TALKING HEADS

David Flower

VoltDB

5G monetisation demands IT and OT that are fit for purpose

With 5G rolling out across the world, communications service providers (CSPs) have invested heavily in their operational technology (OT). However, to generate a return and grow their market share, they need to invest in their IT to handle automation, low latency, services such as network slicing, and technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). To make matters more complex, this is not just a CSP challenge, David Flower, the president and chief executive of VoltDB, tells George Malim, the managing editor of VanillaPlus. Other organisations are already engaging with 5G, meaning that CSPs must keep up the pace in both their IT and OT transformations if they want to maximise success in the new era

George Malim: How is the arrival of 5G accelerating the convergence of OT and IT? What are the complexities of this that need to be addressed?

David Flower: We approach this from a slightly different angle to other organisations because we’re an underlying infrastructure technology provider, not an application provider. We’re in the world of supporting business support system (BSS) applications, for example, in the charging or policy side of CSP operations. This means we are always one or two steps removed from the end customer so a lot of what we learn is really through the conversations we have with partners and operators. Another difference is that not all of our clients are in telecoms even though they are starting to use 5G as an underlying delivery platform.

While we see that there is a lot of hype around 5G, the most common question we hear is how to monetise 5G which comes back to how OT and IT are converging and working together. You can’t have one without the other if ultimately you want to try to monetise these massive amounts of investment that are going into 5G. While the promise is there to unlock enormous revenues for operators and technology partners, there is also a recognition that investment is needed in the operational technology side, that core network environment, to actually build out what 5G is capable of delivering. There is also a recognition that you must match that by ensuring organisations update their IT infrastructure to support what is being invested in the OT side of the operation as well. From that perspective, if most of the investment has quite rightly gone into OT initially, you might think that investment into IT happens in a parallel process but in reality it doesn’t. Having said that, with enormous investments having been made in network builds, the next level of investment is to align IT with OT.

Most CSPs have been relying on ten-year-old architectures when it comes to BSS. In the last 18 months, we’ve seen a realisation, and in the last six months an aggressive realisation, that there is a need to move on from legacy technologies and enable IT infrastructure environments to match the capabilities of all those OT investments that have been made to date. One can’t operate without the other.

GM: Is it 5G or IT advances that have changed the telecoms landscape?

DF: 5G is a completely new paradigm when it comes to the world of telecoms. We’re now talking about software-defined networks, edge processing, and network slicing and these things have never been possible before. They are opening up a whole new world of both pain and opportunity in the marketplace and the broader market is looking at this and starting to step into the traditional world of the CSP.

The heart of fraud and security is all about recognising an issue before it becomes a problem and addressing it

We are seeing manufacturing businesses acquire spectrum, for example, and that’s never been heard of before. These standalone industries are now demanding network slices that can be developed for their specific business requirements and this is something new for the whole industry to get its head round. Some of the legacy providers don’t necessarily have the applications that CSPs are looking for in 5G and we are seeing new providers coming in, particularly in the world of systems integrators. Of course, mobile operators themselves are now becoming application developers in their own right and may be able to keep hold of more revenue than they have seen in the past because of that.

GM: With new edge capabilities and the higher speed that can be enabled by 5G, we’re seeing edge intelligence enabled by low latency data processing. Will these new capabilities be used to fuel OSS/BSS to do new and interesting things?

DF: There are several evolving trends in the market feeding into this. If you look at analytics, it has gone from post-event to in-event over the last two to three years. Everyone talks about real-time analytics and is very much focused on what that is but what do they really mean?

Real-time understandably is used by different organisations to mean different things. In 5G, the latency requirement is sub-10 milliseconds (ms) and that defines where real time starts to have a significant impact, but for VoltDB, this isn’t about being able to do one thing in less than 10ms. It’s about undertaking several different processing requirements on that data to ensure that value can be extracted from it.

That value isn’t extracted only through analytics. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) can do what humans do much better and more quickly but there is no point if you can’t monetise the outcome in real time. I think things are still at an early stage and there is a long way to go in terms of CSPs becoming cloud native and deploying machine learning, AI and analytics. 5G, IoT and edge computing are changing the rules for data-dependent enterprises but, ultimately, the value is only achieved by what you extract from the data. 5G is important here because it’s far more than a simple upgrade from 4G to 5G. 5G enables forwardthinking businesses to monetise a new set of differentiated services. Extracting value from data is where low latency starts to show its true worth because if the data can be extracted, understood and acted upon before competitors, companies can take a lead. Of course, not every application is going to have demand for low latency but there are a significant number of apps that will depend on low latency.

Another issue – and this subject is a little closer to my heart given that I came into VoltDB through the world of cybersecurity – is the impact of low latency on fraud and security. The way technology is evolving creates a larger attack surface for fraud and breaches whether attacks are aimed at individuals or endpoints.

The heart of fraud and security is all about recognising an issue before it becomes a problem and addressing it. You need low latency to be able to do that. If you can see something happening, recognise patterns, and act before the damage is done, that’s a winning ticket.

GM: How does VoltDB help CSPs bring OT and IT together to help 5G monetisation?

DF: Operations support systems (OSS), BSS and OT require an active data plane or data layer that can expose itself across multiple different disciplines as opposed to only silos within the business. If you have an active data environment, it means you can understand what’s going on with the data and very quickly extract value from it.

We are not a 5G application provider. What we seek to do is to ensure that organisations, whether they are systems integrators, platform providers, CSPs themselves, or third-party industries starting to make use of 5G, are able to use the latest technologies to support their objectives in creating and monetising 5G through those applications.

If you do not have real-time capabilities built into your OT and your OSS/BSS application stacks, you will not be able to monetise 5G, so it is something of a chicken and egg situation. We hear a lot about what the killer app for 5G will be, but there is not going to be one

end-all be-all application. Instead, organisations need to make sure they’ve got the underlying fabric to create and roll-out 5G-monetising applications.

This can be achieved through IoT applications, customer value applications , or by providing value to enterprises via network slicing, but if you don’t have the underlying capabilities that are built to support those demands, you are not going to monetise anything. We therefore look at VoltDB as that core enabler in terms of the technology that has been built to specifically deliver those capabilities.

GM: How do you see the market maturing and what role will VoltDB play in that?

DF: 5G is never done. It’s ongoing and will be changing customer demands all the time, which is great because it pushes us forward in terms of our product development. I think as the market matures, it is looking for two or three applications initially to truly showcase the entire value of 5G.

Like any business, 5G needs these apps to start to shine the light in terms of why these billions of dollars have been invested. There is a real hunger to get there and unlock new industry use cases – and importantly that’s beyond telecoms. When I talk about 5G, it involves financial services, for example, just as much as telecoms.

There are many industries that 5G will change. 18 months in the world of telecoms or financial services always seemed to be a blink of an eye but those days are gone. We are starting to see other industries understand the value of 5G and be transformed by it. I think manufacturing, retail and financial services all will benefit from network slicing and enabling real-time offerings to consumers and beyond.

For me, this is where the interest in the industry really lies – it’s not just about what’s immediately in front of us. It’s beyond that and the industry needs to take the blinkers off and consider the wider picture. From VoltDB’s perspective, we came from the world of MIT and one of our founders, Michael Stonebreaker, foresaw that in-memory distributed architectures that offer scale, performance, low-latency and real-time decision-making were something the market was going to require.

Frankly, five years ago, that was still a bit of a pipedream, but now all of it is a reality that has come together with other market trends such as machine learning and AI, which four years ago were still on the drawing board. At the same time, if you look at how cloud has evolved, it is also a reality and has become the primary infrastructure that underpins platforms today.

If you look at the way data volumes have increased exponentially over the last three or four years, it’s clear it isn’t going to slow down. And with the way underlying telecoms capabilities have evolved, network performance means we can do much more than we ever anticipated and CSPs can actually start to take away market share from others. I think telecoms is going to become far more CSP-centric as we move forward and, for VoltDB, we want to make sure we support the underlying requirements of this new business, not only for telecoms but for all industries that need to tap into the true power of 5G. This is what we were built for, and this is what we plan to do. www.voltdb.com

Like any business, 5G needs these apps to start to shine the light in terms of why these billions of dollars have been invested