“We are really looking at automation from the aspect of how we best deliver an amazing product experience to organizations across Australia. Our automation goes all the way from our network through our IT stack and to the way we build strategic partnerships, including with cloud hyperscalers. We want automation around all those capabilities and to make them modular and expose them through APIs,” Logothetis states.
She stresses the importance of decoupling the architecture “to build a highly digital, highly automated, amazing product experience using those capabilities. This enables us to be intuitive and agile in what we can deliver to the market; quarter after quarter, we’re getting more and more product experience out to the market. The [decoupling approach] gives us a high degree of reuse: I can reuse the capabilities in edge products. I’ve used them in cloud products and private network products. We are starting to get that consistency of experience across products as well.”
The modular, API-enabled operating model is also fundamental to collaborating efficiently and effectively with partners. Telstra works with cloud hyperscalers as its cloud compute and edge compute partners, plus some of the large data center vendors and dominant OEM-type vendors. In this ecosystem, Telstra takes on either part or all of its partners’ technology stacks in this modular way via the APIs, then figures out “how we bring that together into a product we can market to our customers,” Logothetis explains. “Luckily, I work with partners that are building technology natively in this way.”
She clarifies that “natively” in this context means both cloud native and softwarisation – building offers as-a-Service using APIs. She notes, “We are doing that inside Telstra and relying on our partners to do it so we can create this experience for the customer.”
Automation Beyond Self-Service
“People tend to think about automation as being about how a customer buys something from and engages with an organization; the order-to-activation process has always been key for telcos…Once we start to build automation, we look at the onboarding experience to make it faster and simpler for customers, so it’s just a clicking this or swipe that type of exercise.”
Logothetis further stresses, “We have very good digital portals, in the consumer and enterprise spaces, and will continue to develop them. But the more recent innovation we’re working on with our customers is understanding how they use our products and what they want, including using telemetry data.” For example, if a Telstra customer has a cloud tenancy, how can they scale it up or create a new tenancy? How can they add AI on top of it? How can they move the tenancy closer to them? In other words, “It’s less of an interaction with us through a digital channel and more of an interaction with the product itself,” she details.
While in the first instance, automating this product interaction is geared to the enterprise market where Telstra expects “really deep engagement with products,” according to Logothetis, “I think as we look out into AR and VR augmented and virtual reality, immersive experiences, and the metaverse – depending on [what] it ends up being – it becomes a very similar sort of scenario, right? It’s about how consumers engage with the product or act inside the product versus engagement between them and our organization.”
Cloud Matters
In the meantime, she says, “We talk about key things like hybrid and multi-cloud, which enable our customers to put their workloads in the place that best meets their demands. Some are best placed in the public cloud with any one of a number of public cloud vendors. For sovereignty and security reasons, some might need private cloud. For legacy reasons, some might run virtualized technology on a public or a private cloud. Other customers want private cloud workloads. We offer that spectrum.”
Telstra has multiple partners at all layers of the cloud stack, and this is where edge compute comes into play. Logothetis says, “We start to talk about distributed computing, because customers will have more and more applications and data workloads with unique sets of requirements. Some they’ll want to have much closer to them because it’s data intensive – they want to collect, store and process the data close to where it is – or because they need actionable insights from it to correct a safety issue, say, or change a manufacturing process.”