Taking the Platform Global with TELUS Partnership

Transcript

Intro:
You’re listening to IoT Leaders, a podcast from Eseye that shares real IoT stories from the field about digital transformation, swings and misses, lessons learned and innovation strategies that work. In each episode, you’ll hear our conversations with top digitization leaders on how IoT is changing the world for the better. Let IoT Leaders be your guide to IoT digital transformation and innovation. Let’s get into the show.

Nick Earle:
Hi, this is Nick Earle and welcome to this episode of IoT Leaders. I think you’re really going to enjoy this one. I’m talking to the CTO of TELUS, TELUS Corporation of Canada, the large Canadian mobile network operator, Ibrahim Gedeon. Now, Ibrahim has a lot of very in sync views and some great ways of describing them. It’s actually quite amusing, the conversation that you’re about to hear. But he also is a real visionary. From our perspective, TELUS were the first company that we partnered with to take our platform and take it global. They now have something called TELUS Global Connect. You’ll hear about that. And it sits above Vodafone’s platform. It sits above Sierra’s platform. It sits above, I think, two Jasper platforms that they have.

Nick Earle:
But he doesn’t really talk about that, he talks about why they did it, but then talks about his vision as to where the market needs to go and gets in some very interesting material at the end, where he talks about the difference between the hyperscalers and the operators and how the operators, although they may seem as if they’re the guys who perhaps are old-fashioned and won’t be able to make the change that’s needed. Actually what assets they’ve got, which actually could be really incredible in this future world, particularly around trust and trust from an end user point of view, but only if the operators work together collaboratively.

Nick Earle:
So I think you’re really going to enjoy this. So let me hand you over now to my chat with Ibrahim Gedeon, the CTO of TELUS. So Ibrahim, welcome to the IoT Leaders podcast. Now, I have to say for our listeners, a couple of things, first of all, who is Ibrahim and why am I talking to him? So Ibrahim Gedeon is the CTO of TELUS, the Canadian operator. I call them Canadian, but actually as you’ll hear in this podcast, TELUS is actually a global corporation and doing a lot of very interesting things. So we’re going to get into that. But first of all, Ibrahim, welcome to the IoT Leaders podcast.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Hey, thank you, Nick. Excited being here and chatting with you.

Nick Earle:
Great. And that background that you’ve got for those of you watching the video looks really nice. Is that somewhere in Canada? Is that photograph?

Ibrahim Gedeon:
It is off of British Columbia. It’s a small area that we use the profits from the sale of some of our real estate to build and provide a haven for children that either travelled at home or need extra support. And this is from one of our engineers that provided coverage to that remote area. So it’s part of our social purpose. So we use the profits from real estate to start the TELUS Future Friendly Foundation. So-

Nick Earle:
How cool is that? Well, that’s great. I didn’t know that, and I’m glad I asked you about it. So that’s great. So, one of the reasons that we’re talking, apart from the fact, I think you have some very interesting views about IoT, where it is, where it’s going to go and the value, but before we unpack that I’d like to start, because we already have a corporate relationship between Eseye and TELUS. And TELUS were the first company that white labels has white labeled our platform, and you’re now in market. And I know you’ve got some great prospects, which of course we can’t mention, but you’ve created a global, you’ve launched a global capability under the brand name TGC or TELUS Global Connect. So I just wanted to perhaps start off there by saying, could you share to the extent that you can, could you share the motivation behind doing that?

Nick Earle:
Because I know that you had Jasper platform, Sierra Wireless platform, Vodafone platform. I think you’re using at least three platforms. And then you did the overlay to create TGC. Can you share a little bit what your motivation was for doing that?

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Well, Nick, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go a bit back for the folks watching the podcast. We partner with Eseye because there’s a similarity or convergence of destiny on what the end user should do. So I don’t want to be flowery, I’m a geek. So I’ll be very… The partnership with Eseye had us at frictionless. So one of the biggest challenges that I think the industries had is there’s always these ecosystems that are very heavy and actually impact going to market, one. Two, impact how customers are onboarded. And three, the global reach is not using next gen technology. And I think a lot of it comes from protecting your existing revenue. So, as a business person, yourself and myself, you either use legacy as a launchpad to the new stuff, or as a boat anchor. And we felt in the IoT space, we had a lot of great partners, as you mentioned some of them. But a lot of it was hinged on minutes and bytes, which defeats where the world’s going.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
And then if you look at the fact that TELUS’s vision is the future is friendly, and there is technical meaning behind that marketing term. The Eseye is all about frictionless. That was the right partner to build an umbrella because you really need to build an ecosystem. So when you say you’re white label, I don’t take exception, but within white label we actually partnered and onboarded. So we threw our assets under the Eseye umbrella, and we hope more of our peers as they come on board, because it will only be richer when there’s more players in playground. Right? So the intent is not to be exclusive, it’s to be inclusive under the Eseye umbrella. And there are technical nuances. It does mean that you need to go to market in a very different way than most people see it today. To be honest, roaming is disappearing.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
You cannot consider what we’re doing with Eseye and IoT as roaming globally, which is the case of that. So for my peers who are thinking of IoT as I have that roaming revenue, or that dollar 37, we have to think of it differently. You need that platform. That will be the umbrella platform where people can come in, integrate, and we have to think of the actual end user. I know it’s not what wholesale or partner solutions team think, which do most of these agreements, but I think our team is a bit unique and we work very closely with them.

Nick Earle:
And I thank you for correcting me. You’ve even expanded what Eseye does. So you’re describing what we do better than I described, the CEO, what we do. It’s interesting you talk about putting your assets underneath Eseye. I talked about, in the intro that you’re bidding on some very big deals that frankly are truly global, you’re offering a truly global solution. And that could well mean that the connections, rather than roaming could get localized onto other MNOs that perhaps you may or may not have roaming agreements with, but they could localize onto them. And so there’s this agnostic approach doing the right thing for the user, as opposed to optimizing the profitability from the early agreements-

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Sorry to interrupt you, but you hit the nail on the head. Why do I need to own the user end-to-end as long as I have the user for a number of services and I want their convenience, right? So their stickiness and convenience, which is what we’re trying to do with TELUS Global Connect among other things, right, like I don’t need to ingest everything from TELUS. You are a TELUS subscriber, thank you for what you’re doing. And then, but I have to think of when you’re traveling or when you’re onboarding with a different platform. We’ve made our money based on certain things, right? So we need to think of what is the best thing for you. And thus it is, we need to be members or partners with ecosystems, Nick, bluntly putting it that provide you with the biggest range of connectivity, the biggest range of APIs. And we need to think beyond mobility, connectivity through eSIM and legacy stem. Right?

Nick Earle:
Exactly. And I’ve talked in some of the recent podcasts about how people don’t realize the fundamental disruption that eSIM is driving. I mean, one thing we know is our whole raison d’être is yes, you mentioned the simplified, but it’s also to demystify IoT, because it’s massively complex. And we talk about ourselves being the guide, which is why there’s an umbrella behind my head, not a lake, the idea of guiding somebody on a journey. But for a lot of people that we speak to, they say, “Oh, eSIM, there’s this basic confusion, does that mean electronic? Does that mean embedded?” But it’s something much more fundamental because it’s intended form factor. It’s the fact that it’s no longer tied to an operator. And so user choice is now being given that the users or the device, and in many cases… Increasingly the user says, “No, I have an agnostic capability, not a proprietary capability,” which is fundamentally disruptive to a model that we’ve known for 40 years.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Yeah. Like so I do, you got me excited. So I was going to jump in.

Nick Earle:
No, that’s the idea of the podcast. Feel free to get excited.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
As I said, I’m a geek, so I’m not terribly marketing worthy, but I love to share my views, especially when we’re working with you guys. I think people miss the boat because eSIM is not the next gen SIM. It actually redefines, not just the independence of the freedom that the client has, but think of the old days where we used to have to insert hardware and add security on hardware. Now we’ve joined the 21st century for the love of God, like when we’re able to actually manipulate those parameters. So two things, one you’ve got to talk about is independence, and yes, it does give you independence, but it’s not so much independence from your operator, it’s the independence, the ability to do way more with your current device than you would in the old days, because it’s tied to a world garden. And the other part where people, I believe it’s in this norm where they say, “Well, what’s eSIM?” And it’s just another SIM.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
It’s because if you don’t invest in a next gen stack, and I’m talking about OSS/BSS, then you’re building a skyscraper in Venice. You have a 30, 40-year-old… (Nick laughs) Oh, but you do. You have a 30, 40-year-old legacy system that’s so used to minutes and bites and picking a roaming partner. And you add on an eSIM, it will have the same behaviour. You are truly… It’s like when people, they mis-built 5G. So you know what, it’s so easy to do 2G with 5G. You just do nothing. You leverage the old technology. I think it’s critical to take eSIM, and that’s why we’re excited about the work with you guys, is to take eSIM and think of it as a disruption, not just in the technology of implementing authentication and verification, you have to think of eSIM as a vehicle that enables other services and what adds on. And then you have to think of the ecosystem.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
I’m not being negative. Nobody is going to get fired to give 5G that looks like 4G. That’s what most of the telcos did. It was a nuclear war. Mine is bigger than you yet there was no devices. I remember around the world, like, who’s 5G is bigger? And I think it behoves us to look at people like Eseye and I see only Eseye, not that you don’t have competitors, but I love the DNA and the agility of being able to get together and say, okay well, eSIM redefines how people ingest and consume operator services and third party services. That’s critical. What does that mean?

Nick Earle:
Yeah. By the way, I have no problems with you mentioning Eseye, but yes, other MBNOs are available as they say. We both have been in the industry a lot of years, and one of the lessons that I learned having worked in multiple countries is that there’s two fundamental ways always of looking at things from the inside out and the outside in. And when you do look inside out and when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You just do very slight increments to what you’re doing. And you think that you’re making significant progress, but actually when you look outside in and you look at what people actually want to do and the potential for IoT to your point, it is so big that if you take a narrow parochial, perhaps because you’re trying to protect a P&L or a legacy business model, which is the primary reason why people don’t embrace change in my view, because it disrupts a business model, it disrupts the way people are paid and remunerated.

Nick Earle:
But actually when you do achieve the leap frog and say, I actually I’m going to embrace this and I know it’s different to what I did previously, but actually it gives more user choice. That’s when you jump forward, and then you make progress. And I mentioned the fact that in the intro, you guys are global. One of the things that was attractive to us in the partnership is your TELUS international business. Because I didn’t realize, I must admit, how big that is. I mean, it’s a big… I think it did its own… It floated. It’s gone off-

Ibrahim Gedeon:
We floated on the stock market. We maintained, I think approximately 60% of ownership as TELUS. It did very well. It’s $10 billion valuation, which was more than most Telco’s around the world.

Nick Earle:
Is that right?

Ibrahim Gedeon:
But it’s a very interesting offer, right? It’s not just IoT outsourcing, it is a full service leveraging the TELUS experience with massive partnerships, with the likes of Google and others, and points of presence all around the world. So it grew from personalized care. So if you think of, when I said we would’ve partnered with Eseye just because you said frictionless. So we’re talking about the future as friendly and where we’re heading, but also it dovetails nicely into… Everything is global now. It’s up to you whether you choose to make it so or not, like there’s no such thing, and not just with COVID, with connectivity. You could build something in a basement in the UK, or you guys don’t have basements, but a basement in Canada. There’s no reason why somebody in London can’t consume it.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
So that being the case, if it’s the best product, what are the impediments? And then you start thinking of mobile networks because everybody is connected or tethered in a wireless fashion. How do we make sure that that happens? And like eSIM to me is a wonderful progression on devices and connecting devices and that connectivity. But from a corporate point of view, we’re massively invested in health, agriculture and the work we’re doing with TELUS International. So you’re right, if you look at the bulk of, not just the revenues, but the bulk of emphasis and investment, if you take broadband off, which all operators are doing to make sure there’s proper broadband, be it wired or wireless, it is these verticals that we think are truly global, and there’s some centres of excellence that can publish globally, Nick.

Nick Earle:
And it’s a blend of the value of… I mean, in its most simple form, the moment you have a cloud-based virtualized capability, it is inherently global. So we come from a global world. We don’t come… We, Eseye come from a global world in that we’re Cloud native. And for us, a geographic border is… Well, it might make a difference in terms of the currency on the invoice, but that’s all I can really think it makes a difference. However, the components, as we talked about it from the operator point of view, they have all of these incredible assets, have come from a geographic model, typically three operators per country, sometimes you see four, regulators per country, license spectrum, you buy it per country. So we’re going from a model, I think this comes back to the first thing that you said, which was always built up with geography as the sort of, the moat, the protective moat or whatever.

Nick Earle:
It was a geography model to a world where suddenly now with seamless everything, not just seamless connectivity, but seamless billing, seamless APIs, seamless capabilities, the data, network based infrastructure that distributes data across a global data centre capability with data that can be back hauled, but it can also be processed locally at the edge. And as the data goes to the edge, it becomes a borderless architecture, which is global digital and therefore much, much more scalable. And that, as you say, I know we’re working with multiple parts of TELUS, but TELUS architect, again, I can’t talk about the project, but we’re doing work with them around animals, let’s say on the architect side, where we’re not just talking about cellular. No, we’re talking about shortwave type sponsors.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
To me, it is very critical, because you cannot protect a technology. You need to protect the services of the customers you want to serve. So when you think of it that way, we’re 100% with you. So one thing I didn’t mention when we talked about the TELUS Ag and TELUS Health, there is a pro for a carrier if they do it right – to open up the Canadian market to the globe through people coming in. But also at the same time, there’s some unique Canadian requirements and Canadian services can go to the world. And how are we part of it? Not just because you have your TELUS device and TELUS centre. That is why the ecosystem, that’s why the APIs, that’s why the work with you guys. Like, the more successful Eseye is the more successful TELUS is and the happier and the more enriched my clients are. And that way, if they’re happy and they got unique services, they’ll never leave.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
At the end of the day, we both need to make money. Not everything can be churn reduction, but there’s a convenience piece that people have. Like, I look at today with COVID I have… We’re on Zoom now. I have Teams. I have WebEx. I have Google Meet.

Nick Earle:
Yeah, got them all.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
I have some bunch of friends at Verizon, so I have, I think Jeans, BlueJeans.

Nick Earle:
They use BlueJeans. Yeah. Yeah.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Yeah. So, but if you look at it, you know what, I think I’m comfortable paying five bucks a month, one button, I click on that, talk to all these six.

Nick Earle:
Yeah.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
And people have to think of Eseye that way. The convenience of not thinking is so beautiful because I need to go say, “Well, do I have a roaming agreement in Nigeria?” “Well, I’m not really sure. Let’s go check.” It’s a process. And you’re right. I cannot as TELUS do a… I have to do an operator or I go through Syniverse for example, which is a legacy version of what Eseye does. And they’re great friends, so as long as you understand. We love them for many other reasons and Tata Communications. But I think it’s got to be to the world where I don’t actually care, I’m going to trust that the ecosystem is big enough and working. Right?

Nick Earle:
So I think one of the questions that our viewers/listeners, people do both, would probably ask at this point is, let’s play devil’s advocate, or just ask the question, isn’t this what the hyperscalers are going to do? I mean, people say, yeah, but I get that. I get it has to be seamless. I get it has to be frictionless. I guess it has to be borderless. I want low price and I want choice and I want applications. And they say, “Isn’t this a world that looks a lot like what the hyperscalers-”

Ibrahim Gedeon:
100%, it does. It doesn’t mean the hyperscalers are the best people to deliver, because whether we like it at the end of the day, the operator is giving you the two things, be it wired connection, and you go wireless inside the house or your mobility connection. And that infrastructure investment has to be leveraged through myself or one of my peers, globally. So there’s a role for us to play, that the fact that they play a role which rides on top and doesn’t have any consideration, it’s something we should learn from if that’s what our clients want versus that’s what they provide. Yes, they do. But at the end of the day, you are going to ride on the cellular network. There’s a local piece that they can never give. So for example, I don’t know, the local power company is in London, but-

Nick Earle:
We have a choice, but there’s… Actually, you know what, mine is EDF, which is everyone thinks it’s a British company, but it’s actually Electricity De France. So my local power company is French.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
So, it’s EDF.

Nick Earle:
Oh, excuse me.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
We’re bilingual in Canada.

Nick Earle:
Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I should have thought of that.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
But Nick, so if you look at your power utility and they may be big enough, but a lot of these partnerships with the hyperscalers, they actually do not want to be local. This is the beautiful thing about the operator. Like I’d like to… I have the local touch. If something goes wrong, Google cannot send somebody to your house or Amazon. I can. So I think there’s a great role for us to play. The fact that they do certain things well does not mean my job is to say, “I’m not going to implement.” Actually, no I’m going to replicate. I mean, you look at F1, I take best practices, dovetail them, and the question is, what is my role? And that’s the role that I think is very critical and remains for operators.

Nick Earle:
Yeah. And that is our view. Our view is that you guys will always be there. I mean, because of the assets that you have, and you’ve built them up over probably 50 years, and those assets are always needed, if you can take the ease of use of the friction, the choice, the global capabilities and apply them to the assets, particularly if multiple operators can do it at the same time, you arguably create a one plus one equals three situation, because you’ve got the best of both worlds. You learn from the ease of use speed, the choice, everything that the hyperscalers have got, but you are leveraging the, frankly, trillion dollar plus assets that’s in the ground, that’s piped into everybody’s house, into everybody’s business, that you need the tower infrastructure, the… So it’s really a change management transition that we’re seeing in the industry here.

Nick Earle:
And I think eSIM is the trigger, and some early adopters such as yourself and some others coming down the pipe, this is the trigger for the best of the lessons that we’ve learned. And we learned them, by the way, in Cloud, they’re not new to IoT. This happened in data centres and applications. We learned them in Cloud. Now the chance is to take lessons and apply them to the operator capabilities. And then you have the best of both worlds for the customer.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Yeah. And then just to close off on this point, that’s what eSIM is all about. You’ve actually gone away from physical boundaries, which is what Cloud or network function virtualization does in theory.

Nick Earle:
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Yeah. I mean, you need, not that TELUS is special, I think we are special of course, but we have such a closely knit executive team and a bunch of actually people that work and we foster, what I call high technical EQ. So Nick, what you’re talking about is connect the dots, make sure your NFV guys talk to your Cloud guys, talk to your wholesale guys, talk to your SIM guys, talk to your core guys. And as long as they’re smart people talking everywhere, they see exactly what you’re seeing, but we need to use every disruption as an opportunity to make customers happier. And of course, increase top line and reduce cost.

Nick Earle:
Yeah. I think the NFV analogy is a good one. I want to switch subjects. My last question on this, I promise. But regular podcast listeners will know. I was 13 years in Cisco and when NFV and SDN, so network function virtualization, software defined networking came in, it was like, whoa, this is a threat. You will need less boxes. If you can actually create a dynamic flexible, event driven network capability with a software overlay on top of physical assets, is that an opportunity or a threat? But actually if you take a company wide view and in terms of what the market opportunity is, it’s an incredible opportunity. But if you take a view of no, my job is to sell more boxes. It’s a threat. And the same with the NFV, especially NFV to the edge of containers, because the applications are going into containers like Docker and Kubernetes, and they go into the edge.

Nick Earle:
So everything, what I mean by network level orchestration, everything has to be virtualized and extended to the edge beyond the hyperscale. It isn’t just a hyperscale world, it’s a behind the firewall, it’s a hyperscale. And now it’s going to be an IoT edge. And the IoT edge will in many/most cases go through the operators. So absolutely the opportunity here is to connect the whole thing. Hyperscalers will do the middle ring if you like, but the edge is a different issue, particularly when you look at what’s happening. So I think there’s a tremendous amount we can do. I don’t want to do this to dominate the podcast. I do want to move on to another area because you and I can probably talk for hours.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
No, but I also, as you’re preparing your notes for the second question, I think people also forget that I’m in Italy and I found this cool lamp. Why would the price points as if not eSIM capable? I bring it home. It should be freaking touchless, like the TELUS should discover it, you come to your mind, you come to your house, you put it, TELUS you discover it. TELUS should have a launchpad saying, “You’ve added another device.” Rather than, “Well, you need to activate. You need a rate plan. You need…” This is the part that I think when you think of connected, what we need to learn and also actually implementers, operators for the subscribers. Sorry, Nick, I interrupted you.

Nick Earle:
Well, no, it is a bridge. There are certain consumer devices, of course, where I think you could argue they’re pretty close to that. There are some devices, I mean, the Kindle is a good one. I take my Kindle, I go on holiday, Italy or the beautiful lake there, British Columbia. I know that part of the world. Our daughter went to university at UBC. And it just works. I don’t really think about it. I turn it on, it knows who I am. It connects. And I know it uses a technology called SM-DP+ in terms of being able to do that. But that is the exception, not the norm, because if you take IoT as you said, most devices don’t work like that. If you take it from country A to country B, there’s an 80% chance it won’t work.

Nick Earle:
And even if it can see a network, sometimes it’s… Like you land on an airplane, airport, you’ve got a network, but you can’t get your data. People say, “Why can’t I get my data?” It doesn’t work like that. So I think that we’re heading into that area where devices are much more smart and intelligent. They are multi, not just cellular, but they’ll be, I was going to say Sigfox, but I can’t say that now because they’ve gone now, unfortunately. But you’ll have Laura, you’ll have Bluetooth, you’ll have lower satellites. And so-

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Very few. Yeah.

Nick Earle:
And it’ll soon be… And today we talk about them in acronyms, but in the future, it’s just… The perfect technology is when it becomes invisible, whoever it was that said that first. Technologies become invisible when you don’t think about it. Has become a mainstream when you don’t think about it and it’s becoming invisible. And I guess our view is that’s the way it’s going to go is that we’re not going to talk about it in silos, in the future. It’s just going to be capability. And you can have the choice as a user and whoever you are in the ecosystem, you can have this choice, which will simplify the industry and reduce the number of players.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
I think, reduce the number of players in terms of friction. Like what you need-

Nick Earle:
In terms of the number of players needed to put the solution. I meant that, yes, reduce the number of players. And I wasn’t referring to the operators, but reduce the number of players-

Ibrahim Gedeon:
No, no. Piece. Piece, like, I mean, you can’t afford to activate eight things so your lamp works or your fridge works.

Nick Earle:
Yeah. Yeah.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
And I think this, as long as we’re doing some work, I can’t give you the project name because I’ll give it away. But it’s basically an Eseye’s part of it. But it’s what we call… It’s secret. Well, no, it’s the B to X to C, right? In the end, there’s a consumer.

Nick Earle:
Yes.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
And we tend to take the value chain and put B2B. There’s a relationship, then B2B2B is a relationship to C. I think what we want to meet is make sure the C can ingest the service, but because you want to stop the multiple agreements, think of the burden, right? To have all these agreements. That’s why you join at Eseye or an aggregate, a global MNO, right? So you need to reduce that, but it also needs to adapt to what they need locally. Right? Like, do I see my power utility? Or do I need their app? How many apps are you going to have? In the end you want that aggregated view. Right? So if we want to make everybody’s life easy, we actually partner with platforms that aggregate the services they need, which is our plan. Because it will happen. So either we write the wave or it’ll crash into us and every year we’ll be beaching and complaining, oh my God, we lost 10 more percent revenue. What are we going to do about it?

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Things are getting repriced. If you’re not increasing your top mind elsewhere, the current services are dying. I mean, you talk about NFV. I remember SD-WAN. We were the first to launch SD-WAN. They said, you’re repricing your MPLS business for him. I said, the market will reprice my MPLS business, but I better have a solution that is next gen, that customer would resonate with. So we were the first in the world to launch managed SD-WAN services. Right? So maybe it’s our DNA, but that’s why put the bulk of the work. Like Nick, the reason we’re here is because we’re partners. That is why we believe Eseye has the technical fortitude and the bridge to look at next gen the way it should be looked at.

Nick Earle:
I was going to go into that. I mean, I think by the way, as a comment, the ultimate success of the case studies that we see two and a half thousand, 3000 now, whatever, that we see, one of the common attributes is that a dis-intermediation of the value chain, less steps in the value chain, because you are actually delivering direct to the sea, the enterprise, be it a coffee machine or a smart meter or whatever. And actually, the casualties, so to speak, are the intermediaries who really add cost and complexity to the process. And when you actually go direct to the consumer and you turn a product into an experience, what happens is that you get more loyalty, but you actually need less people in the chain. And that was the dis-intermediation that I’m referring to. But that’s another subject for another day.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
No, no, but sorry, on that point, but that’s a critical point, because I tell you one of the cases of that is when you hand people next gen way of doing work, they work their job description into that value chain. So in a simple way, because as we said, I’m a technologist working with… The work we’re doing with you guys and the reason we’re aligned vision wise is you’re creating a hub. So instead of having these serial agreements that are backended, you’re coming to a common core to agree, thus, from a consumer point of view, we may have the most complex agreement with a BT or a Vodafone, they’re all partners. But from a customer point of view they don’t see that. It’s a one stop shop. It’s a one hop. So I think that’s the beauty of what we need to do and enable and have the OTT hyperscalers achieved it.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Yes, because they don’t care, but they don’t activate as much as we do. They don’t know where you live. Like the level of trust. We’ve seen all the woahs of Facebook, and I wish them well on privacy. Like you might hate your telco, but you trust them to death with your credit card, with your location. And it is about trust.

Nick Earle:
And as you say, the worst comes to the way you can pick the phone up and somebody will answer. And actually they do come to your house. And that is important at the end of the day. Let’s move it up a bit, just get towards the end of the podcast. Let’s talk about data. And once we create this seamless aggregation, this central hub, one of the things about IoT is that it turns a device into an experience and data, information and insight about how things are being used is more valuable than the thing itself. So this is a CapEx into OpEx. It becomes a… It’s a disintegration of brands because you can actually be a new entrant and actually create a brand new experience. We’ve seen that, Netflix, for example, multiple areas.

Nick Earle:
So the ability to actually create, to be very specific, new managed services from APIs, the ability to have artificial intelligence and machine learning and create. Once you’ve done this, it seems like it’s a prerequisite to do something really exciting, which is a whole new range of services that people have never even thought about before, because you have all the data in one place.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
So first I want to start off by, it’s very critical that we maintain at least Canadian and international areas where we operate privacy and trust assessment, because it’s all about trust. And the challenge with data, for example, I used to drive a BMW. It’s not my favorite car anymore, but that’s not part of the podcast. They’re wonderful people. But it’ll be nice if you like let’s say a certain brand of car. And I know you like them, that the ads that pertain to that car are the ones that you see. So there’s a convenience piece. Does it intrude on your privacy? It could be done in an anonymized fashion to leverage. So I’m with you that the data is where one plus one is three. And unlike certain companies, we don’t use them for our benefit, it’s for the end benefit of the consumer. So I think there is a massive role for the operators where they don’t maintain the data for themselves. They actually maintain it to support that B2B2B2B-

Nick Earle:
Whatever it is, they’re not trying to monetize the consumer, essentially.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Yes. I’m not trying to monetize the consumer. I’m actually trying to enable the value chain to be better. So, instead of sending commercials on saddles, well in a place where there’s no horses, that doesn’t make sense. But if we’re able to identify it, then there’s probably pretty appealing to have commercials on NextGen saddles or whatever they are. So you’re right about that. I think the trust issue is something we as telcos need to align, so there’s lots of work with the GSMA and the United Nations on data trust and ethical AI. But the true opportunity is not monetizing the data. And I think that’s what’s happening with some businesses is, I have data. It must be valuable. Okay guys, but I mean, we’re throwing all our data. That’s what we talk about partnering on the assets. So I’m throwing everything that relates to Nick in one pool, so Nick is happier, we all benefit. Versus I’m here to sell Nick’s data.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
So I think there’s a fundamental shift in our approach to data and trust and other companies, the non-telco competitors. So most Telco’s adhere to the principles we have. And I think that’s why the sooner we get to a hub place where I don’t have to think whether it’s Vodafone or TELUS or BT or Dr. Telecom, or Verizon, the happier we are. But we do need a couple things. We do need uniform APIs, and then we can talk about which standard body can do it. And if we want them in my lifetime or not, because some of them are not the most agile, but also we need the common data models. So how do I model a business? How do I model a farm? You talk about Ag. How do I model a physician? How do I model a patient?

Ibrahim Gedeon:
And I think we need to agree at a high level because there’ll be a lot of local stuff. In the UK you’ve got healthcare, we’ve got Medicare in Canada. So I’m pretty sure they have enough nuances to screw up things in ad complexity. But at the end of the day, if you’ve got a fever, it’s the freaking same fever, it’s just captured differently. So we do need to agree on data models. We do need to agree on APIs, and we need to decide if we rally around that vision to partner with the hyperscalers and learn from, we need to actually force them into certain things. And they will, if they want to benefit from the larger ecosystem-

Nick Earle:
Yes. And we’re describing a give and take. It’s-

Ibrahim Gedeon:
It is. It always is.

Nick Earle:
It’s a given, copying the best practices and the learnings and the agility of the speed, frictionless into that. But at the same time, you’re coming from a basis of trust. You have a brand, people trust you, they’ve trusted you for years. They continue to trust you. It’s like in the healthcare, I’ll use it, I think the same is true on healthcare. We saw an explosion of personalized apps and apps on your phone that you’d never heard of. And it’s going to communicate with your Apple watch and they’re going to have your medical information, but you can trust them. And they’re going to diagnose. What we’re now seeing is wave two, which is hospitals and clinics getting their act together. And for instance, giving you medical grade instruments that you take home with, remote patient monitoring. You go home and they send their data into an AI engine, which the clinicians look at, but now you’ve got the people you trust looking at your personal data, as opposed to a startup that’s trying to do an IPO, looking at your data and giving you the answer in your iPhone.

Nick Earle:
And I think that given this is a huge, obviously global debate, but given what’s going on in terms of monetizing of data and all of the things that come with that, and which is a worldwide debate way above our pay grades. But you, the industry is coming from a basis of trust. And I think this idea of collaborating and building on that whilst at the same time, recognizing the weakness is by saying, we have to become more global and we have to be more agnostic to cooperation… Well, open and willing to cooperation in particular, a more agnostic approach than a proprietary silo approach, I think is something that will happen. It’s happened in other industries. And it actually turns what for some people potentially see as weaknesses, because you’re the industry that’s been around for years and whatever. But actually what you’ve built up is incredible assets and incredible trust. And in the world that we’re describing, they can’t be created like that. I mean, they are strengths that you bring collectively with you as an industry into this world because they will needed when we’re not just-

Ibrahim Gedeon:
But Nick, sorry to interrupt you. The key is, I want to partner with an ecosystem. I don’t want… I remember the old days, like I remember the days when we had to have an agreement with every telco on every country and there weren’t as many as now, if you remember the good old days, there was like what? 300, 400 operators globally?

Nick Earle:
Yeah. Yeah.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
That’s 300 freaking agreements. I can’t afford to do that every time I have a new server. So I think that’s where we need to agree on how we-

Nick Earle:
Yeah.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
… Exactly. That’s why Eseye among other things, right? We need to agree as an industry on one of the Bs in the chain, what it would look like in a model, and the C. And if you all agree, then you can have your… I don’t know what football team you cheer for being in the UK.

Nick Earle:
Well, if you give me an opportunity to say it has to be Liverpool, born and bred a Liverpool fan.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Okay. So I’m a Leeds United fan, which is, there’s two of us in Canada. So I’m pretty excited. I’m 50% of the… But the reason I’m mentioning it is you’re able to get that localized piece with the global nature. Right? And I think this is critical to the work we need to do, but I need to agree on Nick, on Ibrahim, there’s your Liverpool persona. There’s my Leeds persona. There’s, you are the CEO of Eseye, I’m the CTO of TELUS. And these need to cohabitate in an area where, oh yeah, there’s a game. Is there a sale on clothing? By the way, I try to get jerseys for my son who hates soccer, football. Nobody’s selling Leeds anymore. They’re so far down, but maybe in the years-

Nick Earle:
That’s, yeah. But you know what? We’ve overrun our time. I just want to put a big thought on, because it’s something on the table to finish because it’s something that we’re really interested in doing a podcast on in the future. And this is my view, not just a lot of people’s view is to why, what you just said is so important. Okay. And I say to people look, think about it. We’re having this huge debate now about Facebook, sorry – Meta, Google, and the whole thing about-

Ibrahim Gedeon:
After that.

Nick Earle:
Yeah. The whole thing about, you are the product and because they want your information and the algorithms are optimized to get your information and monetize your information. And I say, look, that debate, you think that debate’s big now, but what we’re really talking about is eight billion cell phones. What you and I are talking about is a hundred billion things.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Exactly.

Nick Earle:
And so what happens when your interaction with a machine gets monetized? Your interaction, not your browsing history, that’s just a small slice-

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Instead of the time. Yes.

Nick Earle:
But your interaction with a coffee machine, your interaction with your light switch, your interaction with everything that you touch is then digital marketing will apply to that. And so there will be an enormous opportunity/threat to monetize every single thing you do every second of the day, whether you use a phone or not. And this I think is one of the reasons why we need this trust model and people to get together because we ain’t seen nothing yet in terms of what could be possible for monetizing people’s behavior. And that’s a big subject, but a really good one.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
It’s a podcast, and I’m glad it’s a podcast because you and I would suck debating since we’re 100% aligned. So they’re getting two different flavours of the same view. And I think the sooner we get together with the partner, with the right partners, operators and integrators, and agree on what a data model looks like, because you cannot easily… Then if you don’t agree on a data model, Nick, just one last dig on this one because I’m religious about it, we’ll end up having 600 data models that need to work with each other. So talk about the complexity. We should not bring our 100-year-old history of monetizing minutes and bites to the new world of data. That’s what we need to learn from the hyperscalers.

Nick Earle:
Great. I am going to, unfortunately, I would love to keep this going, but I think our users probably wouldn’t, and they’d probably say, “Look, can you guys have it round two?” But I’m going to leave it there, Ibrahim. I thought it was great. We touched on so many subjects and we only skimmed them. But I really want to thank you. And thank the listeners. This has been a great episode. You’ve been listening to, as you know, the IoT Leaders podcast with Ibrahim who is the CTO of TELUS and an absolute visionary, and a pleasure to talk to. As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions, you can contact me either on LinkedIn, Nick Earle, E-A-R-L-E, or we have an email IoTleaders@eseye, E-S-E-Y-E.com. But let’s leave it there. And Ibrahim, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts-

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Thank you.

Nick Earle:
…. And that beautiful view of the lake behind your head, and the story indeed, which was really nice, nice little bonus at the beginning of the podcast. Thanks very much. And thank you to all of our listeners. And I’ll see you and talk to you on the next IoT Leaders podcast.

Ibrahim Gedeon:
Stay safe.

Outro:
Thanks for tuning in to IoT Leaders, a podcast brought to you by Eseye. Our team delivers innovative global IoT cellular connectivity solutions that just work, helping our customers deploy differentiated experiences and disrupt their markets. Learn more at Eseye.com.

Outro:
You’ve been and listening to IoT Leaders, featuring digitisation leadership on the front lines of IoT. Our vision for this podcast is to be your guide to IoT and digital disruption, helping you to plot the right route to success. We hope today’s lessons, stories, strategies, and insights have changed your vision of IoT. Let us know how we’re doing by subscribing, rating, reviewing and recommending us. Thanks for listening. Until next time.