This week, as thousands of network operators, technology vendors, and mobile device providers from all over the world converge on Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, it’s the perfect time to discuss how IBM® is shaping the future of network operations and telecommunications.

Outside the glitz of new phones, connected cars and 5G with everything, there are some real challenges the industry must address. Top of mind for me are three key challenges, and opportunities, to which we must all pay attention, should we expect our industry to remain healthy. 

Accelerating AI adoption and skills for the telecoms sector

The AI skills gap is very real: executives estimate that 40% of their workforce will need to reskill as a result of implementing AI and automation over the next three years. The telecom industry is no exception.

That’s why, alongside the GSMA, IBM recently announced a new collaboration to support the adoption of and skills for generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the telecom industry through the launch of GSMA Advance’s AI Training program and the GSMA Foundry Generative AI program.

Our vision is to prepare telco leaders and practitioners for the AI-era by equipping members with skills and knowledge to help effectively leverage gen AI technologies. Obviously, IBM has a huge stake in the success of AI with  watsonx™, our AI and data platform with AI assistants. By equipping and sharing AI knowledge and best practices, we help ensure successful and safe adoption of AI across the industry.

Generative AI holds tremendous potential to help improve all manner of operations and customer engagement. Through their commitment to developing generative AI skills and training for the telecom industry, the GSMA and IBM want to enable mobile operators to provide better services and, ultimately, help more people benefit from digital connectivity.

Deriving value from modern application architecture with hybrid cloud connectivity

One of the major themes for this year’s Mobile World Congress Barcelona, “Connecting Everything” aligns with IBM’s work to help companies streamline application connectivity with products that that are simple, secure, scalable, and seamless to deploy. Easy to say, hard to do – at least without the right toolsets.

Enterprises continue to adopt edge, hybrid, and multicloud architectures with applications and data assets spread across public and private clouds while also supporting a remote, dynamic userbase. This creates a consistent issue: IT teams struggle with delivering secure, predictable network connectivity that is required by their applications, and often have no idea how applications are connected to each other because they no longer control or manage the network resources.

At IBM, we’re committed to helping ensure that enterprises are putting connectivity at the center of their application-centric strategies and regaining control of network connectivity across a multi-cloud environment they don’t own. In December, we announced the general availability of IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh, our multicloud networking solution that can support IT in their journey to optimize application performance with reliable network connectivity. Keeping up with business-critical application performance spread across complex networks is now an issue of the past.

Additionally in 2023, we expanded our accessibility of IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh to the Equinix Metal platform to enhance our customers’ ability to take advantage of the extensive Equinix infrastructure footprint to choose where to deploy and connect their enterprise applications in a flexible and efficient way. We also introduced IBM Hybrid Cloud mesh for Red Hat Services Interconnect (RHSI) to help businesses mitigate the impact of rising costs due to diverse IT environments and derive maximum value from their modern application architecture.

Eliminating network complexity and bolstering application connectivity

In a world where consumers expect the best possible experience when interacting with an organization’s offerings, DNS continues to serve an important role in how we transact through applications and data.  

Nearly a year ago, IBM made the strategic decision to acquire NS1, a leading provider of network automation SaaS solutions and authoritative DNS, with the intent of leveraging NS1 technology to improve our clients’ network resiliency and performance. 

It’s why we’re excited to have  IBM NS1 Connect®, a premium DNS solution that leverages the power of NS1 technology to deliver fast, reliable connectivity for applications and websites across the globe, available to customers. With IBM NS1 Connect, we’re delivering a customer experience that can help businesses drive revenue, lower customer churn, and improve the agility of network teams. With IBM NS1 Connect, we’re delivering a customer experience that can help businesses drive revenue, lower customer churn, and improve the agility of network teams.

Perhaps hidden from view for most users, you’ve likely used IBM NS1 Connect multiple times today. As it constantly finds the highest performant, lowest latency way for you to receive web and streaming traffic from many of the largest global content providers, banks, and retailers.

IBM NS1 Connect combined with  IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh,  create enormous value as an end-to-end solution for application connectivity, because it combines the ability to manage how traffic is delivered over an infrastructure you don’t control,

We’re also proud to offer a new approach to modern GSLB (Global Server Load Balancing). With IBM NS1 Connect technology, we’re placing authoritative DNS in the center of the load balancing equation and providing enterprises with an end-to-end offering that supports a cost-efficient approach for managing and influencing traffic flows.

Organizations are already running DNS and some sort of load balancing solution, but don’t have the full visibility that is needed to make important decisions around their applications and workloads in real time—especially in that last mile of connectivity.

We’re pairing Real User Monitoring (RUM) data with IBM NS1 Connect DNS to provide a more holistic and actionable way to steer traffic that’s never been done before. This uplevels GSLB to be used as a strategic service for connectivity versus a tactical load balancing solution.

To get a better sense of how DNS + RUM work together in our GSLB solution, join our webinar on March 5 to see how companies can use this new approach to best inform application and workload connectivity.

Let’s continue the conversation

It’s great to be back in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2024, and I invite you to join us and learn more about how you can apply AI and intelligent automation to help your organization unlock new revenue, optimize network operations, and achieve application-centric connectivity. We hope you’ll join us at booth #2H20.

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.