Bakcell CEO Nikolai Beckers, together with heads of IBM, Wipro, Ericsson, Verizon, Etisalat, Batelco Group, Turk Telecom recently participated in the Telecoms World Middle East event held in Dubai.
Nikolai and other well-known telecommunications professionals came together to discuss collaboration, innovation and the overall strategy of the telecommunications ecosystem in the world. Nikolai and Turk Telecom CEO Paul Doany talked about the current state of the telecommunications industry and the role of digitalization and startups in ensuring the future success of this field in the panel dedicated to the digitization of startup, incubation and telecommunications.
"A number of measures are required to be ready for digitization and industrial leaders need to pay special attention to key and fundamental issues. First of all, consolidation should be carried out, business processes and organizational structure should be simplified. As you know, traditional telecommunication operators usually have quite a bureaucratic organizational structure, and it is not easy to apply innovation and digitalization in such a structure. The way to solve this is to create a separate organization beyond the main organization. This institution should give people the opportunity to freely express their ideas and provide fertile conditions to be open to experiments. Bakcell demonstrates this approach through its "AppLab" incubation program," said Nicolai.
Since the launch of the AppLab program since 2014, local developers dealing with the various hardware and software applications receive support from Bakcell to implement their ideas. The participants of the AppLab project have access to free Internet, table and learning rooms, as well as ideas and the most up-to-date equipment required for the development of their software and devices.
"Factors such as freedom and responsibility for using innovations are important. Only if these two elements exist, digitalization will also be possible. Classical telecommunication organizations are built on orders and controls, which hampers the development of innovations. Also, innovations created through startups should be integrated into the core organization, which is another important issue to be considered by telecom providers around the world," added Nicolas.
