VanillaPlus Magazine Q3 2021: CSPs seek to thrive through collaboration and beyond connectivity

Collaborators will be rewarded. Copenhagen or Nice aren’t host cities for this year’s Digital Transformation World Series but the virtual event is running for three weeks, and early sessions show communications service providers (CSPs) are seeking to thrive through collaboration.

Inside this Issue:

• TALKING HEADS: Hamdy Farid, the vice president of Nokia’s Business Applications unit, tells George Malim that CSPs need to start being innovation enablers and stop being technology integrators
• CASE STUDY: How Vodafone Europe turned to Nokia to collaborate on an automated anomaly detection as-a-service system
• EVENT REPORT: Tony Savvas lifts the lid on the highlights of this year’s TM Forum Digital Transformation World Series event
• INTERVIEW: Erez Antebi warns CSPs that with revenue comes the responsibility to protect consumers and SMBs
• ANALYST REPORT: Beecham Research’s Robin Duke-Woolley and Bob Emmerson explore how to address industrial IoT’s diverse requirements for private networking in 7- page report
• DTWS HEADLINERS: AWS, Telenor and Axiata leaders presentation highlights reveal a renewed focus on collaboration and cloud-based systems
• CUSTOMER JOURNEYS: How real-time decision-making can help CSPs build better customer journeys
• CASE STUDY: Inside Emblasoft’s project to perform SEPP testing and verification over a 5G core for Electryon

Editor's comments

Digital Transformation World, the TM Forum’s popular spring event, typically sees the world of telecoms IT decamp to a European city for some early-season sun and a packed programme of speaker sessions. This year, the pandemic has made that impossible but TM Forum has instead put in a place a three week programme of sessions under the umbrella Digital Transformation World Series. The event has been live on a device near you since 22 September and will continue until 14 October.

Encouragingly, the event is playing host to the usual array of c-level CSP executives who are joined by senior executives from companies such as AWS, Microsoft and Google, demonstrating just how far cloud has come in cementing itself into the telecoms IT landscape. Cloud and collaboration are now seen by CSPs that want to participate in the digital economy as essential enablers of a new type of telecoms business that has been talked about for a decade or more. Those that want to remain a connectivity provider can do so but as Telenor CEO, Sigve Brekke, pointed out in his Headliners presentation: “The biggest mistake we can make is to think we will do everything ourself as we used to do in the past.”

That’s a big statement for the chief executive of a traditional telco but Brekke doesn’t see Telenor in this way, speaking more about projects at fish farms and in local health than the network or the technology. He’s resolutely upbeat about future prospects. “We will be able to move out of the oldest successes we have had in the past and go into actual partnerships where we are developing growth that comes from services, not only connectivity.”

Perhaps CSPs have finally made the psychological leap and truly moved beyond connectivity. Hopefully, we’ll be able to find out more in-person at Digital Transformation World Series 2022.

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