5G Talent Talk with Carrie Charles (00:00)
Thanks for joining me today on 5G Talent Talk. I'm Carrie Charles, your host. And today I have with me Angus Ward. He is the CEO of Beyond Now, and you're gonna hear a lot more about Beyond Now in just a moment. It's gonna be an awesome conversation, so stay with us. Angus, thanks for joining me today. Thank you, great to be here. Great, great. First, we always talk to our guests about...

you know, about their personal journey, you know, how you got to your seat. There's a lot of people listening that are thinking, gosh, I would like to be there someday. How do I get to that seat? But just tell me a little about you. I'll say one of the very rare things was that I joined KPMG in 1988 as a finance guy. And I kind of never changed my seat, but the whole world has evolved around me as rare as bits of KPMG was sold off to become a management consultant for 25 years. I'm in the consulting arm, which was split off in 2002.

and then seeing an opportunity to run a software company within a consulting firm and then doing a management buyout and buying that business. So it's a of a joke that I haven't sort of applied for lots of jobs. I'm more doing the same job. I have my own desk here, but what I've done is evolved from sort of finance to consulting. I'm thinking about strategy and other things and then CEO of this company since 2017. Tell us about Beyond Now. I did a little research, watched some of your videos.

very fascinated about your model. So, yeah, so the company really started off in sort custom software development and then worked a lot with Telecom Austria and was deep into the telecom space. And then it productized to BSS back in 2005, the dawn of time, it seems like now. And that was very much a B2C world in those days. And I really got involved in 2014 and we had a project with BT in the UK, their Cloud of Clouds.

And BT had this concept where it saw that its own cloud was going to diminish and the hyperscale of the cloud was going to just grow exponentially. And when it consulted all its customers and said, you know, how do you see the world? Would you move to your workloads to public cloud? They said they would, but their concern was going over public internet. And so this idea of packaging up cloud interconnect, your own products, these own products.

with its own cloud, but also with hyperscaler cloud, is a sort of multi-sided business model. And we very much took the view that that was how the future was gonna work. And so we partnered up with a professor at MIT called Jeff Parker, who wrote Platform Revolution. He is the guy quoted by Eric Schmidt and everybody else. And we did a lot of work thinking about sell with, sell through advanced business models and B2X, as it's commonly called in telecoms. And really we plotted our journey from there. So the last 10 years,

We've really been thinking about two things. How do telcos evolve and sell with and sell through with partners, partner ecosystems, but also as part of that journey, how do they move to digital, move online, and so all those platform-based business models are through a marketplace which enables them to digitally transform their operating model, take out costs, move to assisted sales, have a richer and richer portfolio of products and services, which...

Customers the whole life cycle is now online so they can research different solutions, can do that whole thing like configuring things themselves, self-serving. How do you have a wonderful customer journey online? But also if you have great customer experience, you have a competitive price and a great experience, how do you sell more by adding more partners? So really the last 10 years we've been helping customers transform their cost base, their revenue growth profile.

and then pretty custom experience by moving to sort of B2B2X business models and moving to have this sort of a marketplace right at the front end. So you mentioned something on one of your videos that telcos have formed partnerships, but they're with companies that are just like themselves. Yeah. So talk a little bit about that because I think this is absolutely brilliant what you're saying. think it could be. I part of the journey is that

Where telcos have been truly brilliant is in cost takeout and building large asset bases, so networks. And when you do those, you do two things. Firstly, you work with very large companies like the Nokia's and the Ericssons and those kind of guys. And secondly, you centralize all decision-making. so things that were business cases and procurement and everything is centralized. And so you build a network and then you define what products you want to sell.

And the journey is actually almost the reverse of that. So what for innovation and some of these hot areas like AI and other areas, you almost need to flip it around and not actually start with centralizing power, but almost empower those people facing off against the customer. Start with the customer problem and work back. What problems are you perfectly able to solve for the customer?

And usually that requires a broader set of capabilities than any one company can muster. So you need to bring in the partners to perfectly solve that problem. So you might provide the connectivity, the service wrapper, but bring in specialists in other areas and ecosystem. But also, in terms of flipping that model, you have to be willing to work with lots of companies and create a win-win for them. So why would partners want to work with you if they go through a two-year procurement cycle?

because it has to be this win-win. So a lot of it is standing the model on its head and saying, what happens if you have to work with a thousand partners, create different vertical industry solutions, solutions for a small or medium sized business, IoT, and create that big ecosystem? How do you become really attractive and much more fleet of foot, much more customer centric, starting with customer problems? And so some of these things are actually around organizational challenge more than they are around technology challenge. Right, right.

So the telecom sector is really going through a period of significant change and upheaval. Many of the world's communication service providers, CSPs, which we'll call it from this point forward, they've announced cost cutting at all levels, sizable layoffs, and even more coming. So how can CSPs adapt and really reinvent themselves under the weight of all this pressure? So let me rephrase that. I said the brilliant cost cutting, right?

The question is, they have been nearly as good at growing revenue. And so how do they bring the great things they can bring to bear on cost cutting to the revenue growth? And that, think, is where this thing around the business models. Because if you're starting with a customer, the question is, which customers, which segments, where do you want to grow? Well, it's the B2B where a lot of the innovation is. I think the first challenge is that a lot of telecoms have been very B2C-centric. And they probably haven't had enough credence around

how to develop in the B2B space. So we call it B2B2X because it's really around how do you enable your customers to win with their customers and how do you actually create the resellers, how do you create the solutions and how do you innovate faster with partners. And so I think that's some of the clue really around how do you bring complementary skills together to really create the right solutions and products. And then, you know,

nothing ever stands still to all the new technologies. So how do you bring things like AI to bear, for example, improving customer experience, the customer journey? How do you leverage all the new technologies that your customers, your B2B customers want to utilize themselves to drive their own digital transformations? How do you use all the new network capabilities, network as a service, APIs? How do you distributed ledger technology? How do you use IoT? How do you these different things to create solutions which are...

easily consumable by your customers. I think that challenge around flipping from just being purely cost reduction thinking, really thinking about how do you grow revenue, but you need to do both at the same time. Right, right. So what countries, what markets do you serve? Globally. You're everywhere. Yeah, actually, the challenges are very different in different markets. So I think, you know, some of the some of the markets got a

Some markets are more sophisticated than US market is the most sophisticated of all in terms of working with customers who themselves are highly sophisticated in terms of what they want and what they demand is different from maybe in another market which has maybe lower per capita GDP and is not as sophisticated. And so how do you go from, how do you create the right things for the right markets? But in this journey also, how do you start off simple? So, Rome wasn't built in a day. So the question is,

How do you start with simple things? So maybe I want to start with my own connectivity and I might want to extend gradually out from that. Can I add security offerings, add margin, things like SD-WAN? Can I build that from things that I know best? Move into the ICT space of a digital office, for example. And then I can build that from the core. But also, I've got various industries where I'm market leader. so maybe automotive is really important for me, or maybe mining is really important for me. And I can create solutions around

not one or two key customers, maybe government. And so how do you actually do things in a progressive way? And so no one says, right, let's bet the house because money is scarce. And therefore the question is how do you do things in an incremental way, building on where you're strong, building on where you have the customer relationships, and really building on where you can make money. And I think, you for me, it's not around betting the house, but it's doing things in a progressive way. But.

You know, I think one of the challenges with that starting point is that today, the legacy where Telco has been means that they have huge number of what I would call stovepipes, you might call silos. don't know whether that's understandable. What typically happened is when I want to sell, I'd say Microsoft 365, I've created a separate business for that and I've got technology just to sell that. And then I've got my core connectivity business, that's separate. And then I've got an IoT business, that's separate.

And so when we did our management buyout back in 2021, we went along to our local telco and said, hey, you know, we just done an MBO and we've moved out, moved away from the mothership and we'd to have some fix, some mobile, some Microsoft 365, some security software, great to have a service desk. Can you do JIRA, Confluence, maybe some Edge? And you list out 20 things and they said, no, here's a list of 20 numbers, go and help yourself.

and everyone will ring you back. How do you that single umbrella customer journey where actually you can bring all those things that you've got today in a simple customer journey? Someone like me, who doesn't have the ear, can go along and say, actually, I can get a package of everything I need from one provider, my telco, and it's a simple customer journey. I'm using an AI assistant so I can order some quite sophisticated things with AI typing in natural language.

and having a simple customer journey, all the complexities at the back. I can get my mobile, my fixed, my SD-WAN, I can get my Microsoft 365 and everything else through a simple customer journey. If I want more, I can add it. I can almost self-serve myself, you know, to changes and things, and I can monitor online. But today that's impossible because it's all so siloed. And so that's kind of, you know, part of our journey to help customers do that and bring that single unburdened customer journey, having a single horizontal platform which bridges all those silos.

And then that is the starting point for you then to start to enrich and add more partners and more solutions and more things into that. Not creating any more silos, but having that simple customer journey and bringing everything, all the good things that Telcos do today in a simple journey under one roof. So it's easy for the customer to navigate rather than that thing I said before about centralizing where it was all about how do I make it easy for me to sell, which gives I create another silo. And so that flip for the customer.

Flip your customer. It's challenging to, know in the US that CSPs are having challenges with monetizing 5G. So it sounds to me like this would be an avenue for that, right? Yeah, it would be because again, no, so I'm going to be very controversial here. Customers don't necessarily want 5G. They want the outcome, which includes 5G. And so if you're selling, know, if someone, if let's say you ordered a buy a car and someone sold you an exhaust pipe.

You get, that's kind of useful, but I need a car. I need actually an outdoor. need to drop my kids at school, go shopping. And so this idea around the solution, the margin is really with the profit margin is with those person who solves the problem, not necessarily you get more commoditized if you can solve, I can solve this bit of the problem, but I can't solve the overall problem. And so the whole thing about 5G is how you create solutions. I think it's like smart manufacturing, a lot of the smart health, lot of those things around.

How do you move into that space with partners to perfectly solve the problem, sit on the customer side and say, we can solve it. And then that gives you the 60 or 70 % profit margins. If you're just being commoditized by somebody else creating the solution and saying, sell me 5G and then I will serve the customer, you're both being disintermediated because you now don't have the customer relationship, but also you're being commoditized. And so the question is, what do you really want is to have great customer relationships, greater share of wallets.

and provide a solution to the problem, not being one of the commodities providers of one part of that solution. Right, right. So what is the state now of that intersection between CSPs and AI, like the current state? And would you have any feedback or advice for CSPs or really any company, any telco company on how to establish AI leadership or just...

start the engines, if you will. I did a great presentation at TM Forum Copenhagen on June and I was my friend from McKinsey, Duarte Begonha and they've done some very nice research and said that only 15 % of companies were getting value from AI at the moment. And there were lots of reasons for this. A lot of it was because they were very much in experimentation mode and every area of their business was doing different experiments with different tools, different algorithms, different ways.

And a lot about AI is trying to take your biggest and most scary problems and prioritize those. So if you take the most scary, the biggest problems that you've got and say, we're going to focus on these things, less experimentation, but getting the models, the data, and all the things right in order to solve those problems, that would drive out that 15 % quite significantly. But there's a whole range of different things from how AI has been used, and it's still in that experimentation mode.

and the fragmentation of it. So for me, think, know, if I look at, you know, what we do with AI, a lot of it, you there are things around productivity improvement. It's around how do you take costs out? How do you use that to improve? But also things like customer experience and then moving online, the opportunities are phenomenal in terms of better serving the customer, you know, more intuitive, better personalization, better customer journey, you know, really helping, you know, AI-based marketing, AI-based selling.

and some of those big things around, how do you grow revenue leveraging AI, and some of those big, big challenges, and those most significant challenges where they do need investment and they do need a level of focus and structure, I think enables people to get more value out of AI. So this concept of digital business platforms or digital business models, and I really hadn't heard of that before. Can you talk a little bit more about that and, you know, and

what that is, like maybe give an example or a case study of some sort would be helpful. So if I have a manufacturer of let's say slippers or wheelbarrows, I would go out and procure all the bits I need to make slippers or wheelbarrows, right? And I have what's called a linear business model. And that means that I go out and procure things and I have a design and I make something and then I go out to the market and sell it. What platform-based business models do is they're called multi-sided business models.

And so what they're trying to do is that there are a number of roles. So who owns the platform? Who is the customer? Who is a provider of services into a solution? And anyone can play one role or all the roles or none of the roles, and they can change in every scenario. So who owns the customer? The reseller could be a partner. It could be the platform owner. Who provides the pieces? That could be the telco with its own products, or it could be complementary partners, tech partners.

service partners and the idea around a platform's multi-sided model is that you create network effect. And so the more you get, the greater economies of scale you get, the more efficiency and the greater gains you get, which means that you're harder to beat. And so what you want to do is generate network effect. So you think about Amazon, all the platform businesses who generate vast amounts of network effect. I don't know, let me give you an example network effect. So Uber for example, when Uber started it had this.

raised 10 billion in cash and had this playbook where we go into, say, Paris, and it knew that customers wanted three-minute pickups, and knew that drivers wanted to have lots of customers. And so it invested its cash to pay drives and give free rides. So by giving free rides to lots of customers, they only used my free ride voucher, and so lots of customers, which attracts more drivers to work for Uber.

And the more drivers work for Uber, the faster the pickup times are, which means the more people are encouraged to actually, that's really good. And they use Uber. And so you get this network effect with more customers, more drivers. And then it's very difficult for someone else to compete because they can't offer the pickup times and they can't offer the number of fares that Uber can get. And so Uber gets stronger and stronger and stronger in Paris and harder for others to compete because they don't have the pickup times or the number of drivers. And that kind of network effect is what you get with a platform.

And it's very difficult for people like regulators to say, well, actually, it's better service, cheaper for airs, better for customers. So how do you stop monopolies forming, which is why often it's winner takes all. And maybe the three hyperscalers in cloud, for example, have got such a high market share because they offer price reductions and more tooling and better service. And it's not like the classic monopolies where the more you grow, the worse you get and higher the prices go up.

So I want to switch gears quickly because many times on the show we talk about company culture and leadership. And I'm just curious about the company culture of Beyond Now. Tell us, what is it like to work there? What makes it different and unique? So I guess part of the thing is I thought about my journey and I talked about we were born out of a consulting firm. And so I think many tech companies that come from a very tech centric angle.

And we come up from more of business angle because a lot of us have come from a management consulting background, therefore we're helping our customers, our clients, solve really tricky business issues. so we've been, as a company, we've been very much happy to go, you know, the last 10 years we said we're gonna place all our bets on platform-based business models, marketplaces, the way to grow revenue. We think that is the future. And I guess, you know, no one else has really been on that journey.

for the longest we've been on and has got the customers and the use cases and everything else. And so we're very happy to bring together not just the technology but also the business understanding to really help our customers grow revenue. And so the problem we try and solve is how do we help our customers grow revenue, not how do we provide the technology. And so every time it's around what partners, what are great offers out there. People often say to us, know,

So what should we be reselling? We say, there's a great offer from Akamai, for example, or essentially got the great MXDR solution. And we know what Telcos are doing and what the great solutions are out there, because we know that they want to have a rich portfolio of solutions which are highly proven and highly successful in selling on the market and being able to do both sides. And I think it's part of our DNA. I love that. So you just got off a plane.

and you're traveling everywhere. see you online. mean, you've got you're everywhere all the time. So what drives you? mean, what just makes you just want to jump out of the bed every morning, no matter what country you're in, what time zone you're in? What what what drives you? think I think we're very much at the cutting edge of, you know, of thinking and where things are going. And, you know, you've always got, you know, the next challenge, the next idea, the next thing you're trying to solve with customers. And so, you know, someone provides you a clue as to, you know, how to do things better.

how to help customers grow more. I very much enjoy that. think a lot of our customers are on a journey and they're managing a huge organizational change, huge challenges around cost and how to grow revenue. And working with customers all around the world who have different angles and how to solve that in different ways is hugely interesting. think that you see how they do it in Japan, for example, different from Australia, in the US, South America, Europe.

Everyone's got a different kind of journey and what they do first and the different pathways they find and how they manage the organizational change and how they solve problems for real customers is hugely interesting. And you kind of get a little bit of piece of the jigsaw as to what the future looks like. have that sort of eye on what's next. So we've got a whole bunch of things we want to do next. So the whole thing around partner ecosystem management and how we...

orchestrate partnerships and bring partnerships together and then You know really into how do you build communities? know, how do you build communities around your platforms a very interesting topic. So you look at Jeff Parker from MIT runs a great platform strategy session every summer and there was a great speaker there who who who done projects with people like like Budweiser how to build communities around beer for example and how to build things that people actively, you know participate if you build a

the community, have dentists recommending you to other dentists. And therefore you build that community around your platform. And that what really drives network effects. There's lots of really interesting new topics coming up and really understanding who's doing it. And it may be things you take from other industries or other places and you see it as a piece of that jigsaw. I was just going to say, I mean, this is applicable in so many industries. My brain is just firing out with, you know, with ideas now.

What's the future like at Beyond Now? I mean, you gave us a little bit of a piece of it, but tell me your vision. I think a lot of, you know, we see that a lot of the idea of how partner ecosystems work, and there's a lot of things to do in that space. I mean, I guess one fundamental difference is that I thought about saying slippers and wheelbarrows, you have procurement, but with, as a service models, you have partnering. And the reason why is that if I sell you a SaaS service and you pay monthly for payers, have a...

surgical procedure or whatever it is, then you have to be able to orchestrate those parts over the next 10 years because they might own different technology pieces of that solution. You have to monetize them. Every time you get paid, you monetize that 789 partners who form that solution. And so the whole thing about how do you create better partnerships, how do you create better communities, a lot of our thinking around how do you do better on digital AI customer journey, how will AI revolutionize how you market, how you sell.

how you engage with your customers, how our platform will really evolve using things like AI to sort of optimize processes and take costs out and improve customer experience. So then it's even it sounds simple, let's take SD-WAN, really simple product, and often they provide analytics. But actually what customers really want to know is, is my router not working? And so in some respects, AI can revolutionize simple products.

how the value added you can bring to an existing product by applying AI to it and reselling it in a different way with different add-ons and a blended package. I think there's huge opportunities to both, in terms of evolving our technology, our understanding of the business challenges our customers face, adding other vertical industries. So we focus on the telecom section, the tech sector, our two big verticals, but we've done things, for example, with Audi and automotive, other sectors.

But then also thinking about the solutions which our marketplace resells and how we get better with partners and ecosystems, but also how we enable, what is that portfolio that we can help our customers bring to their customers? Big one for us. So many gold nuggets here. I am going to re-listen to this podcast episode and I'm going to take notes and I encourage our audience to do the same. So Angus, this has just been fantastic.

What, how can we reach beyond now? So we are, you find us on the worldwide web, as surprisingly, we're all, we're mobile world Congress and TM forum. We've been big players, you know, within both those communities. you know, all the things like the API, all the things around technology, but also the MWC. And so, you know, look us up. Great. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you so much, Angus.

Thank you, Carrie. Talk soon. hope to meet you someday. Very good.