Carriers Tell Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs What Innovations They Need
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- AT&T stressed “mobility, mobility, mobility” and Sprint machine-to-machine (M2M) technology at a conference Thursday. A parade of executives of telcos from around the world explained to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other would-be partners at the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley’s Carrier Connections conference what innovations they crave and how to work with the companies.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
"We want new applications and services on our network,” said Michael Fairchild of AT&T’s interactive R&D CloudTeam, explaining why the carrier is opening Innovation Centers this year in nearby Palo Alto as well as Plano, Texas, and Tel Aviv. “We're already working on four projects,” he said. “So we're actually working before we open.” In general, LTE and applications that work across devices are major emphases, Fairchild said. The carrier is opening a facility for events in San Francisco, too, he said.
AT&T is looking to draw everyone from universities to individual inventors and developers to work with technical, marketing and design experts from the carrier, “our entire set of tools and infrastructures and with “host vendors” at each center -- Ericsson in California, Alcatel-Lucent in Texas and Amdocs in Israel, Fairchild said. AT&T will also go looking for technologies to meet its needs, he said.
Fairchild promised faster action than the conventional telco pace. “As we go up the stack, we need to be faster” than carriers are when they put “wire in the ground,” he said. He called the Innovation Centers “an enhanced path” within AT&T for speed to market.
But Vinay Kundaje, AT&T executive director of corporate development, said the carrier is particular about its dealings with outside innovators. The company isn’t interested in hearing, “I have a great idea -- AT&T, you go implement it,” he said. The carrier isn’t inviting walk-in investment pitches, ideas for entering the hardware business or proposals for sales of unrelated services through AT&T’s channels, said Kundaje, who emphasized mobility as a development direction. The carrier is mainly interested in opportunities to make commercial agreements for services, he said.
Sprint Nextel is making a big push next quarter on M2M connectivity, said Wayne Ward, vice president of emerging solutions. An M2M Collaboration Center and a device-management portal geared to M2M will launch during the period, and it will also see follow-ups to new M2M solutions being released this quarter, he said. Ward highlighted smart grid, signage and digital video surveillance as opportunities. An optimist would call M2M a greenfield business and a pessimist would see it as a life preserver for a saturated mobile business, he said.
Sprint is enthusiastic about open applications development -- to a point, Ward said. He talked up the carrier’s Open Developer Conference, Oct. 26-28 in Santa Clara, and a new, unified interface for consumer, corporate and M2M development, available through the carrier’s Applications Developer Program at developer.sprint.com. But asked about working out common application-programming interfaces for all carriers, Ward said, “there’s a fair amount of secret sauce that’s required to optimize on specific network technologies."
The Internet is the communications battlefield, an NTT DoCoMo executive said, suggesting that telcos are at a disadvantage. Facebook and Twitter have established themselves as major players, on a par with telephony and e-mail, said Tetsuya Yamashita, head of application business strategy in the telco’s smartphone business department. It’s hard for carriers to compete with Google and Apple, because they have no telecom-service businesses to protect, he said. Telcos must “evolve or die,” Yamashita said.
British Telecom is as interested in hearing about ways to cut its own or customers’ expenses or to help its customer service hold on to subscribers as it is in ways to increase revenue, said Rob Hull, vice president of consumer and networks scouting. “Four dollars of extra revenue are the same as a dollar of savings” to BT’s bottom line, he said. Savings are especially important when revenue is flat, Hull said. Changing business processes is the most effective ways to cut expenses, he said.
BT is eager for advances on anything to do with cloud computing, services to take advantage of the capacity of fiber to the premises, mobility applications making use of Wi-Fi, middleware and enabling technologies for IPTV, or extending DSL’s range, Hull said. But not all the most exciting innovations are high tech, he said. The carrier is hot for a way it was shown to repair customers’ yards after they're torn up for fiber installation, Hull said.