2930: Vodafone's Digital Transformation: Connecting the World

[00:00:00] We truly leveraging technology to shape our digital futures and enhance global connectivity. Well in today's episode of Tech Talks Daily I'm joined by Mark Bennett and he's the head of Enterprise Connectivity Products at Vodafone Business. We're recording this at Cisco Live in Vegas this week.

[00:00:24] After meeting on the show floor I invited him to join me to discuss how Vodafone is enhancing the network world through cutting edge solutions like Networking as a Service and also how they're utilising the Cisco Meraki platform to offer unparalleled secure networking experiences.

[00:00:43] We talk a lot about technology, technology trends but as you all know by now every day I try and demystify this technology and talk about the real world problems that we're solving for enterprises.

[00:00:55] I think this is an essential lesson for business leaders so buckle up and hold on tight as I beam your ears all the way to Vegas where you can join myself and Mark Bennett from Vodafone as together we explore the intersections of AI, DevOps and software defining network

[00:01:12] that's bringing a new era of operational productivity and customer experiences to the forefront. So a massive welcome to the show Mark, can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:01:27] Yeah, hi, so I'm Mark Bennett, I lead the global enterprise networking products in Vodafone Business. Vodafone Business is one of the growth engines, the main growth engine within Vodafone Group which is one of the largest communication companies in the world.

[00:01:44] Well it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Before we started recording you were telling me you only flew in just last night. Is this your first Cisco Live and what are you looking forward to the most?

[00:01:55] It's my first Cisco Live in the US and it's a great opportunity to meet with the Cisco folk over here in the States and also some of my peers. I'm also interested in looking at AI and automation specifically around enterprise networking and hearing some of the other sessions.

[00:02:15] There's a lot of AI here that we've seen and heard so far. Obviously Vodafone is a huge globally recognised brand but can you tell everyone listening a little bit more about the Vodafone Business and enterprise connectivity side of things

[00:02:28] that some people listening might not be as well aware of? Yeah, so Vodafone Business as I said is a key growth enabler within the wider Vodafone Group. Last year our revenues were about $8.7 billion, a growth of 5% which is well above our peak with our peers within the industry.

[00:02:46] Our mission is about how do we help customers, business customers to succeed in the digital world and keeping society connected. We're trusted by more than 6 million business customers around the world. About 1400 of those are multinational customers. We've got a really broad portfolio that doesn't just include enterprise networking.

[00:03:08] It also includes IoT. We're a market leader for IoT. We've got about 175 million connections, cloud, security, analytics, unified comms and wider products. So we can provide a full solution to meet the needs of our business customers and those

[00:03:26] customers span SMEs or a small enterprise down to Soho right through to big multinationals, public sector and indeed carrier customers. We have a Vodafone Business International carrier division under Vodafone Business which is also very strong. When it comes to enterprise networking, it's all about our scale.

[00:03:47] So we have 5G in 300 cities. We have 17 domestic networks, fixed networks in our operating companies. Those operating companies also have mobile networks. Our total reach which also includes our Vodacom division in Africa spans 192 countries. So we really deliver at scale for our enterprise customers.

[00:04:08] We're recognized as a market leader when it comes to enterprise networking. We're a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader in 2024. We are a leader in the Forrester Wave for Zero Trust Edge which is all about SD-WAN and SASE.

[00:04:25] So we're trusted by business customers to help them on their digital transformation. That accreditation from analysts provides our customers with additional confidence that we can deliver to their needs. Fantastic. And that's one of the reasons I invited you on the podcast because there'd be a lot of

[00:04:39] people listening around the world who had no idea about that side of things. I'm curious, you're having conversations with businesses of all sizes around the world. What are the key trends that you're seeing in the market at the moment especially around things like network automation?

[00:04:53] Are there any big themes? Yeah. I mean before we get to network automation, enterprise networks are becoming more and more complex. We're seeing the conversion of software-defined wide area networks with security particularly at the edge driven by cloud adoption. It's driven by hybrid working.

[00:05:11] It's driven by the increasing use of internet as a primary transport into branch that needs to be secured. So SASE and how enterprise evolved to SASE is absolutely key and we're supporting our customers on that. The next trend is around cloud integration itself.

[00:05:31] It's relatively straightforward to adopt SASE services but to ensure an optimal experience for end users needs support. Additionally connecting to infrastructure as a service and private cloud and there's different ways to do that across internet as well as more private connectivity and new

[00:05:48] software-defined cloud interconnect solutions which provide a way to connect to multiple clouds for a single port in a cost effective way. When it comes to network automation, did you know that the majority of customers are not automated when it comes to network activities?

[00:06:05] Maybe 65% and that means that configurations are performed manually, that monitoring is done manually but there's big benefits in automating in terms of uptime, improving delivery cycles and business agility. That's why it's important to Vodafone business. As you said this is your first Cisco Live in the US.

[00:06:27] So what are the key trends or anything that's caught your eye whether it be on stage, in the show floor here at Cisco Live, anything caught your attention? Yeah I think the adoption of AI on top of network automation is becoming really important.

[00:06:44] In the Vodafone business session together with Cisco Meraki on Thursday we'll be talking about network automation and AI around the Cisco Meraki platform and how we can improve operational productivity, end user experience and agility for business customers and how we're doing that right now. So that's really exciting.

[00:07:09] The other area that's interesting is the adoption of multi-cloud networking. So we talked earlier about the trend for cloud integration connecting to the cloud but more and more enterprises are adopting multiple clouds maybe around 70%.

[00:07:24] So the next challenge is how to move workloads between those clouds, application to application and how to do so with the right bandwidth when you need it, having end-to-end visibility, integrated security and operationally not having to move between maybe 12 different consoles to configure that connectivity.

[00:07:45] Application developers within the enterprise want agile connectivity and we're working on solutions in that space as well. Wow there's a lot going on there and if we zoom out for a moment, what's your grand vision for software-defined products to deliver superior and most importantly secure networking experiences?

[00:08:03] Yeah so our vision for software-defined enterprise networks is all about providing agile integrated with underlay transport on-demand connectivity to connect users and devices to the cloud. With a network as a service architecture, so all automated wherever possible, that improves

[00:08:26] reliability that improves our cost base for the enterprise but also with a choice of flexible managed or indeed co-managed services across these network products. So we're talking to the customer, right sizing the managed service to meet their particular

[00:08:44] needs and network as a service is at the heart of that vision. If we think of Netflix as on-demand streaming for whatever TV show or film you prefer, network as a service is all about automation of network resources so they're available on demand to

[00:09:03] meet the dynamic needs of today's business customers. From the Vodafone side of things, can you tell me a bit more about networking as a service or NAS and how your implementations with the Meraki platform? Anything you can share around that?

[00:09:17] Yeah absolutely so just to give you a quick summary it's making our enterprise networks as flexible as the cloud. So the networks are not the bottleneck in using those cloud services that are accelerating in their adoption.

[00:09:31] Our program is digitizing exposing our enterprise connectivity on demand so that customers can buy, configure and manage these services as they need to to meet those dynamic requirements and we got three layers to our architecture.

[00:09:49] At the network layer we're starting to digitize our transport resources, our software defined WAN and SASE services and Edge services. Then we have the digital telco layer which is controlling those network resources. So let's think about orchestration, data analytics, cell build run processes across our OSS and

[00:10:15] BSS systems. How do we then provide interface to customers to experience that digital connectivity? We do that through service consoles that sit behind portals in our different Vodafone operating companies but we're also seeing requests particularly from our larger customers for direct API integration

[00:10:35] standards-based so it's easy to consume typically using Metro Ethernet forum standards or telecom management forum standards and we're starting to enable that for example around IT service management integration, for our carrier customers the ability to qualify price and order on

[00:10:53] demand Ethernet transport for example and for customers that have their own SOCs we're providing SIEM integration for APIs as well. Wow incredibly cool and we said at the very beginning of our conversation there's a lot

[00:11:07] of talk of AI here, a lot of excitement around AI so I've got to ask how are you using AI to improve operational productivity because I think it's such a big topic at the moment

[00:11:18] we often get carried away with AI the technology rather than the problems that we're solving here. Yeah it's a really good question so when it comes to AI there's a few areas that we are focused on.

[00:11:32] So firstly we're using machine language and natural language processing within our design tools that we've integrated into our Meraki solutions. So for example we're able to associate customer intents, I want this availability at a site

[00:11:49] I'm looking for this level of application performance to how we configure our services and AI helps us to do that. We can associate those customer intents with best practice templates particular security configurations that will meet the best needs of those particular customers.

[00:12:08] We're also building on that and testing AI in other areas so for example improving the end user experience in life helping to prevent network issues and outages. So if we explore this area in a little bit more detail AI is helping us to correlate

[00:12:29] alarms that may impact enterprise networks across multiple technology domains. Before I talked about complexity of security and network convergence multiple domains how do we manage across that for the enterprise and AI is helping us to quickly isolate where default is so we can restore service quicker.

[00:12:49] We're also testing the ability to complement normal sort of network audits user surveys monitoring with something called the toxic factor analysis. Toxic factors in networking could be latency caused by congestion or particular configuration issues, packet loss caused by device challenges, errors on ports and things like that.

[00:13:20] We might have security vulnerabilities around malware we might have configuration drift where we develop particular configurations for customers but don't maintain them and they never get updated. So how do we bring all those toxic factor data together into a data lake and analyze

[00:13:39] that and look at historical trends and make recommendations around preventative maintenance to prevent an end user experience issue and we're testing AI in that space. And the third area is much more predictive and we've got use of AI co-pilots embedded

[00:13:57] into some of our product platforms right now and this is helping our co-managed customers but also our operations team managing networks on behalf of customers to start to identify where there could be end user experience issues or maybe from a sustainability perspective

[00:14:14] where there's potential to reduce power consumption and making recommendations so going a step further that our engineers can test and then execute on behalf of customers or customers can execute themselves. So it's a really exciting future how automation and AI is going to revolutionize enterprise

[00:14:34] networking really accelerating business agility improving that digital experience and efficiencies for our business customers. Toby Wow it sounds like an incredibly exciting future and a journey of continuous improvement but for anyone listening interested in exploring

[00:14:49] anything we talked about in a little bit more detail obviously Vodafone is a huge website so many different departments etc. Is there any way you'd like to point everyone listening if they want to carry on a conversation? Neil Yeah really simple goes to Vodafone.com slash

[00:15:03] business to read more about Vodafone business some of our solutions and how to get in touch. Toby Fantastic well I'll have links to make sure everything's there so people can find you nice and easily but I know there's a busy

[00:15:14] show floor out there when you're about to dash out again so just thank you for spending a bit of time with me today. Neil Pleasure thank you Neil. So as we wrap up our conversation today what are your thoughts on the role of AI and software

[00:15:28] defined networking in your industries? I'd love for you to join the conversation maybe we sparked a few additional ideas today whatever it is don't let those ideas go share them with me email me techblogwriteroutlook.com

[00:15:44] x instagram linkedin I'm easy to find just at Neil C Hughes as I said this is not a monologue it's a dialogue I'd love to hear your insights and let me know your thoughts questions and everything in between.

[00:15:57] But that's it for today I'm going back out onto the show floor now so thank you for tuning in and until next time keep pushing the boundaries of what technology can do for us. Speak to you all tomorrow.