Telcos have to focus on smart city initiatives, says Sanjay Sainani, Huawei’s vice president of IT and cloud for the Middle East region.

”With cloud technology you are able to move a lot of hardware and software away from enterprises,” he said, in interview at DCD’s Zettastructure event in London in November. ”More and more carriers are looking at being cloud service providers.” 

But, while all telcos undergo digital transformation, there’s a bigger story they need to watch, and that is the rise of smart cities: ”The whole new area of smart cities is nothing more than pure play IoT. A lot of this can be smartly leveraged by telcos, because all IoT requires connectivity. This can be wired and wireless, which is pretty much what the telcos provide.”

Because of this, he said, having an IoT platform is the first step towards supportng smart city services.