From TelCo to TechCo – Conversations with Innovators on Transformation

By Jillian Kaplan, who leads AI and Infrastructure Product and Partner Marketing for Telecom at Dell Technologies.

In recent years, many traditional companies have successfully transformed themselves into tech-driven enterprises, leveraging technology to enhance their operations, products, and customer experiences.

General Electric and Ford, for example, have integrated data analytics and IoT into their manufacturing processes, and we have seen the financial industry evolve from banking to fintech.

Similarly, the adoption of cloud-native architecture and the rise of AI is driving a paradigm shift for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to transform from telco to techco as network computing shifts from the core to the edge, and operators move toward platforms that deliver unprecedented flexibility, greater efficiency, and the ability to generate new revenue streams.

In my interview series, From Telco to TechCo: A Story of Cloud Transformation, we go in-depth with industry leaders and innovators to discuss how their adoption of next-generation network technologies is fundamentally changing how they see their role in the marketplace.

In our first episode, a conversation with Telstra’s Young-Kai Cha, principal technical product owner, we talk through the advancements Telstra has made and the challenges it is addressing with cloud-based network functions.

“Speed is the first ‘pro’ of cloud-transformation,” according to Young-Kai, who outlines how Telstra is now viewing lifecycle management, and how the new capabilities in the network can help improve network troubleshooting, such as real-time pinpointing of performance issues in the cloud so Telstra can recover faster.

In our second talk, Jason Wong, head of telecom cloud transformation at Telstra shares perspectives on the benefits of cloud transformation for the customer and the importance of resiliency in the telco cloud.

“If you think about traditional services and how core networks were deployed, such as in 2G and 3G and even some early 4G versions, when a site would go down there was truly no way of spinning another site up quickly when capacity runs out,” Jason said. “The whole notion of having an ‘always-on’ network within our cloud for our customer is of utmost importance to us.”

Bayou Hana, president, director and CEO of Lintasarta, a subsidiary of IndoSat, joined us to talk about the importance of cloud transformation, challenges specific to IndoSat’s market, and where things are headed. IndoSat has reported 15 percent increases in data traffic growth year-over-year. “Twenty years ago, traffic was still mainly centered around voice and text, and now there has been a sudden shift to data. Digital literacy really went up doing COVID, and we’ve seen the phenomenon of AI,” Bayou observed.

“We’ve been running a cloud business for more than 12 years, but recent developments have pushed us to transform a lot faster and further for our cloud to be ready for digital and AI transformations.”  He also noted that demographically, Indonesia is young and embracing new technologies, giving the country a good starting point for transformation.

We then sat down with Glenn Exline, enterprise architect practice lead for telecom at Dell Technologies, on the need for both technology and operational changes to drive future growth, and the critical importance of having a North Star vision for cloud transformation.

Drawing on his decades of experience helping customers go from physical to virtual to container to cloud native, Glenn knows customers are seeking ways to drive operational efficiencies up and TCO down.

“The number one step is actually developing a ‘North Star’ and making sure that ‘North Star’ is about where you want to go, not where you’ve been,” Exline said. He noted the fundamental change in thought processes that comes with transformation: “The thinking also changes, as we are no longer architecting based on physical servers and physical networks, and instead are thinking in terms of service availability.”

In our latest episode, we heard from Joao Kluck Gomes, NVIDIA’s director of telco global business development on the launch of the Dell AI for Telecom Program, which includes the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA.    “It’s a new type of data center that has been designed and optimized for AI,” according to Gomes. “Think of a factory that instead of manufacturing a product, manufactures intelligence. And there are opportunities for CSPs to use AI not only to improve their business, such as lowering costs and enhancing customer care, it also unlocks the ability to create new businesses and growth opportunities.”

This series shares valuable insights from experts from across the globe who have been at the forefront of the shift from traditional telecom to technology companies driven by innovation.