AS TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES rapidly and the rollout of 5G opens doors to endless possibilities, a Telus partnership with Google is helping the company as it seeks to use 5G to solve problems like how to ensure worker safety.
The partnership more generally is enabling each to leverage the other’s strengths – Telus becomes more agile and faster and Google becomes more secure and resilient, explained Samer Geissah (above), director, technology strategy and architecture at Telus, in an interview with Cartt.ca. Geissah, who has been with the company for four years, leads a team of principal technology architects, senior design specialists and project managers.
Telus’s relationship with Google started with basic things, including the former’s move to use the latter’s suite of services. “That’s just one simple step of moving away from legacy email servers to cloud-based solutions,” Geissah said, adding that the move came just in time for the pandemic when Telus’ mobile workforce jumped from 75% to 95%. Google Workspace allowed them to collaborate, was easy to use and meant they did not have to worry about storage, said Geissah. “All of those advantages were immediately felt.”
Last year, Telus began to accelerate its public cloud adoption on the Google Cloud Platform and announced a 10-year agreement with Google Cloud to collaborate on new solutions.
As Telus started utilizing the Google Cloud Platform, aside from commercial savings, they found they could use a lot of its tools to help with optimization. “And we’re actually working on very exciting projects… that actually help solve real customer problems,” Geissah said, adding that their “commitment in working with Google to harness their power to drive meaningful change across our various sectors where we support our customers was only really strengthened with our partnership with Google over the last year.”
Data is an essential component of the partnership. Geissah explained Telus is working on its ability to create digital twins, which are exact virtual replicas of physical things.
This can help with cost optimization – for example, if you are aware of where all the potholes in a city are and know where the traffic is, you can route traffic accordingly, he said. Geissah also talked about air conditioning and the ability to see whether it needs to be on all the time by understanding when people come and go from a building. The money saved through this can be put into other projects that could be more beneficial to the company’s customers, he said.
“That’s the end strength of knowing the data. Having a partner like Google on our side that takes that data, knows exactly how to ingest it – they handle a ton of data as you know – and then display it with analytics so that everyone understands what they’re looking for.”
As far as competition goes, Geissah said they do not have much telco competition in this domain. “If we look at our investments into health and agriculture, we’ve done a lot of acquisition work there where we actually think end to end of our sustainability,” he said later pointing out the company is also getting into new verticals including connected cars through its partnership with GM.
Geissah also said Telus changed their approach to enterprise opportunities, now taking a design thinking approach. “We have to tilt our own thinking process internally when we are productizing products to go to market and to solving problems and the first step was… falling in love with the problem,” he said.
One problem they are trying to solve is around worker safety. Talking about manufacturing plants, he said they “found a lot of the equipment that are being used are not able to detect if the worker that’s using the equipment is actually wearing the right protective gear… the equipment doesn’t know if you’re safe or not.”
However, using video analytics, Telus and its partners (including Google) created an application that will turn a piece of heavy-duty machinery off if the person operating it is not wearing the right protective gear.
The solution leverages the power of multi-access edge computing and 5G and is being used at Telus’ Edmonton data centre.
More is still to come.
Because Telus does not claim to know what all the problems facing its customers are, they created innovation hubs where they can explore solutions to problems customers bring to them. For example, a customer came to Telus saying they want to be able to monitor pipelines for things like oil and gas using drones instead of helicopters. Telus took that problem and looked at it in their innovation hub in Kanata. “The results were great,” he said.
Telus has more projects that will be announced next year. A lot of them have to “do with leveraging the strength of Google’s ecosystems and taking that in house and ensuing we provide the right sort of solution to our customers,” Geissah said.
Photo supplied by Telus.
