Q&A: Capitalising on Operators’ Assets for the Industry 4.0 Value Chain

Hall 4 - Auditorium 3

Tuesday 26 February 13:00-14:00

What role do you see for operators in enabling industrial applications, beyond providing core connectivity services?

Operators are transforming their service offering from pure end-to-end data transport to a distributed data processing at the edge service. This will enable them to offer complete computing and communications services in a seamless cloud/edge/fog infrastructure. Wireless and mobile computing services are essential to handle the connectivity between all the interrelated entities in a connected industry 4.0 environment. Applications such as edge and fog robotics will be controlled by a mix of AI and conventional applications, running on virtualised computing and communications environments provided by the operators. I believe operators will therefore be absolutely central in the design and operation of Connected Industry 4.0 environments.

Do operators have the right skills to engage with companies in specialised market sectors, both commercially and technically?

Operators have been serving large corporate customers and public administrations for decades. They have been offering them complex service packages covering voice, data, video, storage, terminals and equipment as well as management outsourcing. They are very used to managing extremely complex distributed systems for very demanding large customers. Technically, therefore, operators are in an excellent position. Commercially they are also well placed because they have had this customer base and experience for a long time. However, on the commercial front, they will need to adapt to an increasingly complex business model, that has a substantially longer value chain, and includes a number of other actors they will have to coexist and work with as partners. This means they will have to learn how to build ‘win-win’ relationships with other players in the industry 4.0 ecosystem.

What should an operator do to make it the most appealing partner for industrial applications?

They will need to address the three areas of complexity that this environment will bring. From a technical point of view, they will need to deploy the hardware, but much more importantly, the software infrastructure that will be the basis of all Connected Industry 4.0 systems. For operators, this involves the transition from being hardware-based companies to software-based companies, which in turn requires significant internal reorganisations especially in terms of their employees and their knowledge base. From a business model point of view, they will need to adapt their commercial departments to deal with the actors of a more complex ecosystem and a longer value chain. Legally, they will need to address the challenges arising from a more complex regulatory environment.

Are industrial partners seeing the value in operators beyond their connectivity propositions?

Some industrial partners still believe they will be able to handle Connected Industry 4.0 all by themselves. I do not believe this will be possible. Not even the larger companies in the world like Telefonica, Ericsson or Intel can address the ICT part of Connected Industry 4.0 in isolation, much less will it be feasible for the industrial companies themselves. Most industrial partners, even very large and successful companies, are already engaged in preliminary partnerships with different technology providers, and among those the operators are the most relevant partners but not the only ones.

How is 5TONIC working to bring together operators and industry together for the creation of new solutions?

5TONIC is an open laboratory for value co-creation. We are a meeting point for joint research and for service creation. Our members are launching advanced projects to show the disruptive advantages of Connected Industry 4.0 over a virtualised computing and communications environment provided by Telefonica, Ericsson, InterDigital and other 5TONIC member companies and collaborators.

In the 5G-Transformer project, Telefonica is demonstrating with Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III, Ericsson and SAMUR the fully automated emergency response services of the future. In the 5G-EVE project Telefonica is demonstrating with the University, and IMDEA Networks, Ericsson and ASTI Robotics the next generation of collaborative, automatically guided vehicles all controlled by edge computing. And in the 5G-CORAL project we are showing how connected robots and sensors can collaborate to execute complex tasks that are not possible with current technologies.