DTWS: Fine-tuning partnerships to drive future connectivity

On November 11, industry leaders from around the world came together at Digital Transformation World Series to discuss what the future of connectivity will look like. Facilitated by Joann O’Brien, TM Forum's VP of Ecosystems & Labs, they debated potential obstacles in the way of their vision, and the technologies that can help realize the future goals. This interactive masterclass, 'Inspiring connectivity as a service', took a deep dive into the business challenges and falls under the Forum's Beyond Connectivity theme. A recurring theme was that the future is close: Boris Maurer, Communications & Media Industry Lead – Europe, Accenture, went as far as to say that 5G and the new softwarized networks are not just evolutionary, but are a seismic change. “We are not having just new network technology building on the old technology, we are completely changing the game,” he said.

Networks used to be tied to hardware, and as this hardware evolved, so did the network capabilities, he noted, but now, “The whole network space is moving to the cloud, and that effectively means moving from a hardware regime to a complete software regime.” This also means that ecosystem is fundamentally changing: “Where we had private and physical technology…we are going to public,” he added.

As-a-service model

Enabling new kinds of ecosystems to provide connectivity as a service successfully is not just about technology, but, “It's about working together, and actually developing new IP [internet protocal]: New IP on those networks will be generated every day, everywhere on the edge of the network and we'll add to that and then we all will profit from that. The markets will be changing,” Maurer added. His peers at the masterclass agreed. From the governmental perspective, Henrik Aagaard Johanson, Smart City Program Manager for the Capital Region of Denmark, explained: “We are not technology experts, we are not experts on the applications and the data layer. We're experts in different kinds of challenges for the citizens, cities setting goals and having processes to do this. Larger cities will have more competency to go into a data layer and information, but essentially, we will need some partners to do this.”

CSPs as orchestrators

Maurer noted that communication service providers (CSPs) are in a good position to become the orchestrators of the connected industry. Tom Togsverd, Partner at IndesmaTech, echoed this saying: “I think telecoms have an important role to add; to come up with new business models where they are partners to the companies instead of just being service providers.”

He also said it’s crucial that these partnerships have a clear understanding of what everyone is looking to achieve and resolve, particularly on a local level. Each municipality is different, with its own culture and way of doing things, and not every part of becoming smart and connected can be standardized and/or be suited to “a blanket solution”.

Togsverd said: “We can't come and say this is exactly the value you get out of it. It is about doing it a little bit more innovatively, trying some things and coming back to what was so important [in the first place].” Rasmus Fønss Dyhr, Head of IoT at TDC Business, was in full agreement stating: “I think CSPs can come with extensive knowledge and experience, all the very technical things. Sometimes you talk about connectivity being like it's only a connection, but especially with 5G, that comes as a huge technology layer that we have to just acknowledge. It's new to all of us, but of course the CSP has a role there.”

Trusted partners

Martin Brynskov, Chair, Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) believes that CSPs should be the trusted partners to “make this complex seismic shift available to political direction, which will be different depending on where on the globe you are.” He agreed this means working in partnerships at the local level, in line with Togsverd’s comments.

Brynskov said: “The ports, the hospitals, the manufacturing line, those are the easy cases,” or to put it more subtly, the use cases where standardization is often much simpler because of how standardized they are already. He urged, “Find out what your role [is] in the complex cases then work with your partners.”