Future of Telecom

Michael Krigsman: Telecom affects all of our lives every day in so many different ways. What's the future of telecom? That's our topic today on Episode #310 of CXOTalk. I'm Michael Krigsman. I'm an industry analyst and the host of CXOTalk. Man, I am excited today to introduce our guest.

First, right this second, I need you to please subscribe on YouTube.

We're talking right now with Andrew Morawski, who is the president of Vodafone for the Americas and country chairman. Andrew, I've just screwed up your title. [Laughter]

Andrew Morawski: [Laughter]

Michael Krigsman: How is that for a great beginning? Tell us about your job and tell us about Vodafone.

Andrew Morawski: Yeah. First, just to kick it off, thanks, Michael, so much for having me. It's great to be able to chat with you and your audience today.

Just a real quick bit about Vodafone. Vodafone is one of the largest communications providers in the world. We've got mobile networks in 25 different countries around the world, fixed networks in 19 marketing around the world. We provide IoT, fixed services, global mobility, basically connecting businesses all around the world.

My role is, I'm president and country chairman in the Americas, like you tried to get out. [Laughter] What that means is I run Vodafone's enterprise business in the region. I did join Vodafone back in 2012. Again, it'll come into our conversation a bit as we talk about IoT, but I joined Vodafone originally to run their IoT business in the Americas.

Michael Krigsman: Well, I'm very excited, and we're going to talk today about all of these different things. Andrew, let's begin. You're a senior exec at a very large telecom company, and that gives you this privileged position to see what kinds of changes are taking place in telecom. Maybe we can start by asking you to tell us about that.

Andrew Morawski: Yeah. Look, Michael, it's a really interesting time in telecom between all the technological advances, socioeconomic changes in the world, and then tag onto that all the regulatory changes in the world. It's definitely an interesting time to be in my role.

A couple of trends that we're seeing, the first one, I'd say, is the new global landscape. I say the new global landscape instead of globalization because I think globalization has kind of come and been seen, and we're in a new era now where it's not all about just, "Hey, we've opened up new markets for our company to sell new products or to sell new devices to new countries that we weren't able to sell to before. I think we've passed that.

I think now we're at a point where we're starting to see kind of that next generation of globalization which is starting to see competitors emerge from those markets. If you're looking at Tata in India, no one ever did think there'd be a major automotive player globally that was based in India, just to give you an example.

Other than that, the other trends we're seeing are new business models are being developed simply because the speed and pace of change is going so fast that you've got to be able to keep up, and you've got to be able to adapt your business models to make sure that you can deliver on what you need to deliver for your customers.

Other than that, the next one is probably the intersection of man and machine, which is the next big trend we're seeing. People don't even realize how many interactions they're having as customers of a company. They're actually interfacing with artificial intelligence already. There are new artificial intelligence innovations and creations happening every day, and that's certainly going to make for a change.

I think the last one is around the changing work environment. We've moved to a digital workforce. We've moved to an environment where people don't need to be in an office or at a desk to do their jobs and deliver on their responsibilities.

Michael Krigsman: Andrew, as you're talking, what strikes me that's so fascinating is, telecom itself is really infrastructure, right? It's the phone lines, if you will. Yet, the things that you're talking about are massive business, social, cultural changes. What's the link then between this telecom infrastructure of switching, wires, and cabling and all of these broad-scale business and cultural changes that you just mentioned?

Andrew Morawski: Yeah. I think you hit on a real key point there. The link is where, historically, we're just considered a commodity in the telecom space. Now we're considered an enabler.

Think about how often and what big of a part of your life your mobile phone has become. I know for me, personally, and probably a problem, but I can't be without my phone for more than an hour or two. The acceptance of technology within society has really brought telecom providers to the forefront of the kind of technological curve.

Michael Krigsman: You've moved, as an industry, from being this infrastructure commodity to being this enabler of very dramatic social, economic, business change. What does this mean for the telecom industry and how do these forces affect you and affect the decisions and the investments that you have to make?

Andrew Morawski: Our customers push on us constantly. They've got plenty of different pain points that we help them adapt to. I spoke about flexible working before.

Just to give you an example, I'm coming to you now from our customer experience center in New York City. We've got two floors on Lexington Avenue and 50th. I'm in here on a Friday. I'm probably one of 15 or 20 people who are in the office because of this adaptation of flexible working and bringing technology to the forefront.

Really, it's impactful to all of us across the board on a daily basis on how we deliver on what we need to deliver on for our customers and not even just from a business perspective, but even from a consumer and people perspective. The gamification of technology has made us more entrenched in people's daily lives. I think that's what makes the biggest difference.

Michael Krigsman: These social changes and business changes are going to accelerate even more as we go forward with the advent of 5G and the explosion of the Internet of Things, of IoT devices. Maybe we can talk about that. For people who don't know, what is 5G?

Andrew Morawski: To put it simply, if you look at technology on a timeline, you take 1G started us out, which was our mobile phone calling. Then you take 2G as then mobile phone calling and that's added in then your text messaging. Then you move to 3G. 3G has taken then everything we had before and then added the Internet browser capability and the Internet connectivity, which is again the boom of the iPhone was around that same time. Then you step to 4G, which was the next advancement, which had everything we had before, but then increased our speeds and made it more viable to stream content and stream data.

The move to 5G is really a step-change in network technology. But, the reality of it is, what it's going to deliver is the ability to connect more devices and have higher bandwidth at lower latencies. Those three things are the key that are going to bring forward the next generation of innovation in telecom services.

Michael Krigsman: Why? What is the significance of those three things? You said more devices. Say it again.

Andrew Morawski: More devices, higher bandwidth, and lower latency. If you look at it from a capacity perspective, if I take the first one, there are only so many devices that can be connected at one time to a cell tower, let's just say. In 5G technology, the number of those devices is going to multiply by 10 or 50 fold, even. What that means is, if you think about the Internet of Things or connecting things to the Internet, the limits that we had before around how many things could be connected are going to go away, or the limits are going to rise considerably.

If you take the second one, the higher bandwidth or more capacity, think of how long it takes you to download a video on your phone. Picture those times being cut to a tenth of what they are now. Think of the applications that that then opens up for live HD video streaming, especially in your part of the business. [Laughter]

Then the last one, which I think is probably the most interesting one and the most impactful is the lower latency. Right now, you have a sensor here on this side and connectivity or whatever you're connecting to back on this side. You've got a latency from when the sensor opens and shuts to when you can take an action based on it. Latency with 5G is going to go down to one to two milliseconds, potentially. It opens up the world to doing things like remote surgery, true virtual reality, things that can't work or can't happen with a delay.

Michael Krigsman: What about the level of reliability because, if you're doing remote surgery, you can't have that link fail? That's one of the problems with mobile technology today.

Andrew Morawski: Yeah. I think one of the things that 5G also is going to bring is resilience. 5G isn't just a new network. 5G is utilizing five different technologies to create a new network. There's going to be different types of technology that are actually broadcasting signals at different spectrums so that you'll get more of that resiliency because, you're right, as you get into those kinds of life-critical applications, the margin for error is zero.

Michael Krigsman: With 5G, we hear about the impact on things like autonomous vehicles. As you're building out your network and you're thinking about your business and your enterprise customers, to what extent are they thinking about it, are your enterprise customers thinking about these future applications today?

Andrew Morawski: Our customers are knee deep in it, especially our automotive customers. Vodafone has actually opened a test track in Germany where we test autonomous driving technologies. It is on the forefront of everyone's mind because that's where the real transformative things are going to happen with 5G. Again, if you think about autonomous driving, you've got to think of the quantity of connections that you need to have and also, again, back to that latency point. There's no time, not more than a split second, to make a decision as a driver would to process information in an autonomous system. From that perspective, 5G is the real enabler of autonomous driving.

Michael Krigsman: The latency, then, is it correct to say that it's really not just the bandwidth but the latency maybe even more important?

Andrew Morawski: It is. Again, for different applications, different things are going to be more important. For small sensors that are just sending ten megabits of information, depending on the application, latency may not matter. It's just a matter of being able to receive those in a timely manner, maybe even collect them once a day, right? But, in other applications where you've got something meaningful that has to be transmitted in real time, like driver information, vehicle information, or virtual reality information to deliver an experience to someone, that's where that latency is going to be key.

The bigger bandwidth is going to be key if you're watching, let's say, connected drones as another, another huge market segment. If you're watching high def video from drones, it's not necessarily about the latency. It's about the bandwidth that you've got and how much data you can send.

Michael Krigsman: We have an interesting question or an interesting comment from Twitter. Chris Nicoll is an industry analyst and he's making the comment that it's really up to the enterprise or to the users to create and take advantage of these new applications that will enable business and social change. He's saying that that's not your job. That's the job of your customers to worry about.

Andrew Morawski: Yeah, and you can look at it that way. There are some customers that do that, and there are some customers that come to us to deliver that. If you look at it from a telematics perspective, Vodafone went out, and you would think, "Vodafone, oh, you're just the connectivity connecting the car."

We bought Cobra Telematics going back maybe six or seven years ago now. That's created Vodafone Automotive where we run and manage our own kind of stolen vehicle tracking product for Porsche globally. Again, is that something Porsche could have done themselves? Yes, it is. Do customers necessarily want to invest in that? Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. The ones that do, we're the enabler. The ones that don't, we've moved up the stack on our own and we provide those applications through different vertical markets, all different vertical markets.

Michael Krigsman: Has this forced you and other telecom providers to rethink your role as you've changed from commodity infrastructure to really being partners on these new applications?

Andrew Morawski: Yeah, that's one of the things. Our customers now are looking for partners. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that telecoms are not commoditized in any way, shape, or form. There is a good portion of our business that has become commoditized, but it's those areas where we can add that extra bit of value to help spur innovation, to help drive innovation within companies that we focus on.

Michael Krigsman: It must be pretty interesting working, again, with enterprise customers because some of these things that we've been talking about really are the cutting edge of innovation.

Andrew Morawski: Yeah, it is quite interesting. Again, customers are pushing on us, pushing on us pretty hard. They want help and they want a partner. From the global economic stuff I was mentioning earlier, they're going through their own digital transformations.

Vodafone has gone through significant digital transformations. Expectations on us as a telco are higher than they've ever been before.

Just as an example, if you go online to buy a local broadband connection in the U.K., you go online. You log in. Yes, I want to buy this. I want to buy this.

Customers are expecting from us the same exact experience that they get when they do their online banking. The paradigm has shifted so much that we need to help customers deliver on an ever-escalating expectation of their customers.

Michael Krigsman: There's been a significant digital transformation inside Vodafone as well.

Andrew Morawski: Oh, for sure, across the world. Again, we spoke before about the work environment and the move to remote working and virtual working. In going through a digital transformation, the way our workforce has even changed, it's kind of taken out that thin layer of support people who were doing that first level escalation. That stuff is all managed by AI now.

Again, if you look at our business in the U.K., we've got our own chatbot, TOBi, who answers questions and handles probably a good 70%, 70-80% of inquiries, I would imagine. But then, we've been able to reinvest that or repurpose those folks to step in and help us work through the next generation of services that we need to deliver. You wouldn't think of a phone company as someone like a software company who works in an agile environment, but Vodafone very much has gone through our own digital transformation and works in an agile environment all around the world.

Michael Krigsman: Let me ask you a question. Maybe you'll answer. Maybe you won't.

Andrew Morawski: [Laughter]

Michael Krigsman: [Laughter] You mentioned your next-gen services and innovation. Can you give us a glimpse of what that consists of?

Andrew Morawski: Yeah. At a high level, I'll say if you look at where the intersection of 5G and IoT is, 5G is a true enabler of IoT. When I say 5G, I'm including narrowband IoT, which is again using a very low part of the LTE spectrum.

If you look at where those two intersect and what we're going to be able to bring to the market because of that, our focus is going to be around several key vertical market sectors. I already spoke about the automotive sector. Healthcare is a major focus for us. Manufacturing is a major focus for us. Again, I mentioned automotive.

If you look across the board, there are plenty of opportunities for Vodafone to move above and beyond just that commodity, connectivity player. That's where our focus is going to be as we move forward over the course of the next few years.

Narrowband IoT, I mentioned. We're doubling our narrowband IoT network deployments in Europe, I think from four to eight, just in this year alone. We're looking to build that Pan European low bandwidth IoT only network.

Michael Krigsman: I want to remind everybody that we're speaking with Andrew Morawski, who is the president and country chairman of the Americas for the huge, huge, huge telecom provider Vodafone. Right now, there is a tweet chat taking place using the hashtag #CXOTalk. It's a rare opportunity. You can ask Andrew questions directly and we'll give you answers.

Andrew, we do have another comment, another question from Twitter. Arsalan Khan is asking, "Has 5G started rolling out yet in other countries, and what are the experiences there so far, the early experiences?"

Andrew Morawski: Yeah, so official 5G rollout, firstly, I'd say I think a lot of--not by Vodafone, I'll say--the Olympics in Korea used 5G considerably. I think that went quite well. But, from a Vodafone perspective, I think we're one of the leaders in deployment of 5G. But, again, the big concerns or the big constraint for 5G is the availability of that spectrum.

I don't know if you follow the news or not, but you'll see Vodafone in Italy, I think we just spent about $2.4 billion for 5G spectrum in Italy. We have, however, prior to that, been working with the government in Italy to deploy a kind of non-commercial 5G network in Milan to foster development of applications for 5G and IoT.

Also, again about two weeks ago in the news, we had our first hologram call done over 5G in the U.K., which was really interesting. I think you're going to see our commercial rollout plans are set for probably around 2020. Again, we've got 2,000 sites we're starting to enable now across Britain for 5G.

I guess the long answer to your question, it happens in fits and spirts as we're testing out. But, as we get spectrum, that's when the network build will happen.

Michael Krigsman: Okay. We have yet another question from Twitter. This one is from Wayne Anderson. It's a little bit complicated. [Laughter]

Andrew Morawski: [Laughter]

Michael Krigsman: I'm going to take this one slowly to try to parse out what he was really asking in his relatively long tweet. Here's what he says. Wayne has listened before to this show, and he is a very, very sharp guy. Here is his question. When you look at the transformation to data as being a fundamental currency, how does data in OT, operational technology, meaning many sources of data, transform the relationship and the expectation that I'm assuming he means customers have with telecom companies. Basically, the explosion of data, what does that do to your relationship with customers?

Andrew Morawski: Oh, look. I won't go into the big data conversation, but that is where everything is going. I think how that actually affects us is that we've got customers who have never captured these large amounts of data. I'm not just talking about their customer data. I'm talking about data within their own business to analyze that shows how things move through their own processes, that shows the reaction times within a business.

I think our customers right now are at such a point that they're inundated with so much data that they're just trying to figure out how to use it. We've been a large player in the area of helping them collect that data. Again, only in the automotive segment have we really stepped into using that data from a providing telematic services perspective for a lot of the big automotive.

Yeah, you're 100% right. Data is going to be the next currency. It's all about how people are going to spend it. Again, there are two things I want to be sure I delineate. There are two things. There's customer data, which is extremely valuable from a profitability perspective, product development perspective, or how are you going to change your products perspective. Then there's that internal data, which is what's going to drive cost efficiencies, increase profitability, and decrease speed to market. Those are the two ways that I see it.

Michael Krigsman: Can you maybe give us some insight into the composition of this data? To what extent is IoT data versus other types of data? Maybe even taking a step back, what are the different categories or types of data that you're referring to?

Andrew Morawski: Again, if you look at a manufacturing plant, widget A to get from point A to point Z, what happens at every step along that process? Where can milliseconds be squeezed out? Where can timing be squeezed out to develop your product faster to build 200 of them in an hour instead of 100 of them an hour? That's the internal data I'm talking about.

The external data, again this is a very sensitive topic, so I'm not going to go very deep into it with GDPR and everything, but if you look at the amount of data that Facebook captures, it's not just what you're posting. If you've got Facebook on your mobile phone, people know where you're going, when you're going different places.

There are insurance companies who are developing usage-based insurance based on your driving habits. That's the customer data that I'm referring to. That's the monetizable, that data that you can really monetize that will make a difference to your business.

Michael Krigsman: Would it be a fair statement that from a telecom provider standpoint, your primary concern is ensuring that large amounts of this data can make it from here to there as fast as possible, namely bandwidth and latency?

Andrew Morawski: Correct, and as securely as possible because that data is quite valuable and not just valuable from a monetary perspective, but I know my own personal data is quite valuable to me. I don't necessarily want it flying around there unsecure.

Michael Krigsman: What will the impacts of this data be on businesses? We know that it's a lot of data, but how is it going to--?

Andrew Morawski: Yeah, look; I think it's two-fold. The first is, how do you use that data? This goes back to kind of the early discussion we had. How do you use that data to better or to enrich someone's life? Right?

You take data from, let's say, a pacemaker that historically was never connected. Someone would have to go in whatever period of time and get the battery changed, would need to get data pulled from it. They had to go into a physical doctor's office to do that.

Now, with the ability to capture that data, this is an example of how you can improve someone's life. The person doesn't need to have unnecessary surgery to replace a battery. The person doesn't need to go into a doctor's office to pull data from their pacemaker to get a checkup. They now do it with a bedside device. That's where the positive benefit of data comes into play.

The data that's useful for businesses, and I'll oversimply here--and shouldn't use a customer name--but let's say you've got a major software provider who has got fountain soda machines all around the country. Those fountain machines, historically, someone would have to go around and fill them up, refill, or do whatever they need to do regardless of whether it was empty or needed to be filled or not.

Now, connecting these things, using that data, you're able to build a route specific to what machines need to be maintained or what machines need to be filled. From that perspective, that's using data to create cost savings. They're two totally opposite things.

Another leg of the stool with these soda machines, with elevators, or anything is capturing the data and doing preventative maintenance, being able to manage to know when, based on all the data that you've collected over the course of the past year of your elevator that's operating at 600 Lexington Avenue. You know that elevators of this type after this amount of time are most likely going to have this problem, and you could fix that problem in advance. Again, another cost-saving measure, but there are so many different applications for the use of that data.

Michael Krigsman: We have another question from Twitter. We actually have a couple more questions from Twitter. The first one relates to what you were just talking about. She's asking, "Do all of these applications and these changes that you've been describing now bring you, as a telecom provider, into competition with third parties like customers and partners?"

Andrew Morawski: Yeah, that's an excellent question. It's become quite incestuous is probably the easiest way to put it. You perhaps have seen Vodafone announced a deal with Panasonic, I think going back about a year ago, around security cameras or connected cameras. That doesn't mean it's the only thing we're going to do in connected cameras with anyone in the market. We are the global leader in IoT. Every single one of the providers wants to talk to us to work with us.

Yeah, a very good question. It is kind of a "cooperatition" [laughter] for lack of a better term.

Michael Krigsman: [Laughter] Okay. Fair enough. Let me go on to another question. I love taking questions from Twitter. Here's another one from Wayne Anderson, and I think it's a really good one. Wayne, you've got to simplify your questions, dude.

Andrew Morawski: [Laughter]

Michael Krigsman: Wayne is really smart. He's saying, "In 3G to 4G, things just got faster, so what does 4G to 5G to create and fundamentally change in customer capability?" In other words, what are the new capabilities that Vodafone brings to market with 5G that, therefore, were never possible before? I know we touched on this earlier.

Andrew Morawski: Yeah. Again, yes, 4G was fast, but did it take you eight minutes to download a movie, ten minutes to download a movie or whatever it was to your iPad? That'll happen in 30 seconds. I know it's a real basic illustration, but it shows the impact.

If you think about the speed of that data operating, and again I keep referring to the same things, but look at augmented reality or virtual reality where you're in an entirely immersive experience. There's a reason why people get nauseous today when they use virtual reality. [Laughter] It's because of the delay. It's because they can't get enough data fast enough from the network to their device to make it a truly immersive experience. That immersive experience is going to be the type of thing that 5G can bring.

I'm not just saying it to be able to be in an immersed environment for games or whatnot. I'm talking about being able to do remote surgery in different parts of the world where they don't have access to the same types of healthcare that we have in the United States. That's the kind of thing where that low latency, big bandwidth really has an impact.

For example, someone has a bad health event. They call an ambulance. They start working on that patient in that ambulance before they even get to the hospital.

Michael Krigsman: We actually had, on this show, a guest, a doctor in the U.K. named Shafi Ahmed, who is really one of the pioneers of using virtual reality in surgery. It's pretty extraordinary. I should put him in touch with Vodafone.

Andrew Morawski: Yeah, for sure.

Michael Krigsman: The guy is just a brilliant person.

Andrew Morawski: I can't help but get so passionate about it when you think about the amount of change. Again, the things we're talking about, they're not even scratching the surface about what's possible. I think a lot of the innovation that we're going to see as we move forward over the next couple of years, it's going to come from multiple places. It's going to come from that kind of startup, Silicon Valley type environment, but I'm also seeing--this is why I bring it up because it's quite interesting--major multinational enterprise customers who are starting to kind of greenfield operations within their businesses to develop new technologies, to develop new innovations not hampered by kind of the old systems and the old processes. We really are entering a new age.

Michael Krigsman: Andrew, as we finish up, do you have any thoughts on the intersection, again, of IoT and 5G? Are there things that we haven't spoken about that we need to cover?

Andrew Morawski: Again, 5G is just going to be an enabler for that next generation of IoT. IoT was at the top of the Gartner hype curve that pushed past the tip, I think, just over the course of the past year. I think 5G is going to reinvigorate the IoT industry because of the sheer number of applications it's going to be able to enable.

As much as there is and was so much opportunity within IoT, there were so many limitations. Again, when you get to video security and video surveillance, the speeds just weren't there. When you get to autonomous driving, the latency wasn't there to be able to deliver a viable proposition.

One of the last parts of it that I think gets overlooked a lot when people look at 5G, everyone is looking at the market. But for me, as a telco, 5G is going to deliver significant cost efficiencies. 5G is going to clear network congestion issues that I deal with. It's going to increase my network capacity in different areas, which again will spur a whole next round of innovation.

Michael Krigsman: Okay. We have a couple more questions on Twitter, which is good, and I really want to get to these. We have some very good ones. The first one is Alexander Bockelmann, who is a past guest on this show. He is the chief digital officer and a member of the board of directors of UNIQA Insurance, which is a very large insurance company in Europe, and another amazing person.

Alexander asks, "With digital trends, the barriers between industries are dissolving. What industries do telecom providers, or what industries will telecom providers partner with in the future outside of music and video providers to shake up markets?" In other words, who will telecom partner with aside from music and video that will shake up the markets?

Andrew Morawski: The one thing I will say is that I'll put it this way: Everyone wants to have a conversation with Vodafone. [Laughter]

Michael Krigsman: [Laughter] Listen. I don't mean to interrupt, but years and years and years ago--25, 30 years ago--I did work with someone from Microsoft consulting. Was Microsoft was really rising, rising. I remember his comment. He said, "IT's a great time to be us."

Andrew Morawski: [Laughter]

Michael Krigsman: [Laughter] That's what I'm getting from you.

Andrew Morawski: It is a great time to be us but, then, at the same time, we see competitive threats the same as anyone else. You've got all the OTT, the over-the-top providers. They are partners. But, at the same time, I personally end up using WhatsApp half the time instead of sending text messages or iMessage on my iPhone. That's taking away an old core part of the telecom business.

I think the key is that telecom operators like Vodafone have to change in order to remain relevant. The great thing about Vodafone is that we recognized that really early, and we started making that change really early. Again, I don't know a lot of telcos that are out there that are running agile scrums or fully operating in an agile environment to bring new products to market. When you think of that, you think of the likes of a Facebook or someone like that, but we've taken that digital step really early and that's really helped us help our customers.

Michael Krigsman: Okay. It's pretty interesting. We're really just about out of time, but there's another question from Arsalan Khan. He asks a really good question. We're getting these long questions today. Okay.

Andrew Morawski: [Laughter]

Michael Krigsman: [Laughter] "The convergence of technology, such as IoT and 5G powered by data and near real-time networks, is where the world is heading. Yet, most Fortune 500 companies are still not as tech savvy as they need to be." And so, his question is, and I'll add an appendage to it and you'll like this, "Is Vodafone Group creating a consulting arm to help?" I'll add, what do these companies need to do in order to innovate, understand, and take advantage of these new capabilities?

Andrew Morawski: Yeah. To answer your question, yes, we do do consulting work for customers already. I'm sorry. What was the second part, your question that you added on?

Michael Krigsman: Just in general, what should people in large companies do to get ready today to take advantage of these new capabilities that absolutely are going to be here? This is not pie in the sky stuff.

Andrew Morawski: If we're out of time, it's probably a great one to end on. The biggest concerns, and I think one of the things that holds back a lot of enterprises, are the concerns around security. If you think about corporate IT, if you think about you have 20,000 mobile connections. You've got 1,000 wide area network connections around the world. Those numbers seem massive when you think about them in isolation, and they are massive when you think about them from an enterprise management perspective.

Take a step into IoT, and you then deploy 100,000 devices, 100,000 endpoints a month out in the field or out in a different area of your business. The security concern is massive. Again, if I could leave it with one piece of advice is, and this is what we tell our customers, you need to go into it with an open mind. You need to go into it expecting that there are going to be breaches. The key is to plan how you mitigate those breaches when they happen because, again, with the sheer number of connections and the vast differences in how many types of devices are being deployed all around the world, you've got to be realistic, but you've also go to know that you have to have a plan to handle something when it does happen.

Michael Krigsman: Okay. Clearly, that is great advice, especially since we hear about these security instances every single day, and it's getting worse and worse and worse and worse.

Andrew Morawski: [Laughter] For sure.

Michael Krigsman: Well, we are, unfortunately, out of time. It's been a very, very, very fast conversation. We've been speaking with Andrew Morawski, who is the president and country chairman of the Americas for the very huge telecom giant Vodafone. Andrew, thank you for taking time, and I hope you'll come back and do this again with us another time.

Andrew Morawski: I love it. It was my pleasure, Michael. Thanks so much for having me.

Michael Krigsman: Everybody, you've been watching Episode #310 of CXOTalk. Check out CXOTalk.com. We have a lot of videos there, and please, please, please subscribe on YouTube. That helps a lot. Do that now.

Thanks, everybody, and I hope you have a great day. Bye-bye.