When researching my new book, ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business, I was fortunate to interview more than 50 thought leaders in connectivity. Their input was invaluable and their ideas, advice and examples provide very rich context for the Anywhere vision. I’m sharing selected book interviews through the blog.
In this excerpt from my interview with Axel Haentjens, senior vice president Marketing, Brand and External Communications for Orange Business Services, Haentjens provides his take on how the upcoming ubiquitous connectivity revolution will change how enterprises do business, both internally and with their customers.
What do changes like pervasive connectivity and embedded IP in broader devices mean for enterprises?
I have been in the communications business for 15 years at France Telecom [FT]. In 1995, it was very clear that the desktop had to be connected. Now we’re at the point where we have laptops, BlackBerrys, PDAs, and more. So in the last two to three years, you could access documents and e-mail through a PDA from everywhere — from a train, on holiday, etc. For Orange [FT’s key brand], that translated into a huge success for our Business Everywhere tool. We have more than 1.3 million users.
But this year, we see something else. We’re now at the point of pervasive reachability, where you need to talk to people using various means that are all integrated. We ought to be able to start one way, and then move to another.
And it’s not only human connectivity.
Right. There will be five times more objects to connect than people, at the very least. There are mature applications today in tele-monitoring, fleet management and tracking goods. Orange operates mobile networks in 28 countries, including 15 countries in Europe today: 15 percent of our mobile B2B revenue is already M2M. It comes from SIM cards embedded into devices either for fleet management or remote monitoring, and it’s growing at a rate of about 20 percent per year.
Clearly tele-metering is ready. You’ll find security companies doing it, utilities also, and energy companies doing tele-measuring for gas and electricity. We see a lot of apps in vehicles, helping to manage thousands of trucks via geo-location and route optimization.
And just beginning now is remote monitoring of healthcare patients, like monitoring pacemakers. We are working with a U.S. company that puts a very small chip in the pacemaker that talks to a Bluetooth device in the house, which has a SIM card that sends info to the doctor. If there is anything abnormal with the patient’s heart, the doctor can be informed very quickly, can react and call the patient. We started deploying it in the second half of 2009, and by the end of 2010, we’ll have full-sized deployment underway.
In connectivity technology, what are the biggest areas of opportunity for enterprises to address sustainability?
There are three areas. The first is video conferencing and other collaboration tools, anything that saves you from having to travel. Within FT, we now have a model where, if you buy Telepresence services, we can tell you the CO2 footprint of what you buy, including the carbon cost of creating and operating the solution. We can show what kind of savings you can realize, and how many tons of CO2 you’ll save based on the travel not done, etc. It’s pretty straightforward.
The tough part is life cycle analysis. If you’re serious about CO2 footprint–that’s the hard part. You need the initial carbon cost for building, installing and maintaining, etc. But we are moving from qualitative to quantitative. We were all talking about this for the last two years, but it was poetic and not very measurable. Under the pressure of green auditors, who said they can’t certify applications without measurements because it’s not serious enough, we are moving to demonstrable KPIs. So the next step is to create tools we’ll give to the customer to help calculate the savings.
The second is IT virtualization. We have done it inside FT. We have clearly measured that when you virtualize IT, you make better usage of your IT resources. Typically, you can move the rate of server usage from 15 to 60 percent. Within FT, we have removed 40 percent of our servers. The win in terms of energy savings is several megawatts. We’re not talking about CO2 savings, because we have a lot of nuclear energy in France and it doesn’t issue much carbon. But in the U.S., which has a lot of coal-fired power generation, the carbon impact of that kind of power savings would be huge.
The third is M2M tele-measuring/tele-monitoring solutions. A company very involved in energy management in France is claiming that 15 to 20 percent of its energy consumption could be reduced by remote monitoring: getting the exact temperature of buildings and doing remote management.
What do you think are the factors that could accelerate or decelerate the pace of change around sustainability?
When we look at sustainability solutions, there are three critical success factors.
The first is cost savings. I don’t believe you can sell any kind of green solution if it’s more costly. Telepresence has to save on travel, virtualization has to save IT capex and power, and tele-monitoring has to save on costs.
The second is environmental benefits. We talked about that already.
Finally, when you combine those two, you also usually find a business benefit. For instance, with Telepresence, the business benefit is increased productivity. If I don’t have to travel to Sydney, I save two days’ travel time, I’m less tired and I make better decisions. For virtualization, the performance is better because you can have very smooth, optimized management of resources. With tele-monitoring, you can optimize refilling of the gas tank, do better routing of vehicles and see less time wasted.
We’re working our way globally through a major recession. Is now a good time or bad time for introducing sustainable solutions through connectivity?
Anything that saves costs is easy to propose, but less easy to sell. The negative point is the need for capex. Telepresence solutions are a huge capex spend.
Consider the several categories of customers that we talk with. For those just trying to survive, you can’t sell them anything like this. If customers are just striving for cost-cutting but are otherwise in good shape, they’ll say they love the solution, but they need something capex-free. Then, we have the opportunity to put a leasing solution into place. The third category is customers in good shape that will move forward with these. We do have some of those. McDonald’s is not hurting right now, for instance.
If you were advising a business manager on how to profit from the expansion of connectivity in the world, what would you say? What are the priorities? What’s mandatory, and what’s optional?
Focus first on rich availability everywhere: the right laptop, the right BlackBerry. Jump into the technology, and provide things that are reasonably close to state of the art. We’re in a world where you need to be connected. Don’t shy away from the basic connectivity trend—being away from that could be away from business. Be fully savvy about those technologies.
Second, rethink the way you work. I’ve been experiencing it a lot in the last two years. The way we work has to become more flexible. It’s not about working hours vs. leisure hours; it’s more integrated. We don’t want to work all the time, but we can be more flexible about the way we live and apply some freedom. Think about working in ‘project mode.’ Determine who the key people are on a project, and then be proactive about figuring out how to keep them connected. Use all the possibilities creatively. If it’s brainstorming, you need to book a Telepresence room, since you want eye contact and you want to see body language. But for project advancement—what’s the status of this, what’s next and working down a list of things—using SharePoint and an audio conference should be enough. Think a lot about what kind of communications you need for what purpose.
You have to develop, as an organization and as individuals, a keener sense of the strengths and weaknesses of each type of communications, what works best for the work you’re doing.
Yes, well put.
Do you see the need for businesspeople to campaign inside their organizations for this next wave of communications change?
Yes. FT clients tell us that IT departments are a bit resistant to things they want to do. IT departments like simple things that are fully managed. They are struggling with the fact that they need to accept multiple devices and lots of access via different methods. Diversity is a big roadblock for IT organizations.
Young people coming into the company—that’s a very strong lever for change. They come from university, where they have been using IM, webcams, and so on. They won’t accept just a desktop computer. Change is being driven by the arrival of young people in the company.
There are other strong levers for change. C-level people. For instance, the CEO who is now keen with state-of-the-art technologies, or the CSO who wishes to equip his or her sales force with the latest online sales application and device.
Like a sandwich, with IT in the middle.
Yes. And to be fair, IT organizations tell me they know they have to change.
How will IT organizations have to change?
Diversity is the big driver. IT had to manage desktops—very standard equipment and processes. Now in the next 10 years, IT will need to manage any device from anywhere, anytime. We’ll see convergence between fixed and mobile, M2M activities. We also see diversity in the contact center. Start the discussion, then go to a Web site and add a video session. We’ll see this total interoperability and interchangeability of any connection. IT will have to manage this; otherwise, the company will be out of business. And it will have to do it without spending too much money.
How should managers feel about the urgency of these changes? How fast do they need to move? What kinds of companies need to move fastest, and which have more time?
Manufacturing companies are probably less immediately impacted. Assembly line and big process companies might be impacted, but not so much the people.
On the other hand, all services businesses—banks, insurance, travel agencies and governments—need to worry quickly. Their customers will demand to be served immediately. They use these tools in their personal lives, and they expect the same from the businesses they work with.
My favorite message is the network is not a commodity. It’s a very sophisticated way to manage voice, video and data; mobile/fixed/remote; IP, non-IP; and Internet and non-Internet. Managing these networks will be a critical mission. One of the biggest challenges we’ll face in the next 10 years is making it all work to its potential.
– Axel Haentjens
Orange Business Services
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