Jonathan, Bryan, welcome. Jonathan to you first.
What are your impressions of MWC?
Well, first, thank you for the opportunity.
It's great to be here with both of you.
Mobile World Congress this year is busy.
It's somewhere around 100,000 people here this year.
And so really excited about that.
But it's the traffic.
Of course, everyone's talking about AI.
That's the one thing we all talk about every day it seems. But
also interesting things like ecosystems and openness and
marketplaces.
So those are things that have struck me.
Bryan, what do you think?
Well, Jonathan, good one.
It's good to see you live and in person.
And I echo your statement, MWC is back, right?
And 95,000 people, 105,000, I think as you mentioned—that is
incredibly exciting.
So kudos to Barcelona, and kudos to the organizers for getting
that right.
Data. So as you talk about the ecosystem and you talk about the
platforms and all the innovation, data is a consistent
theme.
How do you use it?
How do you protect it?
How do you start to drive the imperatives and narratives
around trust?
I think those are the two big things.
I think the third would be diversity. If you came here
seven years ago, the diversity of who is on the floor both from
a vendors and partners and just the participants, it looks and
feels incredibly different, and it looks and feels exactly as it
should be and that way we talk about what this needs to be
like.
So that's my first initial impressions. Jonathan,
what are the biggest challenges, the biggest opportunities, for
telco at the moment, do you think?
So it's really understanding how they can leverage that
diversity, how they can address different customers, and the
different customer bases, and understanding the differences
and similarities between their consumer business, the Soho,
small-medium enterprise, and large enterprise. Similarities,
crossover expectations, but also some pretty significant
differences.
We talked a little bit about those a few minutes ago.
So that's really some of the challenges they're dealing with.
And then, of course, it's how do you deal with monetization,
capital, and the ongoing cost of their operations, the
investments they're making in infrastructure and license, and
how would they monetize that.
Bryan, looking to the year ahead, what's most exciting you?
Well, if you walk around the halls seeing what people are
prototyping, seeing how they're reimagining how they feel about
tomorrow, making it more about today.
So the year ahead of how do you actually make these things
actually real and applicable in our day-to-day lives is probably
the first and foremost of what I say, wow, that would be
exciting.
I think the next one is how do you actually bridge the "one
plus one equals three" imperative for the providers,
the ecosystem players, the platforms, the partners, to
really drive
GenAI to make it
conceptual to real.
And I see that as being a massive must do that
I'm incredibly excited about. Jonathan, what's exciting you in
the year ahead?
I think we're going to see some interesting evolutions, but
again, in the realm of data, being able to really capture and
disambiguate that data, to leverage it, to be able to
really seize it for things like AI.
So be able to get back to really a real customer value, making
that real, as you mentioned, making it tangible, making it
give a real business benefit.
Jonathan, Bryan, thank you so much.
Thank you.