Autonomy is about much more than efficiency, as our panel – Eka Kamushadz of Orange Business and Edi Fernando Vieira Filho from Telefonica – discussed with IDC’s Chris Barnard
At Mobile Europe’s recent virtual conference, Telco to techco, our expert panel discussed the wider and more profound impact of automation on telcos’ operations and businesses. We heard from Edi Fernando Vieira Filho (pictured bottom), Head of Network and System Operations at Telefonica and Eka Kamushadze (pictured above, right) EVP Major Programs of Transformation at Orange Business. Chris Barnard, VP European Infrastructure and Telecommunications at IDC was moderator (pictured above left).
New upbeat trends in telco
Barnard opened the debate with a couple of positive observations about emerging trends. The first is that core telco revenues are growing, in enterprise and consumer, fixed and mobile, at about 3.1% overall annually. This is an upswing from five or 10 years ago, he noted. The total amounts to around $1.4 trillion dollars, which underscores the importance of telco globally.
Barnard added that at the same time, we see capex investment and capex intensity declining. Currently telcos collectively spend about $330 billion dollars per year. IDC believes that will decline slightly to around $309 billion by 2028, while capex intensity – the amount of capital required to achieve specific outputs – is declining from around 22% to 18% in the same time period. In other words, telcos are doing more with less.
Barnard observed that network autonomy is top of mind for many telcos, although there is capex cost associated with it. All three panellists supported his opening comments, giving examples from within their own organisations. Vieira Filho pointed out that although telcos have been automating processes “for decades”, new technologies are allowing Telefonica to move from automating “a reactive network to a more proactive and predictive network”.
Vieira continued, “We are starting to operate the same network or a higher network [that has] more complexity, with less people and the people we have are moving through a most valued activities regarding the the Capex intensity. I think this is a good example.” Then added, “With AI [we are] understanding better the impact of actions on customer experience: we can prioritise capex to where we will impact most and best for the the client.”
New customer-facing models
Kamushadz of Orange Business explained her role was “to design holistic transformation, to design and to lead [its] holistic transformation… [to] bring on the comprehensive transformation of business model commercial model operating model” under an initiative launched in 2023 called Lead the Future. This focused on streamlining its product portfolio across Orange and Orange Business, and rethinking how services are offered to customers because it wanted to differentiate itself through innovation.
She said, “We capitalised on our strengths. We focus what we call our 3 Cs connectivity, cyber security and cloud. We’re transforming these components through model powered by a GenAI-powered platform. We have launched our evolution platform [also see Telco to techco keynote session with Philippe Ensarguet,VP of Software Engineering at Orange group] which has three components – our infrastructure layer as a baseline with cyber security on top and all of this is in a cloud environment.
“We are moving very fast in this dimension. We have many customers already on boarded in this platform, and we have quite impressive pipeline built because it’s quite popular and interesting for our customers.”
The discussion continued, including how to turn tech innovation into monetisation, and Telefonica’s network is no longer distanced from this central issue, how a new stack will mean an end-to-end, interconnected and automated customer journey at Orange, how to priortise the right areas for investment, from a business rather than technical point of view and so much more.
