AT&T’s Advance on Manufacturing: Starts with IT, Ends with OT

Manufacturing is one of six verticals in AT&T’s Global Business organization. It has a General Manager and a team of industry solutions architects and channel marketing managers. This group works closely with Line of Business (LoB) leads to leverage existing offerings and do internal marketing to account teams. These account teams support external customers in automotive, aerospace and defense, chemicals, transportation and logistics, and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG). AT&T has been operating like this since November 2017, but expanded its focus from domestic to global opportunities in January 2020.

When it comes to the question of partners, it depends on the technology area. For example, in the Internet of Things (IoT), AT&T has strategic relationships with providers such as Sierra Wireless, Multitech, Xirgo, etc. for the more than 3,000 IoT devices pre-certified by AT&T—using Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and PTCRB criteria—for use on its networks. For software platforms for SIM management, cloud data flow, and storage, AT&T has relationships with companies whose platforms can be modified and fit for purpose. It is a similar story for both data visualization and analytics (e.g., via Mnubo) and IoT solutions that use Blockchain (e.g., via existing Blockchain platforms from IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon). But none of this would be complete without Systems Integrators (SI)s.

AT&T’s SI organization works with alliance companies that are interested in the sale of its products, solutions, services, technologies, and capabilities, including IBM, Microsoft, DXC, etc. In this model, AT&T handles the networking components and its partner works on the application layer. Instead of building everything from the ground up, AT&T is focusing on its strength: networking. It uses normal account team channels as well, but the big SI partners are key for relationship sharing, especially given the clear demarcation between connectivity and applications today.

The typical process is as follows:

1. Conduct an initial meeting by Webex or in-person
2. Conduct an Executive Briefing and/or a visit to one of AT&T’s innovation centers
3. Obtain sponsorship for a plant visit called an Immersion Day (part of the discovery process)
4. Report back on findings with recommendations
5. Agree to a Proof-of-Concept (POC)
6. Work toward a sales opportunity after a successful PoC
7. Implement and initiate feedback loops for future improvement

Traditionally, SIs would call a company like AT&T late in the process to get a quote for a WAN circuit. Now, with the advent of private solutions (e.g., MEC), SIs are working with the telecommunications community much earlier in the sales process. For example, in a typical engagement, it is now looking more like AT&T takes care of layers 1 to 3.5, and the SI takes care of layers 3.5 to 7, where the “.5” represents shared responsibility to ensure that security/privacy is cared for throughout the stack. This means that AT&T will increasingly need to engage with stakeholders in Lines of Business, Business Units, Plant Management and Operations, but also obtain sponsorship from Information Technology (IT) contacts to help connect it to the Operational Technology (OT) organization in the short to medium term.

From an operator perspective, the industry hasn’t done a good job of providing the details of cellular, so targeting IT for the education portion of the buyer’s/seller’s journey has been successful in getting it to the desired OT targets. These conversations typically start by explaining the differences in 5G and accompanying technologies, but are swiftly followed by discussions about applications and use cases. This is more of an “inside/out” perspective versus the traditional operator tendency, which is to build from the macro-in. Today, this means building cellular networks based on campus environments while being very prescriptive around the user, application, and site type. AT&T hopes this methodology will help it understand how and where to build out its application stack in the long run. While this will become clearer as more companies cozy up to their SI counterparts, there is no question that software and virtualization will be a bigger part of the story. In the meantime, service providers must focus on establishing lighthouse partners in both manufacturing and industries leading in the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies—i.e., automotive, consumer goods, and machinery, as discussed in ABI Research’s Digital Factory Data (MD-IICT-105).