by Stephan Gatien, Global Lead for Telco & Mobility Industry Business Unit
I recently attended the TIA annual conference in Dallas (www.tia2015.org ). TIA is an industry body with heavy ties to the US market, gradually trying to evolve into a more international entity focusing on industry market and technology trends and government affairs (e.g: Net neutrality debate in US). This year’s event, held in Dallas, TX, focused on “The Network of the Future.” Participants included a healthy mix of US operators (AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Sprint), network equipment providers (Cisco, Fujitsu, Juniper, JDSU) and various industry players involved in the internet of things (IoT) such as GM / On Star.
One of the highlights of the conference was to hear Chris Penrose (SVP Internet of Things Solutions, AT&T) talking about the use cases and activities in progress in the emerging IOT market at AT&T. Like many others in the industry, AT&T is working to understand the market and position themselves to take advantage of new business models to create new revenue streams. “We are involved in the traditional segments: connected car as provider of OnStar, healthcare, and asset tracking. We are also willing to take risks. Lately we’ve been exploring aggressively a number of scenarios based on business usage of drones, for example.” “IoT scenarios provide versatility along with opportunities. One SIM card in a car can provide multiple opportunities – providing car specific data back to manufacturers for monitoring and maintenance; offering the owner a personal WiFi hub; and partnering with insurance companies for new packages such as pay as you drive”.
Verizon confirmed their desire to accelerate the transition to Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and are working with key partners (such as Cisco) to develop what they describe as the “operating system of the future network”. This virtual network will be made available to software partners and suppliers for value added network services. This move is designed to counter the push of OTT players into the market, and provides SAP with significant opportunity in this extremely data intensive domain.
SAP’s partner ILS Technology spoke about the various IoT scenarios they currently support with their flagship product deviceWISE, including a successful use case co-developed with us on HANA. ILS CEO Fred Yentz reiterated his commitment to working with SAP and continue the positive momentum underway.
Finally, I joined a panel discussing Big Data Analytics in a Data Centric World along with representatives from Accenture, Google, JDSU and Chevron. SAP’s broad industry DNA and expertise is recognized as an asset as carriers struggle to identify the right moves to make in IoT and IoT related Big Data management. HANA’s ability to deliver the right data tier (hot data and high value), and our push to democratize data discovery and predictive analytics resonated well with the audience. Google did push hard on cloud analytics via their Google Cloud Platform, and did suggest that a Hadoop/Spark approach might be enough to build a big data strategy. Though this type of solution will probably be first adopted by industries less concerned about security and privacy than Telco operators.
Overall, despite the heavy network orientation of many conversations, this was an insightful event. It only confirmed that in the Network of the Future, everything will be about building or belonging to the right ecosystem to best monetize opportunities.
To access the presentations from our event, click here and type in password: papers2015
