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How Is Telco Transformation Like Soylent Green?How Is Telco Transformation Like Soylent Green?

It's all about the people.

Mitch Wagner

November 21, 2019

5 Min Read
How Is Telco Transformation Like Soylent Green?

LOS ANGELES -- MEF 19 -- In the 1973 scenery-chewing sci-fi classic Soylent Green, the titular foodstuff turns out to be made of people. And people are also a major ingredient of telco transformation.

Telcos transforming to take advantage of their enterprise customers' requirements for cloud, Internet of Things and other emerging technologies need to change their corporate cultures, business processes and training -- a difficult task, according to telco executives presenting Wednesday at a panel at the MEF 19 conference here.

"We either get better and transform to where we need to be, or we become dinosaurs," said David Hughes, PCCW's global VP of engineering.

That transformation depends on people, business process and tooling, Hughes said. "'People' is maybe the biggest leg of the stool." Changing corporate culture is difficult. People get used to doing things a certain way, and always want to return to familiar business methods.

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About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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