IT LIFE: Duncan Gooding, TalkTalk Business COO

How will the Internet of Things affect your organisation?

Clearly, the main impact it will have is it will increase the demand on our network. We are ready to help unlock the potential of IoT for our customers and have been continually investing in our network so that we can offer the reliable connectivity organisations need for the IoT and other bandwidth heavy applications such as enterprise video.

The retail industry has seen a particularly big expansion in the IoT and forward thinking retailers are now connecting as many devices as they can to the internet so that they can be remotely managed.

The interest from our customers is only set to grow, not just in retail, but across many different industries. In response, we are developing next generation Wi-Fi solutions for retailers to offer free connectivity to their customers.

We are developing these systems to not just provide access to the internet, but also to help businesses measure and profile footfall, and analyse buying behaviour. This demonstrates how our services are becoming more complex and often serve more than one business purpose.

What smartphone do you use?

iPhone 7

What three apps could you not live without?

Microsoft Lync, email (sadly still a huge tool for me) and, from a personal point of view, Netflix.

What new technology are you most excited for a) your business and b) yourself?

Robotics and automation will soon be used in service delivery to streamline operational and communication processes, as we have seen with the supply chain between Customer, Reseller, Carrier and BT Openreach. The result will be that the benchmark for businesses’ expectation of service, and that of their customers, will be raised even higher.

This year, Next Generation Voice services will move to the front of mind for UK businesses. Many organisations have already got a head start ahead of the ISDN switch off in 2025 by looking at new technologies such as Hosted Voice and SIP.

This ability to connect all members of the company reliably over the internet will see many more businesses harnessing the new capability for connecting global teams and flexible working.

Personally, I am very interested in Virtual Reality and how far it can go. I love to take my daughter to theme parks and ride the fastest, wildest rides. From a more general point of view VR can transform how we learn and inject some much needed excitement into education.

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you be doing?

I love the tech industry so can confidently say I would be working in one of the markets associated with tech.

Quiz: What do you know about fibre broadband?