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Urban Lessons for the Enterprise World
12 Plays13 days ago
What can B2B players learn from smart cities' needs, challenges, and experiences?
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Transcript
Introduction and what smart cities can teach us
00:00:04
Pablo Tomasi
Hello everyone and welcome back to an another episode. I think right now it's like the third episode. Eventually going to be publishing this stuff. But anyways, welcome back to the Satura Strategies Podcast at
Challenges in the Smart Cities Market
00:00:18
Pablo Tomasi
TelcoDrift.
00:00:19
Pablo Tomasi
And today we will discuss something slightly different. Now, um thinking thinking back of what I've been working on as an analyst, I did spend some time covering smart cities. So today we'll discuss how the smart cities market can effectively help us understand some of the challenges and solutions in the B2B space.
00:00:37
Pablo Tomasi
and And this and would include some things about reading the room, what what are type of sales you need to to keep in mind for these markets, but also what are so to the tech cycles so or the culture and how how those ideations elements if you want are really affecting the particular market and how you find those also within enterprises now for those new to the podcast i'm pablo you know independent analyst uh at Satura strategies so let's get into it
00:01:11
Pablo Tomasi
Now, ah ah first of all, when I remember when I was covering smart cities, and and quite a few years back, it was ah ah an extremely hyped
Defining Smart Cities
00:01:20
Pablo Tomasi
market. So it was a market where a lot of people were saying, like, this is going to be like a huge thing. This is going to be like a massive market.
00:01:29
Pablo Tomasi
However, it has also been a market that always been extremely undefined in what it actually is a smart city. and And that has been one of the big challenges, is is having a lack of definition.
00:01:42
Pablo Tomasi
One of the big challenges for smart cities has always been the fact that i you you can really define it it's It's pretty much, it's not a market, an idea. And it's something that for me is very similar to IoT, which you see as that idea, but not as ah ah as a market itself.
00:01:59
Pablo Tomasi
and you you can't really capture an idea it doesn't matter how smart city is there's always going to be uh another another step there's always going to be a higher level of of technology can be used in one way or another now when we're thinking okay uh let's look at the differences around the world which one as the are are the smartest cities so which one could be used as an example right for other cities to drive their agenda, to drive their innovation, to use certain technologies and selected solutions.
00:02:32
Pablo Tomasi
and the the reality is that whenever you were like counting smartest cities you always, always, always you were ending up with the like of Dubai, Singapore, Doha and those type of cities as the smartest in the sense those that had the most projects, those that had you know the most fundings and everything and I think that itself was showing that there was a little bit of a misalignment between the idea of smart cities and what an average city can do because when you're thinking about Dubai, the Singapore of the world those are like very centralized cities right they're very centralized cities so it's
00:03:16
Pablo Tomasi
easier to to make decisions, it's easier to adopt new technologies and there are also cities where money is really not not an issue.
Resource Disparity in Cities Require You to Change What You Do
00:03:27
Pablo Tomasi
So you you see these really interesting deployments, these really interesting projects and you realize, okay, this this is like nice, beautiful,
00:03:39
Pablo Tomasi
idea and development, but then you take the average city. They're never going to have the same structure. that you know What a Dubai is doing, the average Italian city is never going to be able to do it.
00:03:52
Pablo Tomasi
and And so there was a little bit of that idolizing not even sure that's a real word anyways uh creating an idea that that's where we should be going but the reality is that you cannot really do that and that is a problem that i i think sometimes happens within the the enterprise space because you you may have some fast-moving enterprise they're deploying your knowledge technologies but at the same time the bulk of the market is never going to behave in the same way
00:04:24
Pablo Tomasi
the bulk of the market will never be able to do what with some of the largest and you know most and rich enterprises can do. and And you need to adapt your strategy and everything to the bulk of the market, not only to those fast-running enterprises.
00:04:45
Pablo Tomasi
Now, going back again, i have some notes, but clearly i didn't write them very well in there.
It All Boils Down To Definitions and Products
00:04:52
Pablo Tomasi
The fact that you cannot really define a smart city creates a problem for the market.
00:04:56
Pablo Tomasi
And I remember one city that was like Barcelona that it a few years back you know had a lot of smart cities projects, like run the smart parking, all those type of stuff.
00:05:09
Pablo Tomasi
And at the same time, remember going there for MWC, of course, every year. And and you know their transport system, their metro, it is like an absolute nightmare. So again, it was very difficult to really be able to define a market.
00:05:24
Pablo Tomasi
And in the moment that you cannot define a market, then you're probably struggling to from your side, and I think about trying sell it to an enterprise, to try to define the right product, the right solution that you want to push into that market.
00:05:42
Pablo Tomasi
and And effectively, yes, it's true. You need to sell solutions. You need to sell an idea. You need to sell blah, blah, blah. But the end of the when you're counting, everything is is anchored into a product. So you're going to say, OK, I sold like 10 Smart City Platform for Smart Lightning, or I sold like 1,000 sensors, whatever you want.
00:06:02
Pablo Tomasi
So in moment you cannot define what the end market is, then you're struggling a lot because you're thinking in a product-centric way. And at the end of the day, even if you start solution, you're thinking product-centric way.
00:06:12
Pablo Tomasi
And that creates ah ah a big problem. and I think with some enterprises, some new technologies, I do see that as ah ah as a little bit of a challenge.
Political and Budgetary Hurdles
00:06:22
Pablo Tomasi
Now, another aspect I think is is quite relevant. It was definitely around for smart cities and I think it's under-evaluated as a significant element when selling to the enterprise is the the politics involved. So who is involved, who does what, and who wants the money.
00:06:45
Pablo Tomasi
Now, within Smart Cities, you had multiple parties involved, potentially multiple departments, multiple departments who, tendentially did not like each other, did not want to put budget for someone else.
00:06:59
Pablo Tomasi
And they had different priorities. And that has been one of the big challenges. So on unless there was, like, ah ah chief innovation officer or someone like that, you know, with a separate budget in charge of driving the de deployment of many smart society applications.
00:07:16
Pablo Tomasi
The reality is that if I'm from the transport department, I care about transport. If I'm from energy, care about energy. And it's very difficult to bring them on the table and say, okay, we are going to deploy something very simple. This camera is going to work helping you with traffic management but you may also help someone else in terms of you know energy or sliding pedestrian traffic.
00:07:45
Pablo Tomasi
And this is because you have silos because you have people that are competing for budget and competing for resources and they also are evaluated based on different KPIs.
00:07:55
Pablo Tomasi
So the enterprise is not as complicated, but it is a little bit similar. so you may want to involve IT within a project, but then potentially whoever will benefit from ah from that project is not going to be that same IT team. Maybe it's going to someone on the OT side, for instance.
00:08:15
Pablo Tomasi
or you may to want may may want to optimize sort of data for driving certain applications, but in order to do that and you need to involve other people for whom that is just a tiny problem among many.
00:08:31
Pablo Tomasi
So there are always different stakeholders, that's sort of the bottom line, and you need to align all of them, and sometimes they do not want to be aligned because the reality is that everyone is are quite selfish. and And I think, especially with large enterprises, that is something that a lot of a lot of time I think people are kind of ignoring.
00:08:50
Pablo Tomasi
And again, thinking at private networks, a lot of people have been always talking to me or telling me about the idea of outside of the private network use case, the idea of roaming, the idea of IoT and everything.
00:09:07
Pablo Tomasi
It's all well and good, but likely who's in charge of outside the the campus is not same person who's in charge inside the campus. So if the idea is good, doesn't mean it will be actually executed because you are going to have two people in charge with two different budgets and with two very different priorities.
00:09:27
Pablo Tomasi
So big challenge and if you want to push it even a little bit more like in in a smart cities you had like the the politics involved like proper politics you know it's like government certain priorities with a few years change of government change of priorities Now, the enterprise is not as bad as that, but you know everyone has sort of a that so to speak political agenda in terms of where they want the company to go and how they want the company.
00:10:00
Pablo Tomasi
to develop. And that is also something that that needs to be taken into account, particularly thinking when do you need to bring that ah ROI for for you know that specific person that that put the budget to create, ah ah to deploy that solution.
00:10:16
Pablo Tomasi
And that brings me to another, i think, important lesson that you can get from smart cities. Smart cities are a lot of use cases, right? You can, you know, have connecting, citizen providing digital services for government, smart lighting, smart parking, traffic management, safety, you know, pretty much think whatever want. Smart waste collection, which still think is like an amazing use case, but somehow it doesn't really get enough credit.
00:10:51
Pablo Tomasi
However, there is like the need for a use case and then there is the the actual benefit of the use case. So for instance, I remember when looking at smart lighting, effectively what was really driving a good ah ROI was not necessarily having connected lighting but but switching to LED lighting.
00:11:14
Pablo Tomasi
so if they were connected sure there was an additional bonus but you could already see like huge benefits just simply changing you know the type of light bulb effectively and this is important because sometimes oh we are pushing use cases claiming that they bring certain benefits to the enterprise, while the reality is that they are not necessarily as effective. Maybe the benefit comes from something else that is much simpler and when we're trying to sell something that is more complicated.
00:11:47
Pablo Tomasi
and And this is like a marketing technique that will work, I think, in the short term, but in the long term people realize, hey, this is not really delivering, this not doing what you're promising to me.
Funding Is Not Always An Opportunity
00:12:00
Pablo Tomasi
and uh you know look at my notes and connected with the issue of use case you have the massive issue of funding not just funding because you know lack of money is always a big problem, but actually having some national, regional government to start projects.
00:12:22
Pablo Tomasi
This is like a double-edged sword that a lot of companies are ignoring because they think about the the short-term gain, right? I got some European funding, I'm deploying this smart city project, I'm done. you know I sort of hit my target of sales.
00:12:36
Pablo Tomasi
What happens in two, three years, I don't really care. Funding is double-edged sword because a lot of time when you're doing that, when you're thinking about short-term, you're thinking, okay, I'm going to deploy sensors in this parking lot because I have the money now.
00:12:49
Pablo Tomasi
I don't care what happens next. Maybe I'm not even going to be in the same job. effectively you're undermining the the future opportunity presented by by the customer, by that application because if there is not a clear business model that is self-sustaining itself then whatever you're deploying is going to fail, it's going to run out of funding, and no one is ever going to use it because it cannot self-sustain.
00:13:18
Pablo Tomasi
And in Smart Cities, because it was like such a hot topic, there has been a lot of of those European funding, for instance, that were coming the way of smart cities.
00:13:30
Pablo Tomasi
and And a lot of people were just, OK, let's try it. Let's deploy it and let's see you know what happens. Have the funding now. It's not a problem. And a lot of those deployment, a lot of those applications, actually, as soon as the fun funding ran out,
00:13:43
Pablo Tomasi
were just left there because no one was was able to continue maintaining them. So ah ah short-term gains are extremely negative in this case. And you always should think, OK, whatever I do, there has to be a business model that without the funding will allow me to remain in this game for the long run.
00:14:02
Pablo Tomasi
If that is not the case, there is no point for you in getting the short sale. And I understand for every dollar matters, but you're not creating a long-term sustainable sustainable business.
00:14:16
Pablo Tomasi
How is that related with enterprise? Well, you can see with private networks. Again, some governments put some fundings. It's easy to deploy small private network.
00:14:27
Pablo Tomasi
But if you don't know what to do with it, at the end of the day is going to be pretty much useless, to be fair. Now, moving on, i think helps this is getting way too long.
00:14:39
Pablo Tomasi
We'll try to cut it down in the editing. So there are two more things that I wanted to touch. One is that there are a lot of sub-verticals within Smart Cities, and probably you can see the same about looking at verticals.
00:14:54
Pablo Tomasi
That creates a challenge because you really need to tailor things to a subvertical, not to a smart city. Again, if you're thinking about a smart grid, that that would be the message.
00:15:07
Pablo Tomasi
And that message is going to be very different from you know smart parking or smart waste. Similarly, if you want to talk about mines it's going to be very different whether you talk to a mine or you know to a utility or to a wind farm.
00:15:25
Pablo Tomasi
Some of the things may be common, but the messaging, what you're selling has to be separate. Last point, I'm i'm not going to really touch a lot of some of the key technology you see right now in Smart City. For me, Smart City is all about the data, right? So of course, there's like a big AI opportunities. Like you want to capture more data, you want to be intelligent in how you use the data.
00:15:48
Pablo Tomasi
that's That's for me, it's the whole idea. And then whatever the device application you put at the bottom is just data, data, data, do something with the data, get a better decision, get more efficient at what I do.
Smart Cities And Network Slicing
00:16:00
Pablo Tomasi
Then, of course, like you know there is like a big ah yeah opportunity, Digital Twins, for smart cities. But you know if you want dear if you have any ideas on that, this entry interesting just call me and let me know. What I was thinking, though, that, OK, I'm trying to bring this back a little bit on the telco side because kind of the title of the of the podcast series.
00:16:19
Pablo Tomasi
I do believe there is like a network slicing opportunity within smart cities. This is on one side because well it is ah ah government right and we've seen network slicing already been quite big for a public safety agency and depending how your country structure you may have fundings hu at city level for for safety and security so big opportunity but also because what you may consider some public utilities part of that smart city conversation so again network slicing will be a big opportunity there
00:16:53
Pablo Tomasi
Having a network that is already there and you can reserve part of it for you know traffic management for you know or cameras, whatever it is, it does make sense. And I would expect, particularly the US, where cities are like really competitive one with the other to to potentially start pushing the boundaries. OK, want this slice because I want to do this, I want to do that.
00:17:14
Pablo Tomasi
Now, probably not going to make a lot of money because not everywhere in the world is going work like that. But it is another another means. of of testing of deploying the solution and i've showcased that the solution can can work in in those specific for those specific use cases it can work for different different type of customers so let me know if you think that uh that could actually be uh another network slicing proposition that uh uh hasn't been tested yet or hasn't hasn't delivered results yet i i know there are like uh
00:17:49
Pablo Tomasi
a couple of you know trials and tests for this. I think one, if I remember correctly, top of my mind, I think in Spain, possibly Korea or Singapore, there have been some trials tests.
00:18:01
Pablo Tomasi
but But I do think could be there could be an opportunity. So we'll see. That's all I wanted to to discuss. I found doing this podcast to be extremely time consuming, first of all, and more on the preparation side on what I actually have to say, what I want to say.
00:18:21
Pablo Tomasi
I don't want to be too generic. I don't want to be too specific.
Podcast Reflection and Feedback
00:18:26
Pablo Tomasi
and And I don't want to over-prepare, to be fair. That just sounds boring to me. So let me let me know if I'm trying em sort of hitting in the right um in the right amount of mild-informative mild-entertaining
00:18:41
Pablo Tomasi
madly entertaining and hopefully a good you know good way of of listening, getting some industry analyst perspective while doing something else. Anyways, lots of lessons that you can bring back from Smart Cities and Enterprise you know to summarize.
00:18:58
Pablo Tomasi
Particularly think about the different stakeholders, think about not relying too much on external funding and think about ensuring that the use case you're pushing through our are genuine and they are really adapted and really targeting every specific segment of the enterprise so that's it let me know in the comments you agree disagree anything that i missed anything else that you know maybe i should be I should be covering within this. And yeah, if you have something interesting to say, but mean drop your message and let's have me stop but and doing solo podcasts because eventually I'm going to be running out of of topics.
00:19:41
Pablo Tomasi
Ciao, ciao.