​The panel ‘Disrupt to lead: the new telco mindset’, welcomed Annette Murphy, CCO – Colt Technology Services, Enrico Bagnasco, CEO – Sparkle, Dimitrios Rizoulis, SVP of global connectivity – T Wholesale, Fánan Henriques, director of product & international Business – Vodafone Business, Valerie Cussac, CEO – Orange Wholesale International and Mohammed Al-Abbadi, group chief carrier & wholesale officer STC.

​Chairing the discussion, Silvia Peneva, managing director of the GLF and ITW said the sector is at “a pivotal moment, where the lines between infrastructure, cloud, and platforms are starting to blur, and telcos are being challenged every day to reinvent themselves.”​

The panel quickly agreed that the telecom industry is undergoing both disruption and transformation, thanks to AI.

​Colt CCO Annette Murphy, said: “I absolutely think I see it as a disruption,” she said. “We’re all in this room because we all share the conviction that the network is pivotal to the way the world works. There are pockets of demand materialising that I think as an industry we have an opportunity to take advantage of.”​

Valerie Cussac, CEO of Orange Wholesale International, described “two kinds of disruption,” one rooted in changing customer behaviour and the other in new infrastructure investment.

“Maybe the first one is related to customer behaviour, a very much ambivalent kind of expectation with a very as-a-service kind of usage,” she said. “The other, is coming from the infrastructure thing where we see some of the people coming into play with much more capital than we have as telcos.”

However, for Enrico Bagnasco, CEO of Sparkle, NaaS represents more of an opening than a threat.

“More than disruption, I see a great opportunity for us,” he said. “Anything new we do, starting from AI, will require more connectivity, which includes new types of connectivity services, more reliable networks, and more redundant routes.”

Meanwhile, Mohammed Al-Abbadi, group chief carrier and wholesale officer at STC, agreed: “There will be a disruption, but I see it immediately as an opportunity. If we play our cards right, it’s an opportunity for the operators to take a bigger chunk of the pie in the coming years.”

Finally, Dimitrios Rizoulis of Deutsche Telekom added: “For us, it’s not a disruption.  It’s a turbocharging of processes and events that already started in telco.” He added that AI is “a great opportunity, one that will accelerate service automation, edge deployment, and secure AI-to-AI communication – all enabled by next-generation networks.”

​NaaS: The future of network consumption

The panel moved the discussion to focus on the shift toward Network as a Service (NaaS).

​Murphy explained that Colt has been working on its programmable, unbundled NaaS platform for a decade. ​“We’re no longer seeing our enterprise customers really kind of stand at arm’s length from it,” she said. “They’re actually wanting to come in and co-create with us because they’re being asked by their own boards to effectively develop their own internal version of NaaS.”

Rizoulis agreed, claiming  enterprises increasingly “want outcomes”.  He added: “NaaS provides outcomes, which is I can easily consume, I can integrate into my ERP, I can integrate into whatever system I have and that’s why the consumption-based model is so attractive for enterprises.”

However, security, the panellists stressed, will be crucial to the success of NaaS, with Rizoulis claiming “that’s really the differentiator integrating the security into the NaaS, the end-to-end flow. That’s what will make the difference in the future.”

Customer-driven transformation

​The panellists agreed that the shift to “as a service” models is being driven primarily by customer expectations.

“It is adapting to the network side as well, to connectivity,” Al-Abbadi said. 

Meanwhile, the newly appointed CEO of Orange Wholesale, Cussac revealed how the telecoms giant is applying that thinking to 5G. “This is what we did with our 5G core network as a service, having the customer with us, building the service together,” she said.

“It’s a journey – progressively putting the network function in this consumer name as a service on demand, but also bringing new services to life in a very easy manner to unlock innovation.”

Organisational agility

Organisational agility was another major focus on the panel with Colt, Orange and Vodafone, revealing they are changing how they work to stay flexible.

Murphy explained: “We took the decision to create two lines of business around infrastructure and platform, and enterprise solutions. Focus and just tearing up the rule book with regards to how we think about org structure is absolutely the way to go.”

​Cussac added: “We’ve built some squads for this 5G core as a service – having technical people, product people, sales people, and also the customer with us to build this service together.” Bagnasco underlined the enduring importance of physical infrastructure, while acknowledging the parallel need for digital transformation.

​“Being the infrastructure owner is very nice,” he said. “Because without the infrastructure, you cannot build anything on top of it.”

Meanwhile, Vodafone’s Henriques concluded that “speed is the only thing to differentiate.”

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