The future of telecoms

Speaker 1:

Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech. Welcome to the XTech podcast where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations, and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster:

Hello and welcome to the XTech podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster, MBE. I’m the CEO at the Tech Talent Charter, and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry.

Today I’m really excited to be joined by Jason Elliott. He’s the Cross Portfolio Solutions and Ecosystem marketing head at Nokia. Jason, thanks for joining me today.

Jason:

My pleasure, Debbie. Nice to meet you with you and talk with you today.

Debbie Forster:

Thanks. So Jason, for our listeners, there’s lots we want to cover, but we like to try and get to know you as a human first before we talk about what you do. And we’re fascinated with how people get into tech. Some people are born with that laptop in hand. Others take that really curly way to get in. How about you? How did you get into tech?

Jason:

I think I’ve always been interested in technology. I mean, growing up in the UK, and I’m going to date myself here, for those of you who remember the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum.

Debbie Forster:

Oh yeah.

Jason:

Right from the very, very early days of trying to think about computers. Yeah. So it’s always been interesting, inspiring to me and the technology was one key aspect of it and what you could do with the technology and actually combining it with people and the social aspect was really interesting to me as well. Even in the early days of gaming, even when they weren’t online, just the sheer fact of other people were playing the same games and you could talk to each other about the games and what you did to get to the next level. Those types of things as well, was always fascinating to me.

So being able to connect the dots with people through technology was incredibly amazing. And I didn’t really realize it then until I’ve got later in my career. So I’ve always been interested in technology and just evolved it over time from being very hands-on and practical and actually building computing, writing programming to full kind of systems architecture, and then kind of moved into more of a marketing function and actually talking about technology and how it can actually empower people and businesses and actually be a force for good as well. So yeah, it’s been a interesting eclectic like career history, I think you could say.

Debbie Forster:

But I think it’s a journey a lot of people who will be listening will recognize. For a lot of people it is that roll up the sleeves, take it apart, see what makes it work. I love that you talk about games before we were all online. Remember those days where you were playing by yourself in the darkened room and you had to go somewhere to be able to talk about it as opposed to what we do today? But I love hearing the thread of people, because I do think that is a common thread for a lot more people in tech as well, is it’s that thread of collaboration, et cetera. Now I find it really interesting that you’re at Nokia now. This is a company, not everybody realizes what a history, what a legacy Nokia has.

Jason:

Yeah, it’s fascinating, because the company’s been around for 155 years, and when you think about technology evolution over that period of time, it’s a long, long period of time and how the company’s evolved and adapted over time. And many of us know that that particular brand is a very, very well known brand around the world, just more as a consumer brand in terms of phones and devices. But really in recent decades, ever since the days of GSM 2G technology, we’ve been building network infrastructure. And as we’ve gone into 3G, 4G and now 5G and we think about how that technology is applied not just to consumers, but also to businesses as well, that really leads to who Nokia really is today, which is a B2B technology innovation leader that’s realizing the potential of digital in every single industry, particularly when networks meet cloud. We talk about that a lot, because obviously as we think about physical network infrastructure and the cloud infrastructure, that’s a real sweet spot for Nokia and thinking about that digital transformation for businesses in that B2B world is really key. And that’s who Nokia really is today.

Debbie Forster:

And it’s interesting, because I don’t think people realize how old Nokia is, and it was technology before there were computers and this fusion as we work through the Gs, as that’s gone through, the world that you and I remember where you were on a computer by yourself as a separate node outside the real world, to the fusion that we’re talking about today, that’s a huge journey to go on. And now it’s hard for us to understand that not being fused together and we have really powerful, exciting, sometimes scary things to think about the ramifications of that.

Jason:

Yeah. No, we do. And that’s interesting you talk about the fusion of digital and physical, because that’s very much kind of how we see the evolution of technology now. It’s becoming increasingly important that we see that fusion between the physical world that we live in and the digital online world as well. And we see that manifesting itself in many, many different ways.

Debbie Forster:

Well, let’s dig into that, because I think for you and for Nokia, what’s the focus at the moment? What is on your desk that you’re really thinking about and working on?

Jason:

Yeah, I think there’s a couple of key things. So again, I talked about enterprises and the potential of networks there as well. There’s a big topic around, and it’s kind of waned a little bit, but I think it’s still important to focus on, which is the metaverse. And we talk about a list in lots of different ways, and I know there’s been a lot of hype about this, but if you really think about it in the practical sense, and we like to position it as kind of metaverses in plural. So we think about the consumer metaverse, which is typically what’s been talked about in the media and in the industry where we think about completely digital worlds to socialize and use gaming and those types of activities.

But we can also think about two other very concrete metaverses, if you like. So that’s the enterprise metaverse and the industrial metaverse. And the enterprise Metaverse is very much more about how we can increase collaboration in a particular business. So obviously today, and obviously since a lot of remote working is happening now through video collaboration, how can we actually extend and enhance that experience? Because it’s not perfect, it’s a two-dimensional experience, but what could that be like for teams, product teams that work remotely? How can enterprise teams kind of collaborate together in the digital space if they’re developing a product or a new service? How can you bring those teams together digitally across the enterprise to think about efficiencies and increase collaboration? So that’s one part of the metaverse.

Debbie Forster:

And I’m glad you mentioned it, because bless him, Mr. Zuckerberg did bring a lot of hype to a noise to the system, but I think it’s useful that that’s dying down so we can start grappling with it in a real way, because if we think during COVID when everyone had to work remotely, that burned through a lot of the myth of what that could be, but we weren’t doing it properly. So this idea of now that the emergency is over, now that we’re working on hybrid, really starting to grapple with that enterprise level metaverse, is quite exciting.

Jason:

Yeah, it is. And we do see concrete examples of this happening today at, like I said, there’s a lot of people in the automotive industry particularly or very physical industries, again, where you’re actually developing a product where it’s very hard to get remote teams together, either geographically or just from a time constraint perspective to be able to realize that. And it’s actually speeding up product development, life cycle of developing a product. It’s reducing error. And then even on things like healthcare as well, we’ve actually seen a lot of healthcare providers and specialists where you have very complex procedures and operations where they’re actually collaborating together. There was an incredible story of a set of physicians and surgeons actually having a complex operation with a couple of conjoined twins, and they actually practiced the surgery for hours and hours and hours using VR before they actually even got together in the operating room.

They spent days and hours collaborating on that. So that’s the really powerful upside of collaboration in terms of the enterprise side of things. And then extending that thought of digital, physical is that third element of the metaverse we talk about, which is the industrial metaverse. And again, that’s more about how you can create digital twins of the physical environment that you build. So it could be a factory. You have a lot of robotic machinery and automation systems there. So the operational technology side of things, if you can create a digital twin of this, you can actually then start to think about how do I optimize the processes in my environment? And you can track that digitally. So we talk about the industrial metaverse in that context. Can I control the physical world from the digital world? That’s one other thing, because that improves safety. And that’s one of a lot of the things that enterprises, particularly in physical industries that haven’t had the opportunity to digitalize as much as other industries like retail and finance.

We saw this again during the pandemic, they were able to pivot very quickly, because they were already very much digitalized. They had online platforms, but the physical industries, transportation, manufacturing, energy, utilities, ports, harbors, they had a real challenge there, because they didn’t have the technology there, the connectivity, the platforms to digitalize a lot of their operational technology. And now they have that capability and that industrial enterprise and industrial metaverse is I think the key drivers for B2B audiences in terms of doing that at scale now. And we can actually realize that.

And that’s where we think the metaverse is really going to play strongly, because businesses want to invest in those areas to become improve safety, productivity and efficiency. And that’s kind of where we see the growth. Consumer will happen, I think over time in specific elements for gaming or for specific social platforms to do things. But I think that’s maybe kind of a bit more of a mid to longer term activity as people start to see, yeah, it could be fun to be able to do this. But I think there’s a real practical implication for businesses in the metaverse.

Debbie Forster:

I couldn’t agree more. I mean, we’ll leave Mr. Zuckerberg to work on the consumer metaverse and see what he comes with and good luck to him. But just the more discussions I have with organizations at enterprise level. But I have found myself over the last few months being blown away at the way in which industries who just wouldn’t think about thinking about that digital twining, looking at how you model those things, really going into industries we hadn’t thought about. But again, a wonderful byproduct. COVID did force that digital journey and as a result, people are working from a really different platform than they were before.

Jason:

And one of the other interesting things, so at Nokia we’ve also focused about, our mission statement really is we create technology to help the world act together. And that’s really, really important, because when we think about the transitions that are going on of the two transitions, there’s the digital transition and there’s the green transition. And really there’s no green without digital. So if you want to become green, you have to invest in digital infrastructure to create that level efficiency and productivity you want. If you want to reduce your, we talk about basically reducing our footprint. So how can we become more efficient in our operations at Nokia? We want to translate that to other enterprises and business as well. So how do we use the lifecycle of our products? How can we reduce emissions in our manufacturing facilities? How can we use raw materials more efficiently for the products that we create?

So that’s reducing our footprint. And then our hand print, the hand print when you think about it is how you can use digitalized technologies to become more green? So what’s the net effect of not having to travel so much with teams? So if we can produce digital infrastructure, we can reduce travel, we can reduce time. Again, it’s about reuse of resources as well to become more efficient. So how do you again, minimize your footprint, accelerate your hand print to have that positive impact so that you can really think about that transition to green as well. And that really falls with our mission statement around creating technology to help the world act together.

Debbie Forster:

It is exciting to watch that happen and I like the way you distinguish between the footprint and the hand print and they both have to be put to work. It is not enough to just look at footprint and if COVID reset us and we’re starting to do and think about things differently, really sitting down and thinking about that hand print and how can we use digital to do things genuinely differently for efficiencies and for the climate is something every company needs to be grappling with today.

Jason:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Debbie Forster:

All right. So I always try to then boil it down to our audience and the practical. I think it’s always important to look to the horizon, but then to think about, so what do I need to do? So if I’m in tech and I’m listening to us talk, what should I be thinking about in relation to what you said? What should I be thinking and focusing on in relation to tech?

Jason:

Yeah, I think again, it comes back to the safety, productivity and efficiency. What is the potential of the network to transform your business? And if you think about start small, but think big, right? So a lot of projects, particularly IOT, I think a lot of businesses got burnt. They were like, hey, we want to go all out on IOT. They’ve put sensors everywhere, they’ve got more data than they know what to do with. And it’s like, what am I actually getting in return of investment on this? So one of the things to think about is as you’re starting to connect infrastructure, whether that’s your people buildings, the operational technology processes, think about a smaller scale project where you really think it could make a difference. Is it a certain part of the production line? Is it a certain part of the distribution process or something like that?

And think about what are the barriers to doing that? Is it people, is it the connectivity? Is it the platform? And think about those kind of key elements and drive that and focus on that small project. Because what you will find is that once you have that win that we’ve seen this today already where we’ve been talking a lot about private networks. So these are dedicated networks, cellular networks that sit on the enterprise’s campus, the physical facilities, and it’s a dedicated private network. And a great example is with at the Port of Southampton in the UK. And they actually had a problem where they had wifi throughout the port and they were using inventory scanners to track the new vehicles that were coming off the roll on [inaudible 00:16:39] ferries. And they were scanning them to make sure the inventory was there. Well, they had dropout coverage, they had to make sure the ferry was right at the position of the port where it was going, because otherwise the handheld scanners wouldn’t work.

So they had to solve that problem. So we ended up installing a private cellular network, it solved that one problem, but then they realized, hey, we’ve got coverage around the whole one and a half, two and a half square miles of the port. Now this is great. So now I can talk to the folks in the warehouse about automating the AGVs in that part of the port, and now I can actually provide group communications, so the folks in the back office as well. So they started expanding, they started one specific use case, one problem, but now they realize that investment has enabled them to actually unlock other potential business processes going forward as well. So again, that strategy around starting small and then thinking big, is absolutely the right approach. And we’ve seen numerous successes with that kind of approach.

Debbie Forster:

So I think, Jason, I love that you’re talking about this, because it doesn’t always go right. You’re able to talk to us about some success stories, but we all know where there’ve been certain people that catch the hype and just want to fix everything. And like you say, sensors everywhere or people that can’t look up from solving the problem to think bigger, more so than ever before. It’s not just about thinking about our hardware, our software connectivity, it’s about thinking about our people, isn’t it?

Jason:

Yeah. And I think it’s not just about the technology. We have to think about the skill sets that our employees have. And there’s a couple of aspects here as well. So I think some people are actually afraid of technology. People will think that technology is going to take their job away. So it’s up to us as leaders to actually help educate the workforce a little bit more and the leaders in business to think about how technology is applied, how it can actually help your employees as well, not take anything away, but actually make their lives a bit easier, give them more opportunity to actually grow as well.

So again, we’ve seen even with our customer service providers, our CSPs, they’ve introduced a lot of automation into the network and things like that. They’ve been helping educate their workforce around digital tools, around how they can use AI and machine learning to not have to sit there in front of a knock and look at 50,000 alarms and try and decode every single one of them, but they can use machine learning and AI to get to the most important ones and actually escalate that to solve that problem.

Or if it’s in an enterprise, a similar kind of approach as well to automation. So I think it’s really important to think about, you need to start thinking, educate the workforce on the capabilities, how it can help them, up skilling I think is an interesting thing. And we were talking about physical industries earlier, manufacturing ports, et cetera, energy utilities, and there’s a lot of people there where they’re actually, the workforce is actually aging out and it’s a struggle to actually either retain or get new talent in. But as you start to employ these new digital technologies, including connectivity, the newer workforce that’s coming into play now they can actually see, hey, well why you’re using those digital tools? We have a digital native generation in Gen Z starting to come into the workforce over the coming decade. They’re digital natives, they know this technology. And being able to apply that and have that mindset from the outset, you’re creating an environment for that future workforce as well. So it’s something that we definitely need to consider.

Debbie Forster:

It’s really thinking about both ends of that journey that I think when you look at the older workforce, ie me, you, those, et cetera, that taking people on the journey to see that technology’s an ally and an enabler, not the enemy, but ensuring they have the skills to make it an ally and an enabler, but then thinking ahead for this next generation and as they’re coming up for the workforce, making sure we keep up. But I think if we look over the last 10 years, this up skilling, re skilling, cross skilling is a way of life for every company now.

Jason:

Yes.

Debbie Forster:

[inaudible 00:21:09] High, the tech company, the CTO that is thinking, well, we’ll do a year of training and then we’re done. You’re never done in relation to skills, are you?

Jason:

No, no, you’re not. And I think that’s the thing is we live in this environment now where technology’s a double-edged sword, is that it does move so quickly and we talk about the S curve shrinking. So that whole notion of like, you start off with an idea, you’ve got a certain amount of time to take that into the market before you get competitors to kind of start replicating what you’re doing or making another product. And the interesting thing about technology is that it’s given us a more kind of level playing field.

So this is why you see so many small technology companies starting up there, because the digital tools and capabilities and the cloud and network connectivity means that they have the capability to enter the market. And it’s really kind of shrunk that whole S curve as we know it. So the time from the incept of an innovation to the time you actually get it into a product to then get it to the market, that whole notion has actually shrunk quite a bit, and I think will just continue to shrink. So you need to have a more, well, dare I say it, DevOps type of mindset in terms of thinking about product evolution going into the market and actually maturing your product set. And that that’s just sped up over time, that ESCO just continues to shrink.

Debbie Forster:

It’s almost [inaudible 00:22:41]

Jason:

Yeah.

Debbie Forster:

It’s begun, then finished before you even looked around before you’ve had your first cup of coffee. No, couldn’t agree more. So look, thank you. I’ve loved what we’ve done so far. We’ve got three metaverses to go away and think about. We’ve got to think about green tech, that thinking big, but starting small, shrinking S curves. Let’s stop for a moment. I love to hear from guests what happens when they look beyond just their own domain, but to look at the horizon to see what has them worried concerns, but what also really intrigues them or makes them happy? So taking a moment, Jason, when you are looking at the horizon for technology and as fast moving as we’ve said, what is it that’s worrying you? What concerns you at the moment?

Jason:

Yeah, I think, again, we were just talking about AI earlier and other things around this. I mean, you do see this kind of very big hype cycle about kind of, okay, it’s this and it’s that, and people get concerned about it. So I think there are many different regions of the world where everyone’s developing their own technology at different paces and wants to apply and use in different way. And I think one of the concerning things is we’ve done so well with technology, particularly like networks and the internet, because we’ve got global cooperation, we’ve had the standards organizations, the scientists, the academia coming together across the globe into standards forums to drive that level of standardization, which means that we can get this technology into the market. But I think the concern is that in today’s geopolitical environment, if we continue to look at the premise of regionalization, we get a breakdown of that global standardization.

And that puts at risk the disparity in the application of technology and the capabilities that can actually improve for everybody across the globe. So we need to make sure that we continue those standardization forums and participate in those across every segment of the technology industry, across every region of the globe. Because standardization again, is what gives us scale, it’s what gives us economic pricing from a product solution standpoint of view. And it gives us in terms of being able to apply the technology in a faster fashion as well, and not having to work through interoperability. So I think that’s the scary thing, is just kind of making sure that we continue to work together through the standards forums to be able to develop the technology going forward.

Debbie Forster:

And I think this is important, and I think sometimes it will get lost if we only leave this to countries to geopolitical decision makers. And I think this is a point, and we see this more and more often for the business market, for the great minds in the for-profit sector to step forward, to push on things like this. Because this isn’t about just competitive advantage. This is how through that standardization, through that cooperation, you get the right playing field for the right kinds of competition instead of these fits and starts and destructive spins that we could see coming through.

Jason:

Yeah, and it’s interesting, because even in our industry, we’re seeing you talk about competition and we talk a lot about now collaboration and co-optition and we talk a lot about collaboration. And it’s interesting, because we have collaborations with many, many big technology companies, including the big three cloud providers, but in some senses they’re also competitors to us in certain product and segment markets.

And I think that’s what we’re going to just see continually going forward, is that you have to look at the continuing market dynamics, because the technology allows you to shift into adjacent markets so quickly that sometimes who is your partner could become your competitor. And then you have to think about what does that business model look like? So on the one hand, it gives you lots of opportunities, but you always got to have your head up and think about, okay, if I do go into bed with this partnership and I look at this, how does that dynamic change over time? And we look at this constantly and this whole notion of co-optition is, I just think even more prevalent today and will continue to be going forward as those business models get a lot more complex.

Debbie Forster:

Because I think even the idea of a business model and the business landscape is changing. With tech it’s an ecosystem.

Jason:

Right.

Debbie Forster:

It is a dynamic changing ecosystem. And [inaudible 00:27:28], the company that looks and says, and that’s a competitor and that’s a collaborator, it is much more fast changing than that. And you need that agile approach to survive and realize it’s not even the enemy of my enemy is my friend, is you’re my collaborator, you’re my competitor, you’re both, and we have to find a way of working within the ecosystem if we’re both to survive. Couldn’t agree more.

Jason:

Absolutely. Yeah. The days have dedicated one-to-one partnerships where you have walls and structure of kind of like, oh yeah, this is partner number one, partner number two, partner number three, yeah, that’s just not there anymore. You just can’t work like that. You’re not agile enough, you’re not fast enough. Again, yeah, we touched on that S curve the other day. This is what a lot of smaller companies do. They’re part of an ecosystem and they can actually expand very, very quickly, because they just adopt that whole ecosystem approach, and that’s how they’re able to rapidly enter a market and expand. So yeah, that’s kind of what we need to skate towards continually.

Debbie Forster:

And we have had on the show several companies that have really done that exponential growth and listeners can listen to some of these other ones to hear how companies absolutely understood the power of an ecosystem and use that to really just jet power what they did. Okay. And then think about, is there anything on the horizon that has you excited or really energized?

Jason:

Wow. Yeah, I mean so many things. I mean, I think we’re even starting to talk about 6G. So the research team at Bell Labs is actually started to position 6G and we talk about the six tenets of 6G, which is kind of really interesting. I mean we obviously, we’ve got a long way to go with 5G right now, and we actually talk about 5G advance, which will come out in the next two years, which just adds more capability actually, particularly for XR and VR as well, which is really interesting. And also for IOT as well, there’s a lot more work in 5G advanced related to what we call reduced capability devices for low powered IOT devices and sensors. So that’s coming out in the next two years. And then that timeframe as we start to look towards the 2030 timeframe is when we think about 6G.

And what’s really exciting about that, we have always thought about wireless infrastructure and collectivity is just transferring data between people and machines, but the future wireless technology, as in 6G, we’ll actually be able to sense our physical presence. So today we use things like video cameras, audio sensors, even Lidar to kind of detect physical presence, but 6G will have this capability to sense physical presence, so we can, when you really start talking about, and we were talking about digital twins earlier, if you really want to do digital twins on a massive scale, and I’m not talking just within a building or within a room, but on a kind of citywide basis, that’s where the power of the terahertz communication that will be proposed for 6G will really come in to be able to create that sensing technology to create a digital map of the world, if you like. That’s kind of where we see 6G going towards the future. So that’s very, very exciting.

Debbie Forster:

It’s a long way from playing the game by yourself, away from everyone else and waiting till the next day to talk to people about it. That’s amazing. Listen, Jason, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of XTech.

Jason:

You’re welcome, Debbie, thank you very much for the opportunity. Great to meet you.

Debbie Forster:

It’s been great to talk to you.

Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at xtech@fox.agency. And finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to the XTech podcast.

Speaker 1:

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