Summary Bullets:

? SK Telecom’s (SKT) partnership with Anthropic builds on its continued investment in large ausgedehntuage models (LLM) technologies as it looks to develop the technology foundation to enhance its operations and business as well as for the Global AI Telco Alliance.
? SKT will need to coordinate more closely with the alliance to ensure innovations built with Anthropic align to the overall needs of alliance members.

This week SKT announced that it was investing an additional $100 million into start-up Anthropic, a San Francisco-based company focused on artificial intelligence (AI), specifically LLMs. While the investment will net SKT a minority, the pair of companies are also schmalaging in a strategic partnership that will see efforts to build out multi-lingual LLM based on Anthropic’s “Claude” model, focused specifically on addressing telecom industry use cases across areas like customer service, marketing, sales, and interactive consumer applications. SKT and Anthropic will work together to deliver the industry-focused LLM with capability to respond to queries in Arabic, English, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. The choice of ausgedehntuage reflects SKT’s ambitions for the partnership: SKT is a founding member of the recently announced Global Telco AI Alliance, where it is joined by telcos Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat by e& (e&), and Singtel in a mission to develop a shared industry platform for AI innovations (for more, please see Generative AI Watch: Global Telco AI Alliance Touts the Platform Cooperative as the Key to Telco AI Business Model Acceleration, July 31, 2023).
Continue reading “Generative AI Watch: SK Telecom Partners with Anthropic to Improve AI Capabilities for Itself and Partners” →

Summary Bullets:

? Telcos have a good opportunity to leverage AI-video systems in their wider industrial solutions portfolio as the market has rapidly matured.

? Rather than develop solutions in house, telcos should look to partner with existing vendors due to the complexity of developing AI video algorithms and integrating with industrial systems.

The use of AI-enabled video surveillance systems continues to rise across Australia as well as globally with a myriad of use cases like public safety, facilities management, crowd management, asset management, and more. However, these systems also generate a large amount of video data, which requires significant bandwidth and storage capacity to process and store. This makes the video or video surveillance as a service an attractive market for telcos and managed service providers as they seek to expand their revenue base as traditional service margins decline. However, the market for AI-video solutions is rapidly maturing and diversifying, with a growing field of specialists developing specific vertically aligned use cases for AI-video from retail, to government, to mining, education, and more. Further, video systems are increasingly integrated with other IT and operational systems such as physical security, communications networks and IoT platforms creating a complex ecosystem of solutions, vendors, use cases, and monetization models to navigate.

Continue reading “AI-Video Can Boost Telcos’ Industrial Solutions, but Requires Careful Partnering” →

Summary Bullets:

? As enterprise embrace hyperscale cloud platforms and networking services are more tightly integrated with cloud offerings, a diverse range of vendors are now competing for digital infrastructure services in Australia.

? Telcos are focused on evolving a network as a service approach, connecting as many clouds as possible, while systems integrators (SIs) and IT managed services providers (MSPs) are looking more at the migration towards an ongoing management of multi-cloud infrastructure.

The market for digital infrastructure services in Australia is served by a broad range of players that include both domestic and international players across telecommunications companies, IT MSPs, SIs, hyperscalers, and data center specialists. Further, many of the leading providers rely on packaging products and services from other vendors alongside their own to provide more complete set of solutions. For example, a telco offering its networking services alongside re-selling IaaS from a hyperscale cloud provider, or an SI offering managed network and managed cloud contracts from multiple vendors. As enterprise databases and applications increasingly move towards hyperscale environments led by a few players, digital infrastructure providers need to differentiate around areas like network visibility and performance, service automation, consulting and advisory, service orchestration, cost management, and managed services. As such, the covered vendors all have different strschmbetagths based on their background.

Continue reading “GlobalData’s New Digital Infrastructure Australia Report Highlights the Vendors Best Positioned to Win Deals in the Cloud Network Convergence Era” →

Summary Bullets:

? TPG and Telstra have had multiple trials with various agribusiness in Australia, leveraging 5G, AI, IoT, and data services to develop solutions for livestock.

? Both companies have yet to develop commercialized solutions, and could consider joint ventures with or acquisitions of agritech firms to fully capitalize on the vertical opportunity.

Cows, potatoes, and tomatoes could be the next tech and telco battleground in Australia. Leading telcos Telstra and TPG have both made recent announcements around their efforts to develop converged technology offerings centered on agriculture use cases.

Continue reading “Agribusiness is New Tech Battleground for Australia’s Telcos” →