What did we write about MWC last week – that it was enterprise, enterprise, enterprise, and that operators failed to show (for RCR Wireless, anyway; to talk private 5G, at least)? Well, that’s not entirely true; some of them did. Verizon Business did, and how; Jennifer Artley, the firm’s senior vice president of 5G acceleration, took 40 excellent minutes to explain how 2024 sales, just to-date, are already outrunning its 2023 scores, and how the team she’s assembled over 18 months is deliberately and collaboratively working its channels. Two years ago, operators talked at this show like 5G was the king-tech in Industry 4.0, and that they would ‘prime’ its sale into enterprises. Has that really changed?
“It is very old thinking,” she responds. The message back then, at MWC in 2022, was articulated most robustly by BT. Artley joined Verizon from BT three years ago – to create order from the disorder of its enterprise edge and private network (“including IoT”) interests – and found the same alpha credo in the ranks. “When I got to Verizon, guess what the conversation was; ‘We are going to prime’,” she says. “But we don’t have the [customer] relationships. We can’t say we ‘own’ a customer, or even that we ‘know’ it, really. We probably know a part of it, but we need these channel partnerships to maximise roots-to-market.”
Is this really an operator talking? It was probably the most reasonable and sane-sounding discussion about private 5G that RCR Wireless has ever had (or remembers) with a mobile operator – or their global enterprise divisions, at an arm’s length from the parochial interests of national carriers. In particular, and as with the rest of the vendor ecosystem, Verizon Business is in lockstep with its global system-integrator (GSI) partners.
“I’m coming up on three years here, and when I walked in the door, everyone was like, ‘Ksssh’ to the SIs. But they are bringing us opportunities. We have a pipeline with them that’s really robust. It’s completely changed.”
Artley explains: “Sometimes we win directly and sometimes we win with partners. With global enterprise, you’re looking at these OT estates that the GSIs understand; we don’t have all of those relationships, and we come-to-market better, together – and we still win.” Artley is joined in an upstairs meeting room in Barcelona by Arvin Singh, global head of 5G solutions and innovation at Verizon Business. He chimes in: “5G is not the final destination; it’s part of a whole journey. There are features coming, an API ecosystem that’s developing. And if we miss the boat on the front end, by playing the prime position, then we’re going to be sitting on the sidelines.”
None of this is novel, of course; most of the market has talked this way for a couple of years, already. But it is Verizon that is talking, here – three years after it planted its flag in foreign soil (and spectrum) with Associated British Ports, and 18 months after it took its own strategy and structure in hand, to retool and refocus, and be speculative and collaborative in the sale of Industry 4.0 systems. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the operator market appears to have gone deathly quiet on private 5G. It is eerie; and the desperate looks from the vendor community at MWC last week were nowhere in this becalmed mezzanine room, with Artley and Singh. Hype? There’s something in it, it seems.
Artley comments: “It took us a bit of time to get our legs, to figure out all the various pieces we had put together. But we have delved into this market over the past nine-to-12 months, and we have seen momentum pick up. We have closed as many private network instances in the US mid-market to date in 2024 as we did all of last year. The funnel has more than doubled; the late stage opportunities in the funnel have more than tripled. And so we are out there. And I am adding salespeople to the team. We are growing.”
Twelve months ago, Artley had 150 staff; she has close to 250, now, and they are structured to drive the broad tech ecosystem into the broad enterprise market. And not just into the US mid-market, but the global enterprise space.
This article is continued here.
