“All human activity will eventually be digitized,” said Professor Michio Kaku, noted physicist and successor to the great Albert Einstein. If that doesn’t sum up the overall impact of Digital Transformation (DX), I don’t know what else possibly could. We were honored to have Michio as our first keynote speaker at MetTel’s Innovation Summit 2020 on February 25 through 28 at the Arizona Biltmore. It was a remarkable gathering of enterprise IT leaders discussing the future, exploring new technologies, sharing best practices and helping each other out.
To recap, we hosted 52 enterprise clients across 16 industry verticals, 14 DX ecosystem partners, ten MetTel experts, six panels, four presentations, three keynotes, two alpacas (don’t ask…OK maybe later) and one visionary scientist. And while we covered the IT communications industry landscape from 5G to AI, hyper-automation, cloud, security, disaster recovery and more—and it was all compelling—it was that visionary scientist who stole the show.
In his own brilliant way, Michio explained how the arrival of 5G would usher in a wave of innovations that will ultimately lead to the digital transformation of not only business organizations but “all human activity: our love life, our personal finances, our education, our dreams, our family tree…and,” he said “the key is the network. The network has to be able to understand, digest this vast ocean of information. That’s where MetTel….at the forefront of 5G” comes in.
According to Dr. Kaku, 5G will lead to innovations like:
- Accessing the internet through our contact lenses
- Advanced robotics
- Remote robotic surgery
- Self-driving cars and automated traffic patterns
- Virtual reality that is indistinguishable from the real world
- Accessing images directly from the human brain
- Predictive maintenance of physical infrastructure
- Holographic television
Eventually, we will arrive at 6G during which we will conduct highly personalized commerce directly from our minds. It all leads to a form of “perfect capitalism” where buyers will have insights into what things really cost, their true quality and how to access goods directly from the source, removing all friction and middlemen layers of commerce. Again, directly from our minds!
With Digital Transformation enabled by 5G as our overarching umbrella, we explored the topics that will determine “the New World Order” of business—the order that will determine the haves and have nots of an emerging commercial digital divide. Topics included:
- AI and Hyper Automation
- Introduction to Intelligent Voice
- The 5G Imperative
- MetTel 5G: the Voice of Reason
- Digital Trends & Predictions
- How Mobility Helps People Navigate the New World
- The Rise of Mobility Automation
- IoT Everywhere, Industry by Industry; Customer Engagement through CPaaS
- How XaaS Accelerates DX & Intelligent Automation
We looked ahead to futuristic technologies and solutions that are in view or already in production, such as network-based AI that is accelerating problem resolution by 80%; 5G services such as in-building, small cell networks that enable 5G coverage indoors and SD-M, Software Defined Mobility which enables control of all mobile data usage for cost efficiency, security and compliance; AI-based security agents that proactively prowl and hunt down threats; resilient, cloud-based disaster recovery as a service that keeps the business running regardless of the depth of disruption…and many more.
And as Michio said: Our clients are definitely among the early winners in the Digital Transformation evolution. Clients such as:
Dave Lafferty of Stratum Health System who participated in our industry-specific, IoT Everywhere panel, said: “We’re using big data, AI and IoT to improve the delivery of patient care, reducing the response times for our nurses from 52 minutes to under 30 per patient visit.” Kirk Rawls of TireHub had similar results in his industry “using IoT to improve route-mapping for tire deliveries, saving time and money.” In the same context, the City of Phoenix shared its experience working with MetTel to deploy IoT services to increase the efficiency and productivity of its Water and Waste departments.
Discussing how Everything as a Service (XaaS) via fully managed services has bridged skills IT gaps, Ashley Denison said Caliber Collision is growing 40% percent per year and requires a network such as MetTel’s that’s always on— “data now flows like electricity and supports major applications like our Nice inContact call center,” she said.
Also on the topic of XaaS, John Pieratt of FIS said his company is using MetTel’s SD-WAN and offering it to their global banking customer base. Through the SD-WAN customer portal, FIS plans to offer popular public cloud services to help banking clients meet their multi-cloud needs and offer integration assistance in this increasingly multi-cloud world.
Similarly, and on a very large scale, David Coulson of Signet Jewelers described how MetTel helped to unify 18 disparate networks into one and performed “slicing and dicing data from the SD-WAN network” which helped with very granular reporting. “It helped with the tracking and availability of apps in our stores.” Coulson went on to describe the project as “a huge win as the savings from SD-WAN paid for Signet’s cloud conversion and deployment of new business apps in the cloud.”
Speaking about using intelligent automation for customer engagement, Ryan Aschauer of Floor Coverings International shared his experience in accomplishing two business goals: improving the customer experience and providing strong ROI for FCI store franchisees. “Toward those ends, we’ve brought the AI-based texting bot from MetTel into our mix very quickly. That went from a tool that we were piloting to a tool that was generating 12% of all of our in-home scheduled appointments and that change happened almost overnight. On top of that, we were able to greatly increase our ROI on the marketing programs that are associated with it while providing a better customer experience for the end-user if that interacts with the bot.”
These are just a few of the many amazing moments we share at the Summit. I’m extremely grateful to all of our clients who attended and participated along with our key ecosystem partners and sponsors, including Samsung, AT&T, Intelygenz, VMware, Cybraics, Raytheon, Datrium, Dubber, Lumin.ai, and Viasat, among others.
Oh, yes. Back to those alpacas. Well, they’re cute and friendly and make great postcards for the family. And we were at the Arizona Biltmore, the birthplace of the Tequila Sunrise, which was flowing in abundance. I rest my (business) case.
