In this episode of The 5G Factor, our series that focuses on all things across the 5G ecosystem, we review key 5G ecosystem developments including recent deft moves by top-tier communications service providers (CSPs) such as BT Group and ServiceNow expanding their relation to vastly improve the CX and workforce experience, Vodafone Germany and FlyNex taking to the drone skies, and Altice using the Google Cloud Application Integration architecture to surmount legacy-borne complexity.
Our analytical review drilled down on:
BT Group ServiceNow Strengthen Relationship to Elevate CX. BT Group and ServiceNow expand their strategic relationship to improve customer and workforce experiences. The multi-year agreement will extend ServiceNow service management capabilities to all BT Group units to drive savings, efficiency, and improved customer experience. BT Group will also use ServiceNow Service Bridge for an automated connection between BT and its customers and plans to pilot ServiceNow’s Now Assist for Telecom Service Management (TSM) to power GenAI capabilities for internal and customer-facing teams. We delve into why this deal uplifts BT’s AI credentials and validates ServiceNow’s market momentum in the CSP space, executing on ServiceNow Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott’s vision of embedding intelligence across every workflow to accelerate the digital transformation of key customers such as BT.
Vodafone Germany and FlyNex Take to the Drone Skies. Vodafone Germany and data collection company FlyNex have launched DroNet Hub, a comprehensive online platform to help businesses plan and manage commercial drone flights. The new ‘DroNet Connect Stream’ tariff comes with a high-speed data volume of 500GB (gigabytes), optionally expandable to 1 TB (terabytes), ensures a consistent transmission of live data from the drone directly to the Hub. Data from the mobile network is also integrated, to help understand the connectivity and population density that lies ahead on a flight path. We examine why the DroNet Hub all-in-one platform, that includes planning, organizing the flight, and automated data collection and reporting, represents an innovative breakthrough in CSP support and delivery of drone services.
Altice Enlists Google Clouds Application Integration to Tame Complexity. Altice Group, through the validation process of Altice Labs, is spotlighting that the introduction of Application Integration has proven especially effective in managing the complexity of its business processes and operations consisting of a growing number of legacy components and intricate workflows overseen by an enterprise service bus. Application Integration is Google Cloud’s Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that automates business processes by connecting any application, including home-grown and third-party SaaS, with an intuitive interface that enables the building of intricate flows, data mapping, and the streamlining of operations with pre-built tasks and triggers. We assess how the new architecture manages APIs for Altice systems including CRM, identity management, shopping carts, plus modules supporting the customer journey, billing, and usage charging as well as efficiently interworking with components for operations, OSS/BSS platforms, service quality, and call centers.
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Ron Westfall: Hello and welcome everyone to The 5G Factor. I’m Ron Westfall, Research Director here at The Futurum Group and I’m joined here today by my distinguished colleague, Tom Hollingsworth, the networking nerd and event lead at Tech Field Day here field at The Futurum Group. In fact, I believe we are basking right now in his Sphere infused afterglow of an extremely successful networking field day exclusive at HPE Discover with the HPE Aruba Networking Team. And adding to that momentum today, we are focusing on major 5G ecosystem developments that have caught our eye, including BT strengthening its ServiceNow relationship, Vodafone taking drone services to the next level we believe, and Altice Labs working with Google Cloud to make network APIs matter. So Tom, welcome to The 5G Factor again and many thanks for joining. How are things going on with you since the last episode?
Tom Hollingsworth: They’re going pretty good. I’m basking not baking because that S is very important. It was Vegas hot, but the nice thing is, like you said, we got to enjoy the very first keynote in the sphere. We got to see Jensen Huang just kind come out and be a rockstar. And in fact, we got the announcement that day that Nvidia was now the most valuable company in the world, which I thought was apropos. I’m not saying HP discovered something over the top, but I’m saying it probably didn’t hurt.
Ron Westfall: Right on. No, I think the timing was outstanding and as a coda of sorts we got to see Dead & Company perform at The Sphere. So I think we can shout out that if you have an opportunity to visit the sphere, by all means, check it out. Also, looking ahead, we have Network Field Day 35 on July 10th-11th, including guests such as Intel, Arrcus, Hedgehog, Selector AI and cPacket all joining us a great eclectic lineup to be sure. Anything to add for whatever upcoming Tech Field Day events?
Tom Hollingsworth: No, right now I’m very focused on making sure that Networking Field Day goes off without a hitch and we should have a great lineup of presenters that you just mentioned. We’re going to have some great delegates as well including you. So it should be a fun time and we’re going to make sure the AC is cranked up so that none of those July heat waves in the room, the only thing hot about Networking Field Day is going to be the content of course.
Ron Westfall: Yeah, yeah, we’ll have the liquid cooling in full rev. So all good, all good. And so hey, with that, let’s jump right in and look at BT and ServiceNow. They’ve had an ongoing relationship and they just announced that they have expanded it to really focus on improving customer and workforce experiences, which I think also merits extra attention including customer experience. So with that, what they’re doing is they have a multi-year agreement that will extend ServiceNow service management capabilities to all BT group units to really improve savings efficiency and also again, uplifting that customer experience as well as employee experience. Now BT Group will also use ServiceNow Service Bridge for automated connections between BT and its customers and also plans to pilot ServiceNow’s Now Assist for telecom service management or TSM to basically power gen AI capabilities for internal and customer facing teams. Now what we’ve seen is that BT has successfully consolidated legacy service management platforms from the BT digital unit onto a single ServiceNow platform.
And that basically started in 2022. And as such, the company’s rolling out ServiceNow service management solutions, again organization wide. Now for me, a key takeaway is that BT is also one of the first customers to pilot Now Assist for TSM and benefit from ServiceNow’s Gen AI capabilities. And so what we’re seeing is that in the initial rollout, about 300 agents, Now Assist will demonstrate meaningful results by allowing these agents to respond and drive quite simply those better experiences we’ve been hearing so much about because of Gen AI, and that certainly applies to how agents interact with customers. Now what we’re seeing is that case summarization reduces the time it takes agents to generate case activity summaries by 55% and also creating a better agent handoff experience by reducing the time it takes to review complex case notes also by 55%. So this is a magic number, clearly they can drive at 55% efficiencies. And also by reducing overall handling time, Now Assist is helping BT Groups’ ability to improve meantime to resolution.
And this is actually by a third, not quite 55%, but still, all these are impressive results and I believe this is showing that the market momentum ServiceNow is achieving and the telecom space is also applicable across the overall market. And telecom as we’re seeing with this build out of the BT relationship, the ServiceNow TSM portfolio is also being used by top tier operators such as Tata Communications, Telia and Vodafone. And we also saw that ServiceNow chairman and CEO Bill McDermott provided the keynote for our Six Five AI Unleashed Summit. And at the summit he detailed how ServiceNow is embedding intelligence across every workflow while partnering with industry operators such as BT to accelerate their path towards digital business. And I think under his leadership, ServiceNow has become the intelligent platform for advancing this end-to-end digital transformation mission and vision, connecting people, processes, data, devices and so forth onto a single unified platform with a single architecture and one data model. So that’s a lot to pack in. And Tom, from your perspective, what are some of the key impressions about this BT ServiceNow relationship that jumps out?
Tom Hollingsworth: I’m really impressed that BT was able to consolidate so many of their existing platforms onto a single ServiceNow platform instance. Having been in IT for as long as I have been, I know how difficult it can be when you have to go dig up information on service tickets from one old platform. Did I remember the login? Can it even display on this screen? What do you mean I have to use a terminal window? That kind of stuff. It makes it difficult for this information to be in one centrally located area. And then once they were able to do that, I think it’s one of the reasons why BT was picked to pilot this new GenAI feature set is because they have consolidated all their data in one spot. I spent a few months, we’ll call it that, on a national help desk when I was just starting out in my career.
And I can tell you automated case summaries are something that not enough people are talking about. When you call into a national help desk, you don’t get to stay on the phone for hours while we resolve this problem. Usually what they do is they work it to a point where there’s going to be something that needs to happen, whether they’re scanning a computer or they’ve kicked off a process that could take a while and they’re going to let you go because they have a minimum call time requirement that they have to hit and they want to get you off the phone. It’s not that they’re being rude, it’s they’re trying to hit their metrics. But one of the biggest problems that I had when I worked there was we would get a call that had come in from somebody previously and their case notes were poor, I’ll use poor because I can’t curse on here, but it was so difficult to figure out what they had done. Whereas now when you’ve got longer important call chains or better yet the infamous follow the sun, 14 people on a bridge kind of call where we’re trying to solve these issues, being able to automatically summarize what’s been going on, what you’ve done, what’s worked, what changes have affected, and then hand that off to the next agent without needing to spend that hour doing that.
That is a massive force multiplier for your support organizations because the more time is spent in admin time, understanding a case and the less time you spend actually supporting the customer doesn’t just affect your metrics, it affects your customer’s perceptions. And I promise you if you ask a customer who’s ever been put on hold while someone reads up on this case, quoting fingers is they have a poor impression of that client. Whereas if you get ahold of somebody who’s like, “Yeah, before we get on the call, I was able to figure out what’s going on, I think I’ve made a path forward on this, let’s give it a shot.” That gives you confidence that they’re actually doing the work. With Gen AI capabilities that increases that capability for them to get the understanding of what’s going on as they dive into the case notes.
Ron Westfall: Yeah, I think this is something that is really vital for any operator out there, let alone any organization. It’s really just improving the overall experience. It’s certainly the customer, as you pointed out Tom, knowing that, okay, when I reach out, they’re going to reasonably prepared, they’re going to have perhaps an answer ready to go, et cetera. And I think that’s going to quite simply improve the stickiness of the relationship, being able to diversify the relationship and so forth. But also the 55% improvement in efficiency so forth, that I think, is going to really win the hearts of more operators out there, that ServiceNow is increasingly becoming a prominent player in this space and not necessarily today immediately associated with this telecom space, but I think the BT deal here will start changing that significantly in addition to the ongoing relationships they have. But I think it’s also about that workforce experience, it’s a win-win.
It’s improving things for the customer, but also you have a workforce that is also more confident that will be able to be more efficient, be able to quite simply have an appreciation for not having to go into the trenches and getting really dirty just to find out that okay, the terminal that the person was using that were watering their plants on it and the water short circuited the terminal and he wasted 48 hours trying to figure out all the other things. So that was another one that from my prior experience actually came up. And so I think, yeah, this is something that we’re looking forward to seeing more of and I anticipate that ServiceNow will definitely expand its profile as a result. And speaking of that, let’s now look at where else the CSPs are advancing service innovation. And one that I think is interesting to many people is what operators are looking to do with drone capabilities and services. And what we’re seeing is that Vodafone, Germany and a data collection company called FlyNex have launched a drone net hub, an online platform that can help businesses plan and manage commercial drone flights. And in recent years, drones have proved valuable in many commercial scenarios, and that includes transporting packages on factory premises, monitoring difficult to reach infrastructure.
I know real estate agents are actually using drones to inspect roofs before a house is sold or goes on the market, things of that nature. So this is actually having commercial impact in many important sectors. However, as we know, implementing and planning drone flights can prove complex and sometimes time-consuming. And this is where the drone net hub can make a difference because it’s basically allowing through a few clicks, I know it’s a bit of a cliche, but it makes a difference, to give them businesses a way to plan, control and analyze flights under one monitor, under one screen. And so again, there are many considerations before having commercial drone flights, especially in populated areas, approved and implemented. And this includes approval of the flight and its trajectory, the quality of the local network coverage. This is where certainly Vodafone comes in, and also ensuring overall controls. So after a flight, any image or data recorded can be very important and then it needs to be evaluated and also done, sometimes in a real time fashion. So what we’re seeing is that Drone Net Hub is covering these areas with their platform, and as such it can automate this whole process including the after drone flight data collection and reporting. So what it’s coming down to is that the drone net connect stream tariff comes with high speed volume of 500 gigabits and it’s expandable to one terabit.
So that will probably cover many of the use cases on the horizon in terms of, okay, why use this service or why test it out? And so this can really ensure a consistent transmission of live data from the drone directly to the hub, which is certainly vital, plus data from the mobile network is again integrated. So it’s not just the drone itself, but also the network that it is communicating with to ensure the safeguards are in place to ensure, again, the quality of the data and so forth. And by having AI, our friend, integrated into the system, aerial photographs can be analyzed more quickly and also help with that report generation process on an automated basis. And so we’ve already seen that Vodafone Germany is working on drone projects which allow residents of remote villages to have their shopping delivered by air, and that includes non-prescription drugs, but wait for it, now, prescription medicine I understand is also included in these deliveries. So this is pretty cool stuff and so it’s no longer a science fiction. And Tom, what do you think about drone services and the ability of operators to actually deliver them on a meaningful commercial basis?
Tom Hollingsworth: Well, I for one, welcome our new commercial drone overlords. Oh, I kid a little bit. So the example that you cited about using drones for doing roof inspections is a big one. And I live in Oklahoma, for those who don’t know and everyone knows one thing about Oklahoma, well, in general, being able to do a long survey of a neighborhood to figure out hail damage in a storm path would be huge. Another thing we have out here is wind. It’s in the song, right? Wind comes sweeping down the plane. So we have a lot of wind turbines and those things are really high, really difficult to maintain. Whereas what if we could have a drone pop up and do an inspection of the turbine housing and maybe the blades if they’re locked shut that day, but more importantly, they don’t put wind turbines in populated areas. That’s a drive to get out there. You don’t want to send your best people out to that area in order to be able to do this inspection in person because that truck roll could cost your company thousands of dollars in lost work hours. Whereas with this drone hub portal, I can send out a drone operator who doesn’t need to be trained in the inspection itself. They just know pop up here, scan this area, and I can have my operator watching from the console at home or being able to download the data as it’s uploaded to the portal and say, “Okay, it looks to me like there’s a stress fracture in this area, Murray, why don’t you go ahead and pan back over here and give me a good shot of that area and hold on it for 15 seconds so that we can analyze it.”
And then because you can then run AI against all those images, what you can do is you can say, “Okay, the AI inferencing tells me that there’s probably going to be an issue in this area, whether it’s heat related or something like that, or there’s some kind of a stress situation.” This allows us to proactively maintain these devices so that they don’t come apart and create hazards to life and limb. And these are things that you want drones doing. What it takes to get clearance to go up one of those towers, it takes weeks. And if anything kind of causes that to not happen, whether it’s a weather event or a sickness or something like that, you would rather be able to dispatch a lower cost employee to go do it. And if it’s in the flight path of an airport, good luck, because you have to get FAA approval in order to be able to fly that drone, which is another thing that I think the portal gives is the ability to say, “Okay, am I far enough away from this airport flight path to be able to fly this without getting a permit? Or if I do need to get a permit, can I get that system set up in advance so I can say on these dates at this time, I’m going to be out here doing this.” Because that will go a long way to making sure that the FAA is more tolerant of using drones for things like inspections.
Ron Westfall: Yeah, I think that’s a perfect example, Tom, and that is energy infrastructure. Certainly wind turbine farms pops to mind, but also naturally solar farms would be well suited for this. And also I think what’s going to be interesting is that data centers are really pushing the limits for what the grid can support in terms of energy production today. And a lot of that’s because of training AI models, it’s the GPU intensive data center loads. And I think what we’re going to see is that more data centers are going to go off grid in order to support these demands and come up with their own independent energy sources, which can include small modular nuclear reactors. That’s not far-fetched. We’re seeing organizations like Open AI investing in this. And so yes, the drones would be very useful for any energy infrastructure use case I anticipate, especially if it involves off-grid implementations, remote implementations and so forth. So this is something that I think will be integral to many verticals, real estate, energy infrastructure and so forth. And so yeah, this is actually cool stuff and hopefully will be implemented in a safe way and will prove a commercial success for all that are involved.
And speaking of what operators need to do to improve their competitiveness, let’s switch over back to what the CSPs need to do to make their services all the more innovative and all the more interesting to customers out there. And what we’re seeing is that Altice Labs is now working with Google Cloud to enhance its API management and overall API capabilities using Google’s application integration capabilities. Now, as a bit of background, Altice Group’s existing IT infrastructure as we can imagine is pretty robust because it has to operate across many different groups across a population that runs into the hundreds of millions being served. And as a result, it is also complex and compromises of, again, a huge number of legacy components that we’ve touched on already, as well as intricate workflows, hello ServiceNow, that are managed by an enterprise service bus in this situation. So this complexity, as we can imagine, hinders Altice’s ability to swiftly launch new offerings and features. And to help overcome this, Altice Labs, the lab part of Altice Group is, one, building APIs to streamline communication with these fragmented systems. Two, ensuring precise control and protection for these APIs using the current Apogee API management tool. And then thirdly, orchestrating these intricate integration flows, data mappings and air handling using Google Cloud’s application integration capability.
And so what we’re seeing now is that Altice is spotlighting that they’re introducing application integration and is really to manage that complexity. They’re basically saying, “This is actually making a difference.” It’s like, again, with BT, we’re actually seeing some breakthroughs. And so this is actually very encouraging, I believe. And application integration is how Google Cloud’s integration platform as a service, or IPAs, is offered to customers such as Altice. And it automates business processes by being able to connect to virtually any application, both the homegrown ones, and that’s important when it comes to operators, as well as third party SaaS applications. And again, that’s through only a few clicks type of simplicity. Now that requires an intuitive interface, and I think again, clearly Google knows how to use GenAI tools, and I think that’s going to be enlisted to help this overall overcoming of complexity in all of these environments. Now what we’re seeing is that Altice is using Google Cloud’s application integration also to manage APIs for systems such as CRM, identity management, shopping carts, also specific modules and customer journeys, billing, usage, charging, you name it. It’s just literally a vast array of things that need to come together if the operators really want to attain operational efficiency.
And also it’s supporting BSS and OSS service quality and call center capability. So we could see why there’s such a challenge and when the challenge is being met in a meaningful way to the point the operator is going to share it publicly, that is important. So I think it’s also good to ask, “What is different this time?” I touched on it already because after all we’ve seen that the boulevard of broken dreams is filled with previous initiatives to supercharge telco APIs. I can remember back to the days of Parlay and also subsequent telco app stores that were basically rendered irrelevant by the Apple Android app stores and so forth. And so fast-forward to today, I think these are going to be difference makers to have partners like Google Cloud, GenAI tools, and so forth that could actually raise the telco game to the point where developers actually want to use their APIs and actually as a result, entice customers to check out, “Hey, the operator actually has something cool. I don’t actually have to limit myself to an existing Android Apple app store, for example, to get something cool and different.” And so with that, Tom, I know you have experience you’ve already touched on here, what do you think is potentially different here? What do you think is going on?
Tom Hollingsworth: Well, long, long, long time ago in a previous life, I worked a lot with Novell Identity Manager, and it was amazing what I could do with it. I could provision accounts and other systems and I could make things work the way that it does, but unfortunately, this is one of those cases where you really don’t want to see how the sausage is made because this is in a pre-API days, everything had to have this weird hacked together system, and if something broke or a field moved, nothing worked anymore and it was just painful. And I fast-forward to today where we’re talking about doing the exact same things only we’re doing them the right way, we’re using API functionality. We’re homogenizing everything so that it works properly, so that if things change or if something needs to be updated or dealt with that it can be done programmatically. And that’s a huge boon for people that are trying to bring these disparate services together.
So on the one hand, earlier in the episode, we had this amazing story of how BT was able to consolidate all of these devices and all these platforms together into one ServiceNow instance. And that’s great if you have the manpower of BT to do that. We don’t. Most people don’t anymore. So what would be better is if we didn’t have to consolidate all the services together, if we could just make them act like they were consolidated with API calls and things like that. But you still have to have that middleware to make that work. And I think that’s what Altice Labs is really trying to do, is they’re going to be the one-stop shop for how to make all of your stuff that doesn’t talk together, talk together. And by leveraging all of these Google APIs and things like that, because really good at that stuff, it’s giving people that kind of capability to go out and integrate those pieces together. And if you’ve ever had to deal with this at a job or when you’ve created an account somewhere where you’ve gotten five or six things that all happen all at once and then six months from now you’re like, “Well, I’m trying to do this.” “Oh, hey, we never created that for you. Oops, our bad.
We must have missed that on the checklist.” “Well, now that you’re making me go through all this extra stuff and wasting my time, I’m not very happy.” However, if the checklist is now automated through the use of all these APIs, and so that account creation for R. Westfall creates all these other things, that’s an even better solution because now I don’t have to worry about the boxes getting missed. And because it all has APIs for interfaces, but also for reporting, I can get exception errors if something goes wrong. I can find out, “Oh, hey, someone changed the way that their API is reporting and I need to rewrite this interface so that it works better this time.” And that gives the people the ability to offer better services for less manpower. Because like we said, not every one of us has the capability of BT to just go roll seven systems into one. We’re probably more likely having one or two people rolling seven systems across 49 other ones.
Ron Westfall: Yes. And I think that is heartfelt. I think we saw that HPE Discover as well as many of the recent breakthrough announcements from ServiceNow. It’s not about adding more data. It’s like there’s already an ocean of data out there, what the customers need, what the organizations need now is how can we better and intelligently manage the data we already have while also adding on naturally new data inputs? And this is, I think, where differences being made is the fact that we’re coming up finally with platforms and tools that are directly responding to this. And it’s incremental in some areas, like in security, there’s still this headache of we have lots of siloed legacy systems. It’s hard to get them working together under a single, I guess you can say window or pane of glass, which I think is an overused marketing term.
But it gets the idea across that this is something that is really going to require AI, both in terms of automating operations, sort of like on the back end, but also on the front end, using those GenAI capabilities to help anybody who is on the workforce or who’s a partner or a customer to avoid getting bogged down in these complexity silos and so forth that can render many people in their sleep repeating representative, representative, representative, just to get something even looked at, let alone fixed. And so, yes, I’ll get off the soapbox there. I think that’s well understood. But I think what we’re covering in this episode is yes, there are actually solutions out there that are making a difference in the very challenging teleco environments. And so with that, thank you again Tom for joining today’s episode. I’m certainly looking forward to our next 5G Factor.
Tom Hollingsworth: I’m very much looking forward to it as well. I know we’re getting into the dog days of summer, but the nice thing is that the dog days of summer are usually when people start doing kind of exciting things with their networks because nobody’s looking around. So we should be seeing some very interesting stuff coming down the pike.
Ron Westfall: I agree. And I think we’ll have an opportunity to touch on that July 10th and 11th in Silicon Valley, no less, to kind of get that pulse on what is going on during dog days of summer that can really make a difference for the second half of 2024. And with that, thank you everyone for joining us and tuning in. Of course, please bookmark 5G Factor and The Futurum Group, as well as the Tech Field Day pages because we got plenty of great new episodes coming up. And I think ones that definitely capture some of the insights and information that come out from that. And with that, everyone have a good 5G and Telco API day.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
He is a recognized authority at tracking the evolution of and identifying the key disruptive trends within the service enablement ecosystem, including a wide range of topics across software and services, infrastructure, 5G communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, security, cloud computing, revenue management, and regulatory issues.
Prior to his work with The Futurum Group, Ron worked with GlobalData Technology creating syndicated and custom research across a wide variety of technical fields. His work with Current Analysis focused on the broadband and service provider infrastructure markets.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
