You assumed the leadership of Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier just a few months ago, in June: what are your key priorities?
For starters, I would like to express my enthusiasm at sharing some thoughts about the telco carrier industry and about Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier, which in the past years has contributed with great passion to several industry initiatives and has become a well-run business with important opportunities for growth.
Our company is performing in line with expectations despite headwinds, notably the contraction of legacy revenue. But to further fuel our bottom line, I have already started with my team to shape a growth story that is setting new targets and an accelerated pace of action.
I want us to become the leading ‘digital global carrier’ that offers more of everything digital, giving our customers more convenience, more choices and more opportunities every step of the way.
Can you describe the main aspects of this vision?
Core to my digital-global-carrier vision is providing easy-to-integrate, software-powered digital connectivity and communications services on a global scale, as well as further scaling our aggregator business models in the digital connectivity and communications enablement market.
Monetising more use cases for identity services, communications, connectivity and the cloud, as well as maximising competitive advantages, are also important to me.
Last but not least, we must strive to achieve a seamless end-customer experience across connectivity and communication services to ensure our customers’ success.
Talking about new targets, what kinds of service innovations has the company recently introduced?
Customer-relevant innovation is of the essence in our transformation towards becoming a global digital carrier. We have recently announced two new capabilities that are progressively being made available to existing and new customers across the world: Global Carrier Digital Services and Magenta Security Roaming.
Our Global Carrier Digital Services are accessible via our all-in-one portal with easy-to-use APIs and many other infrastructure services.
In our portfolio, we aggregate digital services from other operators and allow effortless integration into the digital value chains of our customers.
The first of its kind in Europe, our portfolio allows seamless access to a full range of innovative wholesale services through an agile management interface in the form of a portal, as well as managed APIs. It includes application-to-person [A2P] and other communications-platform-as-a-service [CPaaS] channels, our Numbers Universe service, Telekom Edge Cloud, mobile identity services, a set of network APIs and our Workflow Automation tool.
We have more services in the pipeline, and make sure we continuously enhance our offerings based on customer feedback and requirements.
All digital services within our portfolio can be easily accessed via a single sign-in, providing a rich and more uniform customer experience, and addressing the need for consistency while standards await further development.
Global Carrier Digital Services are deployed and operated from within the EU, adhering to the highest data-protection and privacy standards. This also makes them suitable for adoption in regulated industries or sectors such as healthcare and public sector administration.
We are supported in this by the Network API [NW API] venture, bringing together major telcos – including Deutsche Telekom – to cooperate internationally on a ‘one-face-to-the-customer’ approach. A significant increase in both the supply of and demand for network APIs should follow.
As Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier, we will equip the venture with such APIs on the one hand, but also source them in an aggregated form on the other. In that form, we can bring them to market in combination with the rest of the portfolio.
What benefits does the Magenta roaming service bring?
Magenta Security Roaming is our new concept that future-proofs roaming security. It provides secure connectivity across all protocols for operators worldwide, including our own national companies, with dedicated support and strict SLAs.
Magenta Security Roaming supports end-to-end roaming security, with different design options to fit mobile technologies up to 5G standalone and use cases including roaming value-added services, regional breakout and IoT. We are recognised as the industry front-runner in managed roaming services that combines industry-leading roaming brokerage, a mobility-enablement connectivity platform and security by design.
Both Global Carrier Digital Services and Magenta Security Roaming respond directly to our customers’ evolving needs as digitalisation transcends traditional domestic borders, and global digital connectivity and communications become embedded in central business processes and productivity applications.
What do you see as the biggest challenges in the industry in the next two to three years, and how do you intend to turn them into opportunities?
The carrier industry is often not appreciated sufficiently for the value it delivers. The biggest challenge is to change this perception, and that will not be achieved overnight.
Here are three examples where we believe we can add value to our customers and Deutsche Telekom itself.
First, we must acknowledge that we have missed out on our fair share of value in growth markets such as CPaaS, thinking that securing termination revenue – essentially, A2P SMS – was offering the best return on investment. Upcoming A2P revenue substitution should be the trigger to take a more assertive stand in delivering value with our digital omnichannel and API proposition going forward.
Second, the 30-plus-year-old roaming era is entering a new age of disruption on the back of eSIMs. Roaming enablement has left the comfortable MNO-to-MNO cradle and is now part of a digital experience when you book the next business or leisure trip. Whether this presents itself as a challenge or an opportunity is not the point of the matter: the convenient truth is that eSIMs are changing the way we ought to look at mobility services both in the consumer and enterprise scenario. Roaming is today a globally accessible and mission-critical service, with control shifting towards end users.
Third, we face significant disruption stemming from the recent advances in generative AI, which are transforming entire businesses and value chains. We have been designing our networks and platforms with human and IoT use cases in mind, with the latter still representing a technical and commercial challenge when it comes to scaling.
What effects do you see AI having in the coming years and how will the company adapt to the resulting changes?
AI will further accelerate the irreversible transition of workloads to clouds, while the cloud becomes the long-haul network.
Getting the game at the edge right becomes crucial for gaining a vantage point where access networks meet the clouds, and services are being programmed and delivered through network APIs.
At Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier, we have been spearheading the development of highly responsive, elastic and low-latency connectivity to meet the demands of AI-powered software applications interacting with end users and eyeballs globally.
In a hyperconnected world, reliability and security by design are the only workable pathways to seamless and dependable connections.
We are fortunate to have not only the vision but also the assets to conceive, experiment with and deploy the right strategies to anticipate the challenges ahead and to win.
Read Deutsche Telekom's special report, titled Wholesale Redefined, by clicking here.
