Coppens was speaking during the virtual Capacity Europe session titled Where should telcos priorities lie? The panel was hosted by Amy Cameron, principal analyst at STL Partners and also featured Pascal Menezes, CTO at MEF, and Ralph Santitoro, head of edge cloud solutions architecture at Ciena.
The discussion focused on what Cameron referred to as the three A’s - analytics, automation and AI.
“As a telco, we have been underpinning the digital transformation of so many industries, but we haven’t been inflicting that on ourselves,” Coppens said.
He adds that telcos were held back by legacy and old IT stacks and processes that were holding back the industry from adopting automation.
“We have grown out of it and now we have seen big enterprises, banks and carriers that are using it on a daily basis – it has come a long way in the last five years.”
Menezes, meanwhile, believes that cybersecurity is critical to the future for telcos.
“Cybersecurity is a multi-trillion-dollar industry,” Menezes said.
“You cannot have any service or network if it is not secure. A frictionless experience for an end user is one where they don’t have to worry about potential threats.”
A recent survey by one of Capacity’s sister titles indicated that it would be the main building block needed in digital infrastructure over the next few years.
IJGlobal says in a 36-page report on digital infrastructure that 70% of almost 200 infrastructure and energy industry professionals surveyed worry about cybersecurity.
IJGlobal expects this trend will continue in the coming years with a corresponding increase in market activity.
The panel takes place on 20 October from 12:45
