How 5G Will Change IoT | Vodafone Business' Phil Skipper | E175
you are listening to the iot for all media network hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot fraud podcast i'm your host ryan chicone on today's episode we have phil skipper the head of business development of iot at vodafone business um they are an organization within vodafone group that helps provide services globally regionally and locally whether it's mobile fixed unified communication internet of things and cloud and security basically the idea there is to help them connect people places and things that matter businesses whenever they want um this episode's fantastic we talk a lot about the evolution of iot from technology uh as an operational asset standpoint we talk about how 5g will impact and change iot how quality of service becomes central for future iot hyperscalers we talk about what hyperscales are and and how the quality of service matters so much and then we get into more challenges around the space and challenges related to connectivity related to just iot in general and digital transformation across the board so i think you'll find a lot of value in this episode but before we get into it if any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable iot market but don't know where to start check out our sponsor leverage leverages iot solutions development platform provides everything you need to create turnkey iot products that you can white label and resell under your own brand to learn more go to iot changes everything dot com that's iot changes everything dot com and without further ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcast welcome phil to the iot for all show thanks for being here this week pleasure yeah it's great to have you i'm definitely looking forward to this conversation and i wanted to kick it off by having you just give a quick introduction about yourself to our audience fantastic well my name's phil skipper and i'm the head of strategy for vodafone's iot business now vodafone iet is part of the vodafone group and we focus on delivering just iot solutions to our customers so our mission is is really quite simple to connect anything anywhere and enable our customers to really get the benefits of digitizing their businesses around iot and now now tell me from um when vodafone obviously has been around for a while how long have you all been in the iot kind of focused area and kind of what's that evolution looked like for you internally well i've been in iot ever since it was called something like telemetry in scada and i've worked in many many different industries to get to where i am now with vodafone iot bonafide iot started around 10 years ago and we're now the leader for global connectivity worldwide we connect about 140 million devices across a variety of different verticals from automotive and healthcare right the way down to utilities and buildings so and the business has grown really quite spectacularly over the last 10 years and with all the signs we're seeing in the market it's supposed to grow even further in the future absolutely one thing i'd love to hear about from your perspective since you've been in the space for a while is talk about how how iot has really evolved from just a technology kind of discussion to more of an operational asset for businesses yeah and i think this is really at the heart of how we approach iot so if i look 10 years ago iot was a an interesting technology and most of the projects that we had at that time were people exploring how iot could be used within their businesses and you the automotive industry was clearly one of the first to really understand what power iot could unleash in terms of improved operational performance as well as improved customer services now what we're seeing and if you take some of the analysts transformer predicting about 30 billion devices connected um on iot is not only the growth in connections but the increase in consumption and that shows to us that customers are becoming more more reliant on iot and that's why we have this phrase moving from a technology to an operational asset because as companies rely on iot to deliver their customers customer experience so connectivity becomes almost as critical as electricity so if the electricity goes off the factory stops the same is around connectivity so what we're seeing is it's moving from just a debate about technology to a much more significant question about how do i run my business but more importantly who is the right supplier that can not only build me an iot system but can also run it for the next five to ten years yeah it's very interesting to kind of see that the feedback or the adoption when it comes to it being more of a managed service versus you know being something that companies want to take on themselves and and really run internally um from from your perspective what have been the biggest things that have kind of driven adoption now as iot's kind of been progressing into more of an operational asset what have you kind of seen on your end yeah i think what's happened is that when we first started off it was really just used as a way of gathering data but that data actually wasn't used for very much i think over the last particularly over the last five years as the ability to connect things has become cheaper the ability to process things has become cheaper but also more ability your ability to process things in a more performant way using ai and the edge and that's actually made the data element much more important so what we've seen it's become a much more three-dimensional element it's no longer simply about can i get the the data can i connect can i understand when something's broken into how can i use the data much more proactively in terms of predicting what could actually happen and i think that's part of the maturing process as it moves from simply can i connect something and you know that's a useful technical exercise too right how can i use it to drive wastage out of my business how can i use it to deliver what i do in better ways and then how can i use it to create new customer propositions and engage more with the customer and i think over the last year we've seen that sort of almost take a step change as we move into sort of more sustainable approaches to business where of course if you're taking out wastage you're becoming more sustainable you've got the ability to move to more sustainable ways of doing business and also the ability to influence customers to consume your services in a more sustainable way yeah we're really starting to see real roi out of these solutions i think before we've you know we saw a lot of things getting to the pilot stage and really not being able to be justified moving past that um but but as we are starting to see more applications being deployed in in different industries for different use cases we're starting to collectively see just what the power of these technologies that we were talking about for so many years are when you actually apply them the correct way yes and i think that question of roi is really important because i i hear that all the time we do a number of surveys an roi is never one of the barriers to iot adoption and i think what becomes important with this takes us back to this conversation about iot as an operational asset is in order to realize the true benefit doing the technology in isolation is not enough you also need to start thinking about how you digitize your business around iot sure and i think those companies which have really embraced iot as a way of doing business in a different way i've actually released massive amounts of roi for their for their business and i think for us it's no longer about the proof of concept we believe that the concept is well and truly proven with 140 million devices worldwide i think to say if you really want to get the benefit you really have to change the way you do things so you know we've seen it in in multiple different industries but you've got to really think about what your business is going to look like when it's based on iot and when you've digitized around it as a core capability absolutely i could not agree more um i wanted to ask you from the from the connectivity side of things which we know is super important we have we've been hearing a lot about 5g over the last couple years it's obviously growing in um in its rollout but from your perspective where do you see 5g really contributing to the most change for the iot space yeah and this again is a a good question because if you look at what's happened in iot there's really only two types of use classification you can have one is we tell you where something is and the second one is we tell you what condition it's in 5g opens up a third set of use cases and these are about control and if you look at all the applications that need 5g from autonomous vehicles to virtual reality they're all control applications and i think that is the real game changer for us in iot and we call it 5g for imt because it enables this brand new classification of iot devices which are controlling they could be agvs transfer tables in factories right or all of these things they're all dependent on 5g because it gives you a couple of major benefits and low latency is you know is good but fast um it's not what you know necessarily what you need but 5g gives you the combination of low latency high bandwidth and quality of service that makes the proposition much more deterministic if it's deterministic you can control things and we've done some great examples we've controlled cranes from 250 kilometers away remotely over 5g we've done a lot of work in haptic control where you can pick things up and feel it from across the atlantic so i think those control applications is really a game changer for iot going forwards yeah absolutely um it's it's it's very interesting to kind of see how each type of connectivity now that we have plays a certain role in delivering the kind of the quality of service for these iot solutions to be successful and 5g is one that you know like i said we've been talking about for a while and now we're starting to really see its application and the enablement it has for new use cases and solutions that otherwise or beforehand really weren't as plausible as they are now with 5g which leads me into a question i want to ask you which is um when it comes like the quality of service in general it's really the focal point is really central to the future of iot and the companies that are really focusing on on scale how do you kind of see that quality of service element really playing a role in in growth and adoption for for hyperscalers yeah the quality of service aspect becomes really really vital because organizations rely on their iot provider to make sure that they can keep the wheels rolling in that factory or on the road or whatever so quality of service becomes key but the secret is to match the quality that you provide with the expectation of the customer and as we move into more critical services it's really important that you come at this not from the perspective of traditional technology reliability but you come at it from the perspective of operational reliability so we take a much more manufacturing view of operational resilience and operational quality and i think that's really helpful because you can then have the right conversations about with customers about the quality of service they want to deliver but more importantly the resolution paths they want to follow in order to maintain the service they provide because nothing in the world is ever perfect but what rangers are doing is making sure that we can deliver thoughtless support so that we can keep our customers going be that completely redundant systems build up dual communications backup systems and being able to tailor that to the operational needs is really the key to it yeah and i also think it's very important for this that those conversations and that alignment to happen as early on in the process as possible um so that you don't run into hiccups or kind of a misalignment of expectations down the line and which can cause speed you know any kind of can kind of cause blockage to to scaling and i think that's something that we've had a lot of conversation on the podcast about is is that communication and that alignment of expectations across all parties that are involved yeah and i think you're absolutely spot on i think the the worst thing you can do is to put a technology into a business which somehow um creates friction with their existing processes right what you have to do is to do it the other way around and understand what a frictionless solution looks like and then you can build the components so right you know many organizations think about sell build and run we look at a completely opposite way around we say what is it you want to run therefore how do we build it and finally how can you buy it absolutely so i wanted to kind of pivot a little bit here and talk about um kind of over the last let's say decade or so as we've seen iot come to where it is now um there's been a lot of growth over those years right it's been pretty interesting and incredible to kind of see but it's also i'm sure led to a lot of challenges for for businesses and i'd be curious from your perspective what challenges you have seen come up over the last number of years kind of due to the iot growth that you know maybe iot is also helping to solve or that we all we need to start addressing maybe that we haven't so far yeah i think you know challenge and opportunity how do they fit together um and i think what we've seen is because iot has got such a high profile um and it's actually quite easy to step into we found a lot of customers going down the path of things like proof of concepts and without actually having a clear view of what the outcome they want to deliver is and i think that's one of the things we've seen change quite significantly where they're now in the space of having the right conversation about what is it i'm trying to achieve and i think that's something you know a bit of a challenge that's now been sort of overcome i think the second one is around what sort of technologies to use um and trying to get some clarity because there's so many choices in in iot and we focused on providing very simple solutions for very complex problems and these range from you know being able to stream video into into cars right the way down to a very battery solutions and you know quite clearly just by simply giving customers the ability to connect anything anywhere anyhow in the best way for their own commercial model is the key because when you look at iot the end result is you've got to make sure it fits within the existing companies process and it fits with the way for instance they generate their revenues so it's really a fast maturing market but i think we're now at the space where it's ready to hyper scale and we're ready to see really significant growth as more companies embrace it the ability to process data becomes more accessible more automated and people actually understand what those insights into their business translate in terms of business value absolutely and i think one of the big opportunities that we've seen is for organizations to not only digitize their processes but integrate iot kind of at the same time um under this umbrella of digital transformation and and all this really helps them utilize and understand and realize the value that iot really has so one of the things i wanted to ask before we wrap up is from your perspective how can companies do that successfully or what advice do you have for companies that are kind of getting started on their iot journey and under looking to better understand how to not only become more digital with their processes but also really start integrating iot technologies into their businesses how to approach it you know what advice what things should they be thinking about just anything kind of generally from an advice standpoint that you've seen that could help companies that are kind of on that path right now yeah i think it's think about what you want to be rather than what you are today what you can buy today okay and i think you also need to have a view which says if you if you want to do it it's not just a technology thing so you need to be um getting the views of people especially in the operational world to say what is it that you actually need is the outcome once you've got that you can very simply translate it back down the line into what it is how you want to configure it how you integrate it and so on and i think that's the real key think about what you want to be rather than what you are yeah that's great um i i think it's it's always interesting when i talk to to experts in the space around how they approach those conversations with companies and that advice that they give and i think understanding where you're trying to go what you're trying to solve be as prepared as you possibly can as early on in the process really contributes to that and i think a lot of organizations overlook that and get very hung up on either one problem they're trying to solve one use case they see them they can implement or they just don't fully understand it because they're being told by management hey we need to get iot into our business but they don't understand exactly how or why that's a benefit so so really understanding and grasping those points i think is super important um uh so so one of the things i wanted to ask here is um kind of as we move forward into the space throughout this year what are what are you looking forward to what do you think you know what do you think's going to be happening what are you most excited about you know what what uh talk to me on that end yeah um we're excited really about three things one is the ongoing development of low-power wide area networks now we're already up to 55 roman networks and that is opening up a new set of use cases in the high penetration low battery consumption area okay at the top end it's really about you know the big projects around mobile private networks it's really about 5g it's those control applications at the top and in the middle it's the digital transformation and what we're really excited about is the way that things like iot can enable companies of any size really punch above their weight by giving them access to new insights greater reach availability in more countries so i think we're looking forward to in your ongoing growth and expansion in iot but also the opening up of these two new use cases one for low power and one for 5g so it's going to be a very interesting exciting 12 months absolutely and if our audience out there wants to learn more kind of everything going on on vodafone's side uh as it relates to iot what's the best way to do that what's the best way to kind of stay in touch follow along and connect do they have questions yeah we've we're all over social media um we've got a big website we've got a large sales force we've got our opco countries in every um in many different countries so please have a look see what we do keep looking at our posts keep looking at the material we're putting out there and we'd love to talk to you about iot fantastic phil this has been a great conversation i really appreciate you taking the time to do this um on your friday uh we look forward to getting this out to our audience and having you back to talk more about everything going on at vodafone that's fantastic thank you for your time today thank you all right everyone thanks again for watching that episode of the iot for all podcast if you enjoyed the episode please click the thumbs up button subscribe to our channel and be sure to hit the bell notification so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available other than that thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time
2022-04-16 15:29
