I'm delighted to invite to the stage Robyn Denholm,
who joined Telstra over the summer
as our Chief Operations Officer.
So, Robyn, just like to talk a little bit about
sort of some of those experiences
or how bits of diversity have influenced your career.
Well, thank you, and thanks for having me here today.
I have a fundamental...
And it's evolved over the years,
but a fundamental belief that
if you put different people with different experiences
around the table,
you actually can create something different, a different outcome.
If you are faced with the same problem
and you've got the same background and the same thinking,
you'll normally try and solve the problem the same way.
The founding of Sun was four founders.
You had Vinod Khosla, who was an engineer,
had studied at Stanford, had come over to Stanford from India
to do his PhD...Masters and PhD,
and actually then caught up with the other three,
one of which was Andy Bechtolsheim.
He was at Carnegie Mellon doing a PhD.
And then Scott McNealy, who was not doing his PhD,
who actually wasn't an engineer,
was more of a sales and marketing and business person.
And then they went and recruited Bill Joy,
who was actually at Berkeley, who was a software guy.
Never had done anything on the hardware side at all.
And the four of them got together and actually created Sun
on the Stanford campus.
And essentially, the four together
actually fulfilled different parts of the spectrum.
Very different personalities,
very different backgrounds, very different ways of thinking.
You know, some of them introvert, some of them more extrovert,
some of them you can't get a word in edgeways,
depending on what's going on.
But they all had a common purpose,
which was actually to build a network,
one of the first networks that actually was better
than anything else that was out there.
That's, to me, a great example
of how completely different backgrounds,
getting together to actually produce something phenomenal.
You know, in some respects, the dotcom era wouldn't have happened
without some of the inventions
that they actually created over the years.
And obviously it wasn't just the four of them.
Then they recruited people.
And one of the things that McNealy always said
is to recruit better than you, you know.
The first thing you have to do is build a management team,
or a team of people that are actually smarter than you are
so that you can actually continue that wave of innovative thinking
and that type of thing.
That's one of the earliest examples where I really sort of thought,
"Wow, this is how that all happened."
So that innovative thinking,
the modern way we sort of talk about disruption,
if you're in an industry and kind of used to doing things a certain way,
you tend to think that way.
So disruption tends to take that sort of shock from the outside.
So it is thinking about a problem in a fundamentally different way.
I mean, I think that's the definition of innovation,
that you actually don't think about necessarily how it was done before,
but you approach it from a quite different way of thinking.
And from a customer perspective, again, you've got customers
with vastly different needs, wants.
Absolutely.
I think that voice of the customer's very important
in the innovation cycle.
Not necessarily to say, OK,
we're going to produce what the customer wants all the time,
because sometimes in an innovative world, actually,
the customer hasn't even thought of what it is that they really want.
And so to understand the business of the customer,
to actually see what their pain points are
or the problems that they're trying to solve
and then produce products and services that actually answer that
as a problem statement, if you like.
And again, all the engineering companies
that I've been with over the years, including Telstra,
actually do that, take the voice of the customer
and put it into that innovation cycle.
So, for example, at Juniper,
the very reason why Juniper was around and thrived
was they fundamentally changed the way routing was done
in terms of networks.
And why did they do that?
Because the internet wasn't scaling.
The actual internet was not scaling at that point.
Various companies had talked to the universities
in the valley
to see what ideas people had
to actually change the way routing was done.
And what Pradeep and the team did at the time
was they really separated the control plane
from the forwarding plane,
and actually that's...
But that wasn't traditionally how routing was done.
You had to have it all together.
So to me, that's another example of where a different way of thinking -
why can't we turn this on its head or separate it
or, you know, move it in a different way,
where you had software where the routing tables were stored,
that type of thing,
as opposed to having to carry it inside the same configuration.
And thinking about software defined networking
and network function virtualisation,
we're going through exactly the same thing in a way, aren't we?
Yeah, I mean, to me, it's applying some of the fundamental principles
that have happened in the compute space
to the networking problem,
because at the end of the day, you know,
network elements are computers.
And so the fact that it hasn't happened before
isn't because it can't,
it's just because no-one's really thought about how to do it before.
So I'm actually very excited about this new wave
'cause I think, one, it's gonna dramatically reduce
the cost per bit of traffic as we move forward...
Sorry if I'm getting too technical.
But for me that's really exciting.
I mean, half the industries today would not be around
without what's happened from a networking perspective.
I mean, Facebook wouldn't exist because it would be very, very slow
if you had to do a dial-up to actually log in
to check your status of your friends every day, right?
That would not have happened if those innovations hadn't happened.
Or in this next wave
where the sharing economy is really taking off,
you can only do that with the technology
to enable the connection of those individuals
or that market place or that type of thing.
So to me, um, there's a huge amount out there
that can happen as a flow-on effect of some of the technologies
that we're working on and the industry is working on.