We generate cash, not glamour, says panel at CIL conference

We generate cash, not glamour, says panel at CIL conference

The results of the 2017 Confidence, Innovation and Leadership report found 76% of the wholesale market is very confident for the future.

Key takeaways from the CIL report included:

“40% of respondents said that its revenue was generated in the Europe region.”

“76% of respondents are confident or very confident in the future of the wholesale market.”

“37% of respondents believe their organisation innovates more than the rest of the industry."

“56% of respondents describe their leadership style as entrepreneur/creative visionary.”

During the CIL panel that took place at Capacity Europe, the general feeling from the panellists was that bullish trumps bearish when it comes to this industry.

Sitting on the discussion panel was Tim Passingham, vice president of wholesale at Colt Technology Services; Brent Duncan, senior vice president of sales and marketing, global IP network at NTT Communications; Eduardo Guardincerri, chief marketing officer of international wholesale services at Telefonica; Tom Homer, managing director for EMEA at Telstra Global Enterprise & Services; and Adrian Shatku, CEO of UNIFI Communications, all moderated by our very own Alan Burkitt-Gray.

When questioned on the results that found that IoT and Machine to machine were the areas that respondents thought the held the most growth and opportunities, Brent Duncan said that IoT/Machine to machine "is not there yet, at least not as a revenue generator".

The question of company culture also came up, with all five speakers commenting that recruiting talent is a problem for them. As Guardincerri put it "we generate cash, we don't generate glamour". Simply put these telcos are competing with the likes of Facebook, Amazon and Apple in terms of appeal but all hope is not lost as Homer said we can reverse engineer their culture into their own companies to drive up the appeal.

As for the future, all five mentioned some of the questions they’d like included in the next report.

Duncan said: “the biggest opportunity is the people responding to this from the front lines with buyers, there’s room to get some real insight into what customers are asking for, it would be interesting to pull this group of respondents and ask them what’s important to them.” Shatku had one topic of choice “blockchain”, Guardincerri said: “one question that wasn’t asked was how can we improve our ecosystem”, Homer’s question for next year was on customer service “I’d like to know if there are any consistencies among our various customers and what they’re all asking for” even the suggestion of an industry benchmark was made. Lastly Passingham asked: “what value do customers place on the services we provide.”

To view the full CIL report 2017 >>>> please click here

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