At Ultra-broadband Forum (UBBF 2017), Arash Ashouriha, Group Deputy CTO and Senior Vice President of Technology & Innovation at Deutsche Telekom shared with us how DT’s networks meet the needs of customers and the services providing the biggest opportunities in the future. Watch the interview here.
Interview Transcript:
Light Reading (LR)
I'm here with Arash Ashouriha, the Senior VP Group Technology Innovation and Deputy CTO at Deutsche Telekom. Deutsche Telekom is going through the process of simplifying and revitalizing its networks to meet the needs of its customers or the enterprise need so tell us about that process.
Arash Ashouriha:
Yeah. We DT have started a big transformation a couple of years ago where we've fully committed both to our customers as well as the capital market that we're going to do an all IP transformation, a complete all IP transformation basically making our entire production model IP-based. First, to modernize, to have the latest technology. Second, to use IP as a lever to be able to produce services faster and integrate them better. And third, to make the networks more reliable, fulfilling and addressing the challenges of consumer and enterprise.
LR:
DT has also set itself the goal of becoming the preferred provider for business. How will you achieve that?
Arash Ashouriha:
Within our DNA, we always—you know, we want to be the leading European telco and that means that we always want to have the best possible network experience. That means not only, you know, winning awards in best mobile networks or best fixed, which we have been doing for many, many years in a row but it's also providing reliable network experience and most importantly, secure.
We have put a lot of efforts in DT, particularly for the business segment to fulfill and address the highest possible security and data protection rules, building huge data centers in Germany and across Europe to make sure that we keep the data of our customers, business customers in the country, if required.
And we are heavily investing in fiber networks. In fact, two weeks ago we started—we initiated a new project across Germany, for example, to connect business parks directly to fiber. We kicked it off in Dusseldorf. Within a couple of months, we're going to develop 13 business parks with fiber, which would bring up to 4,000 companies—give them direct fiber access and we can roll this out across the country.
LR:
You've also talked a bit about collaboration so tell us about the importance of collaboration for telecom industry as you see it and how you make it happen.
Arash Ashouriha:
I think one of the main fundamental paradigm shifts I've been seeing in the industry is that the role of the classical operator service provider and the vendor being like black and white, we ask and they deliver, has been completely banished into a partnering model. As our technology becomes IP, and our solutions become—they merge more with the IT Web type of services, we need to build an ecosystem so it's not going to be a one-to-one relationship between a service provider and maybe one or two suppliers. It's going to be an ecosystem of capabilities, which of you compose basically a service offering.
LR:
So looking forward, is there any service you'd like to pick as offering the most opportunity for telecom?
Arash Ashouriha:
On a business segment, I would say cloud and a variation of cloud. so it will be another initiative together with Huawei, our partner with open telecom cloud, which is a fully open stack based cloud where on a price level, it's super competitive to even Amazon Web Services. And with that, we address, you know, midsize company and some of the large enterprises. You know, some of the customers come back and say, “Well, we don't want to move all our asset into one cloud or we might use a combination of a private and public cloud.” So the hybrid cloud is the solution. I think we see growth opportunities in both areas.
On a consumer segment, in Western Europe, or in Europe in general and particularly in some of our markets, Germany, Greece, TV, video and interestingly enough, we started with our Entertain proposition and we have great success, great pickup rates and then we have enhanced this into a basic package and decided that we want to evolve going away from a pure service provider who also provide video services into what we call content aggregator.
One of the learning process has been that content is key. Exclusive content is key and needs to be specific to the culture. So it's not universal formula. You need to do it per country, addressing the country's need and huge take up, great success and I think the next step will be also really going into own productions, exclusive own productions.
LR:
Wow, that's interesting.
Okay. So there we have it, cloud, content and coming soon, DT's own productions.
Arash Ashouriha:
Absolutely. Exciting times.
LR:
Thanks, Arash.
Arash Ashouriha:
Thank you.
