Surf's Up! Telcos still have the time to carve into a glassy wave

One of the big questions of the moment is "why has the telco industry been so slow to adopt the public cloud and, as a result, have they missed the opportunity of a lifetime by not cottoning-on to changed times quickly enough"? Andy Berry says its a valid question but one that misses a couple of key points. He reminds us that telcos were, in fact, world leaders in the private cloud market 20 years ago but have suffered recently by failing to evolve to and introduce public clouds of regulation-free reach and scale fast enough to keep up with their competitors. That is because they failed to appreciate the fact that, in the long-term, value lies not in the network itself but in the reach and scale of public clouds and the services and apps they can provide.

Andy Berry says there was a time when telcos could have bought the likes of Google, Netflix or any other apps of scale coming out of Silicon Valley but failed to do so because they were too slow to appreciate change and adapt to it. They stuck with the old business model where value was seen to be in the telco network and missed the wave when value shifted to an emphasis on business, enterprise and the consumer and the emphasis on "cloud native" apps.

The problem is, he says, is that even now telcos are struggling to decide what they want to be; network providers or apps providers. However, he believes there is still time for them to make the change and they will be able to catch up via 5G. Andy Berry adds that ZephyrTel's mission is to help telcos move into the cloud and provide a safe landing point for cloud-based solutions, to nurture more apps in a trusted environment and used the enhanced scale their solutions provide to boost revenues.

Filmed at DSP Leaders Forum 2019