EY's Global Communications Virtual Panel Discussion: Reflecting on the recent past, to help us look forward

We had a very interesting and inspiring 2nd Virtual Panel discussion, exploring the topic of 'enterprise resilience for communications providers'.

Joined by our fantastic guests Kristof Symons, EVP International Business and Sourcing, Orange Business Services; John van Vianen, CCO Business Market and member of the Executive Committee at VodafoneZiggo; Ned Taleb, Founder & CEO B-Yond and co-founder & Board Member Nexius and Kirill Menshov, CIO Rostelecom and chairman RTLABS, we reflected this time on the recent past, to help us look forward.

We discussed what decisions and actions were taken to deal with the new circumstances, what will continue, and what accelerated…It was a very rich conversation with the following insights standing out:

• Telcos quickly mobilized agile teams to solve new ‘pandemic-related’ challenges, which proved quite successful: enabling contact center agents to (securely) work from home, changing demand modelling for services and care, enabling more ‘customer self-installs’, and dealing with increased cyber-criminal activity.
• On the enterprise customers side of things, it became abundantly clear that besides cloud, high quality connectivity and security form the bedrock of any digital transformation (‘no network, no cloud’) and demand soared. Telco’s ‘brand permission’ got a boost, and they were increasingly being asked to bring ‘all the elements together’ and deliver end-to-end digital enterprise solutions.
• Many digital initiatives really accelerated - including, the demand for and application of AI and Machine Learning solutions, as well initiatives to make networks fully software driven. These were driven by the need to optimize traffic and to support smart network planning and deployment. Notably, telcos did not look to their vendors, but strongly took the reins themselves, setting the priorities, pace and driving the execution.
• Telcos’ experienced increased status as an important contributor to deal with society’s challenges. The level of understanding, appreciation and need for different elements of telecoms services, such as, download/upload speeds, latency, security, reliability, coverage, cloud and collaboration tools, all increased among consumer and enterprise customers, providing telcos with a reinforced platform for future business growth.
• The key guiding principle for telcos in the last few months has been ‘responsibility’. This will continue to be essential to everything telcos do. This responsibility however, will be increasingly complemented by a focus on agility and execution, driving returns from (recent) investments made. Putting it all together, the business context for telcos looks exciting for all involved.

I look forward to continuing our exploration of the topic of ‘enterprise resilience for communications providers’.