5G Factor: BT, Vodafone, Altice Show Deft CSP Moves, Episode 69

Hello and welcome everyone to the 5G Factor. I'm Ron Westfall, research director here at the Futurum Group, and I'm joined here today by my distinguished colleague, Tom Hollingsworth, the networking nerd and event lead at Tech Field Day here at the Futuring Group. In fact, I believe we are basking right now in this fear infused afterglow of an extremely successful networking field day exclusive at HPE Discover with the HPE Aruba Networking Team and adding to that momentum.

Today we are focusing on major 5G ecosystem developments that have caught our eye, including BT strengthening its ServiceNow relationship, Vodafone taking drone services to the next level we believe, and Alti Labs working with Google Cloud to make network APIs matter. So Tom, welcome to the 5G Factor again, and many thanks for joining. How are things going on with you since the last episode?

Uh, they're going pretty good. I'm basking not baking. 'cause that is, you know, that s is very important.

It was, uh, it was about, it was Vegas. It's hot. But the, the nice thing is, is like we said, like you said, we got to enjoy, uh, the very first keynote in the sphere.

Uh, we got to see, uh, yen Wong just kind of come out and be a, a rock star. And in fact, we got the announcement that day that, uh, Nvidia was now the most valuable company in the world, which I thought was apropos. I, I'm not saying HP Discover send 'em over the top, but I'm saying it probably didn't hurt.

Right on. No, I think the timing was, uh, outstanding and, you know, as a, uh, coda of sorts, we got to see dead and company perform at the sphere. So I think we can shout out that if you have an opportunity to visit the sphere, by all means, uh, check it out.

Also, looking ahead, we have network field day 35 on July 10th, 11th, including guests such as Intel, acus, hedgehog Selector, AI and C Packet all joining us a great eclectic lineup to be sure. Uh, anything to add for one of our upcoming Tech Field Day events? Uh, no.

Right now I'm very focused on making sure that networking Field Day goes off without a hitch and, uh, we should have a great lineup of presenters that you just, uh, mentioned. We're gonna have some great delegates as well, including you. So it, which should be a, a fun time and we're gonna make sure the AC is cranked up so that you know none of those, uh, July heat waves in the room.

The only thing hot about networking field day is gonna be the, the content of course. Yeah, Yeah, we'll have the liquid cooling. Uh, and full rev.

So all good, all good. And so, hey, with that, let's jump right in and look at BT and ServiceNow. Uh, they've had an ongoing relationship and they just announced that they have expanded it to really, uh, focus on improving customer and workforce experiences, which I think on also merits extra, I think attention including customer experience.

Uh, so with that, what they're doing is they have a multi-year agreement that will extend ServiceNow service management capabilities to all BT group units to really, you know, improve savings efficiency and also, again, uplifting that customer experience as well as employee experience. Now, BT group will also use ServiceNow Service Bridge for automatic, uh, uh, automated connections between BT and its customers, and also plans to pilot ServiceNow's now assist for telecom service management or TSM to basically power gen AI capabilities for internal and customer facing teams. Now what we've seen is that BT has successfully consolidated legacy service management platforms from, you know, the BT digital unit onto a single ServiceNow platform.

And that basically started in 2022. And as such, the company's rolling out ServiceNow service management solutions, again, organization-wide. Now, for me, a key takeaway is that BT is also one of the first customers to pilot now assist for TSM and benefit from ServiceNow's Gen A I capabilities.

And so what we're seeing is that the initial rollout, uh, about 300 agents now assist, uh, will demonstrate meaningful results by allowing these agents to respond and drive quite simply those better experiences we've been hearing so much about because of Gen ai. And that certainly applies to how agents interact with customers. Now what we're seeing is that case summarization reduces the time it takes agents to generate case activity summaries by 55%, and also creating a better agent handoff experience by reducing the time it takes to review complex case notes also by 55%.

So this is a magic number. Clearly they can drive at 55% efficiencies and also by reducing overall hand, uh, handling time. Now assist is helping BT groups, uh, ability to improve, mean time to resolution.

And this is actually by a third, not quite 55%, but still all these are impressive results. And I believe this is showing that the Market Momentum Service now is achieving. And the telecom space is also applicable across the overall market and telecom as we're seeing, uh, with this, uh, you know, build out of the BT relationship.

The ServiceNow TSM portfolio is also being used by top tier operators such as Tata Communications, teya and Vodafone. And we also saw that ServiceNow chairman and CEO Bill McDermott provided the keynote for our six five AI Unleashed Summit. And at the summit he detailed how ServiceNow is embedding intelligence across every workflow while partnering with industry, uh, you know, uh, operators such as BT to accelerate their path towards digital business.

And I think under his leadership, ServiceNow has become really the intelligent platform for advancing this end-to-end digital transformation mission and vision, connecting people, processes, data devices and so forth onto a single unified platform with a single architecture and one data model. So that's a lot to pack in. And Tom, you know, from your perspective, what are some of the key impressions about this VT ServiceNow relationship that jumps out?

I'm really impressed that BT was able to consolidate so many of their existing platforms onto a single ServiceNow platform instance. I, having been in it for as long as I have been, I know how difficult it can be when you have to go dig up information on service tickets from one old platform. Did I remember the login?

Can it even display on the screen? What do you mean I have to use a terminal window? That kind of stuff.

It makes it difficult for this information to be in one centrally located area. And then once they were able to do that, I think it's one of the reasons why BT was picked to pilot this new, uh, gen AI feature set is because they have consolidated all their data in one spot. I spent, uh, a few months, we'll call it that on a national help desk when I was just starting out in my career.

And I can tell you automated case summaries are something that not enough people are talking about. When you call into a a national help desk, you don't get to stay on the phone for hours while we resolve this problem. Usually what they do is they work it to a point where there's going to be something that needs to happen, whether they're scanning a computer or they're, they've kicked off a process that could take a while and they're gonna let you go because they have a minimum call time, you know, requirement that they have to hit and they want to get you off the phone.

It's not that they're being rude, it's, they're trying to hit their metrics, but one of the biggest problems that I had when I worked there was we would get a call that had come in from somebody previously and their case notes were poor, I'll, I'll, I'll use poor 'cause I can't curse on here. Um, but it was just, it was so difficult to figure out what they had done. Whereas now when you got, you know, longer important call chains or better yet, you know, the infamous follow the Sun, 14 people on a bridge, uh, kind of call where we're trying to solve these issues, being able to automatically summarize what's been going on, what you've done, what's worked, what hasn't, what changes have affected, and then hand that off to the next agent without needing to spend that hour doing that.

That is a massive force multiplier for your support organizations because the more time that is spent in admin time, understanding a case and the less time you spend actually supporting the customer doesn't just affect your metrics, it affects your customer's perceptions. And I promise you, if you ask a customer who's ever been put on hold while someone reads up on this case quoting fingers is, you know that they have a poor impression of that, that client. Whereas if you get ahold of somebody who's like, yeah, before we got on the call, I was able to figure out what's going on, think I've had a path forward on this, let's give it a shot.

That gives you confidence that they're actually doing the work with Gen AI capabilities that increases that capability for them to kind of get the understanding of what's going on as they dive into the case notes. Yeah, I I think this is something that is, you know, really vital for any operator out there, let alone any organization. It's really just improving the overall experience.

It's certainly the customer, as you know, pointed out Tom, knowing that, okay, when I reach out, they're going to be reasonably prepared, they're gonna have, you know, a perhaps an answer ready to go, et cetera. And I think that's going to quite simply improve, you know, the stickiness of the relationship, being able to, you know, diversify the relationship and so forth. But also, you know, you know, the 55% improvement in efficiency and so forth that I think is going to really win, you know, the hearts of more operators out there, that ServiceNow is increasingly becoming a prominent player in this space and that that's necessarily today immediately associated with this telecom space.

But I think the BT deal here will start changing that significantly in addition to, you know, the ongoing relationships they have. But I think it's also about that workforce experience. It's a win-win, it's improving things for the customer, but also you have a workforce that is also more confident that we'll be able to be more efficient, be able to quite simply, uh, have an appreciation for not having to go into the trenches and getting really dirty just to find out, you know, that okay, the, um, the terminal that the person was using that were watering their plants on it and the water short circuit of the terminal and wasted, you know, 48 hours trying to figure out all the other things.

So that was another one that from my prior experience actually came up. And so I think, yeah, this is something that, uh, we're looking forward to seeing more of, and I anticipate that ServiceNow will definitely, uh, expand its profile as a result. And speaking of, uh, that, let's now look at where else the CSPs are advancing service innovation.

And one that, uh, I think is interesting to many people is what operators are looking to do with drone capabilities and services. And what we're seeing is that Vodafone, Germany and a data collection company called Fly Next have launched, uh, drone Net Hub, a online platform that can help businesses plan and manage commercial drone flights. And in recent years, drones approved valuable in many commercial scenarios, and that includes transporting packages on factory premises monitoring, difficult to reach infrastructure.

I know like real estate agents are actually using drones to inspect roofs before a house is sold or, you know, goes on the market, things of that nature. So this is actually having, you know, commercial impact in many important sectors. However, as we know, implementing and planning drone flights can prove complex and sometimes time consuming.

And this is where the Drone net hub can make a difference because it's basically allowing, you know, um, through a few clicks. I know it's a bit of a cliche, but it makes a difference to give them, uh, you know, businesses a way to plan, control and analyze flights under, you know, one monitor under one screen. And so, uh, again, there are many considerations before, you know, having commercial drone flights, especially in populated areas, you know, approved and implemented, and this includes approval of the flight and its trajectory, the quality of the local network coverage.

This is where certainly Vodafone comes in and also ensuring overall control. So after a flight, uh, any image or data recorded is, can be very important, and then it needs to be evaluated and also done in, you know, sometimes in a real time fashion. So, uh, what we're seeing is that Drone Net Hub is covering these areas and with their platform, and as such it can automate this, you know, whole process including the, uh, after drone flight data collection and reporting.

So, uh, what is coming down to is that the drone net connect stream tariff comes with high speed, do, uh, volume of 500 gigabits, and it it's expandable to one terabit. So that will probably cover many of the use cases on the horizon in terms of, okay, why, you know, use this service or why test it out? And so this can really ensure a consistent transmission of live data from the drone directly to the hub, which is certainly vital plus data from the mobile network is again integrated.

So it's not just the drone itself, but also the network that it is communicating with to ensure, you know, the safeguards are in place to ensure, again, the quality of the data and so forth. And by having ai, our friend integrated into the system, aerial photographs can be analyzed more quickly and also help with that, uh, report generation process on an automated basis. And so, uh, we've already seen that Vodafone Germany is working on drone projects, which allow residents of remote villages to have their shopping delivered by air, and that includes non-prescription drugs, but wait for it.

Now, prescription medicine, I understand is also included in these, uh, delivery. So this is pretty cool stuff, and so it's no longer science fiction. And, uh, Tom, what do you think about, you know, drone services and the ability of operators to actually deliver them on a meaningful commercial basis?

Well, I, for one, welcome our new commercial drone overlords. Oh, I, I kid a little bit. Um, so the, the example that you cited about using drones for doing like roof inspections is a big one.

And, um, I live in Oklahoma, for those of you who don't know, and everyone knows one thing about Oklahoma tornadoes, well, severe weather in general, um, being able to do like a large survey of a neighborhood to figure out hail damage in a, in a storm path would be huge. But another thing we have a lot about here is wind. I mean, it's in the song, right?

Wind comes sweeping down the plane. So we have, uh, a lot of wind turbines and those things are, you know, really high, really difficult to maintain. Whereas what if we could have a drone pop up and do an inspection of the turbine housing and maybe the blades if they're locked shut that day, but more importantly, they don't put wind turbines in populated areas.

That's a drive to get out there. You don't wanna send your best people out to that area in order to be able to, you know, do this inspection in person because that truck roll could cost your company thousands of dollars in lost work hours. Whereas with this drone hub portal, I can send out a, uh, drone operator who doesn't need to be trained in the inspection itself.

They just know, pop up here, scan this area, and I can have my operator watching from the console at home, or being able to download the data as it's uploaded to the portal and say, okay, it looks to me like there's a stress fracture in this area, uh, Murray, why don't you go ahead and, and pan back over here and give me a good shot of that area and hold on it for 15 seconds so that we can analyze it. And then, because you can then run AI against all those images, what you can do is you can say, okay, the AI inferencing tells me that there's probably gonna be an issue in this area, whether it's, you know, heat related or something like that, or there's, you know, some kind of a, a stress situation. This allows us to proactively maintain these devices so that they don't come apart and create, you know, hazards to life and limb.

I think that, and these are things that you want drones doing. I mean, the, what it takes to get clearance to go up one of those towers, it takes weeks. And if you know anything kind of causes that to not happen, whether it's a, a weather event or sickness or something like that, you would rather be able to dispatch a, uh, lower cost employee to go do it.

And if it's in the flight path of an airport, good luck because you have to get FAA approval in order to be able to fly that drone, which is another thing that I think the portal gives is the ability to say, okay, am I far enough away from this airport flight path to be able to fly this without getting a permit? Or if I do need to get a permit, can I, can I get that system set up in advance so I can say on these dates at this time, I'm gonna be out here doing this? Because that will go a long way to making sure that the FAA is more tolerant of using drones for things like inspections.

Yeah, I think that's a, a perfect example, Tom, and that is, you know, energy infrastructure, certainly, you know, wind turbine farms, uh, pops to mind, but also, you know, naturally solar farms would be, uh, well suited for this. And also I think what's gonna be interesting is that data centers are really, uh, pushing the limits for what the grid can support in terms of, you know, energy production today. And a lot of that's because of, you know, training AI models.

It's, you know, the GPU intensive, uh, data center loads. And I think what we're gonna see is that more data centers are going to go off grid in order to support these demands and come up with their own independent energy sources, which can include small modular nuclear reactors. That's not farfetched.

We're seeing, you know, organizations like Open AI investing in this. And so yes, the drones would be very useful for any energy infrastructure use case I anticipate, especially if it involves off-grid implementations, remote implementations and so forth. So this is something that I think will be integral to many verticals, real estate, energy, infrastructure and so forth.

And so, yeah, this is actually cool stuff and hopefully, you know, will be implemented in a safe way and, you know, and will prove a commercial success for all that are involved. And speaking of, you know, what operators need to do to improve their competitiveness, let's switch over, uh, back to what the CSPs need to do to make their services all the more innovative and all the more interesting to customers out there. And, uh, what we're seeing is that lts Labs is now working with Google Cloud to enhance its API management and overall API capabilities using Google's application integration capabilities.

Now, as a bit of, uh, background alts group's existing IT infrastructure as we can imagine is a pretty robust because it has to operate across many different groups across, you know, a population that runs into the hundreds of millions being served. And as a result, it is also complex and, and compromises, you know, of, again, a huge number of legacy com components that we've touched on already, as well as intricate workflows, hello ServiceNow, that are an, uh, that are managed by an enterprise service bus in this, uh, situation. So this complexity as, uh, we can imagine hinders ALT's ability to swiftly launch new offerings and features and to help overcome this ALT's Labs, the, you know, the lab part of T'S group is, uh, one building APIs to streamline communication with these fragmented systems.

Two, uh, ensuring, you know, precise control and protection for these APIs using the current Apogee API management tool. And then thirdly, orchestrating these intricate integration flows, data mappings and air handling using Google Cloud's application integration capability. And so what we're seeing now is that Alts is spotlighting that they're introducing application integration and is really to manage that complexity.

They're basically saying, this is actually making a difference. It, it's like, again, with bt, we're actually seeing some breakthroughs. And so this is actually very encouraging, I believe.

And application integration is, you know, uh, how Google Cloud's integration platform as a service or iPads is, you know, offered to customers such as alts. And it automates business processes by being able to connect to virtually any application, both the homegrown ones, and that's important when it comes to operators as well as third party SaaS applications. And again, that's through, you know, only a few clicks type of simplicity.

Now, uh, that requires an intuitive interface and I think, again, clearly Google knows how to use a gen AI tools, and I think that's, uh, going to be enlisted to help this overall, you know, overcoming of complexity in all of these environments. Now, uh, what we're seeing is that Altis is using Google, uh, cloud's, uh, application integration also to, you know, manage APIs for systems such as CRM, identity management, shopping carts, uh, also, uh, specific modules and customer journeys, billing, usage, charging, you name it. I mean, it's just literally a vast array of things that need to come together if the operators really want to attain operational efficiency.

And also it's supporting BSS and OSS service quality and call center capabilities. So we could see why there's such a challenge. And when the challenge is being met in a meaningful way to the point the operator's gonna share it publicly, that is important.

So I think it's imp also, uh, a good to ask, you know, what is different this time? I touched on it already because after all we've seen that the Boulevard have broken dreams is filled with previous initiatives to supercharge telco APIs. I can remember back to the days of parlay and also subsequent telco app stores that were basically rendered irrelevant by, you know, the Apple Android app stores and so forth.

And so fast forward to today, I think these are gonna be difference makers to have partners like Google Cloud, gen AI tools and so forth that can actually raise the telco game to the point where developers actually want to use their APIs and actually, and as a result and ties customers to check out, Hey, the operator actually has something cool. I don't actually have to limit myself to, you know, an existing Android Apples, uh, app store, for example, to get something cool and different. And so with that, Tom, I know you have experience, you've already touched on here.

What do you think is, uh, potentially different here? What do you think is going on? Well, long, long, long time ago in, in a previous life, I worked a lot with Noll identity manager and, and it was amazing what I could do with it.

I mean, I could, I could provision accounts and other systems and I could make things work the way that it does. But unfortunately this is one of those cases where you really don't wanna see how the sausage is made because this is in a pre API days, like everything had to have this weird like, hacked together system and if something broke or a field moved, nothing worked anymore and it was just painful. And I fast forward to today where we're talking about doing the exact same things, only we're doing them the right way.

We're using API functionality. We're, we're kind of homogenizing everything so that it works properly so that if things change or if something needs to be updated or, or dealt with that it can be done programmatically. And that's a huge boon for people that are trying to bring these disparate services together.

So on the one hand, earlier in the episode, we had this amazing story of how BT was able to consolidate, excuse me, how they were able to consolidate all of these devices and all these platforms together into one ServiceNow instance. And that's great if you have the manpower of BT to do that. We don't, most people don't anymore.

So what would be better is if we didn't have to consolidate all the services together, if we could just make them act like they were consolidated with, with API calls and things like that. But you still have to have that middleware to make that work. And I think that's what Altus Labs is really trying to do, is they're going to be the one-stop shop for how to make all of your stuff that doesn't talk together, talk together.

And by leveraging all of these Google, um, APIs and things like that, 'cause they're really good at that stuff, it's giving people that kind of a capability to go out and integrate those pieces together. And if you've ever had to deal with this at a job or when you've created an account somewhere where you've gotten like five or six things that all happen all at once and then six months from now you're like, well, I'm trying to do this. Oh, hey, we never created that for you.

Oops, our bad. We must have missed that on the checklist. Well, now that you're making me go through all this extra stuff and wasting my time, I'm not very happy.

However, if the checklist is now automated through the use of all these APIs and so that, you know, account creation for our westfall creates all these other things, that's an even better solution because now I don't have to worry about the boxes getting missed. And because it all has APIs for, um, interfaces, but also for reporting, I can get exception errors if something goes wrong, I can find out, oh, hey, someone changed the way that their API is reporting and I need to rewrite this interface so that it works better this time. And that gives the people the ability to offer better services for less manpower.

Because like we said, not every one of us has the capability of BT to just go, you know, roll seven systems into one. We're probably more likely having one or two people rolling seven systems across 49 other ones. Yes.

And I think, uh, that is heartfelt. I think we saw that HPE discover as well as, you know, many of the recent, uh, you know, uh, breakthrough announcements from, you know, ServiceNow. It's not about adding more data.

It's like there's already an ocean of data out there, what the customers need, what the organization, uh, organizations need now is how can we better and intelligently, uh, manage the data we already have, uh, while also, you know, adding on naturally new data inputs. And this is, I think, uh, where a difference is being made is the fact that, uh, we're coming up finally with platforms and tools that are directly responding to this. And, you know, we're, uh, it's incremental in some areas, like in security, there's still this headache of we have lots of siloed legacy systems.

It's hard to get them working together under, you know, a a, a single, um, I guess you can say window or you know, pane of glass, you know, which I think is an overused marketing term, but it gets the idea across that this is something that is really going to require ai, both in terms of automating operations, sort of like on the back end, but also on the front end using those gen AI capabilities to help anybody who is on the workforce or who's a partner or a customer to, you know, avoid getting bogged down in these, uh, complexity silos and so forth that, you know, can render many people in their sleep. You know, uh, repeating representative, representative, representative just to get, you know, something, uh, even uh, looked at, let alone fixed. And so, yes, uh, I'll get off the, uh, soapbox there.

I think that's well understood. But I think what we're covering in this episode is yes, there are actually solutions out there that are making a difference and the very challenging, uh, telecom environments. And so with that, thank you again Tom for, uh, joining, uh, today's episode.

I'm certainly looking forward to our next 5G factor. I'm very much looking forward to it as well. I mean, I know we're, we're getting into the dog days of summer, but the nice thing is, is that the dog days of summer are usually when people start doing kind of exciting things with their networks.

'cause nobody's looking around. So we should be seeing some very interesting stuff coming down the pike. I agree.

And I think, uh, we'll have an opportunity to touch on that July 10th and 11th in Silicon Valley. No less to, you know, kind of get that, you know, pulse on what is going on during, you know, dog days of summer. That can really make a difference for the second half of 2024.

And with that, thank you everyone for joining us and tuning in. Of course. Uh, please bookmark, uh, 5G Factor and the future in group as well as the tech Field day pages because we got plenty of great new episodes coming up.

And, uh, you I think want to definitely, uh, capture some of the insights and information that come, uh, from that. And with that, uh, everyone have a good 5G and Telco API day.