Dresden, June 18, 2024
Where are we right now in the digital transformation, what lies behind us and what lies ahead? These questions were the common thread running through the numerous presentations at this year’s connect conference. GenAI was a constant companion – albeit in different roles.
In view of the fast-moving times and even faster technical developments – especially in the field of AI – there seemed to be a certain need to position oneself within all of these developments during the presentations at the connect conference in Dresden. After all, it feels like everyone and many companies are currently on a journey somewhere: into the cloud, between 5G and possibly 6G, between real presence and their own avatar. But even for this article, let’s start from the beginning.
After the welcome by Dirk Waasen, Publishing Director of WEKA Media Publishing, Dresden’s mayor Jan Donhauser welcomed the guests. He also helped with the localization: by stating that his city is possibly the most beautiful state capital in Germany.
Thomas Bergmann, Director Technology Cloud & Datacenter at o2 Telefonica, then gave the opening keynote. He outlined o2 Telefónica’s journey to becoming a cloud-native company. The company is more or less in the middle of this journey: o2 Telefónica has four or five years behind it, and it could be another three or four years, Bergmann speculated. The declared goal of the transformation is to move 80 percent of IT apps to the cloud. An important step in this process is to invest in the 1,600 employees. For example, more than 100 employees have been trained to become certified cloud architects.
Speaker with AI doppelganger
In one of the next presentations, Enrique Moreno, SVP and Head of Telco, Media & Technology Industry at NTT Data DACH, made a double impression: before he spoke about GenAI, an Enrique Moreno avatar took the floor on the screen. For the necessary transparency, the avatar pointed out that although he looked and spoke like Enrique Moreno, he had a better accent in English than the real Moreno. It was a funny, but perhaps also somewhat frightening moment to see the “two” Morenos on stage.
The real Moreno then looked back on the (ever faster) invention of milestones such as fire, the wheel, electricity, computers, the internet – and finally AI and GenAI. 92 percent of AI deployments take 12 months or less, Moreno explained. In view of this rapid development, the motto is: “We need to transform everything,” said Moreno. This applies to people, corporate culture and processes. Moreno also spoke about applications of GenAI in the telecommunications sector. Examples include virtual customer agents as part of an intelligent contact center, chatbots for knowledge mining and automatic code generation in the context of software development.
Michael Martin, CEO of 1&1 Mobilfunk, spoke about the beginnings and the delays in setting up the fourth mobile network in Germany. Unlike traditional networks, the 1&1 network is based on an open RAN architecture. Specifically, the architecture consists of four core data centers, 24 decentralized edge data centers and over 500 regional far-edge data centers as well as 12,600 mobile antennas. Everything will be deployed in a private cloud or the company’s own data centers, although Martin did not want to rule out the public cloud in the future. Chat-GPT also had its say during the Q&A session. An audience member had entered a question for the speaker there and received 10 answers back. Some of the GenAI answers seemed to impress the speaker.
Mega-topics of diversity and sustainability
Michael Langer, Head of Network Quality at the Vodafone Group, emphasized in his presentation on connectivity that innovation, sustainability and diversity belong together. On the last topic, he took a closer look at the current proportion of women in the telecommunications industry, which has remained fairly constant at 25% in recent years. Vodafone is trying to increase the proportion of women in various ways. One of these is the Vodafone Women in Technology network, whose patron is Tanja Richter, Chief Network Officer at Vodafone Germany.
Claudia Töpfer, Group Lead Energy at o2 Telefónica, spoke about the mega topic of sustainability. The company has been using 100 percent green energy since 2016. In addition, AI-based functions have enabled the company to reduce energy consumption by 10 percent.
In the two panel discussions that took place throughout the day, the audience was also able to find out about the importance of the cloud in networks and about green networks. Claudia Töpfer pointed out that the telecommunications industry has always changed and must continue to do so now and with regard to sustainability. It is important that sustainability is not synonymous with “expensive”. Instead, it costs companies more if they do not focus on sustainability.
Later in the afternoon, Badiaa Bazarbacha, Co-Managing Director of Vantage Gowers Germany, spoke about the challenge of network coverage on railroad lines. She presented the idea for a new type of tower designed to meet the special requirements of the track environment. The ground there is rarely flat. However, the innovative tower stands on a platform that can be adjusted at an angle to compensate for such unevenness.
Dirk Waasen had the final word – or more or less ChatGPT: Waasen had entered the question of whether the connect conference was important. The quintessence of ChatGPT’s answer: “Certainly.”
With this in mind, the participants had the opportunity to explore all of the day’s topics and ideas in greater depth during the steamboat trip on the Elbe at the end of the connect conference.
