(bright, upbeat music) >> Thank you, Adam, you're looking great in the studio. Those clouds going behind you in that beautiful blue sky. Okay. We're excited here at the Fira in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 21. Yes, it's on. Yes, it's alive and I'd say it's pretty well. Andriy Zhylenko is here as the CEO of Porta One and Roman Khalenkov is joining us as well He's the Chief Commercial Officer of Porta One. Gents, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> You're very welcome. You guys are local Barcelonans now. That's awesome. You've came in from Russia. You had this great idea for a company. Tell us about Porta One. >> Well, Porta One exists for over 20 years and we focus on helping Telco operators to deliver services more efficiently or create something new by providing an open architecture platform. And we mostly focus on tier two and three operator. So, I think about us as this weapon they can use to fight the Goliath; the large telecom operators because they need flexibility and the ability to get there faster. >> I mean, I love that, right. And we're going to talk about the cloud is a key part of that because you're now giving the smaller operators the capabilities that the big guys have had but actually doing it a way that may be cleaner and more agile, it's cloud based, they can price differently. It's a whole new ball game, right? I mean, what are you seeing when you talk to customers? What's that? What's the initial conversation like? >> Well, people still, to some extent, are afraid of the cloud but we try to give them different options on premises or in the cloud. It's a software after all. >> Dave: What, what are they afraid of with the cloud? >> They're afraid of not having the full control and usually people are afraid of things, which they don't completely understand and I guess having us here helps them to overcome that fear. >> Well, we saw this with the traditional enterprise IT when we used to have financial services executives on the cube. 10 years ago, they go, we will never put our data in the cloud. It's never going to happen. It was financial services, one of the fastest growing and largest customer segments for the cloud. But you're focusing on, you say, the tier two and tier three, I would think they have a greater motivation, right? Because they see the opportunity to disrupt. Right? >> That's true. I see cloud and other technologies such as SDN as this great equalizer because now it doesn't matter that much how much of the fiber optics you have in the ground or how many base towers you have. The true advantage will come from your platform, from the application and the service you can create. And if there's a company, they can create a great service, if it's in the cloud, it can scale to millions of subscribers easily, they just to find that product market fit. >> And Roman, you've got almost 500 customers, I believe. >> Yes. All around the globe. >> Well, that's the interesting thing, you got like 90 customers or more and so, >> 90 countries >> 90 countries, I meant 500 customers in 90 countries. So you've got local laws, you've got local politics, public policy, different across those countries, you know, provenance etc. etc. How do you see - what's the spectrum like are they open to the tier two and tier three disrupting? I mean, I would imagine some countries are trying to protect, you know, their relationships with the big Telcos because it's such critical infrastructure. What's that spectrum look like? Paint a picture of that diversity. >> It all depends on the specific country. In some countries like South Africa, the market is totally liberalized. You want to become a Telco. Here you go. In other countries like China, for example, it's only for a very small group of national carriers. So we basically follow the lead of the customers. If there are an opportunity in the specific countries, they will pop up like mushrooms. If there is no market liberation, what can you do? >> Right. Okay. So now talk more about what you guys sell to these customers. You're talking about the BSS systems and what exactly am I buying from you? And how is that all working? >> We sell the ability to manage your subscribers, create new services, and then provision and deliver those services to a variety of network elements, equipment and through integrations, and through connections to various types of apps. And right now with the cloud move, I see this as an- it's a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. If Telco has existing infrastructure that's our chance to rethink the architecture and approach. Because if they just think we have a cloud, it's some kind of computer where I'm going to run the applications a bit cheaper, they're missing the point. We were born in Soviet Union and one of my treasures is the jokes from Soviet Union times is one of them is a lady writes to the Central Committee of Communist Party and she says, I work at the Moscow Teapot Factory. And I like my job, I like my colleagues, I'm employee of the month, but, what bothers me; I can never buy a teapot in my store. I go there but they never have teapots. Can you do something? And she receives a reply saying, well, we can not change the way how we distribute goods in the whole country but there's an exception that will allow you to take one part of teapot, bring it home, and you can assemble teapot for yourself. And then two months later, there's now a letter from the same lady saying, Dear comrades, I did as you told me and now in my backyard, I have an intercontinental ballistic missile SS20 but I still don't have a teapot. So you cannot replicate what already had to just bring it piece by piece into the cloud and expect it's going to be something different, it's going to be better. >> Dave: We call it the Lunar Landing Module, very complex. Okay! Let's talk about the move from and the journey from on-prem maybe through hybrid but to the cloud, ultimately, and it starts with the customer conversation. First of all, they got to be willing. Right? Okay. But what's that journey look like? What are the phases that we should- how should we think about that? >> Over the last 20 years we've been offering our platform on premises and usually with unlimited license. So, whatever you can squeeze out of your physical machines is all yours. We don't count that. And that was a pretty straightforward model because you own your servers. We give you the license to the product, and it's fully separated. In the cloud it's not possible by default. You will provide both the physical infrastructure and software infrastructure. So, we need to change that model and we need to explain to our customers first of all. The next step; no Telco is the same. So, they provide different set of services. They offer their products to different audiences of the end-users. So it can be hosted PPBX or IP Centrics environments. So, we would then price our platform based on the number of active seats or it can be a mobile operator, a full mobile network operator or virtual mobile operator MVNO, or even enabler MVNE. So in that case, we would price our platform based on number of active sims. Many manual customers prefer to diversify. They want to choose different models, serve different market segments and not only deliver voice, but also data, messaging, value added services. We have a huge customer in Brazil, for example, they don't have a single end-user customer because everything what they do is pure IOT. So how do we price the platform? Because the variety of business models is so huge. We use the idea of billable events. So any call, any message, any data session, subscription, or anything which can produce a rate-able file can counter against the capacity of what the customer uses. So it gives a full transparency for the customer and it's easy to predict the future costs >> And you're able to charge accordingly and transparently because you've written software to do that. >> Roman: Absolutely. >> Its in the cloud, I presume. And so, you're able to show your customers exactly what you're paying for and the seat in that instance is somebody who's creating those services or somebody who's administering those services, or it's a developer? >> It's an extension >> Somebody who's using the service. So the end user. >> Ah, right. Yeah, okay. >> And actually we use our own software to charge our customers for using our software. >> Okay so you eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne as people like to say, right? How about from an engineering standpoint? Going from on-prem to the cloud, how should we think about architecting that? What are some of the roadblocks that we potentially see? >> The biggest roadblock we see in the developing countries is data centers not being available yet. That customer in Brazil, they were like knocking on the doors of the data center >> 9: 00 AM when it just opened, because they've been waiting for so long. We have about 15 customers in South Africa. They still are waiting for proper cloud at the center to be open there. But that's just the question of time. We just have to wait a little bit and this will get improved. And then that's a big thing. that you have your data center, you have your cloud software, and then you have your existing operations. You have your systems. So how do you move there? And I'm a proponent of gradual migration and gradual movement because every Telco, if they were in business for at least a few years, they have accumulated the variety of different systems, legacy, different products, different departments. It's difficult to jump in the cloud in one jump. So let's build a ladder. And with our customers, we use a technology called Dual-Version with RADIUS. It's a gradual migration. You don't move it at once You first with the pilot batch of customers, observe them, then add more customers, add more customers, and you keep going until everybody's on the new version. And it helps tremendously with new technology, or just with different user experience, because maybe some things which were improved in our perspective from some users, they don't like the change or they need some adjustments. So we see a way to the cloud. It's starting the small steps and then get them to the cloud and the process doesn't start there because once you get to version one of Clio cloud software, it's going to be version two and version three and version four. So the first is a general change in the mentality of telco, all this constant gradual improvements. >> You call it radio? Gradual? >> Gradual. >> Okay, so, gradual migration. So when you do a migration and it's gradual what, do you create some kind of abstraction layer so they don't have to freeze everything, right? Or, maybe I do freeze it but I can still operate with the pieces that have moved. >> Exactly. >> So I'm not shutting down my business. >> No, no way. >> That's the problem with migrations, right? I got to, I got to freeze it. And then, so I say, forget it. I don't ever do a migration, but technology allows you to hide that. >> Right. Some freeze may be required because maybe you should not add a new product or change one, which is currently being immigrated. >> Right. >> But to try to minimize the amount of those freezes from a product catalog perspective and the amount of potential inconveniences for the end user while they be integrated. >> Let's talk about the business value. We know that before, we know what it's like, it's a hairball. You described that spaghetti code. It's slow. It's not transparent. It's expensive. What are you seeing in the after state with some of your tier two and tier three customers, in particular, the ones that are disrupting the Telcos, what do you see? Roman. >> It Brings value, first of all. Because the scalability is no longer an issue. Their ability to migrate, ability to update the system to the new releases is also, much more easier in the cloud. So, the industry's changing fast. The consumers are instantly moving from one preferred way of communicating to another. So the Telcos need to change as well, pretty rapidly. So we are trying to give them that set of tools so they are not being dragged behind by the changes. So update faster, scale faster, introduce new products faster, configure new subscription, and get more customers. >> And then that leads to compress time to monetization. >> Roman: Exactly >> Better customer satisfaction. If we talked in this industry about NPS and how it's so negative. Usually people talk about "my NPS is better than Apple's". When they, in this industry, it's like we need to improve the NPS. Unique approach. Okay! Guys, we're almost out of time. Andriy, I'll give you the last word, put a bow on Mobile World Congress 2021 and how poor to seize it. >> Well, I think it's very symbolic, this place we are in right now, it's a space which used to belong to a large telecom software vendor. And now there's a variety of smaller disruptive companies. And I think that's the future. So the days when Telco would shop for a single huge RFP to solve all of their problems, are gone for good. Because now with the cloud, with integration, with API, You, the Telcos, have the power to build what they need, peak the solutions to integrate and create something which will deliver value and allow them to have it (indistinct) >> Fantastic. We are tracking the transformation of Telco and it just coincides with the exit of the post isolation economy. We're really excited to be here in cloud city. Adam, back to you in the studio.