Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Hello listeners, and thanks for tuning in to this edition of metrocyte, a podcast for metrogyl. Beth I'm Beth Schultz. I'm the Vice President of Research here at Metro G. And with me is my guest, Anthony Bartolo. Anthony is a seasoned tech executive whose long career has included leadership positions at companies such as Tata Communications, Avaya Bandwidth, and most recently, Vonage.
In January, Anthony transitioned from his role as COO at Vonage to take on the CEO position at Aduna. Now, if you haven't heard about Aduna, here's what you need to know.
This is a global business venture announced last fall between telecom network giant Ericsson and telecom operators to spur the use of network APIs and ease the ability of development platforms, CPAAS providers, Hyperscalers, systems integrators, ISVs to tap into those network APIs, develop cool new applications and use cases.
In short, it wants to be a unifying force around network APIs to accelerate their use.
Now, there are a lot of eyes on Aduna watching carefully to see whether your venture is able to deliver on its vision and what that will mean for mobile operators trying to get more value out of their networks and enterprises looking to differentiate with new services among other constituents.
So, enough from me. Welcome, Anthony.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Thanks, Beth. I really appreciate the invitation.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Well, we appreciate you taking the time. I know it's been a very busy time for you, so I'm glad you could take some time with us today.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Thank you. It's nice to be in a conversation without so many lawyers being present. It's awesome.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Fair enough.
Okay, so I just gave a high level overview of Aduna. Now let's dig a bit into what the venture is in more detail and how it intends to achieve its goal. So first off, what does it mean to be a unifying force around network APIs? Who's being unified and what's the value proposition for each of the constituents?
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Sure, it's a really good question. I think there's a lot of unification to go around. I mean, what Iduna is about is really sort of centralizing the complexity that naturally occurs amongst disparate groups in the telecoms world and actually centralize that complexity. Complexity, but choice of distribute to simplicity. What does it mean? It means when, you know, I spent a little bit of time, you went through my history, I spent a lot of time in the CPAAS world and as well as in the carrier world as well as in the enterprise world and in those worlds there is this insane desire to have simplicity. And in their view, it's be able to consume or develop a product that's consistently used or consistently consumed around the world.
And if you picture a developer today who Is voraciously consuming APIs, they're trying to consume those APIs in a global fashion. And we sort of don't allow that to happen in a clean way on network API type of technology stuff that's coming out of the mobile networks, they're different in every single country and different jurisdictions. So if you think about that individual, they're trying to work across multiple different operators. All the specifications aren't necessarily aligned. At least the industry's trying to work there with the standards bodies, which is great, such as Kamara. Latency and reliability vary from carrier to carrier. Or if you're using multiple carriers and you've got a lot of different hops, pricing and policies are inconsistent. No singular SLA to unify that particular offering and then they're navigating regulations.
So instead of building, we're finding that teams are actually spending their time managing that fragmentation and that's a real barrier to innovation. So if we could unify how those APIs are presented, at least the network APIs and the mobile APIs that are coming off the 5G networks, if they're unified on a singular platform for consumption, you can rely on the way the consistency they're going to be consumed at. You can rely on the pricing, you can rely on fact that the regulatory elements are taken care of. You can rely on all those things. We allow the developer community to actually do what they do best, which is innovate rather than what we ask them to do now, which is consistently go in and reinvent the wheel country by country, carrier by carrier, which is an incredible waste of productivity. And from a business minded technology guy such as myself, that's, you know, it's just unfathomable that we let it go on for so long, to be perfectly honest.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, high tech in general is known as having a lot of complexity and telecom maybe the worst of all.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: There's no doubt that we're not short on linguistic and jargon and acronyms in our industry and I think we just want to simplify as much as we can.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: Okay, so you talk about simplification, you talk about scalability globally, where are we today or where is he doing it today? I should say in terms of the right players, all the right players in place both on the network and the hyperscaler and the platform side and where we are today, then where would you like to be at the end of 2025.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Great question.
I'm actually surprised at how quickly we've moved along at least certainly since my journey.
It's important to recognize, I think I have had, you know, when you've been in this space for the last 33, 34 years, you can develop some skepticism on our ability to be able to move and move quickly and align.
I've been converted, obviously over the last 12 months, and we can talk about that a bit later. But watching I looked at it and thought, okay, can this industry, which is not known for consistent collaboration, right. Can they really pull it together? And I look at that and say I'm surprised on how quickly we've made some moves over the course of just the last six months alone. The founding members, how many of those founding members have come together?
How many of network partners have come in because you don't need equity to participate any longer. There's plenty of equity to bootstrap the, the aggregation of 5G network APIs.
And for me, seeing those all come together, singing off a similar hymn sheet, but having a desire to really move the needle, actually I feel pretty good about where we are. I think there's a lot to still do, there's a lot to still prove.
But do I feel all the players are there on the supply side? There is no shortage of players wanting to join the.
Join the entity and participate in the entity once again. The barriers to entry aren't really that high anymore. There's not a requirement for any equity whatsoever. So this desire to come and join that entity, it's a very big tent. Doesn't really matter where you come from, what stripe you come from geographically, or what traditionally people would have considered competitive players. There's no such thing. The goal here is to develop and pull together an ecosystem, an ecosystem of repute around network APIs. And whoever wants to participate in network API sort of movement is welcome to join. And so from my perspective, I feel like there's all the players that we need there. Are there other players who are wanting to join? Yeah, they probably haven't been announced. You know, it's more along the lines of getting them on board, aligning.
You've got on the supply side, many, many service providers participating. Obviously you've got the iduna formation, which should be happening in the next little while as we become fully fledged and independent entity and close the transaction.
And then you've got. On the demand side, there's no shortage of demand. Right. So on the demand side, you know, yes, you've got the Vonages but you've also got Cinches of the world, Info Bips of the world, Google Cloud of the world and others who are maniacally obsessed with the supply. Okay, well do you have the supply? And they see that and then they want to sign on. So it's a matter of being able to join all those together. So yeah. Are all the players there? Absolutely. Are there other players?
Naturally there's the hyperscalers, there's already dialogue, there's dialogue there. These are all non exclusive relationships and that's what the best type of ecosystems are born in, non exclusive relationships. They're natural coming together of all the different players and that's what we're seeing and we're navigating through that and having a great time in doing so. But we also have an impatience in doing so as well. I think I'm watching the industry, watching an industry which used to take a long time to do something particularly on standards based and now watching the impatience that they have for it is really sort of at one hand for stressful but at the other hand really refreshing to see, really starting to move the needle. So I'm sort of proud to be a part of it.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: Okay, so for through the rest of the year it's kind of about gelling Aduna and then bringing more, more participants in as they become interested.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Yeah, it's great, great point. Thanks for bringing me back to it. Is to actually create that supply and connect that supply. Having the supply is one thing. Connecting the supp and getting up and running seamlessly in all the different geographies and not with all the different carriers is no mean feat. And it's no mean feat. Normally in this case we've got active and it's a, it's an, it's an in, it's a ecosystem of the willing. So there's this desire to, to do this. So that's what we're actively doing. We're a small company funded by and, and the, the brainchild of some very, very big players.
So there's large ambitions and as a result that pressure to, to onboard and get up and running is really there and that's what's going on right now. So by the end of the year I'd like to have a lot of the main countries, a lot of the top 10 countries really baked in and in process the demand side sort of moving and flowing through the platform. Those, those are our ambitions. Our ambitions privately are much larger than that. It's really to set up scale so that next year it's not CSPs or providers in the tens, but maybe burgeoning on 100 or so carriers. Because that's the goal. The goal is to be easy to connect with. And we recognize we have to white glove a few, but we're trying to do is get a standardized interface into the platform itself on the southbound side and do the very same on the northbound side. And there's an equal desire from everyone to do that. Everyone's got to give a little, and that's what we're seeing. So we're seeing them. We're seeing the right attitudes, the right behavioral traits, which is pretty surprising and very cool.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: Well, we'll see where we end 20, 26. Hundreds of hundreds. That is ambitious.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: It is, it is. And I don't mind exceeding it, but I also, if I get close to it, I'm.
And I'm not hedging, but I think we get to those numbers, we see real momentum and we see real coverage. Right now, if we just take a look at the coverage of those who signed from the get go, you're covering in excess of 50% of the demand of the, of the, of the subscriber base in the, in the industry, and therefore tam, and that's huge. And if we just take a look at signing on, what we've done since then, it's an additional 10 to 10% or so. So you're starting. That's real momentum in this industry. We're not talking. He's not the land of small numbers.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: No, not at all.
Okay, now Anthony, explain Ericsson's role.
Big player, obviously.
What is its role here? And then also what is Vonage's role? Just given that Vonage is owned by Ericsson and you know, you, you know your very recent history there.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: Yeah, look, I think they're all fundamentally different roles, all the same vision. And Ericsson's role is no different to the CSPs. I think the CSP saw a view to sort of come together a little bit and present in a consistent way, which is where their customers that they aspire to court and serve want. And what they want is that consistency of experience regardless of where the carrier is. Likewise, Ericsson is a customer of all of these carriers and they also have a vision for, for the industry in space, which obviously drove the acquisition of Vonage, which I thought was a really bold vision. What Arduna does, what a Vonage does, are very, very different. Vonage is a customer of Aduna. So they're on the northbound side and no different to infobip and Cinch and Google CL Instance and many others to come.
And they basically are the retail arm. So they nurture a customer base of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, or in Vangi's case, millions of the developer community. They nurture that developer community, they manage that developer outreach and they sell network APIs on the retail side, but they also sell CPaaS APIs, network APIs coming off the mobile network and then these adjacent CPaaS APIs, and they sell those and sometimes put together solutions and nurture them with their developer community.
Aduna, on the other hand, is more of a wholesale place. Well, Aduna's customers are the CPAAS players, they are the global systems integrators. They are very large, very large digital natives. And for the most part they're selling in a wholesale manner. They service those. They're not managing or nurturing a developer platform, they're not managing a developer community, so they keep that wholesale. The whole goal of DO now is to present a very thin layer of a platform that connects and aggregates all of the standards based Kamara APIs that are coming out of the, the supply side, which is the CSPs and presenting them in an equal and fair way for that larger community I just described to consume from them. We don't put together entire solutions. They're presenting those APIs and they're presenting them consistently right across the globe or as much of the globe is that we can get to so very different, very different mandates.
And on the Ericsson side, I think they're a visionary technologist who sees that their customers were wanting to do this and making sure that they could aid and facilitate that activity. I think in the end they know that in a way all of these players get a lot of insight through this endeavor. What do I mean by that?
I mean, if you look at what a carrier is doing and what naturally a CSP is doing is they've made these trillion dollar bets over the years on building these mobile networks. And there's an element of betting and doing that. They build it and therefore they would come.
Well, obviously on the top of that has been this tremendous amount of innovation that's been unlocked. And now there are demands on that network. And instead of making bets, any further insights they can get on where the demand lies, on what and which country and how turns those bets into data assisted investments. And that's a big, big change, especially when you're talking the size of dollars. So it's this virtuous cycle where they see where the demand is, therefore they can tailor where their investment in the network is. And then when they invest in that network, they create better network solutions that the innovators on the edge, the builders and the makers on the edge and now can take advantage of and create even more demand. And then you see this virtuous circle, well, there's a natural benefit there because when that network enhancements are required, an Ericsson, for example, gets the advantage of being able to innovate around those advancements when they see them also be able to present some of these solutions as network enhancements that can be therefore invested in by their carriers and therefore in turn be presented to the developer community to take advantage of and express to their constituents through their applications that they build. So there's this multi phase, sort of three loop, infinity loop that takes place that if you've ever been in any type of product development, having any insight on a business case really gives you confidence to really double down and invest in that business case. And, and I think that's, that's the benefit of having an Aduna being able to bring those insights into another concentrated place to provide openly to a whole ecosystem and fairly to a whole ecosystem.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Great promise for sure.
Okay, so Anthony, you took on the role of CEO at Aduna three months ago.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: What are the highlights of your time with Iduna so far and what have, what's been the biggest challenge if you've, that you've encountered?
[00:18:36] Speaker A: I would argue it would be behaviors and behaviors to both those answers. I'll tell you what do I mean by that? I mean it's a, it's.
I express how I, you know, how I think about it and that's the authentic way I think about it. You know, the behaviors that I was really surprised by is watching a unified desire amongst the constituents to really serve the developer community.
And you know, that is, you know, in my 30 years, if I were back 20 years ago, that wouldn't have been a natural thought. It wouldn't have been a natural instinct to sit back and say, okay, well how is the developer going to consume our network?
Obviously the advent of APIs have sort of opened up the awareness around the developer, but not down to the actual developer and the complexities that they face and our recognition of those complexities.
And so watching that behavioral change to okay, well how are they going to consume it? How do we make it really easy for them? As a key question, I wouldn't have thought that that would have been a key question that a carrier asked themselves at the same time, you then run into, you get refreshed by that perspective. And then sometimes you do see the behavior. These are very large entities. And then you start to see that a large entity can have multiple facets within them, that some are more further advanced than others. So sometimes you run into the behavior of not being at the front edge because you've got different aspects within the lifecycle management that's happening within a carrier that haven't adapted yet. And, and sometimes we look at those and see these as paradoxical. The reality is they're managing their businesses and some behaviors are to protect a particular space that they become accustomed to in a big revenue stream, and others which are advanced new ones and take them through that life cycle. And it's not uncommon and not unusual and not in a way surprising that I could swing from one side to another in a day or within a couple of hours in having conversations with them. And you know, I found watching those two different behavioral traits be sort of fascinating and at the same time exhilarating. So for me, I think they're the two biggest changes all within the same company. But then again, we're talking about companies that are hundreds of thousands of people, large, but just have some of the most talented people inside those organizations really forcing their own organizations to come to the forefront and expose aspects of their networks that they wouldn't have thought about exposing. And this is the enriching part of what we're talking about when we talk about 5G APIs. These are APIs that some people have not seen before. Never thought that could be common. And when you get an insight to that, you sit back and say, well, I can't imagine what applications are going to look like three, four, five years from now, let alone a year from now.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: So let's talk about those APIs.
Fraud, location verification, QoS. Those are the most cited examples of network APIs that we can be using here.
What are some other examples? And then do you have any sort of real life examples of how we can start using these?
[00:21:56] Speaker A: Sure. I mean, the real life, you know, we're an intermediary, so we see what's going on at the edge a little bit and we, and we see and we get that sort of aggregated. What I would say is you've got the natural proclivity that we hear about around authentication and fraud. I think they're the first ones that come to mind. Why? Because I think they're real issues and concerns, both because fraud exists. And I think there are many fraud vectors continuing to open up and you swap those fraud vectors down. I think the network is a fantastic way to do it because it is a, a very.
Once again it's an ecosystem of repute. They have this reputation of being bulletproof for a reason and therefore they become a threat vector at the same time. So knocking down fraud is pretty key. And then there's the authentication is important because we're seeing regulatory frameworks kick in in a lot of different ways. And one of the, a couple of the regulatory ways that I've seen them kick in is you take a look at particular examples.
Let's look at ones that are public things like in Australia they came out with a new regulation around social media being sub a certain age. Then you can't.
Limiting exposure to social media and taking some network APIs with KYC APIs and a number of verification APIs and combining those, allowing you to be able to tackle certain age groups not being, having access to certain types of social media is sort of new. And I'm starting to see that in multiple countries. I'm also seeing the same for gambling. There needs to be some type of verification and they tend to be punitive when they come in as a regulation, they tend to be punitive.
Why does that matter? Why does that matter? Because in our world, in the telco world, sometimes we would build applications or APIs that needed to be somewhat solved all of the cases before publishing them. Whereas in the enterprise world, and particularly when it's punitive, if you can lop off chunks of liability by knocking off 20 or 30% of your liability, because 30% of the case you've got the data and you could use that data to at least remove the risk of that, of that profile having access to whatever's being regulated, it's a really big deal, especially when you talk about the scale and the numbers that we're talking about. And they're willing to implement even if you took out 20% of the liability, because they know over time that you will be able to incrementally get better. And enterprises particularly have known this for a long time. Enterprises know that they have a particular problem and they're willing to go after that particular problem with a solution even if it doesn't solve the problem 100% because they know that they can incrementally get there better and better and then you can eke out value in that process.
That is where operators are almost through regulation, almost forced or regulatory new rules forced to be willing to take those, take those routes because they, you know It's a new regulation.
Implementing something that can reduce that liability is huge. Why not, why not implement it? Because that's what we're seeing in certain countries and certain players and the enterprises doing. And network APIs are a perfect example of that. And I've given a couple couple for that. So I think they're really good real life examples. Also seeing Quite a few POCs around sort of interesting things such as.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: You.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: Know, SIM counts and understanding where there might be, not pinpointing, but understanding where there's large amount of particular users in a particular area and recognizing that that area is under threat, whether it's under threat from in Australia, a bushfire or a wildfire in California, or whether it's a flood zone and then making sure you divert resources, precious resources and timely precious resources to those areas. And I think that's a great use of network APIs. I mean these network APIs are effectively sensors in a lot of ways and the network itself is a sensor. And Some of these APIs can expose those sensor capabilities. And I think we're just at the beginning or the early innings of some of those really interesting use cases.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: I love that SimCount example. That's a perfect value. Showing the value potential.
Okay, I have a few more questions and one I have to ask because every conversation has to include, it seems these days, a mention of AI.
So what's the relationship, if any, between AI and network APIs?
[00:26:53] Speaker A: Look, I'm going to go back to the example I just made. I think AI being able to consume, process, leverage data and leverage data from sensors is incredibly important.
And I think what you'll see is network APIs being additional data points on very unique data points that could be exposed into an AI sort of solution become quite important and data that they may not have had access before.
I keep thinking, and a lot of people don't realize that mobile networks just built into the base station itself is rain attention, rain attenuation information because they have to change the power levels because of the rain effect. The rain effect consumes radio waves, therefore they have to increase power. Therefore they have these sensors. They've never been exposed out into the outside world. Now exposing them, exposing them into an AI environment could be super interesting example. One of the PoCs I've seen is a insurance claims.
Someone's just had an accident, it's due to inclement weather, it's a minor fender bender, et cetera. Understanding that they've been in very inclement weather and this happened, maybe there's particular Risk profiles, that they're willing to approve a claim sort of instantaneously rather than process it ad nauseam. Because you can see the weather, you can see a bad weather situation, you can see other accidents in the same area. You know that this isn't an. Isn't an anomaly. It is an event that's taking place.
Those actuaries understand that way better than technology do.
Technologists do. But using technology in a very customized way, marrying two different worlds and coming up with a solution that's better for the consumer, I think that feeds AI each and every day of the week. And there are things that we wouldn't have even thought of.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: And I can definitely see customer satisfaction rates improving if an insurance company was to take that sort of action.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Dollars. And there's value that's created through customer satisfaction. We've been proving that out now for two decades, you know, and I don't see that changing.
Don't see that changing at all.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Anthony, earlier in this conversation, you made it sound like you had to be converted to the idea of aduna.
So what do you say to the skeptics out there?
[00:29:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I say to the skeptics, look, I think a prosecutor friend and mentor that I once learned from. Now, this is a weird segue, but hang in there. Prosecutors, in the absence of hard evidence, look for artifacts of intent.
And when I heard this, it made me realize that I applied that. I started to apply that to the way I think about business.
You have to look for the artifact of intent of a customer you might have or entity that you might be dealing with. And I did the same thing with this industry. I had a particular perspective, and then I looked for artifacts of intent, examples of artifacts of intent that I saw happen.
Obviously the fact that they, you know, you've got very reputable large organizations and carriers actively going out there in, in unison talking about network APIs. But they didn't just talk about network APIs. They started to. They entered into. They created the iDuna.
The iDuna entity. That's not. I'm looking at it from the inside. That is no mean feat. It's thousands of pages of legal documents going through antitrust, navigating these contracts. There's hundreds of contracts that are involved. It's the dialogue that they're using amongst each other on advancing the network API premise and also use cases. It's being able to work and work with each other and understand that there are dialogues that can be had for the betterment of the industry. It's not. I just want to be A couple of points better than the next, than the next person in a particular market share, but actually increase the pie of that market, making the market a larger market to participate in, witnessing that. But then they started to do interesting things like they reorganized around it.
And when you see all those artifacts and you argue, you can make an argument that the intent is real. Bringing somebody as an outsider such as myself into this particular framework, yes, I understand the industry, but I don't come from a carrier specifically. So it's somebody who understands the outside, the enterprise, understands the developer community. Those are all really key artifacts. And when you add them together, you realize that the intent, and obviously they're making investments. That intent is a measurable one.
They all pointed to the fact that this is not a fly by night idea, thought effort, and they put their best people on it. And that is the interesting thing for me. So that converted me to the fact that in your lifetime you don't often get a chance to maybe influence your industry in such a, in such a, such a potential way. And for me it's, you know, it's worth taking that, taking that effort and see if I can drive, drive that, that energy in the right direction. I think it is. And, and they're willing to give it a go. The artifacts suggest it, you know, for me that makes me a convert.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: That's great. Such enthusiasm is great to hear. Okay, let's go with one last question here.
Leave us with your thoughts for IT and SAX leaders in particular.
What do they really most need to understand about network APIs and the potential?
[00:32:52] Speaker A: Well, the network APIs complement what your roadmap, they complement what your other APIs that you're consuming. They provide capabilities that you can rely on being consistent in every country that you operate in or every country that you aspire to operate, operate in more than likely. And that is an important attribute because it creates productivity, it unlocks productivity that you would otherwise have to spend reinventing the wheel, country by country, carrier by carrier. And the other thing to recognize is there is a natural level of trust that happens in this ecosystem.
For instance, your compliance organization inside your enterprise is going to know who these carriers are. They already use these carriers, they already trust, they already contract, they already operate with these carriers. So by definition, there is one level in technology that you sort of run into sometimes is getting it through your compliance organization. While you're using the network that you probably already use, you use the entity you probably already use. So by definition, you've got all the credentials that you need to take this capability and actually put it into practice and and get it out to market in a quick manner and operate in multiple countries. To me that is probably the one thing that when you operate inside an enterprise how stifling that can be and when some of those things those barriers to implementations are already baked in and removed for you to huge productivity benefit because you're trying to solve a problem or you're trying to execute on a solution and anytime that you can remove that remove time to execution is huge. I think that's what network APIs are ultimately going to provide.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: All right so on that note thank you Anthony for sharing all of this. It's been great to talk with you again and great to hear about Aduna and looking closely watching it and you know looking forward to seeing where we end up with with this venture.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Thanks Beth talking to you.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: So that is all for now on behalf of the Metro G team. Goodbye till next time and take care everybody.
