Although business travel and industry events are now back on the agenda in the telecom world, and have been for most of this year, it’s still something of a novelty to head to Copenhagen recently for at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World event and even in the same space as around 3,000 other people all focused on meeting others, sharing insights and doing business. This is the first annual DTW event since 2019 and, as the focus is on digital strategies and the development of the communication services sector where so much has changed over the past three years, I am ready to learn about many notable noticeable development, change. and innovations.
The main takeaways for me are the assimilation of hyperscale public cloud giants into the community of companies aiming to move things for telcos, and the presence of vendors that are part of network operator groups (Rakuten Symphony, Jio Platforms ), as I mentioned in a previous article – Look DTW: The digital light at the end of the telecom tunnel.
But what did the smart people who track and report on this sector – the industry analysts – take away from the Danish capital?
Analysys Mason research director Jason van der Lande also mentioned in his blog after the event the “arrival of Google Cloud as a member and exhibitor of the TM Forum together with AWS and Microsoft Azure, thus showing the importance of the telecoms market for all of them”, and the presence of what he calls “operator technology initiatives” (the mentioned Rakuten Symphony and Jio Platforms) at the show. Analysys Mason analyst also rightly points out that Finland’s Elisa is also a member of that particular set, courtesy of its Polystar unit, which recently expanded its portfolio to taking Cardinality.
“Time will tell how each of the operator’s technology initiatives will fare against solutions from more established vendors, but the ability of these new players to test their products on their own networks and services is hard to fault,” says van der Lande, highlighting a key selling point for these hybrid outfits. He also provided insight into the increasing popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) options among telcos, how common application programmable interfaces (APIs) are now gaining traction in the industry, and the growing importance of energy efficiency – see his Blog, here.
For Martina Kurthfounder and CEO at Telco Republic, the telco sector is still battling its many operational demons. “Telecom providers are still grappling with how to resolve back- and front-office complexity, an issue that seems to have been exacerbated by 5G, cloud migration and a renewed focus on B2B. TM Forum initiatives (APIs, ODA [open digital architecture]], Catalyst projects, etc) have been gaining traction but they alone will not solve the complexity challenges,” she noted in comments shared with TelecomTV.
“That is why many of the same buzzwords of the past remain at the top of the agenda, such as digital transformation, consolidation, ecosystem, network automation, etc. Telco Republic expects them to remain on the agendas of DTW 2023-24 and more,” she noted.
As for the relationship between communication service providers (CSPs) and hyperscalers, Kurth explained: “There is little consensus among CSPs about how to go about moving to the cloud, or whether the public cloud is better suited to their needs than private. cloud. The likely scenario is a gradual transition from an on-premises/public cloud mix to a fully public cloud over the next 10 years.”
Of course there are some early adopters. The telco chief took one of the most popular keynote speeches from the event, given by Jon James, the CEO at Nuuday, the servco subsidiary of Denmark’s national telco TDC which is moving from its legacy IT system to run its critical support systems on a public cloud platform – Look How Jon James killed the Nuuday IT dragon. “The structural separation of Nuuday could be a cloud bellwether for the industry, which will be replicated throughout the industry, especially in Europe,” he said.
“Fear of vendor lock-in” was another topic that resurfaced in Copenhagen, the analyst noted, and again there was no consensus. “Some CSPs prefer simplification at the cost of hyperinnovation, be it product-wise or in the context of public and private cloud providers. Others want the latest innovation bells and whistles and are willing to swallow the exponential development and integration tax . And then there are CSPs who think they can do a better job developing software in-house,” Kurth said.
“Telco Republic is leaning towards the view that a multivendor approach will be dominant, even if it is not the most efficient business model. According to our research, there are around 200 active OSS and BSS startups [that have been] established since 2010, excluding merged and defunct entities. CSPs will always look for technology innovation that established vendors don’t provide and they can’t create internally,” he concluded.
That many of the topics and conversations are the same in 2022 as they were in 2019, when the event was still in its longtime home of the Acropolis Center in Nice, was also an observation made to me on the show floor by Francis Haysom , principal analyst at Appledore Research. He also believes that “too many people are still looking for the killer use case and trying to find it, but it’s not there.”
His colleague, consulting analyst Robert Curran, noted in his post-DTW blog that there are a “surprising number of new startups constantly entering the market. Surprising because some of them are solving problems that we all assume have been solved, or that established vendors already have strong advantage to (like NWDAF). All the same, it is to TM Forum’s credit to give aspiring young companies (and talent) airtime and floorspace,” Curran said, referring to the Startups Pitching sessions that gave new companies five minutes of pitch and Q&A time to make their case at the event. attendees (a good idea). One of those companies is Ikue, which set up in Copenhagen with some new funding and a customer data platform proposition for the CSP community – Look Startups raise funds to address telecom’s Achilles heel customer data.
Maybe the traditional telecom software vendors are off the ball? They weren’t as vocal as one might expect during the show, with Curran noting that there was little in the way of product introduction news during the event, though he called ServiceNow’s entering the telecom network inventory space (as part of its new Tokyo release) and Nokia billing-as-a-service announcements as exceptions.
Curran wasn’t the only one calling out ServiceNow as a company that stood out from the rest during the event (and it didn’t even have a booth on the show floor) – one to watch in the coming months apparently.
– Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV