In conjunction with MWC Barcelona 2022 which will be taking place from the 28th of February to the 3rd of March, Tara Neal, Executive Editor of The Fast Mode spoke to Mark Abolafia, SVP Business Development and Global Channels Program at Intraway on the company's plans and showcases for this year's event.
Tara: What do youthink MWC 2022 will be all about? And what are your MWC 2022 plans?
Mark: We think MWC 2022 will be all about three "R"’s: Re-engagement, Rejuvenation and Revolution!
Re-engagement: After a full two years since the onset of a global pandemic, vendors, customers and partners alike are hungry for that personal and face to face contact that makes doing business so critical. For all of the vast technology that our industry creates and operates to enable global communications, what is clear is that people still do business personally. Having the MWC show live and back in its traditional home will facilitate new relationships and re-energize existing ones.
Rejuvenation: With the advent and rollout of 5G and all the associated technologies, especially around AIOps, machine learning, smart manufacturing and IoT, the industry is experiencing yet another wave of rejuvenation – both from the point of view of innovative sparks and new technologies, as well as new use cases and concepts that are enabled by the newly deployed technologies. This new wave of growth will continue for years.
Revolution! The use cases, applications and capabilities of 5G networks, and the intelligence behind it are only beginning to emerge in the labs and in practical deployments. As these networks are being developed, built and deployed, we are only scratching the surface of what truly intelligent networks can enable society to accomplish. From bottom-up, 5G will enable economic mobility across the world, from commercial to educational to operational (smart roads, cities, etc). Let the revolution begin!
Our plans are to attend and meet up with our existing, and prospective, network of technology and systems integration partners, as well as the telecom operators that consume our technology. We’ll be heading to Barcelona with business development and senior engineering people to leverage the opportunities you can only experience live.
Tara: How has the pandemic impacted the operational and business landscape of the tech segment you are operating in?
Mark: Of course, the pandemic had an impact on our business. There are very few businesses, cross industry if any, that did not feel it. What we found was that while some projects and initiatives at our customer base were delayed, all of our clients, and prospects, recognized that the service activation and orchestration product we produce is a great enabler across multiple domains in a business. One, if you can’t find a lot of senior software developers for your operation, our no-code platform fits in quite well. Two, if you are looking to massively scale your business, because of a high rate of remote working, for example, the solution allows operators to scale more quickly with existing staff, versus having to hire loads more people in operations. Three, companies recognize that when there is an economic dislocation, such as what the pandemic presented, investing, not pulling back, is where you will succeed, and emerge that much stronger. In the last 6-9 months, we have seen that philosophy take hold and gain traction to our benefit.
Tara: What emerging trends/technologies have you observed in your tech segment in recent months?
Mark: The biggest trends we have seen in the last few months are along the lines of technologies and concepts introduced over the last 2-3 years that are finally making their way into wide commercial adoption. 5G, and related use cases, is the obvious one, but two others are quite interesting as well. One, the need to control multiple silos of network elements, i.e. multiple SD-WAN and cloud security platforms simultaneously (SASE, etc). Two, the further evolution of AI/ML in the form of systems designed to deliver AIOps. This evolution is bringing the industry closer to the “nirvana” goal of closed loop orchestration, and indeed, there are some systems that will ingest large amounts of network data and deliver a result based on specially developed algorithms. That result can be fed back onto a product such as Symphonica, but for now, truly autonomous networks remain a work in progress.
Mark currently serves as SVP, Business Development and Global Channels Program at Intraway. He previously served as Chief Operating Officer at Datavision, a global SDN systems integrator, responsible for all aspects of the company’s operations including overall P&L management, service offer development, marketing, partnership/alliances, recruiting, business development and service delivery functions.
