NaaS still a priority amidst AI hype

Laying the tracks for the AI bullet train has dominated industry conversation in the past couple of years. But if the ‘Disrupt to lead: the new telco mindset’ keynote panel is anything to go by, telco leaders are also keeping the main job in mind – giving customers what they want.

When asked whether the telecoms sector was being disrupted, Orange’s Valérie Cussac answered that there were two types of disruption on the menu – one about infrastructure, and one about changing customer behaviour.

And with business customers more focused than ever on getting quantifiable outcomes, telcos are betting heavily on network-as-a-service to provide scalable, reliable connectivity services to their customers.

In the words of T-Wholesale’s Dimitrios Rizoulis, “Naas provides outcomes”, and panelists noted a trend of enterprises wanting to get more involved in defining exactly what they want their architecture to look like. “We’re no longer seeing our enterprise customers really kind of stand at arm’s length”, said Colt’s CO Annette Murphy. “They’re actually wanting to come in and co-create with us because they’re being asked by their own boards to effectively develop their own internal version of NaaS.”

Reflecting this focus, there were two other sessions dedicated to NaaS at Capacity Europe this year. One focused on interoperability and the other on service deliverability – common themes included the importance of APIs and ensuring customers have as much sight and control of usage and costs as possible.