T-Mobile’s Business Push, Technology Advantages, and 5G Slicing with Daryl Schoolar

Full Transcript

0m10s Speaker 0

Hello, and welcome to the two hundred and twenty seventh episode of the week with Roger, a conversation between analysts about all things telecom, media, and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg, and with me as always is Roger Antner. How are you doing, Roger?

0m22s Speaker 1

I'm good. How are you?

0m24s Speaker 0

I'm good. So Roger, this week we have friend and colleague Mitch Klassen on to talk about what he's been working on.

0m30s Speaker 1

Yeah, no, I'm really excited. And before Mitch is talking about the work that he has done in the storage sector in a project where we're working with Seagate, I wanna start this with a little bit bigger arc. For Recon Analytics 2025 is the year of scaling. We're providing flagship services to the carriers, faster, larger, more agile insights than what anybody else can provide. But we are now also making this available in smaller bites.

1m7s Speaker 1

Like, for example, we've sold our NPS data to companies to train their AI with. And we've endeavored into analyzing our data with AI, especially when it comes to finding out topics that we didn't even know we could ask. The other area for scaling for us is we're going to expand geographically. We're going to stand up our survey in Germany, in France, The UK, and Canada. I'm very excited about that.

1m39s Speaker 1

And, you know, Mitch is here as our proof case that we are scaling into new verticals. We're in very advanced conversation to bring this to other sectors. And Mitch has been the project lead and author on our research in the storage area, where for Seagate, we looked at the impact that AI has on storage. And, you know, I'm so excited and I'm so proud of Mitch for the work that he has done in this case. So Mitch, welcome and thank you.

2m16s Speaker 1

And why don't you talk a little bit about the work that we have done for Seagate?

2m22s Speaker 2

I can definitely do that. Thank you for having me on. Yeah. So in November 2024, Seagate commissioned us to look into do analysis around storage and the impact that AI will actually have on storage on the overall storage market, especially around the corporate side and business storage requirements. As we kinda looked into this, we ended up surveying just over a thousand respondents that are business buyers and decision makers for storage infrastructure for businesses.

2m54s Speaker 2

And coming out of this, we found there's still a large chunk of organizations using cloud and that's expected to stay relatively the same with a slight increase about three to 4% across the business market over the next like three to five years. When we really got into this, we started asking more about AI and the impact of AI on overall storage requirements. So when we started digging into and asking them, okay, for those customers that have used AI and those customers that are planning to use AI, how much do you expect AI to increase the overall storage requirements or how much are you expecting it to change? And there's a diverging difference here between those two. Those that are using it, somewhere like 75% are saying they're expecting over a 100% increase in storage requirements over the next three years.

3m47s Speaker 2

Those are planning to use it. They haven't started using AI yet internally. They were thinking like, oh, it's gonna be like a 50 to 60% increase over the next three years. So those are using AI versus those are planning. There is definitely a significant difference in how much those customers expect their storage requirements to change.

4m5s Speaker 2

So that's one aspect that we're looking at.

4m8s Speaker 1

And Mitch, this was an international study. How are the different countries and different regions approaching this in a different way?

4m18s Speaker 2

Good thing you asked that. So more of the Western countries, whether it's Europe and United States, they're much more leaning towards the cloud side of their overall storage capacity, current and future requirements. Whereas companies that were in like China, we did do this survey over 10 different countries and seven different languages. So China on that side is much more geared towards the on premises storage technologies, whether it's private cloud or on premises HDD and SSD. So there's a significant difference between how like the Western countries versus more like companies within China were planning on storing their overall data with AI.

5m1s Speaker 1

Yeah. And I thought the other really interesting thing, it was like how much the increase of storage for AI in Europe was tied to regulation.

5m12s Speaker 2

Oh, yes. Regulation is definitely one that was kind of popping up in a lot of different areas where those countries like Germany and France and even The UK, they have increased regulation. That was one of the larger barriers to overall adoption of AI compared to, like, The US and even in China. It was more around security.

5m32s Speaker 0

Well, GDPR requires companies to house their data inside the EU. Correct?

5m37s Speaker 1

Yes. What were some of the other things that you found?

5m41s Speaker 2

As storage requirements increase, these companies are starting to see us like, hey. We have a lot of data coming in. We have to store it somewhere. And they're starting to look at how they can adapt and evolve to align with these massive increases in storage versus spending a ton of money on new hardware and scaling out. There's a few different aspects they're looking at.

6m1s Speaker 2

Over 50% of respondents across business sizes, whether they're under a $100,000,000 or over a billion dollars in revenue. Yeah. Of course, they're looking at expanding their cloud storage solutions and also upgrading existing storage infrastructure. Some other ways they're looking at is looking at more areas around data management software and new data compression techniques.

6m26s Speaker 1

One thing that probably our listeners don't necessarily appreciate as much when we talk about cloud storage, the cloud is not a nebulous thing here, right? Cloud storage is another word for hot disk storage, right?

6m43s Speaker 2

Yes. So everybody says, oh, I'm using cloud, I'm using Azure, I'm using AWS. And that could be in AWS or Azure's or Google's data centers, or it can also be on premises in their own private clouds. But within that cloud, it's not like, oh, it's just some nebulous type of storage hardware. It's mostly hard disk drives and a smaller portion of solid state drives.

7m8s Speaker 2

I think it's about like 85 to 89% driving of the cloud is actually the hard disk drives. So there's a large amount of hard disks out there, especially in the data center environments that have these hard disk drives.

7m21s Speaker 1

Yeah. It's quite interesting because a lot of the consumer and business computers have moved away from hard disks to solid state drives. Whereas the cloud, that's where really the storage now need is. And it's such a heavy demand for hard disks. This will drive such a huge amount of increase in hard disk requirement.

7m49s Speaker 1

And even though that, for example, Seagate has an innovative new process that allows to have a multiple amount of data storage on each disk, the growth in storage requirement for AI in the cloud that will be satisfied by hard disks. From what we can see, you know, the demand is dramatic and sales will go up, right?

8m17s Speaker 2

Yes. With the high level demand, but with the new technologies that are coming out around hard disk drives, increasing their storage capacity per drive exponentially over the next few years. And currently, I went through a hammer and MAMR. That's gonna really drive much more capacity per disk up to like six, eight, ten, twelve, even more terabytes per disk. So that's gonna help drive the overall capacity to help support this overall increase in growth and storage demand.

8m46s Speaker 2

Because the path we're on right now with AI, with seeing these potential exponential growth moving forward in storage, will we actually have enough storage capacity as as much storage is coming out I. Hardware versus what our demand will be in next three to five years and beyond? How that will change?

9m5s Speaker 1

And will there be enough manufacturing capabilities to drill the hard disk that are needed for the increased demand due to AI. And especially on wireless networks, video is the network killer. And pictures and video on the AI side will be the storage killers. When you're going to create en masse AI generated movies, when it becomes available or video clips, when that becomes and is adopted by consumers and not only businesses, the storage requirement for that will be massive.

9m43s Speaker 2

Well, even on the consumer side, but if you look even on the business side, if you look at a manufacturing company, a manufacturing facility that runs 20 fourseven, They've got a 100 different machines in there running autonomously or close to autonomously. Each one has multiple cameras on it if not just one. They're all sending back and saving all those videos at all times for training an AI to increase their overall processes, how much data will that actually store over a day, a week, a month, a year? And how long are they actually gonna retain that for? So seeing those longer retention periods, which we've seen in the study, most of these companies are saying, Oh, we're going to keep it for-

10m24s Speaker 1

Certain period.

10m26s Speaker 2

Over six months. And even a large chunk, especially in like China, they're saying, Oh, we're going to keep it forever. We don't have an end date for the end of this storage. So they're keeping all this data and it's just gonna exponentially grow year over year on top of it.

10m40s Speaker 1

Yeah, so really exciting and you wrote an excellent short white paper there which is available on website our reconanalytics.com. And I think we will also put it in the show notes. Really worthwhile to look at and see the impact that AI will have on the storage environment. And it will be everywhere. And when people say cloud, think hard disks, right?

11m10s Speaker 1

It's still the number one storage vehicle that we have and will have for quite some time. Thank you, Mitch. Really exciting work, awesome work.

11m19s Speaker 2

Thanks for having me.

11m20s Speaker 0

All right. Thanks, folks. Roger, we'll talk to you next week.