Michael Bird

Sam, we're all used to software updates, right?

You know, your phone or your computer gives you a little pop-up and then spends the next five, maybe 10 minutes, maybe an hour restarting while everything updates behind the scenes.

Often it's while you're in the middle of something.

That's always when it is.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's just your personal advice.

Imagine if you had to update a system that millions and millions of people use, including the emergency services.

So you need to update with no downtime at all.

Yeah, absolutely, Sam.

And one person who knows this better than anyone is Franz Sizer.

Now, Franz is the head of the data tribe at Deutsche Telekom, a telco who recently upgraded their infrastructure, which I wanted to know all about.

But before we could talk about the upgrade, I wanted him to give me a bit more insight into what the infrastructure had looked like before the upgrade.

Okay, so you mentioned silos.

Can you just talk through the silos, what they are and why they exist?

Yeah.

So why did having individual silos make things more complicated?

And you mentioned slow, like how do you quantify the difference in speed from a siloed way of operating?

And we live in like a post-AI world where everyone is expecting changes to be made yesterday.

So that means the network isn't able to sort of keep up with technological changes or demands from customers.

Yeah.