In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review, Ralf Pichler, CEO, Detecon, talked about the company’s sustainability competencies and strategies. Pichler also detailed how Detecon is achieving digital value creation in today’s modern era and noted the industry trends he foresees in the coming year.
Detecon’s sustainability competencies have been recognized as "Best in Class.” What is the motivation behind accelerating the implementation of digital sustainability strategies?
The recognition was a huge motivation for us to push further on sustainability and the practice we are delivering. And here are four reasons why: First, the sustainability and the issues around it. Companies have a key role to play to overcome those sustainability issues. Second reason: Detecon has put out a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030, so we want to be part of that to overcome those issues.
The third reason is the sustainability consulting market. It's a huge growth market for us, and we get a lot of requests from our clients, to help them pave out the way to overcome the issues and become carbon neutral. Last but not least, digitization as being a technology management consultancy, with a huge focus around digitization — supporting the companies becoming more and more digital, which will be a key lever to overcome that.
How important is digital value creation in today’s modern era, and how does Detecon contribute to achieving this?
Nowadays, we all understand it is an important key for the survival of companies. Embracing digital and digital technology is absolutely mandatory for companies in the current environment. That’s our core belief. We tend to contribute to that achievement by not only understanding technology, it’s also how to implement it. So how does your future operating model change? How do we need to change the processes? What is the impact on the skills of the people you're having? A lot of questions around that. At Detecon, we are doing digital management consultancy, focusing on digitalization. That is one of our key roles to play. For example, next month, we're going to open our 5G private campus in Cologne to make that happen and show real live use cases for our customers.
From your perspective, with telcos focusing on their paths to becoming digital telcos, what are the core challenges and opportunities that will set their course for a successful future?
First of all, there's probably not one silver bullet — that one plan for telcos to become digital operators. Everybody's understanding and embracing that challenge and we are here to help operators and support them in finding their way to becoming operators. One of the challenges is, operators have built up systems in the last decades, with a lot of legacy, and have to bring that now to the new world to digitize. But a majority of them don't have a greenfield possibility. The second challenge is what we see as a vertical disintegration happening in the market. As an operator you don't own the full stack from bottom to top anymore, so we are living physically in an era of competition. It's really about embracing it. And I think, the opportunities part is focusing very much on the customer experience.
With its deep technology expertise, how will Detecon continue to provide relevant strategy and process insights to help your customers with their innovative business models?
Our commitment is to stay in the forefront of new technologies and industry trends, and to create value for our customers. It’s important for us to focus on what we want to decide as a company, and to invest in two main topics: first one is sustainability, as a key lever using technology. Becoming more carbon footprint neutral. And that is something we will continue to invest in. The second topic is hyper-connectivity or hyper-connectivity transformation. We truly believe anything that could be connected in the future, will be connected in the future. And that has obviously a huge impact on data security, operating models, new use cases we can think of in a diverse set of industry analytics, AI to be used, etc. All those technologies will play into that game.
In your opinion, what industry trends will continue to dominate in 2023, and how will this influence Detecon’s consulting objectives and target industries?
Most of the dominant trends we will see this year have directly related to geopolitics. So, we are living now in a multi-crisis; we are having war in Europe, high inflation in a lot of countries, a peak in energy costs, and we have supply chain disruption. All of that will influence how our customers are being set up and how they need to manage: if it’s strengthening the resilience of the supply chain, if it's about managing costs, especially in the energy field, which helps sustainability ESG. All of that will influence how we are supporting and helping our customers.
Additionally, how to make use of the ChatGPT in the business model — for example, in the usage of AI — will be also a key trend, which we will see dominated in short term. Last but not least, next to telecoms, we are targeting industries where connectivity and digitization play a key role. For us, it's automotive, manufacture and logistics, and health care — the public area — [where] we believe we can make a difference.