NEWCASTLE, Washington — After spending 27 years working for wireless carriers and nearly the last two as president and CEO of Synchronoss, Glenn Lurie is ready to tell it like it is. “The carriers are hard to do business with,” he said at the Mobile Future Forward conference. “The carriers are tough, and being on the other side of the table is always interesting.”

Lurie ended his 24-year run at AT&T as president and CEO of the operator’s mobility business. His career began at McCaw Cellular in 1990, and during his time at AT&T he held a string of regional executive positions on the West Coast that eventually catapulted him to the C Suite and put him in charge of IoT.

“Carriers have to figure out how to make money. Revenues are down, revenues are flat — not everywhere but pretty much everywhere,” he said. And that creates more challenges as operators gear up to invest heavily in 5G. CTIA estimates U.S. operators will have to invest $275 billion collectively to deliver ubiquitous 5G coverage across the country. Lurie, like many others, wonders where all that money will come from and how carriers will ever get a return on that investment.

“Think about the business model from a carrier perspective. We’re seeing most of the carriers be very diligent on expense and they have to go find other ways to make money,” he said. IoT, a division Lurie launched and ran at AT&T, was supposed to offset network investments and drive significant new revenue for operators but it hasn’t materialized.

“IoT has done a very nice job. Has it delivered everything we expected? Probably not. Lot of devices, but the revenue hasn’t fallen quite as we wished it would,” he said. There’s significant unmet opportunity in the IoT space, but it’s taking longer than most industry observers anticipated. The ascent of smart cities “really hasn’t happened yet,” he said, adding that municipalities don’t have funding to pay for it, which puts the onus on operators to develop new business models.

“What worries me and has worried me since we launched [AT&T’s] business in 2008 is: how do you manage it in one place?” he said. Customers have to manage way too many apps to manage and interact with separate IoT platforms and services in the home, at work, and elsewhere, Lurie explained.

Mobile network operators need to make money now and they have “massive strengths” that remain untapped, Lurie said, adding that telecoms are moving more aggressively into advertising, entertainment, and data. But it’s the latter that’s most valuable from Lurie’s perspective.

“Every carrier in the world needs to be in the cloud,” he said. “Why in the world would a carrier would give their best customers’ data to Google [or Apple] who’s going to go monetize their customers data?” The Apples and Googles of the world are quickly becoming “frenemies” of telecoms and operators need to approach this dynamic differently going forward, Lurie argued.

“What’s more valuable than the data of a wireless customer? I would argue nothing…It’s valuable. Why give that away,” he said. “The operators have more data than anybody” but “you’ve got to talk about using data to make the customer experience better…It’s the using for evil part that gets people uncomfortable.”

Lurie ranks Verizon’s cloud offering as the most successful in the United States and described it as a “wonderful incremental revenue stream that is significant.” Other U.S. operators are behind and missing out on the opportunity and failing to protect the entire customer relationship, he added. “There’s so many angles to this that make cloud an absolute no-brainer for carriers.”

Having just returned from a trip to Asia, Lurie also remarked on the absolute ubiquity of WeChat, a messaging platform that now acts as a conduit for dozens of important daily transactions and services for users. “Every bit of revenue up the stack is being taken by WeChat, but the carriers are the ones having to spend the dollars to build the network,” he said.

“This whole concept of messaging and this whole concept of the customer experience inside of messaging is one the carriers have to be aware of and have to be very proactive with,” he said, mentioning Facebook’s goal of mimicking WeChat’s role in the United States. “If you’re a wireless carrier that should frighten you to your core.”

AT&T used to have a “massive billion dollar messaging business that completely went away,” he said, harkening back to the early days of text messaging. “But the carriers have an opportunity to grab ahold of this again, take control and jump on that [rich communication services] advanced messaging bandwagon.”

RCS is an effort and standard that goes back more than a decade. And while U.S. operators have slowly adopted the service, it’s largely failed to reach the level of utility that Lurie and others would like to see. Of course, Lurie’s current employer Synchronoss is in the cloud computing and RCS business, so it's understandable for him to take these positions.

As telecom, media, and technology industries continue to collide “it’s going to get messy,” Lurie said. “Messy’s good for us because we’re there to support that messy and make it simple…It’s going to get messier, it’s going to get harder because it’s all coming together and there’s going to only be a few winners.”