Talking 5G
EME IOT: The World’s Great Enabler
“It actually allows us to do quite a bit from a security perspective.
“5G enables the service providers to serve customers in a way they haven’t done so before. Now we can do network slicing and segmentation and add security services, so 5G allows these providers to treat the enterprise in a very different way. That means all of the security we had in play in the enterprise sphere gets repeated, which is a good thing and our customers really like this, whether they get it through us directly or our service partners.
“That trust layer I was talking about can now also go all the way down to the device – we can have trusted infrastructure as well as trusted users.”
From the internet of things and mobile connectivity to cybersecurity and enterprise application, 5G is transforming industry fundamentals across a multitude of channels
Whatis IOT? A simple question at first glance, but one which carries an ever- changing answer depending on who you speak to and when.
For us it was Phil Skipper, Head of Business Development (IOT) at Vodafone Business, who answered this in our final meeting before we hot- footed on a metro to Barcelona Airport.
“For me, IOT is about connecting remote devices to drive two outcomes,” he says, sat across from us in a Vodafone-clad meeting room at the back of another enormous booth.
“One is to drive efficiency in the business process and the second is to generate new revenue streams, what we call the business case of cost avoidance and the business case of revenue generation.”
Skipper quickly refers to smart meters and internet in cars as examples of these two outcomes before the common denominator of MWC, 5G, enters the conversation.
“The interesting thing is what 5G then does,” he continues. “It takes this from a data centric service to a control centric service, which potentially presents a third business case, meaning the definition may evolve from two business cases to three in time.”
Vodafone, and Skipper, have witnessed first-hand the fluidity and
of Iot’s meaning over many
There has also been a massive expansion in the breadth of Iot’s reach, with virtually all industries from agriculture to education impacted in some way by this heightened level of connectivity.
“The third element of evolution is what I touched on regarding peer-to- peer conversations,” Skipper adds.
“Rather than Vodafone connecting BMW to every single BMW car, we are connecting to much more of an ecosystem model where the end-to- end process is split into a number of subprocesses. These subprocesses have several different specialists within them that make up the ecosystem, which you then have to trust. IOT is essentially becoming democratised.”
We met with Phil Skipper, Head of Business Development (IOT) at Vodafone Business, to discuss the seemingly limitless bounds of connectivity
MWC saw Vodafone Business announce two significant IOT partnerships with US firm AT&T and British company Arm.
analytics at scale and speed?” she asks. “It is difficult to do so with just the component parts.”
Integration of applications, Mui recalls, was the major use of cloud when she started working in this realm of technology around three to four years ago, but for her this is just the beginning, a means to an end.
The next step is what you do with the data and information that is made more accessible by this integration.
“We’re seeing more customers being innovative with the cloud platform across many different industries, from non-profits and pharmaceuticals to universities like MIT, who have used SAP to extend their HR functionalities,” says Mui. “Some customers are using it for predictive analysis, some for machine learning, for example.”
“Another important thing to add is that we have customers who use our cloud for agile development,” adds Mui’s colleague Ashruti Singh, Director, Marketing, SAP Cloud Platform. “What they want to do is change things in flight and develop quickly.”
Singh goes on to cite numerous examples of this in action, including a case study with US firm Murphy Oil which SAP showcased at MWC.
In a bid to digitise the oil & gas workforce, Murphy Oil implemented Upstream Production Operations by Accenture and SAP in just five months. This involved various integrations of machine learning and AI and also the development of a backend user interface combining up to 15 different applications.
Citing another example, Singh continues: “In the UK, one of our customers is Northern Gas Networks, whose main reason for using SAP’S Cloud Platform is to help respond quickly to customers and improve customer experience.”
Another product used by Northern Gas Networks, Singh tells us, is SAP’S Digital Boardroom, offering a real- time, digital-enterprise insight into integrated line-of-business data from SAP and third-party applications.
“I come from an analytics background and over the years I have definitely noticed a growing interest in reporting, consolidating data into dashboards,” says Mui. “Now we have all the technology to make this happen and to handle and analyse all of this data.
“The objective has been the same all along – it is about getting the most insight from the various transactions and how you understand your customers. What do they want to buy? How do they want to buy it? We can now do all this a lot more effectively.”
And it is this customer-centric focus that is dictating the strategies of SAP more and more, Mui ending our conversation on this note, saying that the company’s major priority when it comes to cloud is to offer an unrivalled experience.
She concludes: “As a company SAP is placing a big focus on this. There are a lot of technologies available to enterprises so experience is going to be huge – we have high expectations in the way we use our smartphones and computers, and these expectations are now being applied to business applications. The user experience will be more important than ever.”