Brendan Ives, president of TeliaSonera International Carrier (TSIC), urged carriers to move beyond traditional services and find ways to be creative in how they provide and manage services.
“Different customers require different services. We need to make sure we are not narrow minded and just pushing traditional services like IP transit. We need to be creative with managing and running services, which is where our strengths lie,” noted Ives.
Mardia van der Walt, SVP at Deutsche Telekom ICSS, agreed: “We have to find new and innovative ways of partnering with OTT players and utilising infrastructure that we have already invested in."
OTTs like Netflix and Google have been building its own infrastructure, such as subsea cables and content delivery network (CDN) platforms.
Given its resources, the panel viewed Google as a “special case”, with Netflix’s director of global networks, Dave Temkin, adding that: “We don’t need submarine assets or data centres. That’s not how we view an exchange of value.”
Temkin pointed to Netflix’s existing partnership with telcos, such as Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia, in which both companies have integrated the content provider into their domestic IPTV platform.
“That has been how we joined up with operators and stayed within their ecosystem. We have all sorts of businesses on the back-end. That’s how we see our relationship with operators moving forward,” he said.
The opening keynote panel, which was moderated by Bob Fletcher, director of business development at Dyn, also included Philippe Meriaux, COO at Happn, Alessandro Talotta, chairman and CEO at Telecom Italia Sparkle and Sven Dirschauer, director of EMEA at Twilio.
