What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
The Trillion-Dollar Mobile Network Is Finally Getting an API
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
The trillion-dollar investment in global mobile networks is finally opening up to developers through standardized APIs, and Aduna Global is leading the charge. Anthony Bartolo, a 35-year telecom veteran, reveals how this platform is uniting telecommunications giants worldwide to provide developers with unprecedented access to network capabilities through a single, consistent interface.
"Nobody understands data sovereignty, privacy, and regulations better than an incumbent carrier group inside a particular country," Anthony explains, highlighting how Aduna leverages the deep expertise of telecom partners representing over 1.3 million employees globally. Rather than forcing developers to navigate complex integrations with hundreds of different networks, Aduna centralizes this complexity and exposes only what truly matters through standardized Camara APIs.
These network capabilities go far beyond basic connectivity, offering ultra-low latency connections, edge computing integration, and real-time network intelligence that developers can incorporate into their applications. Financial services companies are already using these APIs for fraud prevention through SIM swap detection and number verification, while other enterprises are exploring how network data can enhance AI systems for anomaly detection and predictive automation.
The transformation represents a fundamental shift in how telecom operators view their role in the digital ecosystem. Rather than building services independently, they're becoming platform businesses that empower external innovation while creating new revenue streams. As Anthony puts it: "When you see the lights go on, when developers share ideas you never contemplated before but you're making sure they have access to... that's when it really gets exciting."
Ready to access the power of global telecom networks through a single platform? Explore how Aduna's standardized APIs can eliminate integration complexity and accelerate your development timeline while ensuring regulatory compliance across markets worldwide.
Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.
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Hey everyone, I'm so excited for this discussion today as we dive into the world of telecom APIs across worldwide networks and a true innovator leader in the field with Aduna. Anthony, how are you? I'm good. Evan, how are you? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for joining. I'm so excited for this chat as 35 years in the telecom industry and this is the most exciting time I think you would agree. Before that, maybe introduce yourself your amazing bio and background and journey through the decades in the telecom and communication space and what was the big idea behind Aduna Global.
Speaker 2:Well, firstly, it's never boring. Just when you think it's getting boring in our industry, something changes. I've been in a long time straddled both the vendor side on the carrier, or the service provider side of the industry for quite a while With Nortel. That's where I started engineering background and progressed through picking up a lot of different hats in a lot of different roles around the world, found myself migrating towards the enterprise side of the business to understand how enterprises are really consuming carrier products and how enterprises ticked. I ended up spending half my career in the carrier world and then in enterprise. Never thought I'd go back to the carrier world, but at the end of the day, if you really think about it, they're the original builders. They spent a trillion dollars in mobile networks establishing them. And then you take a look at the investment in the fixed line world and then on top of that, we innovate. We constantly innovate in the enterprise world and now the developer world. So it's been a good ride seeing both those sides. I moved into the UCCC business. I've been in it for a very long period of time in the enterprise and then in the CPaaS world, and really I'm an enabler and that's what I like doing. I like enabling businesses to be the best version of themselves. That's always a fun thing to see.
Speaker 2:Watching innovation that sort of happens around the edge is sort of fascinating. And that sort of leads into the Aduna side, because what Aduna is doing is it's effectively a global aggregator of standardized APIs. Global aggregator of standardized APIs, which makes it easier for developers and enterprises to access advanced capabilities that reside inside those mobile networks. Those mobile networks have a lot of capabilities and the industry's finally sort of worked out that if you really want to grow, you need to standardize those capabilities so that you can expose them. And when you expose them, you get scale. And when you get scale, you build an ecosystem that developers can rely on and trust.
Speaker 2:And that's what Adun is doing it's providing that singular API platform on behalf of the service provider industry. With multiple global telecom giants, we reduced the integration complexity that us developers always have faced and instead of reinventing the wheel and rebuilding, they now can go somewhere where they can get that consistent around the world and they can increase their time to market and focus on what they do best, which is sort of innovate rather than reinvent something. So it's fascinating. It's been a good ride Bringing these giants together has been both interesting and pleasantly challenging, but you actually can see that they're willing participants and that is the good thing. That's the thing that's changed over 30 years, to be perfectly honest.
Speaker 1:Indeed, and you talk about being a global collective of communications pioneers. I love that approach. What does that look like in practice? Week to week, month to month? What unites the team?
Speaker 2:It's a really good question. I think what unites the team ultimately is there's there's an acceptance or a willingness to have their network sort of development and focus be instrumented or actually driven by the innovators at the edge right, giving them a you know, they know their stuff. I've met so many very, very bright people who know their stuff super well inside the networks and the complexities that you know it's like anything you know when you get deep into it the complexities you don't really want to deal with. They do this on a day-to-day basis and now they're looking at it not just from the network side.
Speaker 2:But what does a developer need to get access to, the things they really want to get access to, and how do I make it as simple and easy as possible? And you could do that as an individual level, but you need someone on the outside to be able to do it consistently across the industry along these giants. So you know, my venture partners alone represent an employee base of 1.3, 1.4 million people. So that's a lot of intellect and horsepower, but it's also a lot of institutional establishment that you're sort of peeling away and making sure that that doesn't get exposed to the developer. What gets exposed to the developer is what really matters, what they need to. What are these little nuances and nuggets that they can use to make their application go faster, better, smarter and safer and more trusting than just navigating through the telecom complexity that we're all used to?
Speaker 1:I love that simplicity. What a great idea. Uniting global networks on one platform instead of hundreds of integrations is an amazing concept. How do you actually make it happen behind the scenes?
Speaker 2:agreements. They're the complexity of the agreements. What we do is we centralize that complexity. Everyone signs similar agreements. They're all in a similar playing field. What happens is we're exposing what matters to the developer and that means you have to have pre-agreed approaches on how to do that. Number one is we agree to focus on Camara standards. These are the standards that are coming out of the Camara standards bodies, out of the GSMA. One agrees to publish those. There's rules around those publishing and it's not your father or your grandfather's standards body either.
Speaker 2:It actually works pretty quickly. So if a new API is really an idea, an API is really interesting. It requires a single sponsor within the carrier framework, or Aduna can help and you can sponsor that through the Camara standards and it happens pretty quickly and they make it available. And then there's a standard in which those APIs are exposed on each of those carriers and they get exposed to the Aduna platform and therefore you can consume that API anywhere around the world from any carrier who wants to put their APIs on the platform. And you know it sounds super simple. I still think I can make it sound simpler. There's a lot of work. You know there's a lot of work that goes into making something look and operate in a simple way, and that's where the energy goes.
Speaker 1:Love it and we're in this renaissance for developers in the enterprise. These days, with low code and no code and the API economy and Gen AI now it's really an incredible time. How do you play into that world and what does it mean for those developers who are embracing all of these new tools?
Speaker 2:I mean, firstly, they're getting the opportunity to get access to a mobile network which they sort of didn't have a 5G or a mobile network and all the things that comes with it. It's really an intelligent connectivity. It enables enterprises to transform their user experiences or automate operations or scale. But what does it bring? There's ultra low latency that they in some cases didn't have before. So now you know that powers instant transactions, whether that's AR, vr, whether it's autonomous systems or immersive applications. It's edge computing integration, you know, bringing that compute power closer to the end user and their mobile device in a more context-aware experience, for instance. And then there's the, finally, the ability to have an impact on the programmability of the network via API. Like the beginning, it's a little bit one way. I think what you'll eventually see is real-time control of things that they never had control of before. I mean, right now, those APIs give them control around fraud prevention and data insights that are native from the network, that you didn't really know that network captured from the network, that you didn't really know that network captured. When I say captured, it could be environmental what's going on? Or it could be what the traffic situation is and how does that impact your application. Those things are more and more going to get exposed. 5g isn't just faster, it's sort of smarter. And through platforms that expose that, such as Aduna, enterprises can tap into that intelligence without having to navigate the telecom complexity as mentioned before.
Speaker 2:And then it plays into AI, right? You know, if you take a look at AI, I think it's a two-way street. You know, giving those algorithms new feeds that they didn't have before in real time, that they didn't have before in real time, that they didn't have before another vector. It's not like you're replacing. You know, if you take a look at anomaly detection, for instance, you're not replacing the sensors that you currently have. You're adding sensors to it to make that anomaly detection smarter, faster and more educated and more precise. And you know there's no bigger sensor in the world than the mobile networks combined together, providing insights that can just add to the quiver of someone who's trying to find out and deal with some of those threats.
Speaker 2:There's predictive automation, proactive actions you might think of things like quality of service adjustments and customer engagement triggers. If you're just about to do a transaction, making sure that that quality of that network at that 15-second, 20-second, 30-second increment at the time you actually need it is there, and then you can go all the way to the viewing public if you want to give them a bigger slice of a network to live. These are all promises in the future and some of them are being implemented today, so it's super interesting when you get there. I'm dealing with the nuts and bolts of getting it all up and running and getting it done and but what it you know when you see the lights go on, when you speak to developers and some of the ideas that they've got that you never contemplated before but you are making sure that they have access to it really gets you excited about what the possibilities Hence my comment it's never boring.
Speaker 1:Never boring, indeed. So one area that's still full of challenges is regulations around data sovereignty and data protection on a regional, per country basis.
Speaker 2:And how do you help your customers and developers stay compliant while building apps that work across regions or super apps that do it all? I think that's the key that made me super interested in about Aduna and who the venture partners and the key partners are. They're the service providers of the world and the key partners are they're the service providers of the world. Nobody understands the data sovereignty, the privacy, the regulations than an incumbent carrier group inside a particular country. They deal with this on a regular basis, so, in a way, they're dealing with it for the end developer. What they expose, those APIs that are exposed, they've all gone through a regulatory framework. They all go through the requirements that these guys are obligated to as a regulated industry and, by definition, when you pull all of the carriers together and they work as effectively as one, what you're really building is, yes, you're building, you're exposing APIs and you're exposing standardized APIs and you're exposing them at scale. That's the only way that you build an ecosystem and I call it an ecosystem of repute, because that's what it is.
Speaker 2:And if you really think about it, when a developer is developing something, let's say they're developing it for an enterprise, and they go and look at their underlying vendor. When you get it through an enterprise, they've got a reputation perspective. There's no bigger names than the carriers that underlie the Aduna network is what we're exposing. There's a great chance, if not 100% chance they're already using them anyway. So from a compliance perspective, it tends to sail. It sails through. So from a developer perspective, that's an administrative hurdle or thought process that they don't have to worry about. Right, they can feel comforted that they've got the best in the business underneath them.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and, you know maybe, talk about how an enterprise who has some great use case gets started. When and how can they start building on the API, testing, doing proof of concepts and rolling this out globally?
Speaker 2:Sure, I mean, chances are they're already working with our partners on the demand side. So if you take a look at Aduna on the southbound side or the supply side, it's all the carriers, all those members of repute that are pulling together those mobile networks and they appear as one. Those APIs that are exposed On the northbound side to Aduna are effectively our customers. Those customers are really partners. They are.
Speaker 2:You know the Vonages, the Infobips, the Cinchers. You know the CPaaS players of the world or their global systems integrators. You know, such as Wip of the world or their global systems integrators. You know, such as Wipros or Tech Mahindras and anyone else who wants to join, or the Microsofts of the world and the Googles of the world, who are consuming those APIs to be able to present them to their developer communities. That's what they represent.
Speaker 2:So what we do is we enhance the capabilities of those organizations and they present them to their developer communities and they're represented in a standardized way. They're exposed and they're exposed to their developer communities. So that's the way you consume a doona, and so if you're interested in network APIs, you can go through any one of those particular partners and search what APIs they're pulling into their framework and exposing, and they're usually just drawn directly off of a Duna at that point. So it's not really cumbersome at all and you don't have to change the way you operate. You just go through your existing CPaaS provider or your development partner platform and consume it from that perspective.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So let's talk about maybe one or two controversial topics. The traditional telecom model Some say it's sort of broken. Is this an attempt to fix telecom or you have a more narrower?
Speaker 2:I think everyone's got a different motivation. I think from the carrier's perspective on the southbound side. Well, you know, if you look at their perspective, they've invested, like I said, about a trillion plus dollars in their mobile networks and I think they sit back and think you know, how could we monetise this? We've not done a great job of monetising it. You know we need to do it a different way. Could we do it internally? Yes, well, yes, we can make an attempt. Well, our attempts haven't been all that great. Let's take an external view, hence the Aduna being born.
Speaker 2:I think what you're seeing is you're seeing a industry who recognizes that they have missed out on growth opportunities or not monetized their network effectively. Or their investors are telling them that they haven't monetized their network effectively and what they've done is they may have taken a misunderstanding of how the developer consumes and how important that consumption model is. I mean, the developer sort of wakes up and if they want to pull an API, they've got a 60, 90-second window where they're going to call an API. They're going to either get a 200 okay or they're not. And if they get a 200 okay, they're going to continue on.
Speaker 2:If they don't, they're going to either get a 200 okay or they're not. And if they get a 200 okay, they're going to continue on. If they don't, they'll spend a few more minutes. If you make it too hard to work with, they're going to go somewhere else. I don't think that's an understanding that's native to some of the carrier class, and I think they're getting a lot smarter about it because they've watched some of these things grow really quickly around them and they know that there's capabilities that they've got. They know they need to monetize it and now's their time to do it. And if they don't do it, they're just going to miss out that opportunity again.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's a great, great insight. You've seen. I've seen the CPAS market grow from the 90s, before it was called CPAS. It's went from a handful of very large players to a very crowded market Some would say overcrowded. Are you looking to take the industry to the next level? How do you see yourself vis-a-vis the existing landscape of of players out there?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean. I mean you could see a bunch of our partners are c-pairs players. We're enhancing their portfolio by giving them access to to uh network capabilities that they wouldn't have had before and you know what they've done is they had to work around them. But if you think about what, you know what the networks do. They're obviously incredibly secure. They're obviously highly regulated. They have to adapt to regulations that happen on an often basis. They change around the world.
Speaker 2:There are new problems to solve on a regular basis and sometimes exposing an API or two from the network can make that, can make that much easier. And I'll give you a classic example. You know, if you take a look at some new regulations that are coming out and have been coming out, I mean, firstly, you'll probably ask at some point you know what are the most popular? Uh, you know APIs or that are being used by by networks. Usually they're around fraud, right, they're usually around the financial industry. They're things like SIM swap or number verification or fraud all around fraud prevention or identification of fraud. But there's other areas too, and the reason why they do that is they deal with it because it's very tangible, the results. It's quite punitive when you get it wrong and it's whether it's you know losing money to fraud or a regulator is going to fine you for that.
Speaker 2:But obviously there are other regulations as well that come in.
Speaker 2:So, for instance, protection of minors. You see that in countries Australia, my home nation, right, you know social media below 16 years of age, but other countries as well for gambling and things like that, they want to know the user. So if you marry a number verification API with a KYC and a well-managed KYC, if the data is good, you can reduce the incidence. And that's important because sometimes people think you know you can't have a zero COVID policy when it comes to technology and safety and security, because there's always going to be. It's a cat and mouse game. There's always the nefarious that you're chasing, but if you can reduce the probability by 10% or reduce it by 20% or reduce it by 30%, that liability for an enterprise is huge to prevent. So adding those tools to your kit bag to help combat and rather than sitting and waiting for perfection, which never arises, I think is a smart move and is prudent and a move that your investor class is insisting that you take to make sure that you're protecting the organization that you represent or your constituents that you represent.
Speaker 1:Oh, such an important insight. So you're in build mode, the whole community and I think, your partners are in growth mode, but where do you see yourself and this industry in a couple of short years? How do you envision this over time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, really good question. We're definitely in build mode and we're onboarding all of the supply side and starting to expose those to the northbound side. I think you'll see that there will be. I mean, if some of the use cases that I've seen really start to get exposed. I think what you'll see is you'll see it really solidify over the next two years. You'll see that network APIs will be a core capability that's exposed in a lot of the northbound partners. It'll be a part of the Bailiwick.
Speaker 2:You'll see some really interesting applications that are drawing a network API and then you can see AI really start to leverage those network APIs as well, because, once again, it's real time, it's fast, it can help with a lot of the threat vectors that are out there. Whether you're doing anomaly detection or predictive automation, or whether you're doing fraud detection, all of those things, they'll be pulling those APIs and I think it'll be one of these slow burns and then all of a sudden it's going to turn into one of these things where you say, wow, it's growing super quickly. Well, but it usually takes a while and these things happen for a while. No different to AI. We've been talking about AI under a different moniker in the telecoms world and the UC and CC world for a long time, until we called it something and now everybody's you know renamed it and really driving it, I think they'll pull on network APIs for sure.
Speaker 1:On that moment, that note, sort of a mic drop moment. Really exciting to see the journey you're on and thanks for sharing a peek behind the curtain.
Speaker 2:Always a pleasure. Thanks very much for inviting me.
Speaker 1:Thanks, anthony, thanks everyone for listening and watching and be sure to check out our new TV show, techimpact TV, now on Fox, business and Bloomberg. Thanks, anthony, thanks everyone. My pleasure, take care.