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Kevin Peters, AT&T’s CMO, has been trying to persuade people at the TM Forum that “the network matters.”
“The network will be an engine for innovation,” he told the audience during his keynote this week. “It is not just a pipe. That’s nonsense,” he added emphatically.
The pipe, he purported, wasn’t even exactly a pipe, but a “geodesic sphere,” that was both “robust and resilient,” as well as being global in nature. Rather more like a big ball of spaghetti for those more visually inclined.
“The network is the unsung hero,” Peters went on charismatically, as he paced rapidly around the stage, intermittently shouting.
“Business customers show us the way,” declared Peters after another mini marathon across the stage, noting that the notion of mobilizing everything was most useful to AT&T’s expansion plans.
In the US over 50% of AT&T’s customers already carry over three devices and the proliferation of devices, from phones to tablets would only increase the carrier’s reach, he claimed.
“75% of my customers are carrying a smartphone today and mobile workers have doubled their use of mobile apps over the last year,” bellowed Peters before adding “This is a wonderful thing for us.”
Wonderful, too, according to Peters was the rise of machine to machine (M2M) technology, with AT&T already boasting 33 million “things” connected to its network today and that number set to increase three times over the next three years.
This, he said, would be valuable for tracking heavy machinery, connectivity maps and the “intermediate flow of goods.”
Peters also marveled at the “increase in sophistication,” the mobile industry was showing, with many phones now sporting the “process power” of PCs seven years ago.
Of course, the keynote would not have been complete without some mention of the omnipresent “cloud” which Peters claims is “embedded in the network itself.”
“Mobile is complimentary to the cloud,” Peters added, driving the buzz words home.
Concluding his keynote, Peters noted that the telco industry needed to stick together as “frenemies” to protect their interests against over the top (OTT) players, as well as focusing on building telco sponsored innovation centers to gain some ground back from software rivals. Smart move for a dumb pipe? Let us know what you think.
