MWC (Mobile World Congress) 2017 - Insights and Takeaways

It has been a few years since I have visited MWC (4 years to be precise) and it has indeed grown and reconfigured itself in several different ways. Like CES, MWC ought to put better definitions to what is mobile while it clear that it has gone way past the device e.g., the people selling room-scale VR, space economy pioneers, and people playing at the periphery of mobility were all lumped into one big happy family. Perhaps time to rebrand MWC to IoT-WC or something even more creative.

Now, getting onto the key themes and observations while walking the floors:

Massive reconfiguration: What was put up for the grand show was largely products, software, service, and emerging technologies - connectivity was considered commoditized and even though every major operator was in there, it was not dominated by them and what they were positioning was everything except connectivity, that in itself is telling of the times. Secondly, players who once dominated MWC like Ericsson, Nokia, etc. were mere shadows of their earlier self, the size, position, and foot traffic to the booths were all in decline compared to the past and new and emerging players like Huawei, Ubuntu, etc. had gathered, scale, size, attention and influential stature. Unconfirmed sources tell me that Huawei, spent somewhere between $80-$100m to ensure that they had the highest visibility there, I can tell you that motive was definitely successful - now who knows about the ROI.

Car technologies: I have said this before after CES and am repeating myself after MWC. I have never seen these many automobiles exhibited outside of car shows previously, this was way beyond Tesla, Google, etc. A lot more of BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, and other traditional automakers were visible trying to embark on the connected car and/or autonomous driving capability demonstrations. New capabilities include C2CC (Car to Car Communications), new levels of in-car connectivity, auto navigation, congestion planning, and control, etc. Three key takeaways for me were (1) The car is a lot more "software-defined" now (2) Modern-day cars are already at the intersection of Detroit and Silicon Valley, it will be a battlefield out there in the short term, and lastly (3) The autonomous car itself in an edge data center, the decision on where to turn and when to stop will be made at the edge, not the cloud - fog computing is here and it is real.

 IoT, bigger than the big bet: What was once theory at MWC, is now fully mainstream and gaining momentum. Almost every big player known had something to say if not show. This is the first time I have seen the entire stack of IoT in one place i.e., from sensors through applications that are AI-enabled. The massive "sensorization" of assets is well underway and semiconductor companies did drive that point home. A few takeaways (1) Mature ecosystems i.e., connected home and connected car are the first to being monetized at an ecosystem level (2) company strategies ranges from being participants in the ecosystem to controlling the ecosystem or gluing multiple ecosystems all through offering services more than products and (3) edge computing and IoT security continue to be limiting factors for adoption and proliferation of IoT with one slowing down the other eventually.

Virtual Reality: What was once combined in one breath as AR/VR (Augmented and Virtual Reality) is now clearly starting to get segregated out. The Mobile VR contingent was more mainstream and more disappointing as most exhibitors were throwing in a headset, there were hundreds of them ranging from free (yes, literal giveaways) to > $600 with no unique differentiation in capabilities, key differences were resolution, weight, design, etc. The market in 2017, no doubt will be filled with these headsets with gaming and video watching primary use cases. A few takeaways here (1) It was evident that all the investment has gone into hardware devices with no killer software app yet (2) VR is still thought of as a consumer device focused on entertainment until this is viewed platform 4.0 (after PC, internet and mobile), mobile VR at the headset level is already commoditized (3) It is very likely that people playing room-scale VR, players creating the killer app/content or platform players will gain momentum in the short term.\

Augmented reality is still developing and will be a few years behind VR in its evolution (but a massive opportunity in the offing). I will talk about AR more in our upcoming paper to be released next week.

Edge Computing/5G etc.: Most of us know that the mobile 5G standard is not even going to arrive until 3-4 years later, yet several dozen booths carried the tag line of 5G. Open the hood and dig deeper, it was either alluding to fixed 5G, edge computing, platform plays or faster and improved IoT communication, and marketers continued to use buzzwords to create hype. Having said that edge computing needs and demands from customers are growing, if the intermediate solution is not being thought of deployed by mainstream players, the disruptors are already emerging think Ubuntu-powered base stations, etc. Key takeaways (1) Everyone screaming 5G, but with their own definitions of what it is today (2) Edge computing needs are real, customers and applications are already demanding it, either we see fixed 5G get rolled out faster, some intermediate solutions or we will see disruptors commoditize the edge (3) As the IoT ecosystem evolves, it is will intersect with Augmented Reality, Connected/Autonomous Cars, Edge Computing and Artificial Intelligence - the next 6-12 months will be about weaving and stabilizing the ecosystem between the cloud (deep learning), the edge (the machine learning systems), the connectivity and deploying prototype 1.0

Software-Defined Everything: This trend accelerated with the ubiquity of the cloud – essentially “Software-Defined Hardware.” Cloud systems enabled the provisioning of computing power in a faster, cheaper manner. In Software Defined Everything, the entire computing infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service while automating management and control of networking, storage, data, and other infrastructure through intelligent software. Mainstream examples' today are SDN (Software Defined Networking) and SDS (Software-Defined Storage), SDE will be highly disruptive to several different aspects evolving totally new business models. Key takeaways include: (1) Open-source hardware like Lime SDR and Raspberry Pi and miniaturizing and commoditizing hardware (2) Heavy focus on abstraction layers, containerization of apps, and delivering it into hardware is creating cheaper, better, smarter uses of software-defined hardware powered by services, apps, subscriptions, attribution, advertising and what not….stay tuned, the revolution has just begun and indeed Software is eating the world!

AdTech: AdTech companies had a shrinking footprint as well, given all the consolidations in the space and their inability to monetize as quickly as the early promise created limited participation. The commoditization of location-based ads, the advent of header bidding, agency foray into AdTech, Google's structural advantage, and players with massive scale like Facebook have pushed them into a tight spot. Key takeaways include: (1) AdTech executives mentioned the limited ROI from MWC and slower path to scale as key reasons for limiting participation (2) Several players are in the market trying to take the M&A path to survive or to grow, this space will see more consolidations and cleansing in the months to come (3) Machine Learning is gearing up to disrupt programmatic in a big way - watch out for the emerging players!

MWC is always overwhelming and we try to juggle sessions, meetings, events and balance our day jobs so there are always items we skim through superficially and miss. Booths of Enterprise software vendors happen to be one such section for me and hence I do not have meaningful takeaways, should any of you have observed items that I might have missed - please do comments and I would love to learn from you.