An Aussie Broadband Over the Wire Merger Makes Sense, and Could Make Trouble for the Australian Telco Market

Summary Bullets:

M. Rogers

• Aussie Broadband has made a proposal to acquire Over The Wire for A$344 million, which if it goes through would make the combined company a top-five telco in the country.

• On the enterprise side there are lots of synergies, particularly with Aussie Broadband’s Carbon platform lining up with Over the Wire’s managed services capabilities.

Rapidly growing telco Aussie Broadband, made headlines last week when it made a non-binding offer to acquire business focused telco and managed service provider Over The Wire (OTW). After the leak both companies made official announcements to the ASX that an offer had been made to the tune of A$5.75 per share (equivalent to A$344 million). While both companies have clearly stated this does not mean a deal is imminent, and the official due diligence period will not come to an end until November 30th, the move makes a lot of sense and could create a real national level competitor in the enterprise telecoms and ICT services market, from the two upstarts.

Digitalizing the Customer Journey

G. Barton

Summary Bullets:

• Businesses need to adapt their customer contact models to a world where remote is the default.
• AI-powered digital technologies can play a powerful role in improving the customer journey – both independently and in tandem with human agents.

At AT&T’s 2021 Business Summit, GlobalData supported the American telecoms giant in exploring one of the key themes of the event: reimagining the customer journey in a post-COVID, cloud-enabled world.  This is a critical challenge for most businesses as the impact of COVID has fundamentally changed the relationship between customers and businesses, as well as the way the two communicate.

Telefónica Empowers Service Providers to Deliver Tailored Security Solutions to Enterprises

R. Muru

Summary Bullets:

• Telefónica delivers a strong commitment and makes its cybersecurity solutions and professional services capabilities available through partnerships to assist third-party service providers and capture new revenue streams.
• Telefónica’s differentiated value proposition includes empowering third-party service providers with limited security capabilities to deliver bespoke security solutions in less than 12 months.

The Challenged Enterprise in the New Norm

Telefónica (Telefónica Global Solutions), together with GlobalData, delivered a webinar in October 2021 highlighting the impact of cybersecurity attacks on both small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and global corporates.  To put this into context: in 2020, businesses made ransomware payments of more than $400 million in cryptocurrency, a 300% increase compared to 2019.  However, the average cost to a business in terms of financial impact, downtime, and lost opportunity is far greater, with some enterprises in the private healthcare sector, for example, highlighting post-cyberattack revenue losses in the millions and damage to brand and shareholder value.

Key Takeaways from KubeCon: Deeper Focus on FinOps, GitOps

C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a new group focused on software security supply chain problems, added $10 million in vendor funding.
• Google Cloud recently joined the FinOps Foundation, representing the first major cloud provider to commit.

The recent KubeCon 2021 conference garnered much attention not only for its hybrid format (virtual/in-person), but also for its critical role in helping facilitate interaction between customers (primarily developer and IT operations teams) and vendors as enterprises navigate the unchartered waters of digital and business transformations.  A number of important topics and themes raised during the conference were highly relevant to DevOps teams tasked with overseeing an increasingly diverse and distributed IT portfolio.

PLDT Digicon: A Sustainable Smart City Starts at the Infrastructure Layer

Summary Bullets:

A. Amir

• A sustainable smart city should consider the deployment goals, but also the underlying infrastructure.

• PLDT checks most boxes in the infrastructure and technology layers as well as in the other ICT domains but it could consider further expanding its capabilities in the professional services and partner ecosystem.

PLDT’s Sustainable Smart City Initiatives

In the Philippine Digital Convention (Digicon) 2021, PLDT shared its initiatives and capabilities in driving sustainable smart city adoption and helping industries to achieve goals in the sustainability three pillars: economic, environmental, and social. On the application layer, PLDT offers a range of smart city solutions across verticals in line with the sustainable smart city goals. This includes remote learning in education, COVID response in healthcare, and emergency response in public safety. As an ICT provider, PLDT also continues to build the underlying infrastructure to enhance existing applications and enable new sustainable smart city solutions. It has 15 subsea cables including Jupiter, Asia Direct, and Apricot, and 12 point-of-presence (PoPs) across the world to offer reliable global interconnections. Domestically, it has over 540,000km of fiber providing high-speed connectivity nationwide as well as more than 4,000 5G base stations covering major Philippines cities. Besides connectivity, PLDT has 10 interconnected data centers that deliver 9,000 racks and 27 MW of power to host enterprises applications and workloads. Further, in line with its sustainability agenda, it is working to achieve 1.4 power usage effectiveness (PUE) for its facilities, source at least 20% of its data centers’ power consumption from renewable energy, and obtain Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) and ISO 50001 certifications.

VMware Sovereign Cloud to Address Data Privacy, Market Monopoly, and ESG Concerns

C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

• VMware’s Sovereign Cloud Initiative aims to help customers engage with trusted national and local cloud providers, which meet geo-specific requirements relating to data sovereignty and jurisdictional control.
• The initiative will appeal to those with concerns about potential data privacy abuses, service provider monopolies, and the challenges associated with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments.

At its recent annual conference, IT infrastructure vendor VMware reaffirmed its commitment to a multi-cloud future – one where the majority of enterprises will store, run, and manage their digital data, services, and applications across multiple locations, including traditional data centers and one or more public cloud data centers.

Finance Organizations Require a Range of AI Tools

Summary Bullets:

R. Bhattacharyya

• Financial organizations are using artificial intelligence (AI) in multiple ways, including to improve service, better understand customers, gauge risk and predict market movements, and speed claims processing.

• Recent results from GlobalData’s 2021 ICT Customer Insight survey reveal that between 25-27% of digital spending by companies in finance will go towards artificial intelligence and machine learning.

For years the finance industry, which encompasses organizations in financial services, insurance, and banking, has been a strong adopter of AI. Financial organizations are AI in multiple ways, including to improve service, better understand customers, gauge risk and predict market movements, and speed claims processing. For example, chatbots and natural language processing (NLP) assist with customer support, optical character recognition (OCR) helps with the ingestion of information from documents, computer vision analyzes images and videos to speed claim processing, and machine learning (ML) models assess risk, detect fraud, and help determine rating and pricing.

ASEAN 5G Q3 2021 Roundup: Competition Heats Up

A. Amir

Summary Bullets:

• The domestic competitions across ASEAN are heating up as providers are moving from network deployment to the solution development stage.
• Leading providers are starting to commercialize their edge computing services and gain a first-mover advantage.

The enterprise 5G market in ASEAN is moving from network deployment to the solution development stage, led by early adopters such as the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.  Most telcos in these countries such as Globe, PLDT, M1, Singtel, Starhub, and AIS have enabled 5G standalone (SA) networks to support a wider range of enterprises applications through edge integration, lower latency, and network slicing.  The competition at the country level is also heating up, as providers are beginning to commercialize the solutions they have been developing through industry collaborations.  This includes Singtel’s edge computing and AIS’ 5G smart manufacturing solutions.  Service providers are also expanding their collaboration initiatives with enterprises from across verticals and are expected to launch more applications in the market in the near term.  AIS and Globe are Singtel’s associates; hence, the three providers could also gain an advantage in 5G solution development in their respective markets through knowledge and partner sharing.

Enterprise IoT Platforms Evolve with New Edge and Analytics Enhancements

Summary Bullets:

Kathryn Weldon – Research Director, Business Network and IT Services – Americas

• Microsoft and AWS were named “Very Strong” in GlobalData’s most recent Enterprise IoT Platform report published in September 2021. In the last six months, both vendors announced several key platform enhancements.

• New tools for access control, edge computing, visualization, and digital twins improved these vendors’ IoT portfolios. Microsoft’s new role as a board member in the LoRa Alliance was also a significant ecosystem addition.

Enterprise IoT platforms transform data collected from devices and machines to help customers build applications that automate processes, improve products, and help business leaders make decisions. Once data is collected, the platform provides data storage, processing, management, and manipulation along with filtering and visualization options. The platform may send data to an edge computing device, public or private cloud, or remote data center for further processing and analytics. An enterprise IoT platform also provides tools for application enablement; elements may include visual application modelling, design tools, processing rules using business logic, security and access management, reporting, and real-time or historical analytics.

Collaboration Finds a Seat at the DevOps Table

C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• Salesforce’s Slack integration into high-productivity platforms eases IT’s ALM demands.
• Microsoft initiated collaboration integration with developer platforms via Teams and Power Platforms.

Why have collaboration tools suddenly become an indispensable piece of the DevOps toolbox? Well, some might say the advent of the global pandemic and the rise of low-code’s prominence after being injected with AI have created the perfect storm for shoring up the next wave in app modernization.