On the second day of the World Future Trends conference Rob van den Dam from IBM’s Institute for Business Value gave us “A Look into the Future of Telecom” and validated a lot of the trends we’ve been seeing in telecom and beyond–from the rise of empowered consumers to the growing role new players (or over the top – OTT competitors like Google and Facebook as Rob called them) who are increasingly playing in the sector.
Rob presented how driving forces in telecom could lead to 4 alternative futures (for a look at all four of IBM’s scenarios see here). Regardless of the future we find ourselves in, Rob suggested that the opportunity for telecos is to move away from providing raw connectivity and instead they work to provide higher value the cloud services, analytics, etc. for their clients or as he put it telco could and should “become the middleware for a smarter planet.”
