Ivan Mihaljevic, president, BCE NEXXIA, A Bell Canada Company: Cloud services and emerging technology such as 5G will continue to make significant impacts in the wholesale telecom industry, both fuelling the demand for greater bandwidth. Cloud services will drive increasing bandwidth requirements, especially for data centre interconnection and data intensive applications, requiring extremely low latency, while 5G will require exponentially more bandwidth to support the increased volume of connections points.
Katia Gonzalez Gutierrez, head of fraud prevention operations and services, BICS: I believe that the onset of the digital era will bring with it so many more opportunities for evolution of our businesses. Telecommunications is altering so that evermore elements of day-to-day life and business are interconnected, we are going to be challenged with more gateways to potential attacks.
Keri Gilder, VP & general manager, Ciena: While continuing to innovate on high bandwidth technology and services will remain important, intelligent software controlled autonomous networks will drive new levels of agility, network efficiency and a new suite of on-demand services and business models aligned to customer’s business needs.
Rajiv Datta, COO, Colt Technology Services: The importance of connectivity to our end customers is growing dramatically as the transition to the cloud gathers momentum. High bandwidth connectivity that offers agility and features aligned with this transition, such as on-demand/software- defined capability will be drivers of the market going forward.
Mardia van der Walt (Niehaus), SVP, International Carrier Sales & Solutions, Deutsche Telekom ICSS: 5G will be one of the keywords in the coming years. It will meet the demand of industries like Machine-to-Machine, E-health, Smart Metering etc. And I strongly believe IoT will make big steps ahead and change people’s way of living and working. It is the wholesale industry challenge to find a way to enable all of these technology trends.
Rob Coupland, managing director EMEA, Digital Realty: As technologies like Blockchain and 5G become more widely adopted and take hold, I think we’ll start to see much more distributed/disaggregated IT requirements.
Phillip Lawson-Shanks, chief architect & VP of innovation, Edgeconnex: Open compute infrastructure standards - like Open19, along with the next generation of Internet Exchanges and Distributed Ledgers. Server, storage and network platforms are converging and becoming commodities.
Carl Roberts, CCO, Epsilon: The API ecosystem is very exciting. APIs enable new platforms and models to be created and global infrastructure to be used in new ways. I see APIs driving innovation not just in wholesale but in the entire ICT ecosystem.
Eric Schwartz, president, EMEA, Equinix: Use of high performance computing for personalised medical treatment will drive capacity requirements that will far outstrip current forecasts.
Matthew Finnie, group CTO & EVP, cloud services, Interoute: Digital Transformation – driving modernisation and effective delivery to end users – is as important to wholesale carriers as it is to enterprises.
Michael Wheeler, EVP of global IP network business unit, NTT Communications: We believe that cybersecurity and OTT are at the same time challenges and opportunities for the wholesale markets and will continue to change the landscape in the next five years.
Pierre-Louis de Guillebon,, CEO, Orange International Carriers: SDN-NFV! SDN will digitalise our way to sell and manage our network and NFV will change our way to design it.
Marc Halbfinger, CEO, PCCW Global: Blockchain-based settlement capabilities facilitating smart contracts for virtualised components, and instances, in a software-defined environment with more variable services driven by new content forms in a world of ever-increasing bandwidth.
Alessandro Talotta, chairman & CEO, Sparkle: Softwarisation and digitalisation of the networks will drastically change our go-to-market as our customers will enjoy operational control over the on-demand capabilities we will offer them in an agile, assured, virtualised and highly flexible environment
Martijn Blanken, group managing director & chief customer officer, Telstra Enterprise: The transformation of networks from simple pipes to a programmable way of delivering services and capacity on an on-demand basis is fundamentally changing the way we operate.
Stuart Evers, group CCO, Türk Telekom International: I believe API will have a significant effect as it will see wholesalers not just looking at building infrastructure and routes which we have traditionally done, but looking at the use, users and purpose of those routes, which in many cases will alter the build criteria.
Dan Caruso, chairman & CEO, Zayo Group: At the core of nearly all innovation is bandwidth, and fibre is bandwidth’s enabling infrastructure. The creation, storage, processing, and transport of data is improving our health, safety, transportation, environment, education, entertainment, and overall economy. Not only is this true today, it will remain a truism for generations to come.
