I’ve been at Mobile World Congress one day so far.  5G is everywhere and around every corner and under every rock.  Can’t get away from it.

It’s also clear that I was right about seeing IoT and Cloud messaging everywhere. And I mean everywhere. And it’s clear it’s over the top.  One thing about IoT you notice right away is the hype.  Companies are tying everything to it.  IoT here means just about anything – a jumble of M2M and connectivity of anything.  In the future, I expect to see more focused messaging about IoT as companies figure out their play.

And I was right that NFV would be a topic here, albeit more muted than the past, what with the monstrous messaging about 5G and IoT.  But there is marketing message confusion about NFV and Cloud as many companies use the terms interchangeably (most likely because companies are mal-informed).  NFV is different from Cloud – NFV is something very specific with specs and VNFs and Heat Maps and such – very telco if you will.  But running a function in a cloud like AWS is not the same thing.  While Dialogic is very specific about our NFV and Cloud infrastructure products messaging, everyone is not.

One thing I did not write about in my expectations was the entrée of artificial intelligence or machine learning to enhance the telecom experience.  We’ve seen early versions of this with contact centers and “wordspotting” helping an IVR figure out how best handle a caller.  At any rate, I am seeing Artificial Intelligence marketing make an emergence at Mobile World Congress.  After all, Watson has a primary presence along the main corridor.

I’m sure there is much more for me to find out in the next few days.