[MUSIC PLAYING]
BRIAN KRACIK: Hello, everyone.
I'd like to welcome you to the Google Cloud Innovators Tech
Talks for Telecommunications.
I'm Brian Kracik, Head of Telecommunications Industry
Marketing for Google Cloud globally.
And I will be your host for this series.
We'll provide a focus on our Google Cloud products,
solutions, and ecosystems as they
apply to the communications service provider community.
In this series, we'll bring you insights from key technology
leaders within Google Cloud, views from our CSP customers
around their business strategy, deployments, and results.
And lastly, we'll provide insights
from our partners who are delivering
value in the ecosystem.
This series will air on a monthly basis
and will cover topics we believe are
most important to our audience.
But I would encourage all of you to submit suggestions
on topics for this series by emailing them
to GoogleCloudInnov ators@google.com.
Now I've been part of the telecommunications space
for over 25 years, and it's been a glorious ride.
But if we step back a little bit more and take a larger view
and think about what has telecommunication's
meant to the world, it's perhaps the greatest engine
of world economic growth over the last 200 years.
From the invention of the telegraph
at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution,
to today's mobile applications and the power of compute
in your hands, to videos and data services,
communications service providers power business.
But it's not just business.
CSPs have been connecting people to people.
They've been connecting people to things,
and now connecting things to things.
And this is enabling a whole new market
and a lot of new innovation.
Communication service providers are really
a complex organization.
They grow organically as well as through acquisition.
They have multiple functions that
are working together to deliver services out to their clients.
They have a network.
Nobody else has that kind of network.
And they take great pains to architect it, to deploy it,
and to operate it so that it's there for us when we need it.
They also have, just like any other enterprise,
an IT organization really focused
on giving their employees the services and applications they
need to operate the business, as well
as how they can communicate to their hundreds of millions
of subscribers.
And lastly, a CSP is very diverse from how
it delivers its products.
It has standalone retail stores.
It has an e-commerce engine.
It has partners, and it has its own channel.
And it's these products and services
that are leveraging telecommunication networks,
which have been so critical to helping everyone go digital.
So to talk about the telecommunications
space in more detail and really peel back the onion,
I have with me today Amol Phadke Managing
Director of Telecom Industry Solutions at Google Cloud.
AMOL PHADKE: Thank you Brian.
Thank you for having me.
BRIAN KRACIK: Yeah, this is great.
I really appreciate you bringing your knowledge and experience
to the team and to our audience.
So hey, let's dig right in, Amol.
What are some of the core trends that you're
seeing across our CSP clients?
AMOL PHADKE: Fantastic question, Brian.
I would broadly categorize them into four megatrends
that we are seeing in the industry and with our clients.
First of all, post-pandemic the demand
that has been placed on the infrastructure
is just unprecedented.
I mean, we are seeing multiple zettabytes of data and traffic
that is really riding on top of the CSP infrastructure.
And everything we do today--
talking, working, entertaining, educating ourselves-- is all
done on that infrastructure.
So that's the first megatrend, which
is just unparalleled, unprecedented network traffic
demand.
Second megatrend is unfortunately
that demand is not really translating into revenue.
So the revenues are really flatlining globally
across the world.
And the third megatrend is the investment.
So while the revenue is flatlining,
they still have to invest.
In fact, we are thinking somewhere in the region
of $800 to $900 billion of investment
would be needed based on the analysis that we have done
globally over the next five years just
to keep up with the demand, as well
as getting ready for the 5G infrastructure that
is being rolled out.
So if you think about those three megatrends, what they're
doing is really pushing to the brink customer experience,
which is the fourth megatrend, where customer experience is
at a breaking point given this perfect storm of revenues
flatlining, massive demand, massive investment needed.
So that's really what we are seeing in this industry
as core megatrends.
BRIAN KRACIK: So Amol, that's kind of interesting.
So it's a lot of pressures from a lot of different angles.
And as you know we've talked about before, our largest--
this is a game of giants almost.
A lot of large investment, and our CSP clients
have grown through various avenues,
through acquisition or organically.
But what makes them different from other enterprises?
How can they manage this problem and service their customers?
AMOL PHADKE: They are in a unique position, our CSP
industry and our clients and partners.
Their infrastructure is both a horizontal and a vertical.
What I mean by that is, of course,
they have their own demand for their broadband consumers
and their wireless and [? wirelan ?] consumers as well
as the enterprises.
But then, they are also the foundational connectivity
fabric on which other industries rely on.
Whether it's shipping ports, or manufacturing plants,
or retail storefronts, all pretty much
need that underlying connectivity fabric.
So in that sense, they are unique,
because they are an enterprise, but they are also
a service provider.
And therefore, solving the needs for them
is actually going to help us solve
the needs of all other industries
through that process.
So that's why in that context, they
are a fairly unique industry compared to everything
else we see at Google Cloud.
BRIAN KRACIK: I think that's so true when you look at it
and you explain it.
They're a vertical, but really they're
a horizontal, providing a fabric for everyone.
So when I think about that and the landscape,
so just how is Google Cloud helping these CSP clients?
AMOL PHADKE: Again, great question, Brian.
Before I talk about how we are solving the challenges
that they face, it's worth just highlighting those three
challenges that they are all grappling with.
Number one, how can they grow revenue
in order to buck the trend that we talked about earlier
about flatlining revenues.
How can they truly transform their customer experience
in order to move away from this breaking point
that they have got to?
And how can they maximize the investments
they are doing with the best ROI that they
can get from an overall TCO perspective?
So those are the challenges that the executives in those clients
tell us.
And so we built our solutions portfolio
to really meet those challenges, resolve those challenges,
and help them grow.
So there are really four portfolio pillars
that we have built in order to help our partners and clients.
So the first portfolio pillar is what we describe
as monetizing the Edge.
And what I'm talking about there, Brian,
is really helping them monetize the tremendous investments
they are making in 5G and network infrastructure.
And a couple of examples that come to mind
are immersive Edge capabilities, or private network
capabilities, or even industry-specific MEC
capabilities, Mobile Edge Compute capabilities,
that we are trying to build with our clients.
So those are some examples, but that's just the first pillar.
The second pillar, which is really
around network transformation, is addressing that part
that I talked about around TCO, maximizing the ROI
and really efficiently utilizing the TCO.
So we are helping our clients move
towards cloud-native network transformations,
supported by capabilities such as network analytics, network
automation, and so on.
The third pillar, which is really around customer
experience.
And here, we are using our really market-leading
capabilities in analytics, AI, and ML
with solutions such as Contact Center AI and our Customer
Intelligence platform.
These are capabilities we are building
to transform the customer experience that the CSPs can
have with their consumers and enterprise clients.
And then the final portfolio pillar
is around their core IT systems and digitizing their workforce
by helping them move all of that to cloud.
So that's really the four ways in which we are helping
them solve these issues.
BRIAN KRACIK: You know what, that's amazing,
and it really speaks to the diversity of the CSP
organization.
You've covered it.
Now that's a lot to take on for one company.
Are you seeing any trends across the companies?
Where do I start?
Do I start with my customers?
Do I start with the network?
Do I start with intelligence?
What are you seeing happening throughout the globe?
AMOL PHADKE: So fantastic point, Brian.
It takes a village to get all this in place.
And there's just no way us, or for that matter,
any individual entity can solve all of that.
So what we have done really is look at the whole ecosystem.
And really our strategy is built on expanding that ecosystem,
that says across systems integrators,
across network equipment providers,
across Edge ISVs, Independent Software
Vendors on the Edge, as well as core technology partners.
We are really building a very robust ecosystem
of partners that can sit on top of cloud,
work with us to build the four pillars I talked
about together, and that way address the solutions
that our CSP clients need.
So really, it's an ecosystem play
working very closely with us as a foundational cloud player.
BRIAN KRACIK: So Amol, that's really interesting.
So who are we helping, and how are we helping them?
How are we differentiating?
Why are they choosing Google?
How does that match and that ecosystem work?
AMOL PHADKE: Right.
So let me first address, Brian, the differentiation point.
I think the reason CSPs are coming to us
and having these conversations is six different things.
Number one is our world-leading infrastructure and capabilities
that we have built for ourselves.
So as Google, we have built a network infrastructure that
is unparalleled and global, but at the same time
complements the CSP infrastructures that are deep.
And so, really that collaboration
would work because we are going to complement
those infrastructures.
That infrastructure also has decades of learning around
automation, analytics, and so on,
that we will to externalize in order
to help the CSP infrastructure.
So that's really the first differentiation point.
Then of course, our multi-cloud and cost proposition,
which is, again, fairly unique, because it
is the only proposition that can work on any cloud,
also helps CSP bridge those boundaries,
because the CSP workloads are by definition hybrid.
And then everyone knows that we have been major contributors
to open source with Kubernetes-based capabilities
and others that are coming out now.
Backed all of this by our ecosystem player
that I mentioned, our leadership in analytics that I mentioned,
and the Alphabet suite of capabilities
that we bring really create a very differentiated
proposition.
And it is working in the sense that we
have seen some fairly large strategic partnerships
announced recently over the last few months.
You would have seen the AT&T announcement that
came in middle of last year.
You've seen our announcements with Nokia and Ericsson
in the same time-frame.
In December you saw announcements
with Indosat around their strategic multi-year
transformation, as well as Verizon
on their Edge partnership that they are doing with us.
So it's really now a sort of gamut of global CSPs
working with us.
And I will not, of course, forget
to mention Vodafone, who is our premier data partner,
and we are really working with them
on the data side of the house.
And then finally, of course, the stuff
that's happening in India.
It's extremely exciting.
We've announced our partnerships with [INAUDIBLE],,
we've announced our partnerships with Jio.
So it's really globally now, we are helping our CSP partners
and clients grow phenomenally and collaborate with us to try
and drive that transformation.
BRIAN KRACIK: So Amol, that's really fantastic insight.
We're doing so much across so many places around the globe.
And thank you for outlining very clearly
how we're able to help folks, and how we're partnering,
and really developing the ecosystem.
And thank you also for participating
in our first Cloud Innovators Tech
Talk for Telecommunications.
Thank you so much.
AMOL PHADKE: Thank you, Brian.
Thank you very much.
It was a pleasure being here, a pleasure talking to you.
And I would love to do it again sometime.
Thank you very much.