I recently had the privilege of hosting the December session of the PTC Webinar Series: Frictionless Business – Reinventing Traditional Business Models Through Automation.

Featured panelists included:

• Marc Halbfinger, Chief Executive Officer, PCCW Global
• Murad Kablan, Chief Executive Officer, Stateless
• Mark Middleton, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, ActivePort
• Ameet Naik, Product Marketing Lead, Cloudflare

 The topic is clearly central to the business of each of the participating organizations including MEF, and accordingly, there was no shortage of opinions and free-flowing comments to go around. Indeed, PCCW Global and their ecosystem partners, which comprised the panel, were ideally positioned to deliver real-life examples of how enterprise trends were driving automation initiatives of service providers – the transition from carriers to digital service providers (DSPs).

The central advance-billed theme was that as digital transformation plans gather pace, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the ICT requirements of organizations are only increasing in scale and complexity. We explored the role automation and organizations like MEF can play in uniting the ICT ecosystem and driving new value and efficiency for carriers, who need to become DSPs and meet the demands of and value proposition to enterprise customers. In particular, the need for service providers to work together and embrace new industry standards in order to extend the ability to orchestrate networks and automate inter-carrier settlement.

Specific discussion points included: 

• Enterprise business drives and automation: Connected ecosystem networks, clouds, applications, and businesses. Why is automation so important? New expectations for speed, flexibility, simplicity, automation from end customers – moving to everything as a service model. The end user wants to simplify what is becoming a more complex network.
• Challenges to connect this diverse community: Delivery of end-to-end, secured, high-performance cloud-based services on a global basis requires automation across a  diverse range of global partnerships between technology providers, application providers, DSPs, and cloud providers – APIs – order, provision, manage, settle. Role of standards, in particular those of MEF.
• The Internet: Is it good enough for critical business use cases? Most businesses are now running critical applications in a multi-cloud environment. What does this mean for their networks? The need for a predictable underlay capability was discussed.
• Competition: How are the service providers dealing with the competition from MSPs? What do they need to do to change and move faster to a different model?

To learn more about these topics, please view the December webinar “Reinventing Traditional Business Models Through Automation” here:

PTC will be taking a break from its monthly webinar series as preparations are underway for the 44th Annual Conference, PTC’22: Reunite. Rethink.  Renew., from 16 to 19 January 2022 at the Hilton Hawaiian Village® Waikiki Beach Resort in Honolulu, Hawaii. We hope that you will join us!

To learn more about the PTC Webinar Series, visit https://www.ptc.org/ptc-webinar-series.