Elizabeth Aris is a leader in the fields of technology and telecoms. She is currently (among a number of other non-directorial roles), the Chairman of Astrotel, a telecommunications company targeted specifically at the enterprise and government markets. Her career path to date has taken in retail banking, technology and telecommunications, working in sales, marketing, product management and corporate strategy. She was recruited to Telstra and has been working in telco ever since in Australia, the USA and China. She describes working in telco as “fascinating” based on the expansive, global, complex nature of the industry and its infrastructure. “There’s a lot of components and the battle is really being able to take away all the complexity and come up with an opinion as to what you think is important. I’ve worked with some amazing global talent and that’s their real power”.
She sees that the future for telecommunications lies in the cloud in order to manage the increasing volumes of data. Aris references the statistics on how much data the world has generated in the last two years (estimated as 90% of all data generated ever). and this has meant the take-over of the telco space by major cloud players:
“The dramatically increasing amount of data that is being produced every year, because of faster chipsets, because of cloud, because of AI, it’s just going to continue to grow … you just cannot marshal the compute resources that you need or transport the data at this scale unless you are using the cloud.”
This has created a new world order in networks and telecoms delivery: “Google now, for example, has the largest global network anywhere, Google, AWS, Azure and Meta this year will spend more capital on their infrastructure than all of the telcos combined. They are growing their infrastructure dramatically while the telcos’ investment is reducing”.
Aris is committed as Chairman of telecoms company Astrotel to bring to market next generation technologies which she describes as “unique assets because they are usually cloud and AI native”. She states that such assets have not been replicated by Astrotel’s competition. “These assets pull traffic off the existing telco networks, so there is no commercial incentive to offer them”.
One of these technologies is Alkira. While it is early days for Alkira in APAC, the business in the United States has been running since 2018 where it is backed by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins and a number of other ‘big name’ venture capital companies. Aris describes it as “a whole telco network that runs over the combined infrastructure of AWS, Microsoft, Azure, Google Cloud, and it has all of the hallmarks of the cloud. So, infinitely scalable, no hardware required, set up in days, pay as you use, the same performance as the cloud and all of the sophisticated features of a telco such as advanced routing, advanced security, network control and monitoring, and they’ve brought all of that together on one platform”.
“What Alkira has done is to put all of the routing and cabling capabilities that in telco are taken for granted, into the middle of the cloud. And so you can do all of the things that telco can do for all of your cloud instances, and you can do all of the things that you would do with the cloud for all of your telco services. Normally cloud instances and telco instances are separate. Now it is possible to bring it all together and optimize it for the whole portfolio”.
The principles of Alkira challenge the dependence of traditional telecoms based on where their physical infrastructure is located. “That model of having country based telco infrastructure. That model is very limiting”.
The ‘new’ telco model will over-ride national boundaries in terms of delivery in favour of a global delivery model. “This country based telco model, you just don’t need it anymore. You can now have one global network running over the combined infrastructure of AWS, Azure, Google – globally. So you have one network. It’s really quick to set up. It’s really simple. It’s a drag and drop, single interface, and you can connect all of your devices and users to it, and that’s it”.
The existing telcos have little commercial incentive to follow this path, Aris states, since because they invest billions of dollars in their own network infrastructure, their mission in life is to get as much return on that investment as they possibly can:
Aris sees an increasing demand for the new wave of comms technology:
“I know firsthand companies who have moved from traditional telco and have saved tens of millions of dollars and have enjoyed a much better customer experience. These companies are thinking ahead and looking for the next wave of technology that can help their business grow. They’re just starting to learn about products such as Alkira”.
The rationalisation of infrastructure that is possible with Alkira is indicated by an independent analyst report which found that Alkira made possible reductions in the number of devices required in data centers by 50%; a reduction of 75% fewer firewalls than previously and a reduction in the number of days to set up a cloud environment from an average of 26 to a single day with Alkira.
“And what we can do now with Alkira, for example, is once you connect to one of the cloud providers, whether you use AWS or Google or whatever, you can use that connection to get to Alkira. And once you’re there, you can traverse the cloud globally. You don’t need PoPs all over the world”.
In terms of her keynote Aris will also cover the future evolution of the ‘new’ telecoms:
“I will be talking about what’s coming next, what’s available that you’ve probably never heard of, what can you do with it, and what are the business benefits when you know that you can save 40% of the cost. You can dramatically improve productivity and you can significantly simplify a very complex network environment”.
Looking to the future, she anticipates also that the deployment of Astrotel technologies will move beyond the ‘early adopters into more conservative sectors of the market:
“I think you’ll find the early adopters, and then the second wave of adopters will have moved from traditional telcos to these cloud telcos. Really large companies in the US have already done it. It’s just a matter of time before everyone else does too. It’s just like cloud adoption. It just takes a little while to become a normal thing, and then everyone will do it, because the benefits are huge”.
So what will be left for the ‘old telcos’? Maybe the mobile – cellular where the cost of spectrum licenses provides some protection? But even this territory is limited:
“I think the only category that telco can continue to dominate in the short term is mobile – cellular, which requires spectrum licenses. But if you look behind the mobile networks, almost all of the mobile traffic is offloaded within seconds to a fixed infrastructure. So you really have to question the competitive domain that telcos will continue to occupy”,