Aduna will act as the “connective tissue” between network API supply and demand, says CEOAduna will act as the “connective tissue” between network API supply and demand, says CEO

We caught up with newly appointed Aduna CEO, Anthony Bartolo, at the Ericsson pre-MWC media and analyst day, where he spoke about his ambitions and priorities for the joint venture, Aduna’s go-to-market strategy and business model, customer ownership and pricing, and also about Nokia.

Mission and priorities

With a lot of interest from the “supply side”, referring to the operator community, Bartolo began by telling us about his last memories of when the telecom industry was on the verge of a significant breakthrough.

“The last time I saw that in a material way, was what we saw with roaming agreements, and I think that was almost out of necessity, but they really did come together and create something that was really the framework and background for something super special and that we're all benefiting from today,” he reminisced.

Equally, he said that the developer platform partners, referring to the partnerships with hyperscalers and CPaaS partners such as Google Cloud and others recently announced, were “tremendously important” to the Aduna mission. For Communication Service Providers (CSPs), these platform partners embody demand and agility, or as Anthony put it “it's a validation that hangs on our investment premise may well be materializing faster than we thought.”  

While he acknowledged that the road to success won’t be easily paved, he also remained very optimistic saying that the “collective desire by the existing partners and the other partners that we are talking to is really quite fascinating and flattering to the mission of Aduna.”

That mission and his priority, at least for now, is to create what he coins as the “connective tissue” between the supply side and the demand. Another key aspect to the mission related to providing seamless access to harmonised APIs across the globe. This refers back to his nod to the roaming agreements unleashing what we know today as borderless communication.

Based on existing CAMARA APIs, Aduna’s goal is to provide network APIs to a host of developer platforms with new applications able to work anywhere and on any network. As such, he expanded that “it's about getting that backbone up, getting that platform up and running it, making sure it's consumable by a developer community that's nurtured by the CSP, the partner developer, the Googles, AWS, it is the Vonages, etc.”

Business model and go-to-market

The organisation that takes its name from the Latin word for ‘many entities uniting as one’, was only set up last September and unveiled its name ‘Aduna’ and its CEO, Bartolo, last month. The logo and branding were unveiled at the Ericsson event where we met Bartolo. So, while it is still early days into his appointment and organisational planning, we still pressed on with questions regarding the business model and go-to-market strategies.

In the first place, “the go-to-market strategy is fundamentally the developer community partners” referring to the non-CSP partners joining Aduna. He explained that they have the relationship to the developer community: “Those developer communities are large, they foster them, they nurture them, and they are super keen to take our network APIs, at least those partners that we've signed on, are keen to take those network APIs and present them to the developer community, and that's the interface to the developer community.”

Bartolo mentioned other areas where large developer communities reside, saying they: “might be in global service, global systems integrators. They might have a large, developed community that they could leverage an API, or a set of APIs in the global sense, because where it's valuable it is the global bit that is the value.” This is where his reference to the roaming agreements fully unveils itself.

Bartolo explained that pulling an API in one country should also work instantaneously in a second country if it was so desired: “Let's call that ‘n’, n-amount of countries. The larger n is, the more difficult it is to actually get your application to work in that country.” This he explained is because as it stands developers would have to go to a CSP for each country and negotiate a separate contract. Such negotiations are time consuming, effortful, and energy consuming and yet by the time the contracts are done all the operating procedures in those different locations remain different.

“They're not all uniform. ... So, this [an Aduna agreement] helps harmonize that effort and reduces the coefficient of friction of actually getting a product out or an application out on a global basis. And that if I can reserve a talent from rewriting code because he's in five different countries, five different ways, I've already created productivity, I can use that person… that energy and that effort to actually improve the products or bring out more products, and therefore, create more value and create more productivity. Don't reinvent the wheel.”

Customer ownership and pricing

As we pressed on with a question on customer ownership within the Aduna business model, Bartolo maintained that customers could enter Aduna from a host of directions, through the different partners, both via CSPs and the developer platform partners.

While this didn’t solidify the question of ownership of customer relations once a customer has been directed toward the Aduna framework, he did stress that the consortium of CSP partners had come to an agreement on pricing, namely fixed rates.

“It's flat, consistent. We don't want a margin stack to make it more expensive. And that's an accommodation that the partners have actually done. … I don't think people realize how much these guys are willing to do, they're not just doing this because they think they've got to open up a market, and there's no sacrifice. They're investing in putting stuff, their platforms together. They've agreed on a pricing model. Collectively, they've got agreements associated with that, so you're not bargaining one versus the other. They're all in it together. And that's the bit that I find fascinating.”

The absence of Nokia

We also asked Bartolo about the glaring absence of Nokia, and the short end of it was that “there is no inhibition here at all” from his side. Instead, he said “there's a lot of innovation out there, and we are wasting energy redoing things that need not happen, and the ingenuity of developers are the ones who are expending that energy, and if we could just get it in a framework that's clean, consumable, global and consistent, everyone will benefit.”