Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:10):
Hello, welcome back. Welcome back to the Great Telco debate. Please, please take your seats with your cups of teas and coffees. Take your seats, settle down. We are about to start our third session, our third debate of the day. Just as you all take your seats and get settled. Just a quick message for our online audience because Ray and I have been going through the questions that you've been sending us and you have sent us a lot of questions. There's lots of questions you've sent way too many to be used today unfortunately, but we still value those questions and we will be looking at them next week and we will be using them. They're really important to us, so please do keep sending them in and while you're at it, take part in the motions as well. You can do that online if you're not in the room with us.

(00:55):
Okay, so final debate of the morning session and the topic we are going to be talking about is whether or not a TechCo is best placed for API and AI success. Chris has already got his head in his hands. I can't for the life of me funny think what his opinion's going to be about this. I've got no idea. We'll find out in due course. So we are going to ask whether or not telcos need to evolve to Tech cos in order to fully exploit the business opportunities and the operational economics of AI, APIs and programmable networks. So we will get to a motion shortly. Then we'll have a debate with as many of your questions as we possibly can. But first of all, we're going to hear from our experts on stage and I'm going to ask them all to come up and deliver a three minute expert witness statement. And we're doing this, you might have realized already in alphabetical order. That's why we are doing it this way around. So first of all, may I please ask our first witness to come to the lectern and Ranjan band. Who is CTO of the Europe telecom business at Tech Mahindra Ranjan, please?

Ranjan Band, Tech Mahindra (02:08):
Well, I think TechCo very heavy word to be honest. Coming from a telco industry, every telco has come through a journey and not every telco is the same. Some are attackers, which are new players like Rakuten or one-on-one. Some players are being in the industry for so long like the bts and there are some very, very focused players, whether they are mobile only, they're fixed only. And then there's a whole load of fiber cores which are there in the market. From where we sit as an si, we see that there is no benefit a tech core at Telco will get when it comes to adopting the APIs or ai. Everybody's starts at the same. It's about the leadership, it's about the culture, it's about the ization mindset which has to be there, how we can write software faster, how we can roll out products and how we can help businesses, how we can see each and every asset in the company.

(03:04):
It's not just about network, it's also about your IT and the infrastructure, how we can monetize and how we can write the software right first time to ensure they are API. Ready. So there are telcos and we are working with extensively with some of the telcos. Both came from a lot of legacy but had took a bold decision if they want to move and accelerate their telco path, they just don't need to change the entire IT state and wait for becoming a telco TechCo, but they can bring alternative strategies, they can bring a different mindset, different culture and start experimentation. And where there is a bold move to experiment and fail fast, we see the adoption is faster. There is a definite mind share required from the CEO unless the CEO of top, if it is not top down, it's not going to change. It's not a people who are different departments trying to become a tech code, trying to build their application.

(04:03):
We have seen many cases where the leadership made a huge difference, whether it is Telefonica, Germany, whether it is Proximus, whether it is bt, and so many examples we can say where the top down leadership made a difference and some of the large telco transformations are going successful. One last point is we forgot about product mindset and Rahul mentioned yesterday and Har hopped on that if you should not be looking AI in isolation nor API in isolation, it has to be in a use case you had to go beyond use case. Sometimes a product consumes multiple use case. Each use case consumes multiple product whether you are sitting in operations, whether you are sitting in concept to market department, think about aggregated value you can deliver to your customers. When I see operations, we do operations in silos. We don't see a service when the service goes down. We only come to know when the resource goes down and that's the mindset which has to change. And AI and API is gives that opportunity to disrupt the telco industry and make the best use of it and make it more software driven. Thank you. Thank you, thank you very much. You need

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:16):
Great start to this session, first of five different viewpoints here and for our next one I'm going to invite Andrew Coward up to deliver our next expert witness statement. And Andrew of course is general manager of software networking at IBM.

Andrew Coward, IBM (05:28):
Well thanks guy. And I think it's time for another analogy

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:30):
Please.

Andrew Coward, IBM (05:32):
So imagine if you will, that you are rummaging through your stationary cupboard looking for an old USB charger or maybe a print cartridge and you stumble across a two G flip phone and you open the flip phone and much to your immense surprise, a genie appears now. Now this genie is not the kind of Robin Williams blue zany kind of genie. It's a serious telco genie. In fact, the last time this genie was summoned, it delivered for US mobile broadband, which I think we'd all suggest it all think is an amazing gift that we all have and take for granted today. But now you summon this genie, it immediately tells you that its focuses on telco AI and delivering you the best possible LLM that's going to solve all your problems. Now, if like me and a genie appears in front of you, you might think you are hallucinating or indeed maybe the AI is hallucinating about you.

(06:38):
You would obviously have to provide some kind of questions to prove it's worth. I think this is really interesting because I think it's a test point for how we should be thinking about ai. And the genie example is a good kind of, we think it's all magic and a good way of describing this. And there's two really important attributes that we should all be considering about how we implement this and how this applies to the title of this session. The first is that for a genie to really be able to understand and do anything in your network, it has to be omniscient. Now, I don't get to use the word omniscient very often,

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (07:18):
Very good.

Andrew Coward, IBM (07:19):
And if you think about it, omniscient means that it has to understand everything about your network and your infrastructure and the interrelated plays of everything. We talk quite a lot already about that. I want to focus on the other word that your genie really needs to be enabled for and that's omnipotence. Omnipotence being the all powerful capability to go make changes in your network to go fix the things that are broken proactively or reactively. So on the omniscient side, we can get quite a long way. We can enrich tickets, we can find out what's going wrong, we can make suggestions, but Genie does not have any teeth unless it also has omnipotence. And the omnipotence comes from being able to program and manage the network. And I would argue that telcos have not done a good job of enabling the orchestration and management manually of their infrastructure today. And it's a prerequisite to making that happen with ai. Thank you.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:30):
Thank you Andrew. Thank you. Hang on the button. Thanks. Always rely on Andrew for a good analogy. Thank you very much. And our next expert witness please, please invite Darrell Jordan-Smith to the lectern. Darrell of course is the chief revenue officer at Wind River.

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (08:46):
Good morning everybody or good afternoon. Afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity and all the great speakers here. And when Andrew started talking about Genie, I thought he was talking about Java in the phone. That's what came out of my mind. And then when you got Java in the phone, we were all saying, right, okay, we can build applications, we can build navigation systems, we could do on phone voting and we could make tons of money in the industry and the telecommunication space out of that. And I think some telecommunications companies had been successful to a certain degree of doing that, but they really haven't been able to make that breakthrough. And that's somewhat frustrating because I'm a huge advocate of the industry and I see massive potential. We talked to this morning a little bit about the importance of data, the availability of data, the creepy side of data, the non-creepy side of data.

(09:38):
And I see a lot of telecommunications companies today using that data to make AI based decisions, ML based decisions and how they operate and run their network to a certain degree. But they get to the creepy side of the data is what you do with the users and you have data protection and privacy and other things associated with that. But all that data does exist. The issue I think we have as an industry in this space is that the telecommunications companies have lost, in my opinion, I'm going to get shot in a minute, the innovation gene, the innovation genie, they used to be able to sit down around the table and say, we can imagine and envision a marketplace and an opportunity that enables us to interact with content and media and do things with customers and users, but they outsource all of that and no disrespect to Tech Mahindra, but these guys have done a great job of actually taking that knowledge and that capability away from the telecommunications companies and providing that back as a service.

(10:37):
So I think it's really important for us as an industry to look at how we actually build that innovation. Gene back in, put that genie back in the phone, put that ability to be able to actually drive what we're trying to achieve as an industry to deliver applications and services that generate money but in many different ways enable different ecosystems. So one of my colleagues who in river talked about the automotive industry this morning, they want to become software defined anything. Those are going to be devices running around or driving around or motoring around on the roads and aircraft and so on and so forth. We're going to see those different industries create different business models that will enable the telecommunications companies to monetize network infrastructure. But they can't do that unless they have the innovation gene put the genie back in the bottle to be able to actually innovate themselves again. And I would like to, with all the telecommunications companies in the room here, implore you all to think about that, think about how you actually build those skills and those capabilities and insource a lot of that into the business to actually be able to make use of the massive potential you have in the data appropriately, both internally in terms of driving your network infrastructure as well as externally with new services. Thank you.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:55):
You done? Thank you very much indeed. That's it. Absolutely. Terrific. Thank you very much indeed. And our next expert witness, Francesca Serravalle, please coming up to the lectern Francesca's head of infrastructure and energy at VO the uk.

Francesca Serravalle, Vodafone (12:07):
Thank you. Good afternoon. Quite a strong comment here. I'll try and get turn it around. But of course we love Genes genius, but we also need to be connected to the reality and trying to address all the short term CapEx and opex challenge that we have now. I've been working for the service providers for five years and I never been so aware on how technology enables innovation at the business level, new customer engagement models and partnership model. And that's because we're in the middle of our company transformation where we want to leverage on AI and API to enable the platform play. And I believe a lot has been achieved already. We have virtualized our connectivity services and network services. We are digitalizing the customer journey and we are automating the service life cycle. So to monetize all those investment, clearly API has a great role and the opportunity space is big both I call it to the horizontal play and the vertical play, the horizontal plays when we integrate with other platform provider like Equinix Exchange, the Megaport to Ebola, a bigger target addressable market, but also the vertical play where we bundled with cloud platform API platform to innovate the service proposition.

(13:26):
I think the next step on that is really to consider AI API as a product. So just starting from the clear business requirement and then having the usual product planning process with the usual gating and support model on API. Lots has been saved and achieved on the AIOps to working with our suppliers and our partners to enable zero touch automation. But I think what we don't talk a lot is the use case for telco as an enterprise. And this is where a lot of innovation is happening because we are leveraging on our own data scientist and developer to really incorporate cognitive capability in every single business function, whether those are deployment activity, whether those are investment decision for our radio state to drive our point, customer experience energy management, whether it's finance in finance for OPEX management and also in the supply chain for contract management.

(14:27):
So lots is happening and I think there are two things that are exciting me on this space. One is that we are using an horizontal approach, just a single cloud platform, single blueprint architecture that we change as we plug in a new use case. So we add the new cloud services and cloud capability, but also that we're solving our data problem. I think this is key. So we're breaking the data silos, we're working on data quality, we're working on data lineage and also we are incorporating AI and data enabling intent-based inventory to really enable real time dynamic topology across all levels. So lots is happening and I think yes, there are things to unblock. The opportunity space is great, we just need to clone ourself maybe a topic for another motion.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:15):
Francesca, thank you very much. Indeed. Indeed, right. Great. And we have one more expert witness statement, so please, I'm going to invite Chris Simcoe to the lectern and Chris is the network applications architecture director of networks at BT group. Chris, please. Good to see you again.

Chris Simcoe, BT (15:33):
My apologies guy. So I was a bit late to being invited to this panel. I missed the briefing call. So I thought it was is techno best place for API and AI success? So I'm sorry, but I prepared that's what you're going to get.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (15:53):
It'll be refreshing

Chris Simcoe, BT (15:54):
If anyone knows EDM. So there's a lot of TLAs in the music industry, electronic dance music, the fundamentals of techno is it's a four on the floor beat. So everybody delivers four on the floor beat. But how to deliver that, they all buy the same equipment. It's a Roland TR 8 0 8 TR 9 0 9, maybe a Yamaha DX seven RP 2,600. So if everyone's buying the same equipment and putting it together to deliver the same fundamentals, what do you do differently? How do you differentiate?

(16:25):
So it turns out that the creative use of those are the key, the skills you have to use them, what you choose to invest in, whether you invest in the latest, greatest capabilities or how you go about this. But if doing this today, if you are delivering techno today or doing techno music, you wouldn't buy this equipment anymore. It's incredible. It's all available in software. So you can run it on standard compute. So today you can take what used to be racks of equipment and just run it in your computer. Incredible. So what this allows us to do now is instead of plugging different pieces of equipment together on the same compute using APIs, you can run catalogs of all these plugins. You can route them together and different ways using software. The number of configurations is incredible they can come up with and the speed to deliver new techno is just incredible. There's so much of it out there, there's no scarcity of it anymore. So anyone can deliver techno. Now that the number of configurations out there are pretty much infinite. There's actually practitioners of techno, let's call them out there that are using AI to generate techno. And this is actually really disappointing for some of them. I think it's all wrong.

(17:50):
However, if you look at what else the music industry is doing with AI and APIs, they're using it to collect royalties. So that's also helping the industry as well. And if you remember, there was a time where the music industry was going to die actually, but just in this last year, the value of global copyright and music has exceeded that of cinema. And actually there's more royalties coming from streaming video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime to music copyright than there is from cinema. So if we look at our industry, let's solve some real problems for customers. So fraudulent calls, detecting those seems like a good job for ai. And as Jeff mentioned earlier, but the value of fraud to banks and getting that wrong, let's deliver what's going on there through an API. So as you can see, I think techno is very well positioned for the use of AI and api. Chris, thank you very much.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (19:03):
Techno shame. Our colleague Martyn isn't here today. He is a big fan of techno trousers. You'll have to ask him about that by the way. Thanks very much everyone. We are going to have a serious conversation about this in just a moment. But before we can do that, we do need a motion and we need to argue a motion. Do we have grim a motion?

Graham Wilde, BWCS (19:24):
Guy, the good news is we do have a motion. Yes, here it is. The motion is a telco, doesn't have to be a TechCo, a true digital services provider. And we flip the coin, I'm arguing for this and Chris is arguing again. So let me stand up, right? Okay, now the only issue with this is I don't really understand this, but I'm not going to let my lack of understanding get in the way of good argument. So here we go, here we go, here we go. I'm going to draw this because I think digital service provider, isn't that the same thing? Anyway, we're going to say that they're different things. So we're going to say that a TechCo, the term TechCo refers to what you do and the term digital service provider refers to how you do it. Okay? So just bear with me on this one.

(20:17):
So digital service provider, that's a company that is going to use agile technologies, that is going to use software, that is going to use some of those techno APIs, that kind of thing. They're going to use a suite of tools to develop their business and make themselves more agile and more customer focused. And a TechCo is a company that offers more than just connectivity. So it could be a company that's offering you, I don't know, banking services, media, entertainment, credit rating, all sorts of different services. So digital service provider, what you do, sorry, how you do it TechCo, what you do. And I would argue that you can be just a plain old connectivity provider just providing connectivity from one place to another or a 5G service on an eim, okay? You can just do that and you can be a digital service provider. You can use the suite of all those techno tools to make you a better company. So I would argue ladies and gentlemen that you should vote in favor of the motion like that when the time comes. Thank you very much.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (21:29):
Thank you. I'm confused now, Graham. So when Graham and I sit down and talk about the motions, we go to a pub in Chisik that I go to a lot and we usually have sausage and mash and a lot of red wine for him, a lot of white wine for me. They didn't have sausage and mash this year. Oh, that's tragic. Which is really disappointing and I wonder if that's why we ended up with a somewhat confusing motion. But I think you're right, Graham, we always break it down in my computational linguistics, you always pause the sentence, you break it down into its constituents. And I think what we're talking about here is that telcos, yes, you can just be a plain, I think we call 'em plain old broadband provider. You can just be that underlying connectivity provider. But actually, if you are really going to take your place in this broader ecosystem that we've been talking about, then you do need to become a TechCo.

(22:19):
And by TechCo I mean you need as a previous debate discussed to make sure that you understand the data flows within your organization. The data flows from your customers, the data flows from your partners. And that's what being a TechCo is all about. And in fact, I did in a moment of madness, use chat GPT through my be my eyes application to ask which animal best represents the telco, which is always a good fun party game to play perhaps at your Christmas parties. You can do that. Ask people what animal best represents the telco? Strangest answer I ever got was a dolphin by the way. That's another discussion. But the issue here is pretty fundamental to what the telcos want to be when they grow up. And then if you look at the motion, if they're going to be digital service providers, they have to embrace all of those elements that we've been talking about.

(23:08):
They have to understand the flows. It goes partly back to the previous debate as well about working along the lines, understanding the customers, helping that customer experience, getting in the shoes of the customer if we can do it well, the shoes of the people and then with all the other things going on as well. But understanding the way that connectivity fits into provide the value creation. Otherwise we are going to be reduced and reduced and reduced as an industry down to being a wholesale provider where of course the addressable market becomes much more curtailed, much more shrunken and not really where we want to go. The tools are there for the telcos, they need to embrace it. I think the most or the mentioned earlier of changing the culture and actually helping everybody within the telco understand how they can best use AI best, use the APIs best, use the data to deliver a better product to the customer is exactly where we need to be. And that is my definition of a TechCo. Thank you.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (24:07):
Thank you. Alright, Chris and Graham there falling against, you'll get your chance to vote on that very soon, about 30 minutes time or so. But first of all, we are going to have a conversation amongst ourselves, amongst our guests here and we are going to open up to the room first. So I'm going to go around and go right in the middle of the room. It gets the prime spot. It's the middle of the room. It's easiest to get the box to. There you go, Francis, please.

Francis Haysom, Appledore Research (24:35):
Francis Haysom, Appledore Research. I'll be honest, I find the term the way telcos used, the word TechCo, really very annoying because I think what it describes is a kind of lack of specificity of what they want to do. IE, it's saying I want to be something else, but I can't quite say what that other thing is and is the real issue here. Whether we want to be a TechCo or a telco or a better DSP, et cetera is much clearer definition of what it is we're trying to achieve rather than some vague notion of progress without really a definition of what we're actually trying to achieve.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (25:15):
Who would like to answer Francis first? Can you

Francesca Serravalle, Vodafone (25:21):
Yeah. I think over the years this world has been changing a little bit, right? And it's also quite broad, but for me, being a TechCo company is an enabler of new business positioning basically. So becoming a solution player or becoming or having our network to be a platform play. And we know that tech is not just one word, it's a program of transformation. It enables, it is what we need to change for us to enable those two business model and go beyond the connectivity. If we stay to connectivity, we know we need to be an aggregator, interconnector and secure providing secure connectivity because everything is distributed. If we want to go beyond connectivity, it's either platform play or solution play. And for that we need to not only transform our network, the way we operate, the network, the way we engage with the customer, cloudifying the experience of service provisioning, build up our own portal, build up our own API, but it also means changing ways of working and changing mindset.

(26:39):
I think this was mentioned also before, this is quite key changing ways of working where we don't do POC, but where actually we innovate. Creating MVP with a specific outcome in mind where we really want to prove the value of a certain technology and addressing a specific challenge, working co-creating with our own partners using agile methodology to adopt that failure fast culture and also try and breaking silo across the collaboration. So that I think could change the mindset in a way that we do things ourself. We upskills with software, we have our own data scientists and we build squad and create MVP in two months and we are outcome driven rather than capability driven. I think all of this for us is teco, it's a program of transformation. That is why it is taking so long, but we know what we want to achieve.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (27:37):
So it's a program of transformation. Francesca, thank you much indeed. Ranjan, you want to come in as well?

Ranjan Band, Tech Mahindra (27:41):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's again a behavior change. It's about how bold you are to take the new things on board for that it's about the culture, software driven culture, it's about working with the partners. How open are you to work with the partners and make them part of the journey. I think if we don't share the pain and the gain, we will not grow collectively. So it's about collaboration, it's about setting up right ways of working, it's about giving business the tools for them to experiment in the market. And it is about opening the ecosystem to external world. So many things comes into fold and the telcos who are able to demonstrate that it's not about the state. You are a telco and you've become a TechCo. It is about the behavior you demonstrate to the market and to your own people to experiment and fail fast. Thanks.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (28:39):
And Andrew, we're going to come across to you as well.

Andrew Coward, IBM (28:41):
Yeah, I have a slightly different perspective. It's interesting as IBM, we get to sit across lots of different industries and I guess Darryl, you do now too. And we could be having this conversation in a room full of bankers or car manufacturers or pick any other industry. Every industry is going through radical change right now as they attempt to API, fify, if that's a real word, appify, autonomize, all the different elements of their business modernize the stack that they have so they can compete. So I would argue the whole techno conversation is a compulsory thing that we have to go through as an industry as indeed every other industry has to go through to be competitive in the modern world.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (29:26):
Interesting. Thanks Andrew. Any more comments? Darrell, you want to,

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (29:30):
We mentioned that Wind River is owned by a large automobile orientated company ap. And the whole discussion there is how do we software define everything? And it's exactly what Andrew was saying. The topic of discussion is how do we change our culture to build new software for vehicles? For example, radar systems, ADA systems, safety control systems. How do you change the architecture in the vehicle to be more of a container-based environment, a software defined something and then you go to the OEMs, in this case, the BMWs of the world, maybe I show my age, you remember BMW used to market the driving experience. The reality is, is no one really cares about the driving experience anymore. It's the experience of getting from A to B and what you do in the vehicle. And that's software defined. And you can take that example into the aircraft industry, into the robotics industry, and we're going to see a lot of innovation around there.

(30:32):
Linking that back to TechCo and Telco. I think telcos are in a unique position to be able to enable those industries and where they want to focus on those industries by understanding a limited set of understandings around what are those pain points those industries are trying to address in order to provide solutions to those problems. And then lastly, I'd like to sort of give a comment on whenever I've worked with a telco and I've worked for telco and with telcos, they're not very good at actually doing the integration end to end of any. That's not their core competence. So partnerships to the point earlier are going to be very important. Telcos are able to cooperate or compete with those partnerships and those ecosystems to leverage innovation that will sit elsewhere and bring that to the table will differentiate them.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (31:28):
Thank you very much. Darrell. Chris, do you want to have a word?

Chris Simcoe, BT (31:30):
Yeah, I think the irony of the whole telco TechCo, sorry I almost said techno conversation from our customer's point of view, they probably see the telco as being more delivering them technology, but the tecos, they probably just, what are you getting? You're streaming movies, you're searching for things. It's probably the opposite. The way that our customers actually perceive us, we tend to think it's all technology we're delivering, whereas services. So I think the transition is, and we're starting to do this, everything used to be tied to a phone number as the ID within a telco and now we've released last year the EID. So just like any other company out there, you can have a login, you don't have to be a customer and they can start buying things with that. It's not associated with the technology, the mobile phone. So I think the more that we think about it from that perspective, the more we will deliver that our customers care about, like the tech codes do, but not as perceived by our customers in that way.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (32:47):
Great. Thanks very much. Chris, should we move on to another question? Let's have more comments from the panel. Let's move it on to Dean over on the left hand side and then we'll scan the room for any more. I think there's one at the back somewhere I think

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis (32:59):
Is the term TechCo just code for a company with an r and d department and budget. Because in the past most r and d has been done by product companies, not service companies. It's by companies that design aircraft, that design pharmaceuticals, that design cars, services companies, banks, insurers, hospitals even don't tend to do their own r and d exception being online companies and cloud companies. So is there a struggle here that telcos first off don't really have big r and d budgets and secondly their service companies and service companies don't really know how to do r and d Anyway,

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (33:46):
Thanks very much Dean for that one. Who wants to answer Dean first? I can pick the, yeah, Andrew,

Andrew Coward, IBM (33:53):
I mean the banking one I think is really interesting. If you think about competition in banking, what's really shaken up that world is FinTech and the host of new companies that have taken advantage of APIs to go build a new business model to sit on top of the banking infrastructure, which has caused all the major banks to reinvent themselves as tecos. So if you talk to a head of IT in a bank or head of product for a banking product, they will see themselves as a product house in that way. And to your point, Dean, I dunno that we do in telco so much. I mean yes we have product managers and yes they own their service, but are they thinking about that in the way that a FinTech does or now a bank does? I think that to the culture conversations earlier, I think that's some of the change that we're going through.

Graham Wilde, BWCS (34:45):
Can I chip in? Probably not supposed to, but I just want to give a bit of perspective I think on Dean's question, right? So I think the answer to that is no. And the reason I think that is because I think if we were seeing here a hundred years ago, maybe 150 years ago, no 130, 140 years ago in the telecoms industry, we'd all be having the same debate about telco and techno, right? Because we'd be talking about going from telephone exchanges where you had people who are plugging in jack plugs to connect the customers to the party, to telcos are going, oh no, we need to embrace electro mechanical switching. And so we need to become experts in that. We need to develop our own expertise in motors and switches and blah blah blah blah, blah. Okay. We need to have that capability inside our own organization. And I think this is the same, it's just that we're not talking about electro mechanical things. We're talking about AI and various types of software and stuff like that. It doesn't mean you have to invent that stuff, but you have to be familiar with how to use it.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (35:59):
Yes. But those telcos did invent that stuff and did create it.

Graham Wilde, BWCS (36:03):
No they didn't.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (36:03):
Yes they did.

Graham Wilde, BWCS (36:04):
No they didn't.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (36:04):
Yeah, they did. Can Neil asnwer that for me?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (36:10):
Chris?

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (36:10):
Sorry guy.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (36:11):
Yeah, you're taking our marketing too seriously with the can of worms. Okay, right. Where's that elephant? We promised an elephant as well. Good points made though. Anyone else on the panel want to bring this up, Francesca?

Francesca Serravalle, Vodafone (36:25):
I mean for me it's again back to the definition of tech coke, right? But for sure it's not an for me concept at all for me. If I can make a few example for just recent example, we are doing an MVP with again our own employee that where we use Jenny IN AI to be able to automated the invoice settlement for colo services with third party DC and that it's not MR and D because it's not going to give me outcome in two to three years time, but probably will give 2 million saving in one year time. This is being a TechCo company. We are doing ourself an MVP through a cloud platform where we create some model that help us to realize some saving. There are other on another MVP where we're trying to look what is the best of the breed infrastructure that is simplified, integrated when we model cost of uplift, saving of regionalization. This is happening now this is realized. This help us to simplify the network and realize opex and cap saving with benefit realization within the year. So I'm thinking for me this is being TechCo, it's not r and d because r and d we're looking at things that where we realize benefit in years to come. So again, for me it's back to the definition of TechCo company, but this is what I define TechCo company ways of working where we create MVP that address operational and business challenge that are on the short term and we realize benefit within the year with clear outcome.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (38:15):
This is good, this is why we're having this debate. Excellent. Any more comments?

Ranjan Band, Tech Mahindra (38:18):
One point... I think the telcos are taking leadership positions in multiple geographies. They're redefining themselves. I'll take an example on in Indonesia, how many of you must have heard Shabbat ai? That's a large language model created by a telco for the community, for the country, for the government, and being positioned as a sovereign ai, not many telcos are taking that leadership position and saying, I have a role to play in the future of the enterprises and the future of government and opening up that ecosystem to different players, to startups, to developers, to other telco players and creating a community out of it. I think whether it's not r and d, it is about leadership. It is about giving the strategy, giving the leadership position to the telco globally that hey, this is an art of possible if you want to survive and make a difference and create a value in the society. I think it's going beyond the thinking of pipes, softwares, products, and it is more about thinking about what difference we can make going forward. So I think we have to think beyond r and d mindset because r and d mindset may be more long lasting, but some of the causes could be more potential for a long-term growth of this.

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (39:43):
The only thing I would like to maybe build on that a little bit, when I was talking earlier about the innovation gene, I'm very worried that in the telecommunications industry a lot of the telecommunications companies have lost that gene. And I'll give you just two examples. I'm sure BT have invented lots of very, very cool things as well, but I'll choose some outside the uk. At and t Unix, they invented Unix, right? They have more patterns in some of their buildings that can coat walls, but they've lost that. That doesn't exist anymore. Bell Labs has gone, Nokia I think picked up a lot of that, but it is been very disrupted.

Andrew Coward, IBM (40:25):
But don't you think that's just because democratized, IT?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (40:28):
Could be?

Andrew Coward, IBM (40:29):
Across a much bigger ecosystem.

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (40:30):
It could be, but my point is that, maybe I'm biased. I want the telcos to get back into the innovation and get those skills back because I think they can drive that. If I look at NTT research, even today, they have a big research group. They invented pretty much anything we use today optically. I mean a lot of the optical transmitters, DWDM, they still do that today. They see that as a differentiator, but they're starved for investment from the core business. So it's difficult for them to drive that innovation. So my point being is I think the telecommunications companies need to get some of that capability back. The cultural aspects I think we spoke about earlier, taking risks, failing fast, those are the sorts of things that are going to revitalize the industry and actually help us take go to the next level.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (41:20):
Thanks so much, Darrell. Anymore comments?

Francesca Serravalle, Vodafone (41:22):
No, it's just - you want to go first?

Chris Simcoe, BT (41:24):
I was going to say I think maybe you have to separate the R and the D in this discussion. So we do a lot of R. Many people may have been up to Ipswich, the BT lab, so we still do a lot of research there. Development's done all through the company. I'm not saying all the R is in hardware and all the D is in software, but a lot of development now we're talking about development is software. Any research we do that leads to developing hardware generally needs much more scale than we can deliver. So unlike in the past where we used to make switches and things like that, but we do develop new innovations. Many something called MOD came out of our research labs recently to address challenges. We have multicast, assisted unicast delivery and that's something we're working with partners to take the market but something we can deploy with those partners. But there's loads of development done within the company, but I don't necessarily makes it a telco or a TechCo. Sure.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (42:29):
Thanks Chris.

Francesca Serravalle, Vodafone (42:30):
I agree. No, I just was going to say that there is a lot of innovation happening and especially when we call it operational innovation. Basically we're innovating the way we do things, the how. So I think you are talking about the what is coming, but the way we do things that is changing a lot and I mentioned already few the way we do energy management, the way we do budget management, the way we create and we expand our network where we use integrated workflow or machine learning, geo intelligence looking, geo mapping the opportunity from a sales perspective, creating aggregate demand. So I think there is a lot happening but it's on the way we do things because this is what we are trying to transform. So I just want to separate the what from the how.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (43:20):
Darrell do you want to come back? No, no. Fine. Great. More comments? No comments. Let's move it on to another question. Actually there was a question just at the back. You think a lady that put her hand up about 20 minutes ago and then we'll come to Neil, but at the back there please.

Marina Koytcheva, STL Partners (43:33):
Thank you Marina Koytcheva, STL partners. So actually my questions very much related to what Darl was talking about because I find it quite disheartening that it took us two and a half debate today to get to the world innovation and where did this industry go? I mean how did this happen? I think even when we spoke about APIs and ais, it was about how do we build a platform or how do we optimize what we do and how we do it. But I think there has to be a discussion about building new stuff and telcos can do that and building new businesses because if you go to an industry like pharma, they're looking at AI as how to build more stuff and kind of new products and new solutions. It feels to me like as an industry, the industry has given up on innovating internally on the what? I mean I spend a lot of time scouting for innovation. I still think that it exists quite a lot in Asia probably. Is it a western problem? Is it an industry-wide problem? It doesn't matter whether you call yourself TechCo or whatever, it's not just about adopting something that somebody else has invented already. Right.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (44:43):
Okay, thank you very much. There's a few points in there anybody want to address in general?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (44:48):
I have a hypothesis. I think fear is preventing people from innovation. So in certain markets people are frightened of losing what they have so they defend that rather than innovating and disrupting from within to drive that. Whereas if you're in more greenfield environments, you can take that risk, you can drive that level of innovation. I also think that in the telecommunications industry we've lost the importance of what I call the innovation premium associated with the stock price of a particular company. And I think we need to maybe educate our shareholders in these spaces more efficiently about how we can innovate to drive value and get that innovation premium back into our share price.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (45:35):
Thanks very much.

Francesca Serravalle, Vodafone (45:36):
Just again, I'm thinking we should have more empathy for the service providers. We have a lot of opex and CapEx challenge. We have a lot of services and revenue from declining market. We know we need to move towards a market where there are new emerging revenue and we know that to do that we need to transform everything and invest even more CapEx and even more opex and we're trying really to navigate this path in a way that we manage the risk but we try and get the opportunity as well. So I think rather than fear, I think some of the things we need to change is probably process. I agree we need to streamline some process and especially maybe have some process for industrialized product and process for innovation that I agree because sometimes the MVP takes two months of the one that I mentioned, but then to get the green light from security, it takes maybe three, four months. So that I think is because we really protect our data and our network and I think this is something where we need to change really maybe having some different process for innovation and process for industrialized product.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (46:52):
Fantastic, thanks very much. Andrew. Do you

Andrew Coward, IBM (46:54):
Was reminded, I was at a recent Marconi Society event which is hosted by Vince and the subject was internet resiliency and how to improve it. There was representation from many of the major companies, cloud providers obviously, but bizarrely not telco. Almost everybody in the room but not myself had written a couple of RFCs each a very esteemed community of people. These people don't work for telcos. So I'd argue yes, we have a lot of smart people in telcos, but there's a much broader ecosystem of people who are largely seeing telcos as irrelevant to the future of networking and that's really scary.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (47:40):
Scary. Yeah. Come on Neil.

Neil McRae, UKTIN (47:43):
This problem started in the late eighties and nineties. I founded a company called Demon Internet. You might remember it. This is when this problem started because all telcos wanted to do was sell minutes and sell lots of them. And you tell me one significant telco breakthrough from 90 to today that was actually delivered by a telco, they don't exist. That is the stark reality and it is a hundred percent down to innovation and skills and competence and also what we're willing to invest in. And I say investment not just in capital or equipment, but you go look at what the AI companies are paying for people in California right now

(48:28):
To join them. It's insane how much they're investing in that because they believe they have no fear, they've got nothing to lose. They either go for this and make it work. In which case few hundred k here or there, it's peanuts, right? And that is one of the biggest challenges and tel goes even Francesca is Miller. Well what about the security department? I'll tell you what, I got hauled up in the office about a hundred times for ignoring security to get something launched. So you have to take risks, you have to go for it. And if we don't believe it, the people in this room don't believe it.

(48:58):
Why would our customers believe it? Just that innovation thing is crucially important, but I don't think it's all about just inventing stuff yourself. It's going to be about partnerships and leveraging that because actually we're not going to be able to afford it. But also there was a time, back to Chris's point, before the internet, everything that was made in a telco was made by the telco or to the telco spec. Look at SS seven interconnect. There's 50 different variants of it. Why? Because every telco had their own one. So we haven't learned from that piece of history and we continue to ignore that piece of history. We got lucky with internet because it pivoted towards the telcos because of speed and access. But if we don't get back to doing stuff and launching, I said this in the last one, a platform business is easy.

(49:50):
You launch compelling products that customers want to buy. You love the biggest platform in the world. We've lost that gene and until we fix that, we're in serious trouble. It starts with some of the stuff Francesca talked about. So have a cloud platform so you can deliver services. I talk to many customers around what's their cloud strategy? They don't have one or they have one that's so incoherent, it makes no sense. But you see the car guys, BMW have got their own cloud platform. Why? Because their cars are online and we're not learning from these other industries that are making a success of this. And hence back to Andrew's point, we are irrelevant in this world.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (50:27):
Let's put that to our panel then. Neil, thank you very much for those extra comments. What do we think? Who wants to address this first and Ranjan? Perhaps we could pick up and also start off from the innovation point as well.

Ranjan Band, Tech Mahindra (50:39):
No, I think what Neil mentioned is absolutely important. I think unless we deliver a product which our customers are desperately or a future ready product, not even today's product, I think most of the telcos are dealing with selling a sim card, same acquisition, just kind of making marginal single digit revenue. And no wonder the investments are coming from only from the pension funds and what PEs are looking PEs are wanting to buy infrastructure telcos or the fiber guys. So it's about the product mindset. It's about what we see the future from the enterprises point of view. When we talk about B2B, most of the telcos are taking certain shape. We have seen some examples. It is making collaborations going beyond the traditional telco trying to go into the digital ecosystem, whether it is digital authentication, whether it is security, whether it is digital banking, buying digital insurance companies.

(51:42):
I think it has to go beyond the connectivity, traditional connectivity providers and look at the product and be the aggregator of some of the products and be in the home of the customer When it comes to B2C, what's stopping a telco? Trying to own the customer, whether it is security, whether it is all the white goods, how about making sure the want of spend, which is there in every household around insurance. So there is enough market for the telco to go. It is more about the product mindset, looking beyond the network, trying to build forge alliances and create ecosystem where the products are more coming out of the factory. We've

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (52:23):
Got about three minutes to go, so let's round off this debate with extra points on this on so Andrew first,

Andrew Coward, IBM (52:30):
So I just want to raise a point that hasn't been brought up, which is the role of startups, particular being my bonnet I've had for a long time. And if you look at other industries, so what happens to the FinTech companies? They get bought by the banks. How does IBM reinvent itself every few years? We go through acquisitions, we've done 35 acquisitions in the last five, six years. How many acquisitions have the telcos in this room done through that time period? And for what purpose was it to bring innovation? Was it to bring new products into your organization or was it just to consolidate the businesses you already have? There's a very poor track record of investing in startups. As a telco industry, we do not do a good job of it. I've been in that situation and I've been on both sides of this house. It's very interesting. And so there is a requirement if we want to be successful, bring innovation in that we both fund and support the startup environment to make that happen.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (53:32):
Thank you very much. Andrew. Chris do, you want to come in?

Chris Simcoe, BT (53:34):
Yeah, a couple of points. So on the innovation front, I think there's loads of innovation goes on. I think most of it is internally focused. So we use a lot of innovation to keep our costs down to deliver increased performance for our customers, that sort of thing. So I just don't think we see it, our customers don't see it. I think, and the other thing that Neil pointed out about us being irrelevant, I think I'd counter that with what Colin was saying earlier, we're extremely relevant. Customers definitely notice when we're not there. Maybe they don't notice when we are there. Things keep ticking along and I think finding the value in that relevance is I think what is key. For years we've been chasing edge compute, it's all about latency. It's this technical thing, it needs to be closer. I think what we're now finding is actually it's about knowing where your compute is happening, your analytics, whereas your data contained. There's value in that to our customers, understanding where that's going on, who's running it. And again, to Colin's point, we are critical for our customers and that's the kind of value we need to capitalize on in innovating. It may not be technical innovation, it's actually how we're selling on that value to our customers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (55:06):
Great points. Thank you so much. Any more comments?

Francesca Serravalle, Vodafone (55:09):
I'll just repeat similar things. I think there's a lot of innovation within telco, a lot happening in the enabling operational innovation. So how do we make things better? How do we incorporate AI in our business and operational activity? Lots of innovation in the network and the operation side. I do agree we need to cooperate better within the broader ecosystem and I agree it has to go. That requires innovative partnership model just beyond the technical synergy but also synergy business model level and we need to streamline some of our processes. But otherwise I think there's a lot happening in terms of within the network and the operation.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (55:54):
Fantastic. Great. Thanks very much. I think we're going to end our q and a there. I do love how these debates kind of morph into what we really want to talk about, which is great, which is the whole point of great teleco debate. However, we have a motion which is going to come back on the screen any second now and we will remind you who was voting for, arguing for and who was arguing against and read this motion really carefully. A telco doesn't have to be a, a true digital service provider. If you agree with that statement, then please raise your paddles with the green facing the stage. If you disagree with this statement, please raise it with the red facing the stage. So let's go and vote could go by the way. Well yeah, I think that's probably two thirds in favor of the motion. There you go. First motion again. Thank you very much. Right, that's all we have time for. We have lunch coming up. Well right now I think over there it's about an hour long. You've got 60 minutes before we come back. Lots of goodies to come back with after lunch. We've got two panels and we've got an interview and we've got a spot with Ray, which is fantastic. So thanks very much. Please thank all our guests and enjoy your lunch.