There’s no question that you can learn a lot from what people are reading. My own work in gathering buyer information is based on that; buyers who read my blog are free to comment and ask questions, or even pose questions, and the benefit to me is a better understanding of what interests them. SDxCentral has an interesting piece that looks at what workers at a group of 20 telcos were reading in the three months prior to MWC, and I’d like to compare the findings with what I’ve heard from the 88 telcos who have offered me their views, and also address whether reading and learning are going to help telcos address a complex future problem set.
The “Hot telecom topics” list, to me, illustrates that SDxCentral is seeing pretty much the same sort of mix of job categories that I do, which is hardly surprising. People tend to look at pieces that relate to their perception of their job or career, which is why I don’t think (as the article does) that security interest for telco workers is surprising. There is a lot of enterprise interest there, which means there could be an opportunity for the telcos. Truth be told, four of the ten topics on the list are security-related. I also think the low placement of 5G and SD-WAN suggests that most telco employees think those topics have little chance of generating seismic changes in opportunity at this point.
It’s a bit challenging (for me at least) to understand the difference between the “hot” and “most-researched” topics, but I gather that the latter (our second topic list) is based on categorizing views of companies, but then identifying the topic being researched. This list, then, probably shows a more practical/tactical interest, but it doesn’t reorder the list as much as you might expect.
The article notes surprise that edge computing, private networks (I assume private 5G), and 6G didn’t make this list, but none of those topics are particularly interesting using my contact experience either. What’s interesting is that all these topics are getting a lot of ink, which must mean that the vendor community is giving them the full court press because I don’t see enterprises very interested in them either. That in turn shows the influence that advertising has on editorial content.
The most-researched company list, the third in the article, is a bit more surprising to me because it doesn’t align with the commentary I’ve gotten. In my contacts, Broadcom and Juniper rank higher than any of the top five on the list, and cloud providers (Google/AWS as the list shows, then Microsoft) rank third. Nile didn’t make my list at all. My view based on the nature of user interactions I’ve had is that the telcos are trying to balance their interest in sustaining a single dominant vendor (Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Cisco, Juniper) with their interest in some transformational new feature set. They want novelty in features, not so much in vendors. Thus, M&A that might create something new is of special interest.
There’s not much value in my trying to assess the list of most-read articles. What I’ve found with respect to telco interest in my blogs is that telco feedback was greatest on blogs that talked about the evolution of the telco business model, the future of new service opportunities and technologies, and the problems with 5G and 6G. There was somewhat less interest in my blogs on the attitudes of enterprises toward service and technology, and on regulatory issues. AI interest was behind that in terms of comments and response.
Telco employees are apparently generally aware that their companies need to enhance their profits. They’re also aware that if new revenues can’t contribute to that, only lower costs can help, and that human costs—their own salaries—are likely candidates for reduction. What I see in the comments made to me, when they are correlated with the role that workers who made them play, is that more senior people tend to be very conservative with regard to the new revenue sources, and the juniors more inclined to step way outside the connection services box. The tone of some of the former sources of comments suggests to me that there may be an element of fear involved; a shift to a totally new service area could well mean that the skills senior people developed in the past could be devalued, and their jobs might then be at risk.
Could it be that defensive thinking, concern over personal financial and career security, is a big driver of interest in technology pieces? Could that same force be a factor in the decisions telcos are making, since senior people typically make those decisions?
I’ve gotten several thousand comments over the years from operators, and while it’s difficult to assess how they’d point us in answering that question, my analysis shows that, first, there is for sure a tendency for telco senior people to dig in on tradition, and second, that the exceptions to this seem to come from employees who have direct exposure to other technology models. For example, telco senior people hired from vendors or OTT/cloud providers tend to reflect a more “modern” view on services and technology than those who came from another telco, and those seniors who have spent more than two-thirds of their careers with their current telco employer are the most conservative of all.
There are also strong parallels between telco employee behavior and the behavior of people who work in IT for national governments (that seems to be true for state/provincial government workers, but I don’t have enough contact with that group to be confident). Some of my friends in the HR space tell me that “job security” motivates some people to seek government jobs, public utility employment, or telco employment. Could it be that telco employees overall, at least those with longer service and more senior positions, are working for the telcos because they are more conservative thinkers, rather than their being more conservative because they work for telcos?
One interesting point related to this is that of the 88 telcos I’ve had comment from, 75 suggested that they would benefit from “new blood” to improve their ability to address emerging technologies, particularly AI. The reason why AI was by far the most-cited “emerging technology” may be due to the fact that AI could be used, perhaps most easily, to cut costs…and jobs. A revenue-generating role for AI might fend off interest in a cost/job-cutting role.
The question, of course, is whether senior people would be willing to undertake the kinds of projects that “new blood” would likely want to launch, and would certainly be needed to justify the hires in the first place. You don’t obtain new ideas by osmotic pressure, you have to take steps to make new things happen. No matter what telcos may read, absorbing information isn’t the same as acting on it.
