Interview with Yogesh Lulla, Vice President – EMEA & SAARC at PCCW Global

Hello everyone! We continue our series of interviews of the big telecom players.
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It is very important to understand current trends in the telecom industry. To stay updated you need to know the thoughts of trendsetters who make up the market. But how do you do it?

In current circumstances, offline events have switched to online. Dozens of Skype calls make everyone hurry up and shorten their conversations. We all feel the lack of networking that was found at traditional conferences.

That is why we at LANCK ask decision makers directly about meaningful telecom trends. We provide you with all the information we hear from them. So, once more, do not forget to make sure that you are subscribed to us on FB, LI, Twitter, Instagram to hear the news first.

Today, our man of the hour is Yogesh Lulla, Vice President – EMEA & SAARC at PCCW GLOBAL.

– Hello, Yogesh! Thank you for finding time to talk. Let’s start with current trends.
One of the new trends a couple years ago was Blockchain. We hear about this technology practically everywhere. PCCW Global has made strong input into this technology, as relates to the telecom industry. Now it seems that blockchain is an entire part of modern telco. What do you think of this technology in telecom and its future?

– Blockchain is already becoming an important part of the telecom industry. One major use for the technology is in the area of inter-carrier settlement.
Traditionally, these transactions rely on a mix of automated and manual processes, the latter of which can be complex, expensive and time sensitive. It relies on human intervention and is prone to manual error, slow dispute resolution, long payment cycles and exposure to fraud.
Despite the huge growth in traffic, much of the ‘settlement’ is based upon the use of spreadsheets passed between carriers to work out what the costs are. The result is that it can take many months for carriers to be paid their respective fees and the whole process is extremely inefficient.
It’s clear, the current model of settlement within the ICT service provider sector is much the same as it’s been for years, and it’s simply no longer fit for purpose.
PCCW Global has been pivotal in the development of CBAN (Communications Business Automation Network) to use common standards and make use of distributed ledger technology, or blockchain to process transactions and work out quickly and efficiently the costs associated with voice and data transmission over multiple, global networks. This use of automation provides carriers with the opportunity to improve their revenue realisation.
The result is that CBAN not only reduces operational costs but can also be used to reduce and mitigate fraud which remains a problem within the industry.

– I would like to ask you about the top news from your company: we have already touched on an SD-WAN solution, but besides this, PCCW Global has a lot of initiatives regarding cloud services, eSIM, IoT and etc. What are business priorities for you?

– Our main priority currently is to ensure the health and safety of our staff. They make us what we are, we must do everything we can in the current climate to protect them.
Our mission is to leverage our extensive global network. Our Pay As You Go – Console Connect platform is successfully providing on demand scalable bandwidth into all major cloud providers, SAAS applications, data centres, etc. It’s a powerful tool, bypassing the public internet and connecting directly on a real time basis.
Emerging technology is the future of our business as we move from being a telecoms company to a service provider. One major growth area for us is IoT. Again, based on the above principle of our extensive network, our Console Connect IoT is a single source for complete and reliable global coverage for M2M and IoT Applications.
We’re very excited about the future and what it holds for our business around the world.

– And my final question would be about our new initiative. You might have heard about LANCK’s new A&B number handshake initiative. It’s very interesting to know our partner’s point of view. What do you think of it?

– I first became aware of it from our friends in LANCK!
All of us in the Telecommunications sector are tackling fraud on a daily basis, huge amounts of money are lost every year due to such activity and it’s adversely affecting the bottom line of Telecom operators.
Most enterprises would only know about it during their next billing cycle when there is an enormous surge. Let’s face it – Most of us can detect an attack hours after it was completed, but by that time it’s too late, the fraud and the loss has occurred.
We need a reliable solution keeping pace with multi-layered cyber-crime to efficiently manage the business and network operations. A system focused on identifying and disrupting fraud before it occurs is extremely valuable.
A&B Handshake does seem like a relatively simple and cost effective, game changer at a first glance. If it can indeed avoid the abuse of phone networks then it will save billions for our industry, keep costs low for users and help ensure the future of infrastructure developments.

– Thank you for an interesting conversation!

That’s all for now. Do not miss the next interviews that we are planning to publish relatively soon.