Guest: Larry Goldman (LinkedIn)
Company: Analysys Mason (Twitter)
Show: 2022 Prediction Series

Analysys Mason is a telecommunications industry-focused consulting and research firm that works with network operators, their vendors, their investors across the world in the decisions they’re making about how to best run their business. It was my pleasure to host Larry Goldman, Chief Analyst at Analysys Mason.

Goldman believes that 2022 will be focussed more around innovation and services around the 5G network. This year, we will be trying to ask “how do we make the most out of 5G?”. He predicts that a lot of effort will go around gaming, cloud gaming and things that start to make use of 5G. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic that’s leading to shortage of supply, this usage will be limited somewhat by the availability of handsets.

“Business services is a very big deal, and the cloud and convergence and pushing with 5G is a very big factor that we see coming about this year, that more and more enterprises are figuring out how to take advantage of 5G,” quips Goldman. Check out the above video to know what else Goldman is predicting for the year ahead.

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host, Swapnil Bhartiya, and welcome to our 2022 Predictions series. And today, we have with us, Larry Goldman, Chief Analyst at Analysys Mason. Larry, it’s great to have you on the show.

Larry Goldman: Well, it’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Of course, I’ll ask you to pick up your crystal ball and share the predictions, but before we go there, could you tell us what is Analysys Mason all about, what you focus on when it comes to Analysys, and why there is so much happening in industry today?

Larry Goldman: So we are a telecommunications industry-focused consulting and research firm. So we work with network operators, their vendors, their investors across the world in the decisions they’re making about how to best run their business, very much what’s going to change in that business and what strategies that they need to pursue in terms of pursuing the business itself and investing in the business.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Now it’s time for you to pick up your crystal ball and tell us what predictions you hold for 2022 or this year?

Larry Goldman: Well, for the telecommunications industry in particular, certainly it’s a year of trying to say, “How do we make the most out of 5G?” So very much, more and more consumers are becoming 5G customers, and they’re looking at how we make use of 5G? Certainly, the metaverse is a thing that’s affecting the way people think about communications and what they do. And we think that a lot of effort will go around gaming, cloud gaming and things that start to make use of 5G, but we also believe that the usage is going to be limited somewhat by the availability of handsets, and there are some issues in the industry, simply the chip limitations and so forth, that we’re going to be limited not by the network operators’ roll out of 5G as much as we are by the pace at which consumers are getting the right handsets. So that’s one aspect of what we’re looking at is on the consumer side.

Secondly, business services is a very big deal, and the cloud and convergence and pushing with 5G is a very big factor that we see coming about this year, that more and more enterprises are figuring out how do we take advantage of 5G? How does the cloud integrate with that? And in the same sense that we’re talking about things like cloud gaming and that kind of thing and the consumer side, cloud-enabled functions are a very big thing, a big factor, if you will, that’s affecting what we see happening in the year ahead. So 5G will become more important for enterprises but because they’re trying to make the most use of the cloud.

And the last thing I would like to point out is just the way investors and oh, excuse me, network operators and other key players are investing. So it is a year of really investing in 5G, 5G standalone. A cloud native deployment is a really important part. So there’s a big theme that says cloud is affecting the telecom industry, and the telecom industry is enabling more use of the cloud.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What are the things that you folks will be focusing on this year? I do see a theme there with 5G there, but tell us.

Larry Goldman: Well, I think we’re very much focused on what it takes, investment-wise, to make these things work? So we see different investment models for network operators. In the past, a network operator like AT&T would invest in and own all of their infrastructure, build out all the network, be the direct supplier to all the consumers, and those investment models are changing a lot. And I think a lot of what we see happening is because of the cloud, because of the amount of money required to provide these services and so forth. There are different investment models. So the big high profile public cloud providers are investors in important telecommunications infrastructure, as well as other names that aren’t so much known, but so we have a lot of different kinds of investors coming in and new business models happening in the communications industry because of this. And at the heart of it is cloud technology makes it possible to do things very differently than they could in the past.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Larry, thank you so much for taking time out today and not only share your predictions, insights but also the focus of, of course, the company, and I would love to have you back on the show next year or maybe end of this year to kind of hold a scorecard and see how many of your predictions turn out to be true and then get the next set of predictions for the next year, but thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Larry Goldman: You’re very welcome, and we’re glad to share more detail on these things. People can visit our website so that this is freely available information that your listeners can get more detail on if you like. Thanks for having me.

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