CTO of the Year Awards 2022: Top-Level Views on Key Topics

Accedian sponsored the Mobile Europe CTO of the Year Awards 2022 for the second year running. It was my pleasure to be part of the judging panel and to share a virtual roundtable discussion with the CTOs who were shortlisted before virtually presenting the Award to the winners.

Having participated in these events in the past, it was pleasing to hear the words ‘latency’, ‘performance’ and ‘end-user experience’ so many times. To me, this shows performance assurance is now table stakes and top of mind for CTOs. 

Here are my observations on key topics discussed:

Mobile Edge Compute – how to differentiate and not be commoditized by hyperscalers.

Growing demand for low-latency services especially in gaming, entertainment, and private networks. The expectation is that service provider business models will need to change to become ecosystem enablers, with an option to play the middle game using OSS and BSS as core strengths to evolve partnerships. The reality being that connectivity and cloud services are joined together at the edge. Hyperscalers have proved it’s a global game, the battle for services will be fought at a higher level than infrastructure ownership.

5G Standalone, what stage of deployments are you at? Will customers pay more?

Universally 5G Standalone is at an early stage and challenges include achieving low latency. The general expectation is that consumer ARPU will not increase over the next 3 to 5 years. Enterprises are a big play for service providers that have those relationships, especially those that have expanded their ICT service portfolios.

How to differentiate with end-user experience?
Consumers tend to prioritize value over performance, with gaming perhaps being the only exception. Even if all 5Gs are not made equal, performance differentiation often gets lost in a sea of different marketing offerings, discount plans and coverage variability.

Opportunities:  Are enterprises ready to pay a premium for low latency?

The consensus was a resounding YES. Enterprises are ready to pay a premium to assure their end-users have an exceptional digital experience, and that includes network latency.

The focus will be on solving enterprise pain points and digitalization needs. Connectivity is a recurring pain point with the opportunity to add value on top with storage, security, cloud and integration services.

Post-pandemic, now that CSPs have re-established the importance of their role for society, a new challenge arises: with the slowdown of the economy and the rise of inflation, how to maintain and create value for end-users and enterprises?  Not the only angle but certainly an important one, will be network performance and end-user experience.

Find out more about the winners and nominees of Mobile Europe’s CTO of the Year Awards 2022!