Andy Lockwood
Career so far Twenty-five years in telecoms – most recently driving business transformation for Opal. Prior to that working for a number of the UK’s leading alternative telcos – ie, not BT – in senior commercial and operational roles. My experience is in delivering solutions across all areas of telecoms (fixed and mobile, voice and data), which change the landscape.
If you could be anyone else for a week, who would you be and what would you do? Not a personality or historical figure – I’m a perfectionist and like to create things. A week isn’t long enough. Selfishly, I’d like to find the property, cash and time to figure on TV’s Grand Designs.
What would you have as your last meal? What’s the smart answer? A drink from the cup of eternal youth, but there’s a contradiction in there somewhere.
What is the best corporate jolly you have ever been on/taken partners on? Years ago I took a customer to meet with a supplier in Israel. We took a day out to see the sights in Jerusalem. What an incredible place! I would love to go back there again.
Do you see the cloud as a threat or an opportunity? Oh, opportunity definitely. The opportunities created for businesses by combining business-grade, next-generation networks with cloud-based applications are phenomenal and will come to be one of the defining transformations of the early 21st century in both our business and personal lives.
Have any of your predictions come true this year? SIP is finally maturing from bleeding-edge to mainstream – albeit slower in the UK than in some other economies. But 2011 will see that change, too, I believe. Ethernet growth continues to accelerate as we predicted it would, with a steady migration to gigabit speeds. At Opal we launched a 10/100Mbit Ethernet service off our own next-generation network in early 2010, and we are already seeing orders for 1GB and even 10GB customer connections. The need for speed cannot be quenched.
What do you see as the channel’s biggest challenge in 2011? Delivering growth (sales and profits), despite the continuing commoditisation of connectivity services and the increasing ability of next-generation network operators to simply converge services that were once a complex and value-added service integration project. Channel players need to move up the food-chain and begin to add real intellectual and operational value to their end customers – not just running the networks, but driving IT and network strategy to deliver real business advantage for your customers.
What is the best part of your day? At work, when the customer says, ‘Yes’. At home, getting out into the garden.