlling a platform being ours because the platform economy already exists, it's existed for over a decade and we are trying to find our relevance and way in that world. This industry as we reflect on this year is hurting. We see incredible challenges due to the rising cost of capital, the amount of capital we've invested in networks and our inability to see that payback and the ongoing reality that the businesses we serve are too complex need to be modernized and automated to meet the needs of customers today.

(00:20:31):
And I believe that we actually have to stand back for a second from all the talk of platforms and APIs and say as we enter this new era of our customers leveraging AI to run their businesses, what do they actually need? And Geoff said it very well at the start, the example of Lumen starting with what customer solution we need, not a technology. We still see 99.9% of telco offerings described in terms of technology. And yet our customers when we go out and survey enterprises want solutions. And we are not recognizing the fact that those customers want three actually basic things from this industry. One, connectivity on demand to their terms at their price point when they need it, which has to be flexible, which our networks can do but it's still too hard to get. But the security and resilience in those products as more and more of their workloads that run their businesses need to be satisfied.

(00:21:28):
And three, opening up as I think we're starting to do with a lot of the industry and API initiatives, the ability to deliver new services. Each of those can solve the pathway to growth for this industry, but they have to be anchored in a reset going greenfield in our minds around how we as an industry actually deliver that solution. Now we're fortunate in the TM forum we're working with the industry to try and make some of that happen. The reality is it's not that this industry isn't clever enough to figure out this is what we need to do. It's that we are mired by decades of legacy technology spanning IT networks and the way in which we build and handle data that we now need to address and the words that we use by Nathan. The importance of collaboration at this moment I don't think has ever been greater. Look forward to the discussion. Thank you.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:22:17):
Thank you Nik. Thanks Nik. Thanks to all our witnesses with their statements before we have our q and a and that's going to be a fiery q and a. I'm sure we are going to hear our motion now regular. Great, good. Debaters, we all about the motions but to hear, to introduce our first motion, Graham, could you introduce the first motion and tell us who's arguing for and against?

Graham Wilde, BWCS (00:22:44):
Absolutely. Thank you guy. So the first motion as you can see on the screen is this. It's aligning APIs with a digital platform play. We'll put CSPs at the heart of the digital economy. And just before we start the for and against speech, let me just tell you that Chris and I toss a virtual coin to see he's going to argue for and against. So this doesn't necessarily represent our own beliefs, but we're just trying to get the points across. So I'm arguing for, so I go first, so I'm going to stand up and I'm going to tell you a story. So the other day I rather foolishly offered to buy my daughter who's 26 years old brunch in London and I let her choose the venue. So she chose this very hipster sort of cafe in a very hipster part of town. And we met there at sort of half past 10. And I went in and immediately I felt the same way that I feel when I go into AI meetings at work, which is that what's this guy doing here? He's much too old. People are usually dead. But anyway, and everyone's got a beanie hat and wire rim glasses and everything. So we sit down, she goes, oh this is such a great place, this place I can recommend the Shaq.

(00:23:58):
Well I grew up in War Hampton, which is an industrial town in the 1970s and eighties and we didn't know what chuka was. And what I had for breakfast was a fried egg on toast. And I looked down the menu and I saw that in some dishes they had eggs and they also had bread. So the guy comes over to take our order and I said, I'll just have a fried egg on toast please. And he goes, we don't do that. I said, but you've got eggs, right? You've got bread, you put the egg in a pan, you toast the bread, that's it. Fried egg on toast. Yes, we can't do that because that's not on my, I've got tablet here and I put the order, there's no fried egg on toast on my tablet. I said, well I've got 10 pounds in my pocket or for 10 pounds, I'll give you 10 pounds.

(00:24:44):
Just go and talk to the chef and just say, give this guy fried egg on toast. They wouldn't do it, they wouldn't do it. And so my daughter was rolling her eyes thinking why have I ever agreed to do this with my father? It was all very embarrassing. And I said, okay, well we're leaving. So we left the restaurant, it was terrible. We left the restaurant. My daughter's in a very bad mood as you can imagine. We walked two doors down the road and then there's another hipster place, but this place is not full. They only has a few people in it. So we go into the other hipster place, we sit down and I call the waste driver and say, can I have a fried egg on toast? I'll pay you 10 pounds. And he said yes right Now why am I telling you this story?

(00:25:24):
The reason I'm telling you this story is that fried egg on toast is to hipster cafes. What APIs are after telecoms, right? You've got the X, you've got the bread and some people will pay you good money. We've just heard about lumen, right? For fried egg on toast. And if you don't do that, if you don't offer that, then the cafe down the road, the telco down the road, they're going to do it right because they see the demand, they'd see the demand basically from dinosaurs like me for fried egg on toast. So what I urge you to do, ladies and gentlemen, when it comes time to vote, is to hold up the green side of your paddle and vote in favor of the motion. Thank you very much. Thank you Graham.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (00:26:13):
And for those who haven't attended before, this is Graham's therapy session. He gets things out there that help him in his life and obviously in relation with his daughter and obviously where he gets his fried egg on toast. Now ladies and gentlemen, the motions are always designed to try and get people thinking about obviously the issues that the expert witnesses have raised about the role in the future economy. And it actually occurred to me and Nik, I dunno whether you can remember this, but TM forum in nice many years ago there was a company called Rocket who talked about we're going to produce a platform for the telcos, we're going to bring all the customers in, we're going to make sure everyone gets everything that they want and we're going to move the telcos, elevate them up to this high level and deliver every service.

(00:26:56):
We're going to be right at the heart of everything that we use consume through the telecom market. I didn't manage to Google what happened to Rocket, but I suspect they didn't take off very well. That was really bad, wasn't it? Yeah, I didn't even mean to do that. And what occurs to me whilst listening to the expert witnesses is that actually it's, do you remember Star Trek, the Vulcan chess game where there were three chess boards piled on top of each other and actually you were playing chess at different levels and only Spock knew how to go from one level to the other. So basically playing your game, the platform game for the telco as Geoff pointed out at a lower level connecting actually, and by the way, and securing, because one of Luma's big focuses is their security play is they're connecting at that lower level.

(00:27:41):
And it actually occurred to me whilst coming in on the tube today, we actually actually came in and passed Brompton Park tube. Anyone ever been to Brompton Park Tube? I doubt it because it's closed and it's one of those wartime where Tube underground station where we used to go down to get away from the bombing. And of course in the wisdom of the underground, they closed it. So actually the trains whiz past that platform, that platform never gets any attention anymore. And I think that's what's beginning to happen in this digital economy is that telcos are there, yes, to provide that plumbing at that lower level of the Vulcan chess game. It's an essential component of it. It provides the underlying networking, but it's not at the heart of the ecosystem. And I think we need to be very careful about the ambitions of the telcos.

(00:28:26):
And we certainly touched upon it in some of the thoughts there around where telcos sit in the value chain in the hierarchy. It's much more important to get that collaboration piece together. And I think the outcome of all of this is in terms of demand and supply. We need to get, and I think we said at the telco debate at least five years ago, probably seven by Phil Jordan from then Telefonica, reliable, ubiquitous, secure connectivity is what we want. There are plenty of other players who interact with the customer and deal with the customer a better place to interact with the customer, have more knowledge of what the customer's trying to do, bring in all those other parts that support what we have in our digital economy. So ladies and gentlemen, despite Graham's egg on toast, I encourage you to vote against the motion.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:29:08):
Thank you Chris. So you go, that's our first motion of the day fried egg on toast and Vulcan chess only at the great time. Only at the great time, thank goodness. So thinking about that, you've got about 30 minutes to think about it because we are going to open it up to a Q and a now, and I've just realized standing here, we've got two time zones going on in this venue. We've got 9 38 in this time zone. We've got nine 40 on this side of the room, so excellent time travel as well. How about that? We're on the line. We are indeed. Okay, we've got some questions here, but what I'd like to do is open it up to all of you because I know there are literally two or three questions coming from the audience. So who's going to hand up first? Where am I looking first? I looked right down the middle, right in the center. Let's kick it off. That's you. It's coming slowly. So where's the camera? Thanks Alex.

Monica Paolini, Senza Fili (00:30:00):
Thanks. So maybe I'm a little bit thick, it's Monica, but could you tell us what is a platform? Because it used to be that the holy vendor sell products, then there was solutions. Now we have platforms, right? What are they really? The other thing is that I'm not quite sure I see what is the two alternatives because it's not like you have or you don't have platforms, it's like the role that the platform would play and clearly you need to have a lot more connections, develop the ecosystem, whatever. So I don't see the two positions are as mutually exclusive. So maybe you can comment, but definition of platforms.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:30:40):
Okay, great question. In fact, you've stolen my first question so I'll just put a line through that one. So any comments as to what we're talking about here? What is platform first of all, who'd like to start us off? Any volunteers to get some definitions? You've stu, you've stumped the panel.

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (00:30:55):
I'll start and then I think it'll trigger other people to comment. I think words are really, really dangerous. I think it's a very good question. I think we all sit in this room and we talk about a platform, but I don't think we really understand what we mean by platform. I think the framing of the debate is very good because the nucleus of the framing of the debate is whether we need to collaborate around common interfaces as a communist organization to drive wealth into our individual companies. And I adamantly think that is irrelevant and I adamantly think technology is irrelevant as a starting point. And I'll say something I thought about saying this in the opening, but I'll say it now since it's the end of year technology is a bit like masturbation. No,

(00:32:10):
It feels good but it's not very productive. It doesn't really matter how much technology we have. If you want to be successful in the online world, you end up organizing your own delivery mechanisms in terms of interfaces that allow you to digitally provide to your customers an outcome and your customers even at the connectivity layer in a modern network, your customers are other internal people in your organization that consume that. If you are not doing that in a digital way, you will fail because your cost of delivery speed will be inappropriate for competitiveness. So I don't think we'll get a common understanding of platforms and things like this, but I think we are on a search for in a relevant pot of gold if we really believe we can coordinate ourselves to deliver to one customer type at the absolute top level, I think we can optimize delivery once we know success and get commonality. But I think that as a starting point is fundamentally wrong.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:33:23):
Thanks Geoff. Nik, do you want to come in as well?

Nik Willets, TM Forum (00:33:25):
Well it's quite hard to follow Geoff's anecdote there, but follow that back to your question. You're quite right and I'd agree with Geoff that words get used and abused and I was counting the time it took 22 minutes into this session for the letters AI to be uttered. I'm pretty sure I said them actually ironically. But that's just a symbol of how the industry gets obsessed with a word or a phrase right now it seems to be telco as a platform. I think if you unpack it, yes you've got software that used to, we used to buy and run ourselves, now we can run it on what we call a platform basis or a SaaS basis, park that to one side that causes a level of confusion. It is fair to say that in line with this logic of selling solutions, not technologies, customers want to buy through a self-service environment and increasingly want to buy the same product universally.

(00:34:13):
Particularly when we think about exposing industry capabilities to a developer community. What I'm highly skeptical about is that this industry will in any way own that platform that there will be one I think is a mistake. I think there'll be a multitude, they may be a multitude of platforms owned by hyperscalers because developers already exist in those ecosystems. They may be owned by another aggregator such as an Apogee, they may be owned and maybe the telco industry can create its own. It almost doesn't matter. It's like saying, well I will sell my sim cards only through my own retail stores or through supermarkets or whatever else. What we need to focus on is our customers want to consume services on a platform basis, by which I mean on demand in real time, not in an annual negotiation for a price with a procurement manager to buy a fixed product that is extremely outdated to what the customers now need and what they're going to need in this next era. So we can use all the words we like. We need to come back to what do our customers actually want right now as an industry we are failing to meet those needs and failing to keep up with them. The risk of that is we'll get further disintermediated.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:35:24):
Thanks very much Nik. We'll come to him in a minute. But Amit, let's introduce your conversation.

Amit Liebstein, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (00:35:29):
I'm Amit, HPE. I will touch another point on your question and this is will it be a platform or something else? So for us, the world is hybrid. That's a fact. You will have everything. The platform memory is just an enabler. It'll make sure that you provide the services to your end customer as they expect for that you'll need to have a few elements except the technology. You will need to have an ecosystem to support you in it and you will need to be able to monetize it in a proper way. So I'm looking at this, another option to go to the market, get the invest that you put in your network and on your assets out there for your customer consume and we'll force you to get an ecosystem to help you doing it. Thanks.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:36:15):
Did you want to come in on this?

Fahim Sabir, Colt Technology Services (00:36:16):
Yeah, I did. I mean I agree quite strongly with what Nik had to say. I mean in terms of the whole idea, what are the two alternatives, what are the two different ends of the spectrum? I think actually we use the word platform and it is somewhat of amorphous expression doesn't really mean anything in itself. I think the question that's really being asked in this is do telcos believe that they can be the focal point of customer interaction or are they just a member of the supply chain? And that's really the two ends of the spectrum that I think we're talking about. We've always, again, I go back to the same expression now within the telco environment, it's all about owning the customer. I want to own the customer, which means that I am the focal point for all customer interactions and basically I orchestrate those across the entire supply chain. Now the question is, is there enough value just being a supply chain participant or do we really need to be at that top level and be that orchestrator? I guess that's the key question we're asking here. Thank you very much.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:37:18):
Anyone comment too?

Erez Sverdlov, Nokia (00:37:19):
Yeah, so if I may, so do I see that currently the platform or maybe go a step back. So the idea behind the telecom as a platform is to expose what current is the network to the outside world for APIs. So camera API and so on. But the idea behind it is there'll be many platforms that you can consume different application and make an ecosystem around it. I believe the future will be around ecosystem that telco will be play a key role of it. We are working with many kind of partners around the world, we which achieve 28 partners and we're working with them to expose those kind of APIs to community of developers and creating a platform, if you look currently it can be to provide for the B2B for the B two, B2C and to the B2C and it's coming to prevent idea like fraud in banking or flying don, so on. So the platform in my perception is a way to create more line of revenue for the telco by exposing the network to the outside world. We just finished a hackathon in one of the Nordic countries with tens of developers creating a platform above one of the operator network to be able to show type of application you can and the telco is actually going to be much more in control over this platform because today mainly the telco is doing the connectivity in the ecosystem will play a different role.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:38:57):
Thank you very much. Nathan, did you want to come in?

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (00:39:00):
I mean I can take a quick comment without wasting too much time. I mean in the end I think telco as a platform, as a buzzword and nonsense and in the end I could go and ask 10 people inside of Deutsche Telecom what telco as a platform means and I get 11 different answers

(00:39:13):
And it basically just comes down to who you're talking to. If you're talking to the API folks, the platform's an API, if you're talking to the connectivity folks, it's their platform that they're building. I mean everybody's got a platform so it means everything and nothing at the same time. But I think Nik hit it on the nail on the head in a sense that the concept is customers want to be able to get what they want, where they want, when they want as a self-service. And I don't believe that we'll probably build this one giant platform that solves all the problems.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:39:45):
Okay, well thanks everyone. Let's move on because it's more hands coming up here. Dean, over in the corner there, there's a box. There's a box heading your way. No worries.

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis (00:39:59):
Sorry Francis Dean Bubley from disruptive analysis. Well firstly, Monica criticized the word platform. I'll criticize the word digital, we're swiftly moving to the post-digital era, but important point here is where are the developers, where are the customers? Not just the hyperscalers but developers. I was on a webinar last last night run by an operator's, API team for developers. There were five people on it including me and two from the telco. There are no developers on the panel. Do they care? And also to prove that they should care. Are telcos using their own network APIs? I know they're using the TM forum APIs and are they also using each other's APIs? So you're getting higher quality on your roaming partners for example. Because if the industry doesn't consume its own products and platforms, why would it expect anyone else to?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:41:08):
Thanks Dean for that. Who wants to tackle this one first? Go on,

Erez Sverdlov, Nokia (00:41:12):
I can start. So I think if you look backwards, it was extremely difficult to reach the network APIs. They were very complex, hundreds of parameters, hundreds of different type of permutation. So the developers did not care about doing it. So it was too complex. I think with recent development talking about team form APIs and about come initiative and more, we're trying more and more to open and create a very simple way to do so today. To use a network, APIs can take you a few minutes activities to get I would say, for example, a precise location or to get improved network on demand. Now this creates a huge amount of opportunities for the telco to basically create. Now it's a process removing I would say from zero to I would just mention the A catalog that we did actually two weeks ago. It's require people to understand better the APIs and we see more and more involvement. I can tell you that there's a sea of opportunities still going still they have to find more to do so but currently we built now together with a Belgium company a way to and the seaport a way to navigate ships

(00:42:30):
Into the port of Antwerp without having the captain on board doing it remotely. We did currently drone that can be in 15 minutes at every location. That is an accident in Belgium for example. And there are more and more. So I think you're right, it's requires some extra education for this there to be community education. There should be some kind of webinar talking about what they can do and so on. Because they're there, they want to do so they see the benefit of having using the API, but they have to be educated. It is not as difficult as it used to be before.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:43:05):
Okay. Okay. I'm going to get some more viewpoints. Nik, do you want to go first and we'll come back to Nathan.

Nik Willets, TM Forum (00:43:11):
I think we're over indexing on APIs, which sounds a bit strange for an organization that really loves APIs to say, but APIs are like talking about the plug socket when you want to put switch on electrical it, they have a purpose. There's lots of reasons why standardized APIs have lots of benefit, but in the context of this debate, I'm not sure they're really the problem. If you start from the developer, and to your point dean, I'm a reformed developer. I started life as a developer, so I think I know a thing or two about them. The first thing they've got to do is actually reach where the developers are. And I don't believe that's going to be in a brand new platform that Telco stands up. And secondly, I have to ask what were they looking for when they went there in the first place?

(00:43:54):
The developer just wants to get a job done. That's why you see so many flocking to aggregated platforms like Apogee. And when we talk about the capabilities of our network, the efforts made right now, which Tfor deeply supports to standardize simple exposure. Those is good stuff, but it's got to be paired with educating our audience, our developer audience on what it can do. Think about any developers today, they have lived the last 20 years of their life treating the network as a fixed immovable object. We build content delivery networks, we build buffering loads away around this last mile of a fixed immovable object. And now as an industry, we're getting to the point that we believe through network slicing and new technologies and software defined networks, we can offer that to be a flexible capability, but we haven't educated the users on that. So their mindset is still, well it's still fixed, it's still slow. I haven't perception on the telco industry, so putting on webinars or these kind of efforts are not enough. We would actually have to work together to educate people on the art of the possible. And I think that goes beyond sexy use cases and proof of concept. It comes down to, look, you can now do this with a network and they may be pretty unexciting use cases to start with, but unless we educate developers and put our goods in their locations, I think we'll continue to see this disconnect.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:45:15):
Great. Thanks Nik. Really good point this Nathan, let's come to you.

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (00:45:18):
Yeah, I guess you kind of had two comments, so I guess I'll hit the second one first about do we eat our own dog food basically? No, I don't think we do yet. And that's probably part of the problem. We use some of these capabilities, but they're not the ones that we're offering out to our customers because we had these capabilities in our network all the way along using them and then we tried to create something to give to the customers, but it's a different flavor than what's there. I think that we've got to probably to look at that and solve it, but I don't think just eating our own dog food is going to help. It's going to maybe help us learn what a developer wants, but in the end I think Nik is right. I mean the problem we currently have is the developers are there and we have two problems with it.

(00:46:00):
One, they do need to be educated because most of them, as you said, the only thing you know about a telco network is how many bars are on your phone. That's it. So they need to be told what they can get because they've never had that capability. But the other thing is that when we have educated those developers, and at least from Deutsche telecom's point of view, we've gone out and talked to some and we run into the same problem currently every single time they're like, oh great, solves the problem. Does it work in the other networks in the country? And we have to say, well no, not yet. And then they're like, okay, call me when it does. And we're sort of in that space right now, which is why again, I think if we want this to succeed, it does come back to a little bit of a collaboration where we need to make sure everybody wins. Because in the end, when it comes to creating API products, API services, it's great if my competitors actually go off and sell APIs in my market too. Because in the end there's three operators in Germany or four operators and we each get this percentage of terminations that we have SIM cards, so that's our playground. And so if somebody sells it or we sell it, it doesn't matter, we all still win together. But in the end we still have to have those products made available for developers to even start to become interested.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:47:13):
Thanks so much Nathan. Fahim, let's come across to you.

Fahim Sabir, Colt Technology Services (00:47:15):
Well first of all, someone with digital in their job title, and I think I might have to reevaluate my life choices. I mean to be quite honest, I don't really buy this whole idea of educating developers. Developers don't get educated on APIs. Developers find and use APIs because they have a use case that they need to fulfill. It is that important? If you look at, let's say for example, go back to the CSPs. The CSPs have had APIs from day one. Developers have used them a lot because they've wanted to and they've needed to use them. Now the reality is, I mean we have this whole perception that network flexibility and all these other things are really, really important and they do carry some value. But the reality is if the network itself is working as a fixed asset, well then what's in it for the developer to actually want to change that? So the reality is what we need to do is there is an element when it comes to these APIs and the such like where there is an element of build it and they will come because if they are there and the developers find reason to use them, they will use them. And if they decide not to use them, well chances are it's because they weren't needed in the first place

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:48:24):
Thanks Fahim. A response from Geoff and then we'll open up to another question.

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (00:48:31):
The last time I looked for an API was maybe 1998 and that's when I wanted to send an SMS from a program I'D written and rest APIs were new then. So I tried to find one, developers don't look for APIs. I think Fahe just said it, they're trying to solve problems and they look for solutions to that problem and then they find the easiest way to solve it that's going to work at the right price point. Now some of those problems can be solved directly by one company example, lumen. Lumen didn't need to coordinate their APIs to meet the needs of what they were targeting. Their promise was, as we've said, and the addition was very good, secure, reliable, performant connectivity for their business. Because if they didn't get that, the hyperscalers had to do what Lumen did and that's horrible. They don't want to do that. Willing to pay billions of dollars for that. Next example, banks in a country, they want their outcomes changed. And in the UK here it's been proven that those fraud APIs can actually change the outcomes of those banks if the operators coordinate just at a regional country level,

(00:50:00):
Not global level. We've done that here. It's successful. The most important KPI for the banks is false positives because the cost of false positives is massive. And that brings me back to my last point and it might be a general theme for today. We keep trying to put ourselves at the center of this conversation why

(00:50:30):
We're all customers by the way, do we all wake up in the morning and ask ourselves what part of my life is telecom going to solve for me today? Because telecom is the only organization on this planet that delivers me promises that makes me live. I'd say on that hierarchy of needs, telecom is not at the top, it's only at the top when it doesn't work, by the way, which is another industry problem. So I think we need to re-pivot if we're serious about this conversation and actually understand that it's not about us, it's about the customers. And then the last point, which just because I can, everything we do in Rakuten is on APIs, you can't do it otherwise, including the traditional business as you said of roaming. We do reverse auctioning, roaming in products like this and we win awards for it everywhere and we're trying to help the industry change that way.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:51:33):
Thanks Geoff. Thanks everyone for those comments. I do want to open up some more questions. I am going to go this way first sir, because Francis has been waiting patiently and I've ignored him for about 20 minutes. Francis please.

Francis Haysom, Appledore Research (00:51:44):
Francis Haysom, Appledore Research. One of the things I've not heard in platforms and API is what I would term as investment. And my sense of a lot of the conversations, whether it's API or platform, is they're kind of a new skin for what we already have that will deliver us some extra value. I very rarely see some sort of sense of I'm going to make investments in the platform, the API or whatever, which is to be able to deliver this thing is this investment. And it is not just money investment, it's time, it's interconnection. And I'll give you one specific example, very practical. I've just come back from hiking holiday in the Canaries islands and one of my biggest worry was losing connectivity was I was on a maps, I downloaded an offline download. In fact in a heavily canyon 1200 meter island. I never lost connectivity.

(00:52:47):
I had roaming. I could roam between the best side. If I tried to do that with my UK operator, it would fail. I can guarantee 50% of the time I would be offline is the problem. And what are we doing about it? Which is this investment. How do I invest in achieving micro, how do I invest in maybe more cell sites in remote locations, whatever it is. The API comes second. It's actually what is our fundamental capability that delivers an excellent capability. And I'm not hearing anything about investment investment in it. I'm seeing technology as a solution. Technology is a skin.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:53:27):
Oh, okay. Thanks Francis. Anybody want to tackle Francis' point there about not hearing about investment yet? Anybody want to have a bit of a stab at that one?

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (00:53:36):
I can kick it off. I agree. I think, but then the problem is that the way that we handle investment is something like getting a trade deal done in our industry and organizations because every investment we make, we believe it is a five year multi-billion dollar big deal. I think the other strange thing is that we don't build on the successes that start to appear in different places and actually amplify them and implement and take the easy things. There are successes in telecom. We are not all one. We are very, very different. The investments actually in this world don't have to be these large investments, but they tend to be more than technology. They tend to be commercial engagement, legal, everything else.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:54:31):
Great. Thanks so much. Thanks for talking over the collapsing tower of glasses behind you there that threw you out. Yeah Nik,

Nik Willets, TM Forum (00:54:39):
I think it's a great question. I think clearly the industry is spending no shortage of money on technology. So it is investing. I think the question is we're not investing with conviction in this future. And I think that's because we're not entirely clear what it is. It's very tentative. So there's investment going into exposing APIs platforms in a very tentative way. If you look at where those responsible for that or developer experience sit in the hierarchy, in a typical telco, it's many layers down. So it's clearly not a top table priority. To Geoff's point, let's not lump everybody together, though I'm not so familiar with Lumen. But you've got companies like axa, MTN, others who are very clear on what they want to be in the future. And I believe making great strides to get there and leveraging a combination of their own platforms, standard APIs, collaboration won't make sense, but it's a very clear strategy driven from the top.

(00:55:37):
And that's where I think all of this debate about what products and services we offer need to be anchored in. What will our customers need and therefore what will developers need, not where are we right now. And a lot of this debate much as there are really valuable things we can expose as industry, I find too anchored almost in yesterday rather than saying we're working to a future where every enterprise on the planet will be driven by ai. Therefore the value of the workloads running that company go up, therefore the security risks go up. We as an industry can play a big role in that, but we're not designing for that future and I certainly don't see enough discussion about how you make money in that future, which should be thinking about dynamic pricing models, very different approaches to billing. So I feel like we're applying a lot of yesterday's logic to today and not thinking about tomorrow.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:56:27):
Thanks Nik. Erez.

Erez Sverdlov, Nokia (00:56:28):
Yeah, if I may. So I the net providers, which is a bit different angle. So we believe this is a very strategic part of our future. We're investing a ton of money into IT. Network as code is one of our way to go forward in the market. We just bought a company, we are basically, that is API management. We are signing a partnership with many of the tel operators to create these kind of awarenesses. It's evolving, but we in the mid ourselves but also also our other depot operators to buying and believe that this is the future. Look, the industry, the CSP spent billions, billions on the 5G networks. Look how numbers, I think it last year it was like 122 billion euro of investment in the 5G network. We have to make money. Connectivity will not be the case in my belief. So this API, we believe will be the future.

(00:57:31):
We don't get the magic bullet for this, but we believe that we are building more and more into it. So I think there is a massive investment. If you look currently at our side of the fence, telco is getting into it. So this is why I'm thinking about the almost 30 partnership we have currently, but also our other provider have the same kind of ecosystem. Goes back to the point of the Nik. We are building model, which are different. It's a revenue share model for example. It's an ecosystem. So if traditionally we used to kind of charge for everything today world is about revenue share. It's an ecosystem that basically we get money from the consumer for the customer and we split according the developers, the network that provider they Cs, P and so on. We're coming with much more a creative business model to cater for this different change. We can more charge normally. So I think this is where I think our money goes from our side. So there massive investment. If it seems not to be, it is.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:58:32):
Thanks very much Erez and Fahim, did you want to come in on this one as well?

Fahim Sabir, Colt Technology Services (00:58:34):
Yeah, I think it's case of there's an element of innovator's dilemma here, sort of. We're in a very, very well established market. We have a whole bunch of cash cow type products. And just going back to Nik's point, I think you're right, I mean at cult we're very, very fortunate because it is a top table discussion. As you probably know. There's always a bunch, bunch stuff happening and the most interesting conversation that you actually end up having at Colt, try to rewind a little bit. I was tasked about seven or eight years ago of creating a team that built a network as a service platform. So what they did with us, they basically put us separate from the rest of the organization, start with blank sheet of paper, do what you need to do, ignore everybody else, just get it done. Basically something which is completely new.

(00:59:23):
And we looked towards the cloud providers and the way that they think about things rather than looking at the traditional telco model and how we actually do things. But when it comes to actually bringing the thing to market, there was some really, really interesting conversations. One of the main ones being if we have a flexible platform, how do we manage revenue? Whereby previously somebody would buy a circuit, they would sign up for 12 months that was guaranteed money for 12 months and now all of a sudden we have this ability to turn up a circuit and then turn it down again an hour later. There is no guarantee of where the money's actually coming from and that is a very, very uncomfortable place to be for a traditional tail case. It's just not how our business models have been built. We put a lot of capital into things, we build a lot of stuff, we need to see it pay back.

(01:00:08):
And I think getting over that fear is the one thing that the industry has to be able to do. And it comes back down to the fact of, it's strange because looking back at our platform and the behavior that we have on the platform itself, the services are really, really flexible. Have whatever service you want, have it for however long, long you want. The amount of actual change that you see on the platform is actually not that great. And I'll give you an example. So as an it if as a CIO, I have all of my infrastructure in the cloud, theoretically on Friday afternoon I can switch it all off and then switch it back on Monday. But who wants to be the CIO that has to stand up in front of the CO on Monday morning? Try and explain why the thing didn't switch back on. It just doesn't work like that. Flexibility is great. People love the idea, but it's more of a door knocking tool rather than anything else.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:01:04):
Great, thanks.

Nathan Rader, Deutsche Telekom (01:01:05):
Do you want to come back? Yeah, I mean if it comes back to the investment topic, I think when you were describing your story, it's kind of two different investments. So one is investing in the network to build it out more market specific. Some have good coverage, some don't. Clearly you found two that are opposite ends of the spectrum. But if we're talking more about investment towards platforms or API exposure, I think there's actually quite a bit of investment. I mean if I look at where we've just had lots of conversations amongst CSPs kind of discussing this API venture, we announced, we had conversations about everybody's platforms that they're starting to build. The problem is is that I think you don't see or hear about that investment because there's not a lot of vendors in that space making exposure type platforms for network APIs and therefore no one's out there running around with press releases saying, look, we've just launched things, but there's actually a lot of internal development being done. Now we could argue if that's the right or wrong approach, but at least at this point in time, that is where I see there is quite a bit of investment and effort being done to build things there.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:02:16):
Thanks so much Nathan. Looking at the time this debate, this debate has rattled along and we're almost out of time, but Amit, do you want to come in with a final comment, maybe final thing?

Amit Liebstein, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (01:02:25):
I think it's an opportunity that the telcos cannot put aside. You have the data, you have the connectivity, you have the ability to provide a service to end customer in a secure and a private manner. I think that's the best that you can get. You cannot lose it.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:02:42):
Okay, thanks very much. Well, we are out of time for our q and a, unfortunately, Neil, I mean they've just talked down, I think it's called Philips, isn't it?

Neil McRae, UKTIN (01:02:50):
One point. The platforms that are successful are the ones that have got super compelling stuff that you're willing to buy. That's what we need to do. We put products that are super compelling that folks want to buy. We'll have platforms all over the place. That's what we lack. We don't have products that people are willing to invest in.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:03:07):
I agree with that. Thank you very much Neil. Thanks for that. Last final comment. We are done on the q and a, however we still have our motion now. You heard the motion earlier. You heard Chris and Graham give the pros and cons on the motion arguing for and against. Here is a reminder of the motions and reminding myself, Graham was voting for the motion and Chris was voting against the motion. So it's time for you to locate your paddle pros, get them ready, activate them. We want to see if you are swayed by Graham's story, fried egg toast. Just to remind you or Chris's argument why we should be voting against so for or against am not influencing the decision at all. Oh my goodness me, I've got to work this one out. This is incredibly tight. But you know what? The reds, it's defeated. It is defeated. No fried eggs of anyone this Christmas canceled. Thanks very much everyone. It is time for a short break and then my colleague Ray Le Maistre will be back with our next session of the day. So you've got about 20 minutes to have coffees and croissants and things like that. And reminder to our online audience, stay with us. And also if you want to send in a question, good luck. Use the website and also you can take part in the votes online as well. So please do that. Thank you very much. See you soon. Thanks.