Full Transcript
David Savage- Welcome to today's episode of In Conversation With I'm lucky to be joined by Chris. Chris, you're the Senior Vice President for Nokia Enterprise. How are you today?
Chris Johnson- Very good, thank you. It's great to be here.
- And you haven't come from too far, over from Paddington.
- Yep, that's where our London office base is, so yeah, not too bad.
- Originally from Sheffield?
- Originally from Sheffield, the steel town.
- Yeah.
- But yeah, travelled quite a bit and been down in London for about 30 years or so.
- Yeah, well, look, it's a pleasure to have you here today. Senior Vice President of Nokia Enterprise. I imagine to people within the industry, they might have an inkling of what that is but in your own words exactly what is your job for the business?
- Yeah, there's a long and a short story, right? And Nokia's like over 150 years old. We've been through many, many iterations as you can probably remember. Today, we're largely a telco infrastructure business. So we build fixed and wireless networks, the big radio networks for the telcos. And then we also have a high growth enterprise business which is the piece that I'm running, which is really selling to industry, to government, to enterprise. Everything that's not telco really.
- You kind of allude to the fact there that some people would be familiar with an iteration of Nokia. It's interesting to hear you say that the business is 150 years old 'cause I am squarely of the generation that Nokia is the 3310, it is snake. Just expand on that if you will, because I think to some people watching, to hear that Nokia are the kind of business that they are, will come as a bit of a surprise.
- Yeah, I mean we started in wood pulp, we went into rubber, we made rubber boots for a while and obviously, yeah, it moved into the to the handset company that everybody knew and loved back in the day. That's was ended back in 2010 actually. And since then, we've been really focused on providing the 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G and eventually 6G infrastructure for telecommunications around the world. So selling to all of the big telco operators in every country, helping them build their big wireless networks and their fixed networking that goes with that. And then the enterprise business, which is now the high growth part actually of Nokia where we're focusing on industry and helping enterprises become more productive.
- It's interesting that you're talking about kind of high growth and businesses becoming more productive. Technology feels like one of those industries that is to a certain degree, insulated from some of those economic headwinds that we often hear talked about on the news. But as we are entering a period of economic uncertainty, how do you think technology is going to play a role in helping industry through that?
- I mean, it's always gonna play a role, right? So back through my career, the first phase I guess was sort of office automation. The second phase was the internet. And we're entering this new era, which we call industry 4.0. And this could be seen as a sort of a hype term industry 4.0. But the reality is, there's still a lot of manual processes and automation that can be done in heavy industry in processing plants, things like wind farms, across complex organisations like airports, oil refineries, I can go on and on. Any site that has a preponderance of assets of physical things, can now be connected and there's a lot of productivity that can come out of that.
- What are kind of the examples then of businesses, in terms of the productivity, how are businesses looking at evolving to meet some of the challenges that they're facing? Cause there are businesses that they are struggling to get workforces in. They are struggling to kind of meet the demands of their customers. And I suppose industry 4.0 is a way forward for those organisations.
- Yeah, imagine a factory, right? And you've got goods in, so some components, materials that run through a manufacturing process and you've got goods out finished products. And there's very complex set of processes, people interactions, robotics, very old legacy machinery, a lot of new software and capability coming in. And I think technology plays a role to bring all of this together into more efficient process, more sustainable process, keeping that factory running at at its most efficient best. And that's really about connecting everything using the data available from every machine and person and activity in that plant and turning that into insights that can be used to better improve efficiency. So that's just one example in a factory. There are kind of hundreds in every different industry and what we tend to do is, we verticalized our thinking. So we've had a lot of people from different industries, so we can learn the language of those industries, communicate better with them and understand their challenges and then apply the technology to get those productive outcomes that we need.
- And are those businesses ready for this? Because you talk there about legacy technology, you talk about manufacturing and connecting. We're talking about connecting, we're talking about IOT and I imagine telecommunications and mobile networks. There's a lot of tech there that's legacy tech that was never designed to be connected and suddenly is being connected, that must present some challenges for organisations that maybe they haven't thought through.
- Yeah, and I think there's a process to go through, right? There's always a use case that's very dynamic and very easy to understand. So if you look at the mining industry, for example, most of the mining industry is trying to automate all of its machinery, big diggers and equipment is usually man-less now or woman-less. And so connecting that machinery and making it work efficiently and nonstop 24 hours a day and safely, is something that is an immediate impact. And if you think about technologies like wifi, simple wifi technology, it's not super reliable in an environment that needs to continue running safely and continuously. And so bringing 4G and 5G networking, really ruggedized industry scale networking into that environment, allows us to bring an immediate productivity increase to that plant by keeping those machines running 24/7. And safety is really important in those environments as well. So that increases the safety of the workers that are on site.
- As someone who then is working with a lot of growth organisations and someone who is leading kind of across enterprise for Nokia, keeping kind of partisan politics to one side, we're talking about economic uncertainty and over the last few days, we've heard leaders talk about the need to invest in sustainable technology and how that can drive industry. Is that something that you would echo from the technology sector's point of view or are there other industries that perhaps aren't being thought about or talked about that can really help drive growth?
- I think it applies to all asset intensive industries right now. This is where the big wave of economic advantage is coming. So in the office automation days, that was all about paper processes and improving the process in a bank, processing checks, retail, EPOS systems in the supermarket. That was where technology was making a difference. The internet age, we all know about what it did for us. In this industrial age, it's really focused on the kind of basic economics of humanity, right? Big industry, energy, transport, kind of mining and extraction and making these real economic drivers perform better. And so yes, we are in a period of uncertainty but actually technology will be very attractive to these organisations that need to be looking at an enhancement to their economics and productivity. So the investment in technology actually is very insignificant compared to the returns that technology can bring them. And by the way, there's a massive sustainability topic that goes alongside this, right? So as we increase productivity, we're usually finding that sustainability goes hand in hand. Less wastage of raw materials, less use of energy and water and a better sort of economic output that turns into a sustainability advantage for that company.
- We're talking a lot about industry and process and automation, but how do you envisage that impacting the workforce?
- So I think in the current state, we do see a lot of robotics, for example in a manufacturing environment. There's a lot of high tech being deployed but there's also a lot of legacy processing happening in manufacturing lines, processing plants and what have you. And so, as we start to connect both the advanced stuff, the robotics and the legacy machinery that's typically been wired up, we can start to connect that more dynamically and people will move off the shop floor, if you like into the back office where they're working with the software, alongside the software. The data is extracted, the software is interpreting and decisions can be made about the efficiency of that plant and decisions to be made about improving that. So the jobs will be more analytical, more software led, there'll be more design skills in software needed, more interpretation of industry needs into the software both on the technology company side but also in the industrial player themselves.
- So look, as a final question, 20 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, Nokia with a company that people thought of as snake. What do you think in 15 or 20 years time people might think of or would associate Nokia with I suppose?
- So I think today we're absolutely leading the way in the 5G deployment world with telecommunication companies and building out networks for governments and other departments. So we're definitely leading that space and that will lead a natural progression to 6G and 7G and all of the technology advancements beyond that. But I think, where Nokia's headed at the moment and the growth in the enterprise business at the moment. I'd like to see us as a real power and force in the kind of deep engineering, processing industries, as someone that's really facilitating industry 4.0 and economic value.
- Well Chris, I wanna thank you for taking the time out today to come and be part of this filming session in our pop up studio. So thank you for your time.
- Appreciate it. Thanks very much.
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