We're still catching our breath after a wonderful experience at Telstra Vantage 2022. Ideas per minute have been off the chart, and for those on site at Royal Randwick in Sydney, we learned that some coffee cups can even be eaten!
With so much happening live on stage, on Vantage TV and across the showroom floor, it would be an impossible task to catch every moment. So here is our wrap of some of the best moments and big ideas to take with you as you explore a new world in new ways.
After a stirring recital of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Vantage 2022 kicked off with incoming CEO Vicki Brady taking to the stage to share her vision for Telstra and key trends to shape the industry over the next decade.
Group Executive of Telstra Enterprise, David Burns, introduced Vantage to what he sees as one of the biggest ideas in building flexible businesses for the future: composability. To face a new world in new ways, bringing a composable mindset to business means putting together systems and processes that can quickly adapt to change. Swap in new parts, swap out redundant modules, and always be ready to change whenever needed. If you haven’t heard about composable business before, you’ll be sure to hear it a lot more in the years ahead.
Head of Telstra Purple, Chris Smith, picked up the composable business discussion and explored how Telstra Purple creates deep partnerships with companies that want to bring their ideas to life through technology. Building flexible, fit for purpose technology stacks is in the Telstra Purple DNA – and Airspeeder is a perfect example of how they truly bring vision to reality.
Airspeeder is a drone race like no other, with Telstra Purple enabling 5G powered augmented reality interfaces to flying race cars with ultra-low latency performance so the remote pilots have rapid feedback from the vehicles they’re flying. Attendees in Sydney had the chance to try their hand at racing virtual Airspeeders and testing their skills against lap times of real Airspeeder pilots. And when we checked in it seemed there was some serious talent in the Vantage crowd – just fractions of a second off the pace set by the pros!
In a time of ‘The Great Reset’ businesses are needing to re-shape and innovate to stay competitive. Technology usage and behavioural patterns have evolved, and customers expect greater personalisation and consistency across channels than ever before. Kim Krogh Andersen – Group Executive of Telstra Product and Technology, joined Narelle Devine – Telstra’s Chief Information Security Officer, and Chris Smith to share their thoughts on what’s coming next in the year ahead.
Narelle discussed how heightened security risks in a hybrid world need careful attention in every business, and threat actors are following every trend to look for any opportunity. As a crucial provider of infrastructure, Telstra’s capability in this space runs deep with a complex and constantly evolving system to help keep customers safe.
Speaking on the way to determine the right tech solution for your business, Chris called out the need for clarity in business leadership. Knowing what you want to achieve is the essential step before deciding what new tech you should be exploring. A clear sense of the outcome you are looking for will help to define the right technology as we move deeper into this new world.
Telstra Customer Experience Executive, Mira Bashi, spoke about the ‘total experience’ and what it means to be the right kind of partner to both employees and customers. With insights across customer experience, people management, environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) Mira pointed out the flow-through impact happy employees can have on customer experience and all aspects of the business.
Alex Badenoch, Telstra’s Group Executive of Transformation, Communications and People, offered three keys to staff satisfaction in the hybrid era: a commitment to flexibility, opportunities to learn and develop, and interesting work. These elements are a core part of how we work at Telstra.
From the ESG perspective, Lyndall Stoyles, Telstra’s Group Executive of Legal, Sustainability and External Affairs, discussed how this is a critical area for corporate governance and will be both a risk and an opportunity for the future of all business. At Telstra, we have committed to reducing absolute emissions from FY19 by at least 50% by 2030 and have extended this target to include our supplier and customer emissions.
With an increasingly complex threat landscape, Narelle Devine says we are well past the time for ‘fix on fail’ strategies to be an acceptable cyber security strategy. As a central pillar of all business, security must become part of the cultural and operational foundations. Like wider business resilience measures, we must prepare to adapt and respond quickly to security incidents and have real incident response processes in place well ahead of when we need them.
At the Adaptive Networks stand, attendees could discover tools to help design a new corporate network before you even have the equipment. When you want to be up and running as quickly as possible, being able to setup the rules and processes on a network while you’re waiting for hardware to arrive saves precious time.
This showcase demonstrated the here and now for 5G—and how Telstra 5G combined with the right tools could help customers empower their hybrid workforce, help set up branches rapidly, and keep field workers efficient and connected.
Lobster anyone? This showcase offered a look at the power of traceability systems that remove the need for manual processing and deepen trust and visibility throughout a supply chain like the fisheries industry. If a customer asks where that lobster came from (or whatever it is you might sell), you can easily answer that question.
Moving business apps, workloads and data to the cloud are central to digital transformation. But successful cloud migrations require the right skillset, security compliance and cost management strategies. Many businesses indicated they're unprepared for the next step in their digital transformation, and this showcase offered a simple view of the five stages toward cloud transformation: Assess, Migrate, Manage, Optimise, and Innovate. The first step, 'Assess', can be particularly powerful, with the team showing how they help to analyse what you need to do, how much it will cost, and how significant the benefits could be.
It’s all fun and games until someone loses a cyber battle. This showcase pitched the Telstra Purple Red Team attackers against the Blue Team defenders in a (thankfully) fictional attack on a critical infrastructure asset, being a large oil and gas refinery. The attacks may have been a game, but valuable lessons were to be learned for any business in this simulation in how to build a more proactive cyber defence.
What better way to close out the ‘New World, New Ways’ theme than with the master filmmaker of grand visions like Avatar, Aliens and The Terminator? Head of Telstra Enterprise, David Burns, sat down with James Cameron live on stage to explore his filmmaking, his ocean exploration, and his thoughts on the nature of being an innovator.
It's been wonderful to come back together this year, both in person in Sydney and at our Vantage Connects around the country, as well as online via Vantage TV. What will we see in 2023? We can't wait to find out!
