Author: Tegan Valeny

Why the space industry needs to be thinking about refuelling.

Posted on by Tegan Valeny

Joining us on episode 49 of The Tech That Connects Us was Daniel Faber CEO at Orbit Fab. Daniel joined Andrew Ball and Ewan Lawrenson to discuss the future of the space industry and how Orbit Fab will fuel it. The vision Daniel has for the future of space is nothing short of spectacular!

So why does the space industry need to be thinking about refuelling?

“The problem is nobody is buying fuel in orbit yet. It’s worse than that, as nobody has fuelling ports. Everyone is in a paradigm where you just don’t refuel satellites. We’re working on getting people out of that paradigm and shifting that mindset. 

‘don’t disrupt your customers, disrupt your competition’ 

 So we’re trying to convince our customers, the satellite operators whose business is providing telecommunications service to people on the ground, they’re focusing on that, so they don’t want their business disrupted. 

 What we decided to do instead was realise that they shouldn’t be our first customers. The satellite operators will come along eventually but for now, we’re looking to partner with other satellite servicing businesses. For example, companies that are building tow trucks in space, these tow trucks are used for rendezvous and docking, it’s part of their procedure. 

 What currently happens is the tow trucks are used for four or five operations, they run out of fuel, you then throw away the tow truck and build a brand new one. You run out of fuel, throw away your tow truck and buy a completely new one and launch it. 

 In the space industry, despite how inefficient something is we still do it. Because there’s so much value to having that vantage point in space. 

 Once we’d realised that our market was the tow trucks and satellite servicing companies our probability of winning as a company is predicated on the satellite servicing industry. 3 years ago there were eight companies in this industry, today more than 60 companies are working on satellite servicing a 600% increase. 

‘today more than 60 companies are working on satellite servicing a 600% increase’. 

 The perception in the industry is that satellite servicing is inevitable. So it’s been a huge change in a brand new industry.”

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

How can the Broadcast Media Industry have a positive impact on the Environment?

Posted on by Tegan Valeny

Joining us on episode 48 of The Tech That Connects Us was Darren Long Group Operations Transformation Design CT&I for Sky. Darren has been working for Sky for the past 32 years across News, Sports Entertainment and Production, as a director in a range of different capacities, such as Group Content Processing, Production and Services and Operations.

Darren joined Tegan Valeny and Henry Johnson where they discussed diversity, inspiring a healthy culture, the future of content creation and the importance of owning a dog.

One question Tegan and Henry put to Darren was ‘How can the broadcast media industry have a positive impact on the environment?’ Here’s what he had to say.

“At Sky, we’re now committed to becoming carbon neutral. Last weekend we did our first carbon-neutral football match in conjunction with Tottenham and the supporting staff and infrastructure. 

If we look at these opportunities, we’ve got an important role to play. We are a broadcaster, and all broadcasters need to ensure that we lead by example. That’s something that Sky has always wanted to do and we’re very lucky because we own the whole supply chain, everything from the customer buying the equipment through to making and distributing the programmes. This gives us a unique opportunity to own that whole customer journey from an environmentally friendly perspective. So we can ensure that from a carbon-neutral point of view we tick every single box along the journey. 

We took a really strong lead on this and Jeremy Darroch was instrumental in ensuring that everything we do going forward is “do we reduce our carbon footprint?”. From the packaging, we use to the way we recycle our equipment. Traditionally people would hold on to the equipment and never give it back, so of course, it went to landfills and various other things. Now, technically, you never own that equipment personally, it’s owned by Sky so that means once your contract finishes and you no longer want it then we take that back and recycle. 

 Everything we do going forward will be about actually how can we minimise the environmental impact. All the Sports we’re at, we ensure that the people who are working on the sports are doing so in a way that’s very economical and reducing the carbon footprint. From how they get to the venues, all the way through to the distribution platform minimising the power that we’re using. 

The key thing we can do is sending the message around why this is important and making sure that message is strong. So every single day we have a climate report which is on Sky News. It’s about educating people, not just preaching, but trying to give people an understanding of why we’re doing this. We believe in this wholeheartedly, and from an industry point of view if you look at all these productions now that whether they be for Sky or other companies they are trying to measure every single part of the impact of those productions. Traditionally you’d build sets and then destroy them, you’d use plastic cups and all those things. So whilst some of these things are very small, you know what? From small things grow large trees. 

 Sky is not just doing this as a tick box exercise, we really do believe in what we’re doing 100% and everything we do going forward around the way that we deliver our services and the way we recycle our services is going to be measured. That in itself is important, people should hold us accountable for our actions. It’s important that when products arrive that customers know that packaging isn’t just thrown in the bin but can be brought back to Sky, recycled and used again. 

 From an industry point of view, it’s time for us to lead the charge. There are lots of good broadcasters, filmmakers, and TV production crews who are doing this now. So we have a responsibility to keep doing this, keep improving and keep supporting companies and industries that bring innovation in this area as well.” 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Is the Cyber Security industry getting cloud security wrong?

Posted on by Tegan Valeny

Joining us on episode 47 of The Tech That Connects Us was Trish Cagliostro Head of Worldwide Alliances at Wiz. Trish joined Laurie Scott and Andrew Ball. They only scratched the surface in a conversation that spanned Cloud Security, threat intelligence, the partner landscape, Cyber’s diversity challenge, the joys of softball and much more!

Trish is a thought leader in the cyber security industry, so whilst we had her on the podcast we needed to find out if the industry was getting cloud security wrong as is mentioned by commentators in the industry. Here’s what Trish had to say. 

“Cloud security is hard. It’s hard and it’s a little bit different from what the rest of the industry says. Cloud security isn’t so much of a problem for the born in the cloud companies, such as Netflix, they’re fine. Where this does become an issue is when a traditional enterprise goes to the cloud. Organisations go to the cloud for innovation, the costs savings are nice, but it’s the elasticity and the ability to endlessly expand and instantly expand globally that is powerful. 

However, the way these traditional organisations go to the cloud typically looks like this. They look at their applications on-premise, they go with what’s easy and upload some VMs into the cloud and expect to take their on-premise security structure with them. 6 months then go by, and the customer is thinking that they can’t innovate and they aren’t saving much money. So they want to look at what they can do differently from here. They’ll then start to refactor some of their applications, containerise, embrace some more modern application architecture, replatform and kick the Oracle legacy databases to the curb. 

Now the organisation will have a stopping point on their cloud adoption, they have their legacy on-premise tools supporting the legacy workloads. So now they need to go out and use some cloud-native services as all the cloud providers have cloud-native services. But they’ll have some very different types of computing that are very different in the cloud than they are on-premise. Then there’s the idea of a managed service which comes with the complication of the shared responsibility model. So at this point, the company will be looking at different tools from different vendors for niche cloud security. This is where the breach happens, all of a sudden, there are three separate data silos, the traditional on-premise tools, the cloud-native services from the cloud providers and the new types of security tools that were brought in to deal with the new types of cloud computing. 

So now these organisations still can’t innovate, they’re probably spending just as much money as they were in the first place, Then the cloud provider comes in and says ‘let me tell you about serverless’. The whole model is then broken. So in this instance, I don’t think it’s fair to blame the cyber security industry. It’s a shared responsibility between the industry and the customers as well, to think differently about security in the cloud. 

I meet with partners all the time, and they’ll say to me ‘Okay got it, it’s the same way we dealt with data centre security. But you can’t think that way. You have to think of a customer and the entire cloud journey they’re going on, and then understand how to build a security strategy that supports them across that. 

The other part of this is beyond just helping them with the security strategy and explaining that the customer will need to have an unusually long term vision with this and that we need to be transparent, understanding and really dig into what we’re doing in the cloud. A lot of time to the customers it’s not obvious, they’re normally using a managed service and think they’re good. You need to have a clear understanding of what your responsibilities are as a vendor, then make sure you have the controls and mitigation in place to account for what’s really important.  

I really do think that when we think about this we can’t just think about it in phases, we have to think about it holistically through the journey. 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

What’s the current state of the new space market right now?

Posted on by Tegan Valeny

Joining us on episode 46 of The Tech That Connects Us was Sascha Deri CEO at bluShift Aerospace. Sascha joined Laurie Scott and Andrew Ball.

bluShift Aerospace, are an exciting New Space company aiming to not only drastically reduce the cost of space flight but also offer a much more environmentally friendly solution than any other launch provider out there at the moment.  

So what is the state of the New Space marketing currently? What’s happening and what’s coming to the market soon? Here’s what Sascha is currently seeing. 

“The market is taking off, there was some suppression of the market last year thanks to COVID, but that was for everybody. So with the nano and small sat launches that are occurring now they’re being owned by Space X, the majority of the small sats that are out there are theirs. But they are out there making it happen – so kudos to them. 

But there are also rocket companies left and right, in addition to launch specifics services like our own. But now those companies are looking at the possibility of also providing some payloads of their own because you’re sending stuff all that way, it isn’t a stretch to provide some of your services or at least some of your technologies. 

The market certainly didn’t grow as much as we wanted it to in the last year from what I saw. But Frost and Sullivan came up with a market report which said the market is looking strong and aiming to do 38 billion in just launches for small satellites to space by 2030. So that will remain a very strong industry. 

For us, the opportunities is not only that, but the population and corporations are looking to do things in a more earth responsible way. There’s a lot of focus on carbon footprints, there’s a lot of focus around transportation and electric vehicles and space transport is one of the last industries which hasn’t been touched by the ‘we should do things in a little more environmentally responsible way’. So what was cool for us as a small company launched in the United States was when we first launched a rocket using bio drive fuel we’d then see articles pop up in spacenews.com and other places then the dialogue started to change to ‘Hey space companies, you should be doing something that’s a little bit more earth-friendly.’ 

So our next launch will be off the coast of Maine, and we’ll be launching over the ocean, and in Maine, there’s a very strong fishing industry. So if your rocket has highly refined kerosene in it, or a nasty oxidizer what’s that going to do to the fisheries below? What is it doing to the ecosystem below? So even if we ignore the climate change aspects, if that rocket is plunging to the ocean and it’s not always being retrieved or it’s leaking a bit what’s that going to do to the fisheries? With ours, we can safely say other than the kinetics we will not contaminate the ecosystem below. Of course with our orbital launches and first stages of our rocket engines we plan to fully recover them and then next year we’ll be doing the same with civil, academic and commercial rockets. But you know in the bad case that one does plummet into the ocean we feel very confident that it won’t affect the ecosystem below us, and we won’t have our local fisherman being mad at us. 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

What can the satellite industry take from the mobile device space?

Posted on by Tegan Valeny

Joining us on episode 45 of The Tech That Connects Us is John Kinney VP of Quality Assurance with Intelsat. John joined Laurie Scott and Tom Wilding to talk about all thing’s connectivity, aircraft connectivity, business optimisation, quality and customer service. 

 John has an impressive background with over 20 years at Motorola and beyond, having worked at Rockwell Automation and Blackberry, so we wanted to find out what can the satellite industry learn from the mobile device space? Here’s what John has to say. 

“There are certainly some parallels between the two industries. They’re very similar actually, we’re just sending bits and bytes over different media. 

The main thing we can learn from the cellular industry is to focus on the customer experience. Everything starts with the customer. 

How does the customer want to use it? 

What issues does the customer currently have? 

Once we know what the customer wants and what issues we’re trying to solve for them we can work our way back through the network and supply chain, but we need to stay focused on the customer experience. 

As you know I worked for Motorola for a long time, and then went on to Blackberry and so I had a front-row seat watching Apple evolve. I remember the launch of the original iPhone in 2007. They came out with it and when it first launched the iPhone wasn’t very reliable, in fact, it was the worst-performing phone from a reliability perspective. The phone itself was fantastic from an applications point of view and it was neat and the industry was of course very curious, but it just wasn’t reliable. 

This is where Apple changed the rules to the game, this is where their focus went to customer experience. They knew when it launched that it wasn’t going to be the best, but the end isn’t the beginning. We need to remember the end, and Apple and the iPhone went from the worst to the best in two years from a reliability perspective. How did they do that? By focusing on customer experience, they did it by just learning, learning and learning some more. 

This is where they changed the rules in the industry. It was always the case that the network carrier would own the customer experience, so if you had a problem with your phone, you’d have to take it back to AT&T, Sprint or Verizon who would then send it back to the OEM. You’d have a middle person, within the loop. But Apple said no, we don’t want that middle person, everything went directly back to Apple, they bypassed AT&T who had an exclusive deal on the original iPhone. They did that intentionally, they wanted to learn and they didn’t want that learning to be filtered through the carrier, and they wanted to figure out what was going on fast and fix it fast. Which is what they did. 

 So, I learnt a lot from Apple just dominating from a customer experience point of view, they were a formidable opponent. 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

What can the connectivity industry and everything associated with being connected learn from its past?

Posted on by Tegan Valeny

Episode 44 of The Tech That Connects us saw Omae Qaise the Founder and CEO of OQ Technology join Laurie Scott and Tom Wilding to cover 5G, IoT, the evolution of M2M, Albert Einstein & Elon Musk. 

In a moment of reflection, Omar was asked what can the connectivity industry and everything associated with being connected learn from its past? Here’s what he had to say. 

 “One of the biggest lessons learnt is that the model of developing your technology, your hardware and your own ecosystem from scratch which has often been the way with traditional satellite and communication business isn’t the right approach. 

 The problem is, there are still many new space companies and startups going in the same direction. This is a major difference when you look at the mobile telecommunication industry, they’ve been through that phase and nowadays there are standards, you have GSM, LTE or 5G and there are multiple operators, chip vendors, and hardware manufacturers who all follow a standard. You can connect sensors to phones, and phones to operators just by changing a sim card. Could you imagine if all operators used different sized and shaped sim cards? 

 That’s why the satellite industry is expensive. Connectivity specifically is down to the hardware. If we want to change this then we need to tap into the existing ecosystem that everyone understands and uses from North pole to South, from Australia to America to India. That is the mobile technology that our satellites can be used for as cell towers in the sky. Users can connect seamlessly, and they won’t know if they’re connected to a terrestrial network or a facility network. This is a first in the world because mobile chips they’re very cheap, and the connectivity is cheap and that’s because millions of engineering hours have been put into scaling that technology. There is already an ecosystem, with lots of participants and players. 

 If you compare a 4 or 5 dollar cellular chip with a satellite alternative, firstly each satellite operator have their own chips, which start at a few 100 dollars, not including a device! Now imagine if the 5 dollar cellular chip could do the same job as the satellite chip and the terrestrial chip, it’s not something that’s unheard of but it’s yet to be scaled. 

 This is really going to open up a lot of opportunities, allowing access for a lot of users and enable mobility between terrestrial and satellite technologies. That will then funnel into big data of massive machine communication, which is one of the biggest aspects of the 5G revolution.” 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Is diversity and inclusion at the top of your agenda?

Posted on by Tegan Valeny

Diversity and inclusion is one of the most important ethical and strategic priorities for businesses in 2021, but is it top of your agenda?

Over the last month we’ve been busy collating some of the best answers from our amazing guests on The Tech That Connects Us podcast. Every week we ask the big question on diversity and inclusion and get insight into what they’re doing to make that positive difference.

In this white paper we’ve compiled 10 fantastic insights and tips business leaders need to think about if they want to begin the process of building a truly diverse organisation, filled with talented individuals from different backgrounds.

This white paper will provide you with some tangible actions, that will build momentum and have a positive impact on diversity within your business.

If you’d like to talk to us about what we have learnt or the experiences of others in your industry please get in touch.

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

What are the biggest challenges to the TV industry and video industry moving forward?

Posted on by Tegan Valeny

On episode 43 of The Tech That Connects Us John Clifton and Tim Meredith were joined by Nuno Sanches, General Manager for Telecom and Media at Kaltura.

When it comes to the TV and video industry there are a lot of challenges as we move forward, here’s what Nuno thinks are the biggest.

“In the media and professional TV industry, the biggest challenge we currently have is understanding the role of each of the agents and players. The structure of the industry itself is not settled. 

 It’s not clear if there’s market potential for a distributed content model, where we’ll have many providers providing content directly to many customers, or if we’re going to see the reaggregation of the intermediary where you then have half a dozen large aggregators that intermediate with a larger group of customers. 

 
This is the biggest risk but also the biggest opportunity, the winners and losers of each of these two configurations are dramatically different. Right now the question that will shape the industry is, can people be successful and meet the needs of the customer but reach them directly and profitably without having to be aggregated as it used to be. The question itself is still open, but we have a very interesting data point with Netflix in the fact that Netflix itself has stopped growing. Which has put all the projections about what the industry can be into an upheaval. 

 
We now have three or four players who could legitimately be at an equivalent scale in a couple of years that starts to make it clear that the winner takes all model doesn’t exist. But it still has not eliminated the fact that you could go back to essentially a US media company driven half by media and half by tech and have five giants who then consolidate everything like back in the days of paid TV. 

 
It’ll be fascinating to see whether this new world will emerge or if the old world of content aggregation will come back under a new banner of Video on Demand and non-linear content. 

 
For video, the biggest challenge will come from privacy. People do not understand the full impact of the videofied world we live in. This is why we’re only now starting to process the enormous implications of fake news and social media. We’re starting to grasp with personal exposure, if you’re putting up pictures of your kids or you out drinking then that’s something that could potentially come back to haunt you when it comes to a job interview. We’re only now understanding these implications. We’re starting to grapple with all this but the regulations around this have come afterwards. 

 
For example, does an employer have a right to record a meeting whilst you’re working from home? We’ve decided that this is now acceptable for everyone. So something could happen in the background and it’s ok for your employers to be recording it even though that’s in your home. We’ve made these decisions without fully understanding the implications.  

 
Over at Netflix, someone got fired due to some comments which were critical of the management team but on a channel they thought was private. If you’re adding video to these situations due to the depth of information you can get for a video the number of things that can go wrong goes through the roof. 

 
So a huge challenge for the video application world is how privacy will work, and we need to know the implications of these situations. One question we should be asking is how can machine learning and AI be used not for exposing your privacy but for protecting it? Can we use blockchain to make sure we control our own video feeds and keep the rights to them as if it was an NFT for example?  

 
If something happened that you didn’t want to be recorded then you’d have the ability to correct it in the master distributed file. These are important topics that may not come today because we’re all at home and privileged just to be talking to each other. But tomorrow they will come and they’re important discussions and the biggest challenge around video for the next decade.”

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

What are the Emerging Marketing Trends Within Cyber?

Posted on by Tegan Valeny

On episode 42 of The Tech That Connects Us John Clifton and Jake Sparkes were joined by global Cyber marketing expert Reuben Braham. 

In the episode, we heard Reubens thoughts on the marketing trends that are emerging in the cyber industry. 

“Anything that we talk about regarding marketing trends, is actually a bit different to what we’d be talking about 18 or 19 months ago before we had the COVID 19 pandemic. 

Before the pandemic, it was different because we could travel and meet people face to face and be present. What I’m seeing now is that the world is ready for a more hybrid model of business, so our marketing needs need to focus on gearing up and being part of the virtual events and conversations, we’re having over Zoom right now. It’s something that is now more acceptable even for business meetings with CEOs, CMOs etc. So, we have to be ready for a hybrid business model.  

On the other side, we need to understand that people are going to be hit with a lot of virtual requests and that ‘Zoom fatique’ is real. All the different vendors and suppliers will want to have virtual briefings which will start to take its toll on our customers. 

The best strategies I’m seeing currently are around creating thought leadership content that can be circulated to your target audience, companies need to be building more blogs, building more thought leadership content and educating your market. 

When you’re building content you should be focusing on your perfect customers, understanding their pain points and doing your best to help them by being consultative with your approach. 

As a marketing department, you must be doing targeted research, and then use an account-based marketing approach, not just a shotgun approach trying to hit everybody. If you can build a library of very good content that can educate your audience and continue to educate them then that’s something that will have a massive impact on your business. 

In my first 6 months at Cyberint, our first task has been to build up our content library, I really believe that creating great engaging content will work wonders for not only engaging with your current and potential clients, but it’ll really help with our website SEO. Once you’ve built up that library of content potential customers will understand that you’re a player in the marketing, and they’ll start to differentiate your business from the competition.  

Virtual meetings and virtual events are starting to have their toll on people, and people would rather consume content at their leisure rather than at a set time. 

There’s also a lot to be said too for building out good automation and allowing 70-80% of your customers journey to be done through marketing automation. The more content you can give your potential client the more they’ll know about you and the more they’ll see you as the business to work with over your competition.” 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

The Disruptiveness of Kubernetes.

Posted on by Tegan Valeny

On Episode 41 of The Tech That Connects Us John Clifton and Dan Jeffery were joined by Subha Shrinivasan Senior Director, Customer Success at Robin.io.

Subha has over 20 years of experience across virtualization, datacenter, and cloud-native technologies. It was a great chance for us to talk about all things Kubernetes and more specifically the future of Kubernetes. 

Here’s what Subha had to say when it comes to Kubernetes. 

“Kubernetes is a very disruptive technology, and it’s going to disrupt two or three major trends we are seeing in the market. The first one is that it’s going to completely disrupt AI and machine learning. AI and machine learning are going to be the heart of every business in a few years from now, there won’t be a business that doesn’t use an AI or machine learning stack.

So, there is not going to be an AI or machine learning stack that is not deployed on Kubernetes, in the future at least 90% of the workloads that are built on EMR will be hosted on Kubernetes. 

Here’s why. See unlike other technology stacks such as AI and machine learning, which are actual services with technology that are constantly changing, it’s not just one application it’s a combination of multiple applications or what we call an application pipeline, that is stitched together to deliver AI or machine learning as a service. You don’t want to be locked into one technology stack, you want to be able to have the flexibility of being able to combine different stacks and adapt them for the use case.

Secondly, the integration with DevOps is going to be extremely critical as there is continuous innovation, development and improvisation going on. Machine learning is like a feedback loop, you derive certain analytics, you pass it back. So, it’s a process of continuous development. If you get locked into one technology stack or one infrastructure that is like this giant gorilla which is difficult to move, then you’re not going to be able to use machine learning efficiently and your results won’t be accurate. Then your predictive analytics will fail.

Kubernetes plays a major role in this because the way it is designed is that it’s very flexible to changes in your deployments. It’s logged into the infrastructure and then nothing is logged and sealed into the infrastructure, so you’re able to continuously move around the pods, you’re able to continuously move around the infrastructure and you’re able to use the same infrastructure and build any application or integrate with the DevOps stack and be able to move in a matter of a few hours or minutes rather than taking days and disrupting existing infrastructure.

My prediction is that there’s not going to be any Amazon stack in the future without coordinators on the platform.”

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.