The creative quest to merge Tech and Telecom

According to Laurent Le Gourrierec, VP, Strategic Partnerships at Nokia, transition to 5G ought to be both fast, and creative.

Nokia, as an organization, is gradually focusing more on software and less on hardware, resulting in generic hardware, and differentiation with software.

Systems integrators, such as Infosys, play an important role because they are an important key contributor to the speed of deployments, says Gourrierec

As the world traverses across generations of wireless technologies, Laurent Le Gourrierec, VP, Strategic Partnerships at Nokia, is readying for the next big transition, to 5G. And according to him, the move ought to be both fast, and creative. In a conversation with Anand Swaminathan, EVP and Global Head- Communications, Media & Technology, Infosys, Gourrierec notes that there is an imminent merger between IT and telecom, and this is creating new opportunities for the telecom service providers.

Furthermore, Nokia, as an organization, is gradually focusing more on software and less on hardware, resulting in generic hardware, and differentiation with software. “This means that engineering now becomes a service of marketing and sales effort, which is partly new for telecommunications, which traditionally was very engineering driven,” says Gourrierec, adding, “Here, all of a sudden, you ask a CTO to work with a CMO. Not only in the communications service providers on enterprises, but also in our own companies.”

The executive from the Finnish mobile telecom network maker believes that because 5G is more cloud native, and is software based, not only does it gain from the entire software ecosystem, but it also gains all the attributes that come with software, that is, ease of deployment, flexibility, and scale.

The implementation, however, is not without challenges. Along with a quick implementation which would allow for faster user pick-up, it is essential to be able to find new use cases to be able to monetize the technology - not just for consumer applications, says Gourrierec, but also for enterprise, or industrial applications.

According to the VP, Strategic Partnerships, Nokia, there is an important role to be played by systems integrators, such as Infosys, because they are an important key contributor to the speed of deployments, whether they work with equipment providers like Nokia, or they work with communications service providers for the deployment, operations and maintenance.

“5G, as is often presented is not just an engineering problem to be solved, but it’s also a creativity problem to be solved,” he says, adding: “Companies that master innovation on creativity in use cases will win much more for 5G.”.