>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona. We're here at the Fira Live, theCUBE's ongoing coverage of day two of MWC 23. Back in 2021 was my first Mobile World Congress. And you know what? It was actually quite an experience because there was nobody there. I talked to my friend, who's now my co-host, Chris Lewis about what to expect. He said, Dave, I don't think a lot of people are going to be there, but Danielle Royston is here and she's the CEO of Totoge. And that year when Erickson tapped out of its space she took out 60,000 square feet and built out Cloud City. If it weren't for Cloud City, there would've been no Mobile World Congress in June and July of 2021. DR is back. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> It's great to see you. >> Chris. Awesome to see you. >> Yeah, Chris. Yep. >> Good to be back. Yep. >> You guys remember the narrative back then. There was this lady running around this crazy lady that I met at at Google Cloud next saying >> Yeah. Yeah. >> the cloud's going to take over Telco. And everybody's like, well, this lady's nuts. The cloud's been leaning in, you know? >> Yeah. >> So what do you think, I mean, what's changed since since you first caused all those ripples? >> I mean, I have to say that I think that I caused a lot of change in the industry. I was talking to leaders over at AWS yesterday and they were like, we've never seen someone push like you have and change so much in a short period of time. And Telco moves slow. It's known for that. And they're like, you are pushing buttons and you're getting people to change and thank you and keep going. And so it's been great. It's awesome. >> Yeah. I mean, it was interesting, Chris, we heard on the keynotes we had Microsoft, Satya came in, Thomas Curian came in. There was no AWS. And now I asked CMO of GSMA about that. She goes, hey, we got a great relationship with it, AWS. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But why do you think they weren't here? >> Well, they, I mean, they are here. >> Mean, not here. Why do you think they weren't profiled? >> They weren't on the keynote stage. >> But, you know, at AWS, a lot of the times they want to be the main thing. They want to be the main part of the show. They don't like sharing the limelight. I think they just didn't want be on the stage with the Google CLoud guys and the these other guys, what they're doing they're building out, they're doing so much stuff. As Danielle said, with Telcos change in the ecosystem which is what's happening with cloud. Cloud's making the Telcos think about what the next move is, how they fit in with the way other people do business. Right? So Telcos never used to have to listen to anybody. They only listened to themselves and they dictated the way things were done. They're very successful and made a lot of money but they're now having to open up they're having to leverage the cloud they're having to leverage the services that (indistinct words) and people out provide and they're changing the way they work. >> So, okay in 2021, we talked a lot about the cloud as a potential disruptor, and your whole premise was, look you got to lean into the cloud, or you're screwed. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But the flip side of that is, if they lean into the cloud too much, they might be screwed. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> So what's that equilibrium? Have they been able to find it? Are you working with just the disruptors or how's that? >> No I think they're finding it right. So my talk at MWC 21 was all about the cloud is a double-edged sword, right? There's two sides to it, and you definitely need to proceed through it with caution, but also I don't know that you have a choice, right? I mean, the multicloud, you know is there another industry that spends more on CapEx than Telco? >> No. >> Right. The hyperscalers are doing it right. They spend, you know, easily approaching over a $100 billion in CapEx that rivals this industry. And so when you have a player like that an industry driving, you know and investing so much Telco, you're always complaining how everyone's riding your coattails. This is the opportunity to write someone else's coattails. So jump on, right? I think you don't have a choice especially if other Telco competitors are using hyperscalers and you don't, they're going to be left behind. >> So you advise these companies all the time, but >> I mean, the issue is they're all they're all using all the hyperscalers, right? So they're the multi, the multiple relationships. And as Danielle said, the multi-layer of relationship they're using the hyperscalers to change their own internal operational environments to become more IT-centric to move to that software centric Telco. And they're also then with the hyperscalers going to market in different ways sometimes with them, sometimes competing with them. What what it means from an analyst point of view is you're suddenly changing the dynamic of a market where we used to have nicely well defined markets previously. Now they're, everyone's in it together, you know, it's great. And, and it's making people change the way they think about services. What I, what I really hope it changes more than anything else is the way the customers at the end of the, at the end of the supply, the value chain think this is what we can get hold of this stuff. Now we can go into the network through the cloud and we can get those APIs. We can draw on the mechanisms we need to to run our personal lives, to run our business lives. And frankly, society as a whole. It's really exciting. >> Then your premise is basically you were saying they should ride on the top over the top of the cloud vendor. >> Yeah. Right? >> No. Okay. But don't they lose the, all the data if they do that? >> I don't know. I mean, I think the hyperscalers are not going to take their data, right? I mean, that would be a really really bad business move if Google Cloud and Azure and and AWS start to take over that, that data. >> But they can't take it. >> They can't. >> From regulate, from sovereignty and regulation. >> They can't because of regulation, but also just like business, right? If they started taking their data and like no enterprises would use them. So I think, I think the data is safe. I think you, obviously every country is different. You got to understand the different rules and regulations for data privacy and, and how you keep it. But I think as we look at the long term, right and we always talk about 10 and 20 years there's going to be a hyperscaler region in every country right? And there will be a way for every Telco to use it. I think their data will be safe. And I think it just, you're going to be able to stand on on the shoulders of someone else for once and use the building blocks of software that these guys provide to make better experiences for subscribers. >> You guys got to explain this to me because when I say data I'm not talking about, you know, personal information. I'm talking about all the telemetry, you know, all the all the, you know the plumbing. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Data, which is- >> It will increasingly be shared because you need to share it in order to deliver the services in the streamline efficient way that needs to be deliver. >> Did I hear the CEO of Ericsson Wright where basically he said, we're going to charge developers for access to that data through APIs. >> What the Ericsson have done, obviously with the Vage acquisition is they want to get into APIs. So the idea is you're exposing features, quality policy on demand type features for example, or even pulling we still use that a lot of SMS, right? So pulling those out using those APIs. So it will be charged in some way. Whether- >> Man: Like Twitter's charging me for APIs, now I API calls, you >> Know what it is? I think it's Twilio. >> Man: Oh, okay. >> Right. >> Man: No, no, that's sure. >> There's no reason why telcos couldn't provide a Twilio like service itself. >> It's a horizontal play though right? >> Danielle: Correct because developers need to be charged by the API. >> But doesn't there need to be an industry standard to do that as- >> Well. I think that's what they just announced. >> Industry standard. >> Danielle: I think they just announced that. Yeah. Right now I haven't looked at that API set, right? >> There's like eight of them. >> There's eight of them. Twilio has, it's a start you got to start somewhere Dave. (crosstalk) >> And there's all, the TM forum is all the other standard >> Right? Eight is better than zero- >> Right? >> Haven't got plenty. >> I mean for an industry that didn't really understand APIs as a feature, as a product as a service, right? For Mats Granryd, the deputy general of GSMA to stand on the keynote stage and say we partnered and we're unveiling, right. Pay by the use APIs. I was for it. I was like, that is insane. >> I liked his keynote actually, because I thought he was going to talk about how many attendees and how much economic benefiting >> Danielle: We're super diverse. >> He said, I would usually talk about that and you know greening in the network by what you did talk about a little bit. But, but that's, that surprised me. >> Yeah. >> But I've seen in the enterprise this is not my space as, you know, you guys don't live this but I've seen Oracle try to get developers. IBM had to pay $35 billion trying to get for Red Hat to get developers, right? EMC used to have a thing called EMC code, failed. >> I mean they got to do something, right? So 4G they didn't really make the business case the ROI on the investment in the network. Here we are with 5G, same discussion is having where's the use case? How are we going to monetize and make the ROI on this massive investment? And now they're starting to talk about 6G. Same fricking problem is going to happen again. And so I think they need to start experimenting with new ideas. I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if this new a API network gateway theme that Mats talked about yesterday will work. But they need to start unbundling that unlimited plan. They need to start charging people who are using the network more, more money. Those who are using it less, less. They need to figure this out. This is a crisis for them. >> Yeah our own CEO, I mean she basically said, Hey, I'm for net neutrality, but I want to be able to charge the people that are using it more and more >> To make a return on, on a capital. >> I mean it costs billions of dollars to build these networks, right? And they're valuable. We use them and we talked about this in Cloud City 21, right? The ability to start building better metaverses. And I know that's a buzzword and everyone hates it, but it's true. Like we're working from home. We need- there's got to be a better experience in Zoom in 2D, right? And you need a great network for that metaverse to be awesome. >> You do. But Danielle, you don't need cellular for doing that, do you? So the fixed network is as important. >> Sure. >> And we're at mobile worlds. But actually what we beginning to hear and Crystal Bren did say this exactly, it's about the comp the access is sort of irrelevant. Fixed is better because it's more the cost the return on investment is better from fiber. Mobile we're going to change every so many years because we're a new generation. But we need to get the mechanism in place to deliver that. I actually don't agree that we should everyone should pay differently for what they use. It's a universal service. We need it as individuals. We need to make it sustainable for every user. Let's just not go for the biggest user. It's not, it's not the way to build it. It won't work if you do that you'll crash the system if you do that. And, and the other thing which I disagree on it's not about standing on the shoulders and benefiting from what- It's about cooperating across all levels. The hyperscalers want to work with the telcos as much as the telcos want to work with the hyperscalers. There's a lot of synergy there. There's a lot of ways they can work together. It's not one or the other. >> But I think you're saying let the cloud guys do the heavy lifting and I'm - >> Yeah. >> Not at all. >> And so you don't think so because I feel like the telcos are really good at pipes. They've always been good at pipes. They're engineers. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Are they hanging on to the to the connectivity or should they let that go and well and go toward the developer. >> I mean AWS had two announcements on the 21st a week before MWC. And one was that telco network builder. This is literally being able to deploy a network capability at AWS with keystrokes. >> As a managed service. >> Danielle: Correct. >> Yeah. >> And so I don't know how the telco world I felt the shock waves, right? I was like, whoa, that seems really big. Because they're taking something that previously was like bread and butter. This is what differentiates each telco and now they've standardized it and made it super easy so anyone can do it. Now do I think the five nines of super crazy hardcore network criteria will be built on AWS this way? Probably not, but no >> It's not, it's not end twin. So you can't, no. >> Right. But private networks could be built with this pretty easily, right? And so telcos that don't have as much funding, right. Smaller, more experiments. I think it's going to change the way we think about building networks in telcos >> And those smaller telcos I think are going to be more developer friendly. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> They're going to have business models that invite those developers in. And that's, it's the disruption's going to come from the ISVs and the workloads that are on top of that. >> Well certainly what Dish is trying to do, right? Dish is trying to build a- they launched it reinvent a developer experience. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Right. Built around their network and you know, again I don't know, they were not part of this group that designed these eight APIs but I'm sure they're looking with great intent on what does this mean for them. They'll probably adopt them because they want people to consume the network as APIs. That's their whole thing that Mark Roanne is trying to do. >> Okay, and then they're doing open ran. But is it- they're not really cons- They're not as concerned as Rakuten with the reliability and is that the right play? >> In this discussion? Open RAN is not an issue. It really is irrelevant. It's relevant for the longer term future of the industry by dis aggregating and being able to share, especially ran sharing, for example, in the short term in rural environments. But we'll see some of that happening and it will change, but it will also influence the way the other, the existing ran providers build their services and offer their value. Look you got to remember in the relationship between the equipment providers and the telcos are very dramatically. Whether it's Ericson, NOKIA, Samsung, Huawei, whoever. So those relations really, and the managed services element to that depends on what skills people have in-house within the telco and what service they're trying to deliver. So there's never one size fits all in this industry. >> You're very balanced in your analysis and I appreciate that. >> I try to be. >> But I am not. (chuckles) >> So when Dr went off, this is my question. When Dr went off a couple years ago on the cloud's going to take over the world, you were skeptical. You gave a approach. Have you? >> I still am. >> Have you moderated your thoughts on that or- >> I believe the telecom industry is is a very strong industry. It's my industry of course I love it. But the relationship it is developing much different relationships with the ecosystem players around it. You mentioned developers, you mentioned the cloud players the equipment guys are changing there's so many moving parts to build the telco of the future that every country needs a very strong telco environment to be able to support the site as a whole. People individuals so- >> Well I think two years ago we were talking about should they or shouldn't they, and now it's an inevitability. >> I don't think we were Danielle. >> All using the hyperscalers. >> We were always going to need to transform the telcos from the conservative environments in which they developed. And they've had control of everything in order to reduce if they get no extra revenue at all, reducing the cost they've got to go on a cloud migration path to do that. >> Amenable. >> Has it been harder than you thought? >> It's been easier than I thought. >> You think it's gone faster than >> It's gone way faster than I thought. I mean pushing on this flywheel I thought for sure it would take five to 10 years it is moving. I mean the maths comp thing the AWS announcements last week they're putting in hyperscalers in Saudi Arabia which is probably one of the most sort of data private places in the world. It's happening really fast. >> What Azure's doing? >> I feel like I can't even go to sleep. Because I got to keep up with it. It's crazy. >> Guys. >> This is awesome. >> So awesome having you back on. >> Yeah. >> Chris, thanks for co-hosting. Appreciate you stay here. >> Yep. >> Danielle, amazing. We'll see you. >> See you soon. >> A lot of action here. We're going to come out >> Great. >> Check out your venue. >> Yeah the Togi buses that are outside. >> The big buses. You got a great setup there. We're going to see you on Wednesday. Thanks again. >> Awesome. Thanks. >> All right. Keep it right there. We'll be back to wrap up day two from MWC 23 on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back. We're here in the main stage in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Normally, we're over there on theCUBE set, but here we've got a special presentation. We'll talk about Totogi and the new CEO of Totogi is Danielle, who is also the CEO of TelcoDR, Digital Revolution. Great to see you. And of course, Robin Langley, we interviewed you in theCUBE, CTO of Totogi. This is a main stage conversation because this is the big news. >> Yeah. >> You guys launched there with a hundred million dollar investment. We covered that news a couple weeks ago and you as the CEO. What's the story. Tell us what is happening with Totogi? Why such a big focus? What's the big push? >> Yeah, I'm really excited about Totogi because I really think this team is working to build public cloud tools for Telco the right way. It's everything I've been talking about. I talked about it yesterday in my keynote and this is really the execution of that vision. So, I'm super excited about that. A couple of days ago, Rob and I were talking about the charging system, but there's another product that Totogi introduced to the world and that's the webscale BSS system. So I think we're going to talk about that today. It's going to be great. >> Let's get into actually the charging system, which was great processing here. What is this focus? What is BSS about with cloud? How does the public cloud innovation change the game with this? >> Well, a little bit like charging. I mean, there are maybe, you know, a hundred plus BSS systems out there, why does the world need yet another BSS? And I think one thing is we're coupling up with public cloud, which gives it that webscale element. Right? We can have a platform. Never do another upgrade again, which I think is really exciting. But I think the really key thing that we're working on is we're building on top of an open API standard. And a lot of vendors talk about their APIs, why is this different? These are standards developed by TM forum, right? It's an independent body in our industry. They've been working on these, sorry, open APIs, and all the different vendors signed a manifesto that say, "I pledge. I pledge to support the open API", but if you look at the leaderboard and everyone is Sub10, Sub5, right? And so it's kind of like, going through the actions and not falling, you know, saying it, but not following it up and we're doing it. >> Wow, so... >> Yeah. >> Dave: Robin, you guys just popped up on the leaderboard. You went from a standing start to, I think more than 10. >> Yeah. >> I don't think that's ever been done before, has it? >> No, so we were out there. We published 12 APIs and we've got a quote from, you know, TM forums saying, essentially I've never seen anyone move so fast and to publish. And it's our intent to publish, you know, 50 plus, all of their APIs by the end of the year. >> So, how were you able to do that? I mean, like, were you holding them back? Just kind of dumping them on one day? This is the nature of the new business, isn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely and then you think about BSS. It's just, you know, been known for years to be a spaghetti of, you know, applications, you know, disparate data, data being duplicated, systems not talking to each other, lots of different interface types. And it was crying out to be just, you know, sold properly in the cloud. And the public cloud is perfect for this. You know, we can build a model and start, rather than looking at the applications first, you know, let's look at the model, the unified model and build on those open APIs and then start to, you know, allow people to come in and create an ecosystem of applications all using that same model. >> If you don't mind me asking you, if you can explain. 'Cause we talked before we weren't on camera, but we talked about the cloud and you were explaining to me how this is perfect for the challenges that you guys are trying to solve. What about the public cloud dynamic or innovation component that you guys are leveraging? Take us through a little bit on that, because I think that's a big story here that's under the covers is... >> Yeah. >> What you're capable of doing here. Do you mind explaining? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. So the cloud gives us this true scalability across everything. You know, we can scale to billions of records. So we can hook in, you know, to suck in data from, you know, our on-premise systems anywhere. We have, you know, a product called Devflow, so we used to do that. And it can really allow us to bring that data in, scale-out, use standard term cloud innovations, like Lambda functions and AWS, you know, DynamoDB, and present that, you know, through that open API. So we can use, you know graphQL, you know, present that with rest on top. And so you can then build on top of that. You can take any low code, no code application building tool you like, put that on top and then start building your own ecosystem. You can build inventory systems, CRM, anything you like. >> Well one thing that's really interesting about these projects is they usually take months, years to deploy, right? And what we're doing is we're providing, almost BSS as a service, right? It's an API layer that anyone can go to. Maybe you need to use it for five minutes, five months, five years, right? With the open standard and your own developers can learn how to use this text stack and code to it doesn't require us. And so we're really trying to get away from being an SI, you know, systems integrator or heavy services revenue, and instead build the product that enables the telcos to use their own people, to build the applications that they, they know what they want, and so, here you go. >> It's a platform. >> Yeah. >> It's a platform. >> So, how do you connect to systems on the ground? Like what's the modern approach to doing that? >> Yeah, go for it. >> Yeah so, telcos have, you know, a huge amount of data on premise. They have difficulties you can get to it. So, as I mentioned before, we had this Devflows product and it has connectors. We have like 30 plus connectors to all the standard sort of, billing systems, CRM systems, you know, we can hook into things like Salesforce. And we can create either, you know, couple of a real-time interface in there, or we can start to suck data into the cloud and then make it available. So, if they want to start with a nice, easy step and just build slowly, we can just hook in and pull that information out. If there may be, you know, an attribute that you want to, you know, use in some of that application, you can easily get to it. And then, you know, over time you start to build your data into the cloud and then you've got the scale, you know, and all the innovations of that brings with it. >> So is Devflow an on-ramp, if you will, for the public cloud, is that the way you were thinking about it? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I call it the slurper. (group chuckles) Right. I mean, these telcos have, like Robin was saying, spaghetti systems that have been, you know, customized and connected and integrated. I mean, it is a jungle out there of data. They're not going to be able to move this in one step. We just think of like a pile of spaghetti, like the whole bowl. >> Overcooked spaghetti. >> Right overcooked, the whole bowl comes out and it's really hard to just pull out one noodle and the rest is there and what are you going to do? And so the slurper, right, Devflows, allows you to select which data you want to pull out. It could be one time, you could have it sync. You don't have to do the whole thing and it doesn't disrupt the production environment that's on-premise. But now you're starting to move your data into the public cloud and then like Robin was saying, you can throw it up against quick sites. You can throw it up against different Amazon services. You can create new applications. And so it's not this like, you know, big bang kind of approach. You can start to do it in pieces and I think that's what the industry needs. >> I'm talking about this the other day, when we're talk about charging. What a lot of vendors will do is they'll put a wrapper around it, containerize it and then shove it into the public cloud and say, "Okay". >> Check mark. >> Yeah a checkbox. And it affects how they price, if they price the same way. But we talked a lot about pricing the other day, really pricing like cloud, consumption pricing. How are you pricing in this case? >> Same with the charging system. The BSS system is paid by the use, paid by the API call. So, really excited to introduce yet, again, a free tier. We think we're doing 500 million API calls per month for free. We think this is great for a smaller telco where like, you're experimenting and just getting to know the system and before you like, go all in and buy. And I think that API pricing is going to go right at the heart of some of these vendors that love to charge by the subscriber or a perpetual license agreement, right? They're not quite moving as a service. And so, yeah. >> Are you saying, they're going to be disruptive in the pricing in terms of lower cost or more, consumable. >> And I think it's also an easier on ramp, right? It's easier to start paying by the use and experimenting. And it's really easy, just like I was talking about with charging, where you're going to get the same great product that you would sell to a tier one at a price that you can afford. And now those smaller two or three guys aren't having to make a trade off between great technology, but I'm paying through the nose or sacrifice on the tech, but I can afford it. And so, I think you're going to see this ecosystem of people starting to learn how to code and think in this way. Telcos have already decided that they want to adopt the TM forum, open APIs. They're on all the RFPs. Do you support it? Everyone says they support it, but we don't see anyone really doing it. They're not on the leaderboard. >> And there's transparency, because you're pricing by API call, right? Versus the spaghetti, you guys call it, the hairball of what am I paying for? >> Right, you're getting, all of this. It's by the subscriber. It's millions and millions of dollars. Oh, and you know, you're going to need to buy a bunch of consulting revenue to make it all work and talk to each other. Pay up, right? And that's what we're living in today. And I'm taking us to the, you know, public cloud future by the API. >> This is the big cloud revolution. It's unbundling has been a really big part of the consumption of technology paid by the usage, get in, get some value, get some data, understand what it is, double down on it, iterate. >> Put it up with different services that are available that we don't have, but Amazon uses, right? They have call centers up there, they have ML that you may want to use like, start using it, start coding, start learning about the AWS tech stack. >> So is it available now? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, it's available now. We've already published the swagger for the BSS APIs. So, you know, they can come on board, they can go to access to all the API straight away and start using it. They can load up their favorite REST clients and then start developing. >> So you got a dozen APIs today. Where are we headed? What can we expect? >> All by the end of the year. There's over 50 APIs. You know, the number one guy on the board is at like 22, 21, 22 APIs covered. We'll be 50 plus by the end of the year. And we're just going to blow doors. >> The API economy has come to telco. >> Yeah, I mean, it's really BSS' Lego pieces, right. Assembling these different components and really opening it up. And I think there's been a lot of power by the vendors to keep it locked down, keep it close. Yes, we have an API, but you got to use our people to do it. Here's the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that you're going to pay us and keep us in business, and fat and happy, and I'm coming right in on the low end. Right, dropping that price, opening it up. I think telcos are going to love it. >> Well, Mike, you said too, you'll allow the smaller telcos to have the same, actually, better capabilities than the larger telcos, right? Maybe the stack's not as mature or whatever, but they'll get there and they'll get there with a simpler, easier to understand pricing model and way, way faster. >> Yeah. >> All right and that's where the disruption comes. >> And I Think this is where AWS has really done well as a hyper scaler against their competition, is that they've really gotten to market very quickly with their services. Maybe they're not perfect, but they ship 'em. And they get them out there and they get people using them. They use them internally and they get them out. And I think this is where maybe some of the other hyperscalers, they hold them back and they wait until they're a little bit more mature. And AWS is one because they've been fast. And I want to sort of copy that feat. >> I think your idea of subscriber love in your keynote, and I think applies here because Amazon web services has done such a great job of working backwards from the customer. So they'd ship it fast on used cases that they know have been proven through customer interactions. >> Yep. >> They don't just make up new features. And then they iterate. They go, "Okay". >> Start simple, grow on that, learn from the market. What are people using? What are they not using? Iterate, iterate, iterate. >> Okay, so with that in mind, working backwards from your customer, how do you see the feature set evolving for this functionality? How do you see it evolving as a product? >> Yeah, I mean, I think all of the BSS systems today have been designed with manual people on the other side of the screen, right? And we've seen chat bots take off, we've seen, you know, using chat as support. I think we need to start getting into more automation right? Which is really going to change up telco, right? They have thousands of customer support agents and you're like, "Dude, I just want a SIM, that's all I need". >> Yeah. >> Just like, where do I push a button and send an Uber to my house and drop it off or eSim. And so, speeding up business, empowering the subscriber. We know how to interact, we just went through COVID where we learned about different apps that overnight, you can like order all of your groceries and order all of your food and there it is, and it was contactless and... >> It's funny, you said future of work, which we love that term, "work". Workloads, work force, you got all these kind of new dynamics going on with cloud enablement and the changes is radical. And the value is there. There's value opportunities. >> I mean like, you know, where are the ARVR applications, right? Where your agent pops. I saw the demo. There's a strife in Austin and they're going to kill me 'cause I can't remember their name. But they had a little on your mobile phone, a little holographic customer support. Like, "How can I help you"? Right. And I'm like, "Where's that", like, imagine you're like, ATT, you're not like on the phone for like an hour and a half trying to like, figure out what's wrong. And it's like, you know, it knows what's wrong. It understands my needs and so, no one's working on that. We're still working on, keyboards. >> Right, that and chat bot is a great example because it's all AI, and where's the best AI? It's in the cloud because that's where the data is. That's where the best of modeling has been. (chuckles) >> I think your point, it's the scale of data. >> Absolutely. >> And machine learning and AI needs a lot of data points to get really good. I mean, I'm old, I'm 50. I graduated in 1993. I took an AI class from Niels Nielsen, like the godfather of AI, right? Okay, like that AI, even 10 years ago AI, it's just moving so quickly and it's now super affordable. >> Well, I really want to thank you guys for coming up and sharing that knowledge and insight, congratulations on the product and open APIs. Love open API's open source with some new revolution. Danielle and Robin. Thank you so much. >> Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations. Thank you everyone for coming. (crowd applauding) (people whooping) Okay, back to you in the studio at Cloud City.

(gentle music) >> Okay, thank you Adam. Thank you everyone for joining us on the main stage here, folks watching, appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante co-hosts of theCube. We're here in the main stage to talk to the two main players of Totogi, Danielle Royston, CEO as of today, the big news. Congratulations. >> Danielle: Yeah. Thank you. >> And Robin Langdon the CTO, Totogi. >> Robin: Thanks. So big news, CEO news today and $100 million investment. Every wants to know where's all the action? Why is this so popular right now? (Danielle chuckles) What's going on? Give us the quick update. >> Yeah, I met the Totogi guys and they have this great product I was really excited about. They're focused purely on telco software and bringing, coupling that with the Public Cloud, which is everything that I talk about, what I've been about for so long. And I really wanted to give them enough funding so they could focus on building great products. A lot of times, telcos, startups, you know they try to get a quick win. They kind of chase the big guys and I really wanted to make sure they were focused on building a great product. #2, I really wanted to show the industry, they had the funding they needed to be a real player. This wasn't like $5 million or a couple million dollars, so that was really important. And then #3, I want to make sure that we could hire great talent and you need money for compensation. And so $100 million it is. >> $100 million is a lot of fresh fat financing as they say. I got to ask you, what's different? Because I've been researching on the refactoring aspect of with the Cloud, obviously public cloud with AWS, a big deal. What's different about the charging aspect of this? >> Yeah I mean, charging hasn't been exciting, maybe ever. I mean, it's kind of like this really sort of sleepy area, but I think what the Totogi guys are doing is they're really coupling the idea of charging and network data to bring hyper-personalization to subscribers. And I think that's where it changes from being a charging engine to become an engagement engine. Telcos know more about us than Google, which is kind of crazy to think about it. They know when we wake up, they know what apps we use. If we call or text, if we game or stream and it's time to start using that data to drive a better experience to us. And I think to Totogi is enabling that. I'm super excited to do that. >> So Robin, I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. I mean, maybe we get into the plumbing and I don't want to go too deep in it, but I think it's important because we've seen this movie before where people take their on-prem stacks, they wrap it in containers and they shove it into the Public Cloud and they say, "Hey, we're cloud too." If reading a press release, you guys are taking advantage of things like Amazon Nitro of course, but also Graviton and Graviton2 and eventually 3, which is the underlying capabilities, give you a cloud native advantage. Can you explain that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we wanted to build this in the Cloud using all of those great cloud innovations. So Graviton2, DynamoDB and using their infrastructure, just allowing us to be able to scale out. These all available to us to use and essentially free for us to use. And it's great, so as you say, we're not shoehorning something in that's decade's old technology, wrapping it in some kind of container and pushing it in. Which is just then, you just can't use any of those great innovations. >> And you've selected DynamoDB as the database. Okay, that's fine. We don't have to get so much into why, but maybe you could explain the advantage because I saw some benchmark numbers which were, like an order of magnitude greater than the competition, like share with us, why? How you were able to get there? And maybe share those numbers. >> Yeah, no, we do. So we just launched our benchmark. So, a million transactions per second. So we just blew away everyone else out there. And that's really because we could take advantage of all that great AWS technology in there and the database side we're using DynamoDB, where we had a huge debate about using what kind of database to go and use? There's a lot of people out there probably get very religious about the kind of database technology that you should be using. And whether it should it be SQL in-memory object database type technology, but really a single table design, gives you that true scalability. You can just horizontally scale that easily, across the whole planet. >> You know, Danielle. Again, I said that we've seen this movie before. There are a lot of parallels in telco with the enterprise. And if you look at enterprise SAS pricing, a lot of it is very static, kind of lock you in, per seat pricing, kind of an old model. And you're seeing a lot of the modern SAS companies who are emerging with a consumption pricing models. How are you guys thinking about pricing? >> Yeah, I don't know of any other company in telco that's starting to price by usage. And that is a very standard offering with the cloud providers, right? Google we know, Amazon, all those guys have a price by the API, price by the transaction. So we're really excited to offer that to telcos. They've been asking for it for awhile, right? Pay for what you need, when you need it, by the use. And so we're really excited to offer that, but I think what's really cool is the idea of a free tier, right? And so I think it's smaller telcos have a trade-off to make, whether, am I going to buy the best technology and pay through the nose and maybe at an unaffordable level, or do I compromise and buy something more affordable, but not as great. And what's so great about Totogi, it's the same product just priced for what you need. And so I think a CSP it'll, below 250,000 subscribers should be able to use the Totogi absolutely for free. And that is, and it's the same product that the big guy would get. So it's not a junior version or scaled back. And so I think that's really exciting. I think we're the only ones that do it. So here we go. >> Love the freemium model. So Robin, maybe you could explain why that's so much, so important in the charging space, because you've got a lot of different options that you want to configure for the consumer. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about sort of how the old world does that, the old guard and how long it takes and how you're approaching this. >> Yeah so it's, I mean traditionally, charging design, there's as you say, there's lots of different pricing leavers you want to be able to move and change to charge different people. And these systems, even if they say they're configurable, if they normally turn into an IT project where it takes weeks, months, even years to build out the system, you know, marketing can't just go in there and configure the dials and push out your new plans and tariffs. They have to go and create a requirement specification. They hand it down to IT. Those guys go and create a big change project. And by the time they're finished, the market's moved on. They're on to their next plan, their next tariff to go and build. So we wanted to create something that was truly configurable from a marketing standpoint. You know, user-friendly, they can go in there, configure it and be live in minutes, not even days or weeks. >> No, IT necessary. >> Robin: No IT necessary. >> So you know, I've been thinking about, John and I talk about this all the time, It's that there's a data play here. And what I think you're doing is actually building a data product. I think there's a new metric emerging in the industry, which is how long does it take me to go from idea to monetization with a data product. And that's what this is. This is a data product >> Yeah. >> for your customers. >> Absolutely, what Robin was talking about is totally the way the industry works. It's weeks before you have an idea and get it out to the market. And like Robin was mentioning, the market's changed by the time you get it out there, the data's stale. And so we researched every single plan in the world from every single CSP. There is about 30,000 plans in the world, right? The bigger you are, the more plans you have. On average, a tier one telco has 40 to 50 plans. And so how many offers, I mean think about, that's how many phones to buy, plans to buy. And so we're like, let's get some insight on the plans. Let's drive it into a standardization, right? Let's make them, which ones work, which ones don't. And that's, I think you're right. I think it's a data play and putting the power back into the marketer's hands and not with IT. >> So there's a lot of data on-prem. Explain why I can't do this with my on-prem data. >> Oh, well today that, I mean, sorry if you want to jump in. Feel free to jump in, right. But today, the products are designed in a way where they're, perpetually licensed, by the subscriber, rigid systems, not API based. I mean, there might be an API, but you got to pay through the nose to use it or you got to use the provider's people to code against it. They're inflexible. They were written when voice was the primary revenue driver, not data, right? And so they've been shoehorned, right? Like Robin was saying, shoehorned to be able to move into the world that we are now. I mean, when the iPhone came about that introduced apps and data went through the roof and the systems were written for voice, not written for data. >> And that's a good point, if you think about the telco industry, it seems like it could be a glacier that just needs to just break and just like, just get modern because we all have phones. We have apps. We can delete them. And the billing plans, like either nonexistent or it has to be all free. >> Well I mean, I'll ask you. Do you know what your billing plan is? Do you know how much data you use on a monthly basis? No one knows. >> I have no clue. >> A lot. >> No one. And so what you do is you buy unlimited. >> Dave: Right. >> You overpay. And so what we're seeing in the plans is that if you actually knew how much you used, you would be able to maybe pay less, which I remember the telcos are not excited to hear that message, but it's a win for the subscriber. And if you could >> I mean it's only >> accurately predict that. >> get lower and lower. I having a conversation last night at dinner with industry analysts, we're talking about a vehicle e-commerce, commerce in your car as you're driving. You can get that kind of with a 5G. The trend is transactions everywhere, ad-hoc, ephemeral... >> Yeah. >> The new apps are going to demand this kind of subscriber billing. >> Yeah >> Do people get this? Are you guys the only ones kind of like on this? >> No I think people have been talking about it for years. I think there's vendors out there that have been trying to offer this idea of like, build your own plan and all that other stuff but I think it's more than just minutes, text and data. It's starting to really understand what subscribers are using, right? Are you a football fan? Are you a golf fan? Are you a shopper? Are you a concert goer? And couple that with how you use your phone and putting out offers that are really exciting to subscribers so that we love our telco. Like we should be loving our telco. And I don't... I don't know that people talk >> They saved us >> about loving their telco. >> from the pandemic >> They saved us during the pandemic. The internet didn't crash, we got our zoom meetings. We got everything going on. What's the technical issue on solving these problems? Is it just legacy? Is it just mindset? Robin, what's your take on that? >> I'll keep talking as long as Robin will let me. (Daniel laughing) >> So the big technical issues, you're trying to build in this flexibility so that you can have, we don't know what people are going to configure in the future. It's minutes and text messages are given away for free. They're unlimited. Data is where it's at, about charging for apps and about using all that data in the network the telcos have, which is extremely valuable and there's a wealth of information in there that can be used to be monetized and push that out. And they need a charging system on top that can manage that and we have the flexibility that you don't have to go off and then start creating programs and IT projects that are going to do that. >> Well it's funny Danielle, you say that the telcos might not like that, right? 'Cause you might pay less. But in fact, that is the kind of on-prem mindset because when you have a fixed resource, you say, okay, don't use too much because we have to buy more. Or you overbuy to your point. The cloud mindset is, I'll try it. I'll try some more, I'll try some more. I'm aligning it with business value. Oh, I'm making money. Oh, great. I'm going to keep buying more. And it's very clear. It's transparent where the business value is. So my question is when you think about your charging engine and all this data conversation, is there more than just a charging engine in this platform? >> Well, I think just going back to what Robin was talking about. I think what Totogi is doing differently is by building it on the Public Cloud gives you virtually unlimited resources, right? In a couple of different directions, certainly hardware and capacity and scalability and all those other things, right? But also as Amazon is putting out more and more product, when you build it in this new way, you can take advantage of these new services very, very easily. And that is a different mindset. It's a different way to deploy applications. And I think that's what makes Totogi really different. You couldn't build Totogi on-premise because you need the infinite scalability. You need the machine learning, you need the AI of Amazon, which they have been investing in for decades, if they now charge you by the API call. And you get to use it like you were saying. Just give it a try, don't like it, stop. And it's just a completely different way of thinking, yeah. >> If I have to ask you a question about the Public Cloud, because the theme here in Cloud City is the Public Cloud is driving innovation, which is also includes disruption. And the new brands are coming in, old brands are either reinventing themselves or falling away. What is the Public Cloud truly enabling? Is it the scale? Is it the data? Is it the refactoring capability? What is the real driver of the Public Cloud innovation? >> I think the insight that CSPs are going to have is what Jamie Dimon had in banking. Like I think he was pretty famously saying, "I'm never going to use the Public Cloud. Our data is too precious, you know, regulations and all that stuff." But I think the insight they're going to have, and I hopefully, I do a keynote and I mentioned this, which is feature velocity. The ability to put out features in a day or two. Our feature velocity in telco is months. Months, months. >> Seriously? >> Yeah, sometimes years. It's just so slow between big iterations of new capability and to be able to put out new features in minutes or days and be able to outmaneuver your competition is unheard of. So the CSPs that starts to get this, it's going to be a real big get, and then they're going to start to.. (Danielle makes swishing sound) >> We just interviewed (Dave speaking indistinctly) a venture capitalist, Dave and I last month. And he's a big investor in Snowflake, on the big deals. He said that the new strategy that's working is you go to be agile with feature acceleration. We just talked about this at lunch and you get data. And you can dismantle the bad features quickly and double down >> Yup. >> on the winners. >> Ones that are working. So what used to be feature creep now is a benefit if you play it right? >> Danielle: It's feature experimentation. >> That's essentially what you- >> It's experimentation, right? And you're like, that one worked, this one didn't, kill that one, double down on this one, go faster and faster and so feature experimentation, which you can't do in telco, because every time we ask for a feature from your current vendor, it's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. So you don't experiment. And so yeah- >> You can make features disposable. >> Correct. And I think that we just discovered that on this stage just now. (group chuckling) >> Hey look at this. Digital revolution, DR. Telco DR. >> Yeah. >> Great to have you guys. >> This is super awesome. Thanks so much. >> You guys are amazing. Congratulations. And we're looking forward to the more innovation stories again, get out there, get the momentum. Great stuff. >> Danielle: It's going to be great. >> And awesome. >> Feature experimentation. >> Yeah. >> Hashtag. >> And Dave and I are going to head back over to our Cube set here, here on the main stage. We'll toss it back to the Adam in the studio. Adam, back to you and take it from here.

>>Back cubes back on day three here in cloud city, global world Congress. This is where all the action is. And this is the cube set. I'm John. We're here with Dr., who is the CEO of telco VR, as well as the CEO of Tacoma. Great to see you again. Hey, Hey, how are you guys? Good, great time. Great boat last night. Good industry executives. A lot of intimate high player players here in the industry, even though not a lot of attendance, but the right people are here and events are back. >>Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, you know, MWC was the first event to cancel with COVID in, uh, February of 20 end of February, 2020. So first big event to come back. It's such a nice symmetry. Um, yeah, typically you have big delegations, hundreds of people from the big groups coming to the show, we're seeing the executives are coming smaller delegations, but they're all in the booth and that we're having great conversations and it's awesome. >>Yeah. And the thing I will say is that the cubes back to we'd like them to be fee in here in the action. He says, one of the things that's happened with this hybrid events is that people are watching. And so there's a virtual space and the physical space and cloud city has built out paradise. It's beautiful and spectacular behind this. Look, you look around for the people who can't see, it's really made for the combination of onsite and virtual experience, the content, the people Bon Jovi last night, just, it's just the top of mobile world Congress. And it's translating to the industry. This has been amazing. So congratulations. Well, >>I think I got to say you have a lot to say as we all know. Yeah. But I think it was easy for the big guys. That's why we love you in the queue, but I think it was easy for the big guys to tap out and say, Hey, we can save a bunch more money. We don't really have much to talk about. Right. We're going to talk about again, let's talk about 5g revolution. Whereas, whereas the narrative here is all about the future and it's not about the future of blah, blah, blah. It's about the future. You know, this is the journey that we're taking and here's where it starting and with leaving the boat. >>Yeah. And I think what's really interesting about cloud city is the fact that we've brought these different players together that are all focused, as you said, on the, on the future. And I'm starting to see these connections where they're collaborating right vendors that didn't know each other probably would never have partnered before. Totally different areas. I'm hearing the conversation in the booth about like, Hey, I talked to Pete when security or I went and talked to, you know, LMX and we're putting deals together because we're complimentary and it's amazing. >>And integration partnership heard that from Google yesterday on our, our news exclusive break in there, they see integration. And they're talking about Android with Android, for mobile. They're seeing a whole new software paradigm coming into telephones it's partnership ecosystem and open. These are new kind of dynamics >>For you guys. When you say integration and open, I think those things are really paired and they're important. A lot of times telco people will hear integration, I'll think customization, right? Coding it up and customizing it so that they talk to each other. But I think the open part of that is really important where we're connecting via API APIs. And I think that's bringing in the hyperscalers, that's what they do. Right? They provide these systems and the software, it's all API base and you can use it very quickly and you can unravel it if you need to. It's feature velocity that we talked about a couple of days and automation >>Is the underpinning. I mean, that's really the theme, right? It's not like a one-off hardcore custom integration. That's gonna be, I have >>To upgrade every 18 months or whatever it is. Yeah. It's, it's alive. Yeah. >>How about Musk yesterday? I mean, he's always a crowd pleaser. First of all, my kids love him. He's crazy. >>I mean, he is amazing. >>He's he's, he's a builder. He takes no prisoners. He's just, you know what? My goal was not to go bankrupt. That's what he said a couple of years ago, which >>Was brilliant because everybody's gone bankrupt in that business. And he's just, you know, and he's just like, look it, we're here to >>Just want to chip away at it. And we're just going to keep striving, not making up excuses. He takes the failures, he takes the face plant. He gets back up and he keeps going. He's focused on buildings, >>Some one thing, right? He's not focused on everything. He's focused on getting to Mars. And I think that's what I like to compare myself to Elon Musk, right? Not that I'm building rockets or getting to Mars, but that the hard problem that I'm solving is getting telco to the public cloud. And that's going to take a decade. It might've been accelerated because of COVID, it might've taken 20 years and now it might take 10, but you look at what he does and that guy, he has, he has haters on Twitter there. Pew, pew always like throwing their bars, but he's like, I got, I got my rocket company. I got my, you know, communication and space company. We're going to need the bore holes, the boring company. I need batteries. I got my Tesla company. And so this guy focuses. He's got >>Some haters, but he's got a lot more lovers on his other side because people might not know this, but he fires entire PR department because he's like, I don't need PR. I'm just going to go do my own, his own PR actually the crypto, stuff's always fun. Goats, coins, >>Always a laugh. >>And it's just more of like playing watch this. >>I said, I live was interesting thing he did, but I think he illustrates the point of a new generation. And I think my young kids, not young, they're in their twenties. Now they look at him and they say, that's aspirational because he's building and he's not, he's focused on that one thing. And again, the growth that you mentioned telco to the cloud, thinking back to that, I want to ask you this growth question. It used to be like, okay, growth was there, people expand itself? Howard's networks were networks. Now it seems like the growth of telco for telco is going into what's the edge and all the open ranch stuff, which means that we need more infrastructure. Yeah. We need more stuff. There's more and more needed and there's grow. Find them. >>What's your, what's your, I think we need more software. Right. Software eats the world. Right. And it's, I mean, there was a lot of hardware to Trump in telco and it's just gonna keep eating it. Um, and that's just gonna accelerate. I think that's where tacos needs to start to build that muscle. They don't have great software capability. They don't have public cloud building capability. And so that's a big upskilling. That's a new hiring. And I think it's a, it's an executive conversation. It's not just an it thing or just a marketing thing. I got to chime >>In here for a second because there are a lot of parallels with how the data center transition has occurred. And what's happening here. We talk about all the time. It was a mainframe, et cetera. There are parallels. Yeah. And what happened when the data center went to software defined a whole bunch of hardware was allocated to run all the software defined stuff. It wasn't built for that. But the cloud, what you guys are doing with Togi and taken advantage of AWS is nitro and graviton. That's built to two V software defined. Correct. And so the telcos are going to go through the same thing. If they just virtualized, they're going to say, oh wow, we're wasting 30% of our power, our compute power on just supporting all this software defined stuff, because it wasn't built for that. But the cloud is built for that. And that is going to be a huge >>Difference. And I keep trying to make this distinction. And I think people in telcos still don't get this about the public cloud. They think of it as a place. It's a place to run a workload. And that tells me, they think of it as infrastructure. I think of it as servers still like, well, I'm going to run it in my closet. Or AWS has closet. I'm like, I was just having a conversation about this with a senior person from DSMA. I'm like, it's actually about the software. That's there. It's about the databases they're building and the analytics and the AI and ML that they let you buy by the minutes by the API call. And that is my, like, you need to think about that. Cause it's mindblowing, it's a totally different way. And you're >>Totally right. And just spend it again, give you props on this. I've had many one on with Andy gesture the past seven years, not for exclusives, but over the years it's been consistent. Each platform lifting and shift. Wasn't the end game. Okay. Replatforming in the cloud. Certainly a great advantage, a great starting point. It was the refactoring. And that's why you see Amazon web services. For instance, keep adding more services because that's the model. They keep offering more goodness so that the businesses could refactor, not just replatform. Yeah. And that's what you're getting. I think with the AI and machine learning where you start getting into these new use cases, but why couldn't do that before? Right? Right. This is going to be a huge >>Game changer. Forest Brazil, right? A great guy. A cloud guru wrote a great blog called a lift and shift is a ticking time bomb. And it's a great start to get your stuff over there. It forces your team to start to interact with like an AWS or GCP in a real way. Like now they, they gotta use it. You take it away. And I'm like, but once you move it, you got to read factor. You got to rewrite. And then that's why it's a ticking time bomb. You got to get, move it over and get you're going >>To rush him. Dr. Digital revolution of you are one. You got it here, tells the VR. And this has been a great experience for the cube. As we get back to business with real life events and virtual, the folks who couldn't make it here, Barcelona is still a great city, obviously a great place to come and events. We'll be back. There'll be hybrid. There'll be different. Certainly the queue we'll wait doubling down, but, but we've got a great video. I want to share with the group, the Barcelona and cloud city. This is a montage of what it's like here and a little experiential video. So they get away and run that video. >>Hi, I'm Katie Goldfinch here in Barcelona for an action packed day two at telco DER's cloud setting this morning, the focus was firmly on Dr. And her MWC keynote, which told telco exactly in no uncertain terms that now is the time to act on embracing public clouds back in cloud city content ruled the day with both the cube and cloud city life stages, hosting public cloud, thought-leaders covering a wide range of topics to educate and inspire attendees and in the beautiful space of cloud city, the excitement grew throughout the day. As we streamed MW cities, exclusive keynotes from Elon Musk and preparations got underway for tonight. Star performer, Jon Bon Jovi. Wow. What an amazing day from groundbreaking keynotes into space and back to a star studded performance. Don't forget. You can catch up on anything you missed and join us for the rest of the week@cloudcitydottelcor.com or following hashtag cloud Ceci. >>Yeah, that was a great look at what's going on here in cloud city. This next video, Dr. You're going to love this. Your keynote highlights and some Bon Jovi highlights, which by the way, was the most epic thing people were packed. It was excited. It was packed. It had the security flicking, peoples counting. All the people, people are standing back. All the people from their booths are all coming in to watch. He was pumped. Let's take a look at this awesome highlight video from yesterday isolation. >>Dave, that was a highlight reel yesterday. Um, VR has got some action on stage, great messaging, um, revolution, digital revolution. >>You know your comment about how you think like Elon Musk, that's an inspiration from it. I mean, what a lot of people don't know is when you look at autonomous vehicles, remember you're driving down Palo Alto, you see one of those LIDAR things he's doing away with lidars too expensive. It's $7,000. He's taken it with cheap cameras and software down to a couple hundred bucks per vehicle. That's the way he thinks. And you're doing the same thing to telco. >>I am, I am. I'm trying to change ELCA, right? I mean, he's changing the world. He might be one of the most important humans on earth right now. I don't think I'm exactly that level, but I'm trying to become a really important person to taco. We had this great message. I think it's going to help tacos get better businesses. And I think it's a great idea. >>The folks out there watching, what is that big change you're going to drive down this cloud city street, main street of cloud city and just all about cloud. Because public clouds here, it's going to become hybrid dynamics, operating models, and changing. What is the key message that you'd like to send me? >>I think all of the software in telco needs to be written. And that's how many millions of lines of code is that. And it's going to shrunk down and put out on the public cloud and rewritten using the software Legos of the public cloud. That is a big undertaking. No, one's working on it. I'm working on it. I'm doing it. >>Let's go do it. Let's do it. If you look out a couple of years, what would be a successful? What does checkmate look like in this >>I'm winning hashtag. I mean, I think it takes, again, it takes singular focus like Elon Musk on Mars. So when these to singularly focused on getting to the public cloud and you can't sit there and protect your old business models, your, you know, uh, CR revenue, if you're Amdocs, right? Give that up. When they start to give up their CR revenue to focus on public cloud, then they'll be okay. There's there's a worthy adversary out there really. >>I mean the late clay Christianson had all the same things. Innovator's dilemma. You just get stuck here. What do you do? You kill your own debris. You eat your own to bring in the new, I mean, all these things are going on and this is, this is a huge test. >>Have to be willing to burn some boats. >>I think it's transparency, simplicity, and the consumer saying, Hey, this is a great experience. That's the thing. Yeah. Right. And that's what we're going to see. Consumers >>Love their telco. I can't wait for that. I want to love my Netflix. Yes, exactly. >>We'd love you because you've got a bold vision. You putting it out there and you're driving it. You're walking the talk. Congratulations. And again, cloud cities, a home run. Great success. Thanks for >>Having me. It's always super fun. >>Okay. Cubes coverage here. And remember we're here getting all the action and it's all going to go online after the synchronous consumption. But right now it's all about mobile world Congress and cloud city. This is the action. And of course, Adam in cloud city studio was waiting for us and you're going to take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it, we're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have Amol Phadke who's the Managing Director, Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave, so we want to bring him in and get commentary while we end out day two. Obviously, the story here is CLOUD CITY. We are in the CLOUD CITY. Amol, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. I'm very excited to be here, virtually at MWC 21. >> Oh we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert and you're the only thing standing between Bon Jovi and all the great stuff so. >> A lot of people watching. >> Thanks for coming on. Seriously you guys got some big news first Ericsson partners with you guys on 5G, platform deal with anthesis as well as open O-ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge testament to the industry. Obviously Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you're no stranger to large scale. What's the news? Tell us why this Ericsson news is so important. Let's start with the Ericsson announcement. >> Sure, so, John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Ericsson for the last few months, the partnership, the reason we feel this is very important to the industry is we are actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not done in isolation. You in fact saw in the press release that we have already launched something together with Telecom Italia in Italy. Because you will see that also in the press. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSPs monetize 5G and Edge, which is a real team at the moment using Google Clouds solutions like the Edge computing platform and Anthos and Ericsson's cutting Edge 5G components, 5G solutions. And if we can onboard this together at the CSPs, such as Telecom Italia, that creates massive time to market efficiency. So that's point 1. Speed and agility is key John. But then point 2, it also unlocks a lot of Edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare and so on. Which we are already starting to launch together with Ericsson. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuous wave of Cloud Native innovation that you just highlighted, John. We are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really try and create this Cloud Native Application Suite for 5G over time. >> Talk about the innovations around Cloud, because the message we're hearing this year at Mobile World Congress is that the public cloud is driving the innovation and you know, I can be a little bit over the top and say, so the Telcos are slow, they're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there, they're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept, Cloud Native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that, encapsulate that older technology and integrate it in. So this is not a rip and replace, someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the Telco's. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >> Spot on, John, spot on. We, we believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is, when you talk about that containerization and write once and deploy everywhere type architecture, that we are trying to do, that's where the Cloud Native be really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5G solutions with the operators at Telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to go create that again and again for every deployment. As long as you have Anthos and Ericsson working, you should be able to have the same experience everywhere. >> Yeah, John and I talk all the time in theCUBE about how developers are really going to drive the Edge. You're clearly doing that with your Distributor Cloud, building out a Telco Cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving and a lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about Edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >> Sure, so I think David first of all, it's a fantastic segue into how we are looking at analytics at the Edge, right? So we, we have realized that (connection disruption) is a very, very data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned, is definitely something that we can offload to the Edge? Why is that so important? In the pandemic era think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously, needing zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products and manufacturing. That's a very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the Edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Ericsson and a Google Cloud and Telecom Italia type of carrier, gives you that Edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to a factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run the AI influencing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >> Great, thank you for that and now the other piece of the announcement of course is the open, Open RAN. We've been talking about that all week. And you know, you well remember when Cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. And of course, now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the Telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually are pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component? Maybe first talk about the Open RAN piece, why that's important and how security fits? >> Sure, so first of all, Open RAN is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time. In the radio layer, we believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and desegregating that radio layer. And why is that so important? 80% of the operators spent globally is on radio across the entire infrastructure, 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that and if you created synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware, standard purpose software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in PCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and becomes a really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution, that's about to get larger with 5G and the capillarity that 5G needs. You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware, software with open interfaces, is an extremely important cost dimension too. And on the revenue side, the things is that, the reason we got so excited with Open RAN was, you can now run a lot of API's on the radio net itself. That then suddenly brings a whole developer community on the radio layer. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing yours and mine experiences at a device level, from the cell tower. And so that really is what is driving us towards this Open RAN type announcement. >> John: Amol, we've only got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on Open Source and the innovation. Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of TelcoDr. She's a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone, 14 years ago was launched, okay. And you think about Open, and you mentioned proprietary with the 5G, and having O-RAN be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs, increase the surface area of infrastructure. Everyone wins, 'cause everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry, and Open Source is driving that. Is Android the playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at Telco? >> Absolutely John and the parallel analogy that you raised is spot on. We believe in the Telco world Anthos multi-cloud as a unifying software development layer and the app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation. Whether it's a radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the IT side of house. Same software running everywhere. That really allows you that whole CICD SRE type development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for start, that would be for systems to come on. >> John: That's great stuff. And I was, just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at Mobile World Congress. Amol, thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news with Google. Congratulations on the Ericsson Anthos platform deal as well as the Open Ran Alliance. Congratulations, good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on theCUBE featured segments. So, watch that interview. >> Thank you John. Glad to be here. >> Thanks Amol. Managing Director, Telecom Industry Solutions at Google, obviously player, he's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology to get the chops Dave, and we're going to now, bring on Danielle Royston, she's here, I want to bring her up on the stage. Bon Jovi's about to go on, behind us, Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in CLOUD CITY. Dave, Bon Jovi is right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of TelcoDR, Danielle Royston, great to see you. She's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you have a mic. Great to see you. >> Oh, it's great to be here, awesome. >> We are going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote but thanks for coming by and closing, swinging by. >> I know we're closing down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day today at MWC and in CLOUD CITY. >> And Bon Jovi by the way. >> Day two, I mean really starting to get packed. >> And I mean, everyone's coming in, the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening. >> A lot of buzz about CLOUD CITY out there in the hallway. >> Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited >> Awesome. >> with how it's going, so yeah. >> Well, this is awesome, while we got you here, we want to put you to work being theCUBE analyst for this segment. You just heard Google. We broke them in for a breaking news segment. Obviously, so hard news Ericsson partnership. We're in the, actually former Ericsson booth. They're not even here, it's now the TelcoDR booth. But that's and then Open RAN again, Open Source. You got 5G, you got Open Source all happening. What's your take on this, as you're seeing this? >> Yeah, I think, you know, there's two big, and I talked about in my keynote this morning, there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it--MWC 21 I certainly wanted to make it about the Public Cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is Open RAN, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, we saw these two. >> I loved your keynote, we were here live Chloe was here filling in for Dave while Dave was going to do some research and getting some breaking stories. But you are on stage and, and we were talking, Chloe's like, these there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, that the money's in the middle of the table and it's changing hands. If people don't watch it. And then you onstage said there's trillions of dollars. This is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You've got operators and builders trying to figure out, it feels like Dev Ops is coming in here. >> Yeah. >> I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's the, what do you? >> Yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the Public Cloud, to double your ARPU without massive CapEx expenditure. And I think the CSPs has always viewed to get the increase in ARPU, I got to build out the network, I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our ARPU, why not? We should do that absolutely. >> You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave. Got to ride the wave or become driftwood, as John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the Telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the Edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the Edge and that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. But, obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have, they're going to have to embrace Cloud Native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. >> Well, I think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to. Now, historically they haven't had this opportunity. Historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented, it's available. There's developers out there that know it. And so I think that's the big opportunity. And this might be the, the big use case that they've been looking for with 5G and looking forward to 6G. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSPs to do that. >> I think that's an important point because you've got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay, those are pretty safe bets, right? Those guys are going to be around. >> You think, I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. And like, are you guys nuts? They're safe bets. >> Safe bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you've got to move fast. >> Yeah. >> That's the other piece of it. >> Yeah. >> You got to change your business model. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Well, you got to be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? Does Snowflake trust Amazon? It sure did to get them where they are, but now they're looking at other options. >> That is a great example, John. It really is, because there's a company that can move fast, but the same time they compete, but the same time they add incremental value. >> And so here you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering, Telcos aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new. Well containers do, will help them manage that operational legacy, but culturally, if they don't move, they're going to have an asset that'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building CapEx and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value's shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle, love to get your thoughts on this, because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, >> Yeah. >> Then you can, don't have to try to extract the rents out of the CapEx or, what's your thought, I mean. >> Yeah, I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in Telco, right. There, I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right? Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their investment and for your own benefit and start to focus, and we heard Amol talking about it, starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us, right, yeah. >> Well, you've talking about that many times that you exhibit, you're right. If the conversation has been, has to go beyond, okay, we're just connectivity. It's got to be going to be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges, ah great. >> Yeah. >> Tick that box. Right, it's those value added services that you're talking about. And it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in, and creativity in the industry. It's just a blank piece of paper. >> Well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right? We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving up ads and you're like, how did it? >> Facebook does? >> Right, Facebook. But you know who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother even, your Telco. >> Yeah. >> You take your phone with you everywhere, right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide a really great experience. >> And by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Totogi and the investment hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing and the there's a good, there's a whole new team, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I want to hold that, we're going to meet tomorrow. I want to, I want to, leave that here. >> Stay in the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That, it's that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook now trillion dollar valuations. >> Yeah. >> It's all about the data and the Telco's have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >> I think there's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise, siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them, and you certainly do it without, and we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight , it's useless, right? And so to Totogi, we announced the launch of Totogi, I'll get a little to Totogi plug in there, right. Totogi is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve it would have been solved already. But I think the key is leveraging the Public Cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provide to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue, right. And you know, we've heard some keynotes from GSMA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, Telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep, it's not fair. That's life, right? >> Yeah. >> Stop complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they're happy to give you more money. >> Yeah, and I think that's the message about the assets too. But one thing I will say, this Mobile World Congress, is that we've been having a lot of fun here in CLOUD CITY. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote. You have a spring to your step. CLOUD CITY is beautiful, spectacular here. >> Yeah. >> Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip so far. >> Well number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered in and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a bunch. You know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and that was really fun. But yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes the attendance is reduced. You know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups. And yeah the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right? The senior leadership teams are in the booth. We're having meetings, we're having amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the Public Cloud. >> Yeah, the pandemic helped. >> I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off. I think I'm right in the right moment. It's Awesome. >> Do you think that, do you think that they'll think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line, struggled and then winners. >> Yeah. >> Big time tale wind, booming. Obviously the Zooms of the world. Telco's did well. They were up and running, business was good. You think they might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >> Yeah, I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation. We're digital Telco, we're digitally enabled. And I think the pandemic really tested this, right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM? Or do you need to go to a store, in person, to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of Telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver sims, and all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot. >> Agile. >> Right, agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big wake up call. >> Telemedicine booming. >> So If you were in a digital business during the pandemic. In general, you're out of business, maybe unless you were a Telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh-oh, if we don't move. >> I mean, I am not kidding right. As an ex-CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, >> Facts. >> Right, in some country, once a month on Tuesday between 10 and 2. And I'm like, how are you doing business, like that? That's like the dark ages. >> Yeah, this is where the crypto guys got it right, with know your customer. >> Yeah, right. >> 'Cause they have the data. >> Well, they had to, they had to. >> Yeah. >> There's a lot of things that's going wrong on crypto, we don't want to, we could do a whole show on that. But Danielle great to have you drop by, obviously Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy, Patriot's fan. >> Yeah. >> Dave, we love him. >> Fantastic. >> Well, I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi, right? We knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. That, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging like the way things have been done in Telco. Kind of just shattering the glass ceiling in lots of different ways, right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me, right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl, oh, so. >> Well we are punk rock. They're rock and roll. >> Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten The Clash, right. Black Flag, right. I'm a little bit older than you. >> Bon Jovi's good. >> Right, we'll go with Bon Jovi. >> We like both of them. >> Accessible, right. >> Once's more conservative rock and roll still edgy. >> Yeah, so really excited to get them here. I've met him before. And so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk, so yeah. >> Yeah, he's going to be inspiration he'll talk space, SpaceX, >> Oh yeah. >> And possibly Starlink. >> Talking about the edge. >> Starlink, right. >> Starlink. >> I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites and I think that's really interesting for rural. For rural right in Telco, right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower, I think. I mean, that's an interesting idea right there, yeah. >> It's exciting, he's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming in and saying why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, A or B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. >> Yeah. >> I think eventually the generation shifts in time. >> It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it, yeah. >> Great, great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >> Awesome team. >> I'm excited to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership is, so thank you so much, yeah. >> TheCUBE, theCUBE's rocking inside the CLOUD CITY. The streets of the CLOUD CITY are hustling and booming. >> Packed. >> Packed in here. All stuff, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Yep, thanks so much. >> Bon Jovi is here, we got a shot of Bon Jovi. Do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? >> Yeah, there it is. >> There it is, yeah. >> Okay, he's about to come on stage and we're going to take a break here. We're going to take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

>>Hello everyone. Thank you, add appreciating the studio. We're here at the cube here in cloud city telco DRS Cloud city. I'm Jeffrey Day Volonte. We're here for the next three days. Wall to wall live coverage. It's a physical event with a virtual program. It's hybrid. We're here with Daniel Royston, the Ceo of telco D. R. And the acting Ceo Toby, which is announced today. Great >>to see you. It's awesome to see you guys. >>Awesome to see how you doing, how you >>Feeling? I'm feeling congratulations. Right. 101 days ago, I didn't even think this doesn't exist. Right. And we got in contact with you guys and we said we knew there was always going to be a big virtual component and we invited you guys and here we are together. It's insane. >>Well we did the preview videos, but we're kind of walking through and document in the early stages. It all came together beautifully spectacular For the folks watching behind us is the most spectacular build out clouds. It's an ecosystem open concept. It feels like the Apple store meets paradise. Of course. We got the cube here in the set and we got the studio with all the command and control of adam there. So I gotta ask you with the connected keynotes going on right now. The connected world. Yeah. It's connected. We all know that everyone knows that what's, what's different now real quick before we get into the program, what's going on? >>Yeah. I think a big part of my messages and advocating it's more than just the network, Right? And I think telcos forever have relied on. That's all it is. That's what it's about. And I'm like, nope, you guys got to start focusing on your subscribers, right? And so the over the top players keep coming in and siphoning away their revenue and it's time for them to start focusing on us, right and making experience great. And I think that's what this is all about. >>So we're gonna get the news but I want to toss it to Katie. The roving reporter is going to give it a detail on how it all came together. So Katie take it away. >>Mhm We're here in Barcelona and so excited to be back in this beautiful city over at the convention center. The team is working hard putting the finishing touches to tell Cody are amazing cloud city booth at MwC Barcelona 2021. I'm sure you know the story of how this all came together as one of the biggest vendors Erickson pulled out of M. W. C. With just over 100 days until the start of the event. When this happened last year, it kicked off a tidal wave of departures and MwC was called off this year. We all wondered if MWC was going to be cancelled again and that's when Daniel Royston Ceo of Telco D. R. And Tito G swooped in and took over the booth all 6000 square meters of it. The plan turn the booth into cloud city, the epicenter of public cloud innovation at MWC crews have been working around the clock. Over 100 and 50 people have been on this construction site for over three weeks with covid testing every day to prevent outbreaks during the build and in 100 days, it's become just that Cloud city has over 30 vendors presenting over 70 demos with 24 private meeting areas. Cloud City Live is a virtual showcase and live broadcast studio featuring 50 guests from cloud Thought leaders around the world. They have telepresence robots for a more personalized experience and the Cloud city quest game with a chance to win more than $100,000 to gain access to live streams of our nightly concerts with rosario flores and rock legend Jon bon Jovi. And don't forget to visit cloud city dot telco D R dot com to join in on the fun Daniel Royston and Nacho Gomez, founder and Ceo of one of the key vendors in the construction of the booth gave us a behind the scenes tour of the booth. >>Nacho. We did it. Yeah, we did. It can't even touch because of Covid. Yeah, but look what we did. But right, 100 days ago I called and I said I'm taking over the Ericsson booth. What did you think? I know you were crazy but just a little bit crazy, realized that you were mortgages than I thought. So at the very, at the very beginning I thought, yeah, she's crazy. But then I couldn't sleep that night. But the next uh then I realized that it was a very good it's a great idea. Yeah super smart. So yeah we're gonna show everyone toward the booth. Yeah let's go. Let's go. Okay So how do we build such an amazing, beautiful building now? So this is we've made building inside a book. So it was very hard to find a glassful of facade. The roof is around 24 tones. Yeah so it's crazy crazy but we made it work and it's totally amazing. Yeah. Do you want to go to tragedy life? Do let's go. Okay so here we are Cloud city live. I know we're producing a whole live streaming tv show. We always knew because of covid that not everyone will be able to come to Mwc as we wanted to make sure that people can learn about the public cloud. So over here we have the keynote stage, we're gonna have awesome speakers talking all throughout M. W. C. People from AWS Microsoft, google vendors companies. So really really great content. And then over there we have the cube interviewing people again 15 minute segments, live streaming but also available on demand. And you can find all of this content on cloud city. Tell Cody are calm and it's available for anyone to you. Well, a lot of content. And what about the roberts? I never get them out. Come on. We remember 100 days ago we were locked down. So we came up with the idea of having robots for the people who cannot attend in person. I know right. We always knew that there was gonna be a big virtual component to MWC this year. So we bought 100 telepresence robots. It's a great way to have a more personal experience inside the boot. Just sign up for one on cloud city dot telco D r dot com and you can control it yourself. Right? So today we have Nikki with us, who's dialing in from the Philippines in Manila? Hello, Nicky. Hi there, how are you? I were great. Can you show us a twirl all gaining on us? Super cool. Yeah, it is. What an experience. So Nikki robots are not the only cool thing we have in cloud city. We also have super awesome concert. We have rosario flores on monday. Who's a latin grammy award winner. We have Jon bon Jovi, Jon bon Jovi on Tuesday, can't be changing telephone that a little bit of rock n roll and that's Tuesday. And on Wednesday we have DJ official, it's going to be a super party. Now if you play our cloud city quest on cloud city telco D R dot com you can participate in a live streaming concert and so I know a lot of people out there have been a lockdown. Haven't been able to be going to concerts. Things from austin texas, which is the live music capital of the world, How to have music. It would be so exciting is gonna be great. I'm getting hungry. Why don't we go to the restaurant? Let's go eat. Let's go. Yeah, Here is our awesome restaurant. I know it's called Cloud nine. Right? It's a place to come and sit down and relax now. Barcelona is known for its great food and I'm a foodie. So we had to have a restaurant. Should we go check out my secret bar? Let's go. Mhm. Yeah, here >>thanks to a R. And thank you Nacho if you're watching this at home, I'm so sorry you can't join us in person. However, let's not forget this is a hybrid event meaning we're bringing all the public cloud action right to you wherever in the world you might be. This includes the Pact cloud city live program. We've partnered with the cube Silicon angle Media's live streaming video studio to make sure that all of the keynotes, panel discussions, demos, case studies interviews and way more are available on demand so you can watch them whenever and wherever you want or you can live stream and enjoy all things cloud city as and when they happen. So for those of you not able to join us in, Barcelona, be sure to log in to cloud city live and catch all the action and don't miss the awesome concert Tuesday night with Jon bon Jovi available for free. If you participate in our cloud city quest game, I'll be here throughout MWc bringing you reports and updates. Stay >>tuned. Yeah. >>Mhm. Okay, we're back here on the cube on the floor at mobile world congress in cloud city telco DRS clouds. They were here with D. R. Of telco, D R. Danielle Rice and great to see you back, we're back. So the keynotes going on connected world, the big news here, I'll see the open shift that's happening is going open. Open ran, it's been a big thing. Open ran alliance. You're starting to see the industry come together around this clear mandate that applications are gonna be cloud native and the public cloud is just coming in like a big wave and people are gonna be driftwood or they'll be surfing the wave. Yeah, this is what's happening. >>Yeah, I think public cloud is an unstoppable megatrend. It's hit every other industry regulated industries like banking, right? Top secret industries like government. They all use the public cloud tells us the last, you know, standing old school industry and it's coming and I don't think we could have had an MWc without talking about open man. That's the other major shift. And so we're bringing both of those ideas here together in cloud city. So >>the big theme is telco transformation. Maybe we could start with the basics like paint a picture of what the telco infrastructure looks like, particularly the data center stuff because they all have big data centers >>because that's >>those are the candidates to go into the cloud explained to the audience. >>Well, do you have a time machine? I think if any of us were in tech in the late 90s and early 2000s, that's what telcos like today. Right. So for people outside of the industry don't know right there mostly still managing their own data centers, they're just sort of adopting virtualization. Some of the more advanced telcos are mostly virtualized public cloud. Is this idea that like this advanced thought and so yeah, I mean things are on premise, things are in silom, things don't use a P. I. S there all integrated with custom code. And so the transformation, we can all see it because we've lived it in other industries. And I'm bringing that to telco and say come along for the ride. It totally works and it's gonna be amazing. >>So it's hardened purpose built infrastructure. Okay. That ultimately parts of that need to go to the public cloud. Right. What parts do you see going first? >>I think all of it. Really. Yeah. And I think when you look at like dish in the W. S. Which was an announcement that came out about two months ago. Right. I mean dish was doing all these are FPs. Everyone knew about it. They were looking for a cloud native software and no one knew what they were. They knew a big part was open man. But their coupling open ran with AWS and deploying their parts of their network onto the public cloud and the whole industry is like wait we thought this was years away, right? Or number two, you're crazy. And I'm saying this is what I've been talking about guys. This is exactly what you can do, leverage the Capex over. Let's see. I think Amazon did $100 billion 2020 right, leverage that Capex for yourself. Get that infinite scalability right? It's going to, well we >>have, we have a saying here in the queue, we just made this up called D. R. That's your initial tucker. The digital revolution and the three Rs reset re platform and re factor. I think the observation we're seeing is that you're coming in with the narrative what everyone's kind of like they're waking up because they have to reset and then re platform with the cloud. But the opportunity is gonna be the re factoring, You're seeing the public cloud, do that already with the Enterprise Enterprises. Already re factoring has done that. Already done that now. Telcos the last area to be innovated by the cloud. >>Yeah, I think there's old school big, we're kind of on a hollowed ground here in the Ericsson booth that I took over, right? They bailed and I kind of made fun of them. I was like, they don't have anything to say, right, They're not going to go to the show. I'm like, this is this is a revolution that's happening in telco and I don't think the big guys are really interested in rewriting their software that frankly makes them billions and billions of dollars of revenue. And I'm like to use the public cloud. All of the software needs to be rewritten needs to be re factored and you've got to start training your teams on how to use it. They don't have any capability. The telcos, in terms of those skills hire the right people, retrain your teams, move your applications, rewrite them. And I think that's what we're talking, this is not a short journey, this is a 10 year journey. So >>let's fast forward to the future a little bit because when I look around cloud city, I see ecosystem everywhere. So as you well know, the telcos have generally done a poor job of attacking adjacent seas. So my question is can they go beyond should they go beyond connectivity or is that going to be the role of the ecosystem? >>Yeah, I think it's time that the telco starts to focus on their subscriber, right? It's been really easy for them to rely on the oligopoly of the network, Right? The network, we live in the United States, we see the 18 T Verizon T mobile five G network, five G network. Like what about us? Right. And it's really easy for the over the top players right, that come in and they're always, telcos are always complaining about being coming dumb pipes and I'm like, you don't focus on the customer, we would rather buy from an Apple and amazon if they provided a mobile service because the customer experience will be better. Right? They need to start focusing on us. They have great businesses but they want to make them better. They need to start focusing on the subscriber, so >>it's a partnership with the ecosystem then for them to go beyond just straight connectivity because you're right, those are the brands that we want to do business >>with. You know, there was a great survey, Peter Atherton who will be talking as a speaker I think um I can't remember when he's talking but he was talking about how there was a survey done, where would you rather get your mobile service from? And it had a couple of big names in telco and then of course the obvious, you know, consumer brands, the ones that we all know and it was like overwhelmingly would rather buy from an amazon or an apple. And I'm like, this is like if you guys don't change, right, if telco doesn't change they keep rolling out 60 and blah blah blah. It's about the network and I don't start making about the subscriber right? Those revenues are going to continue to erode and they just sit there and complain about the O. T. T. Players. Like it's time to fight back. Yeah, I own the subscriber >>relationship. It's a digital revolution and I think This event really encapsulates in my mind this hybrid world here because it's physical events back. It's been since 2019 winter that this event actually happened. >>Well no it was even longer than, well I guess winter it was February of 19, right? And so like you look at ericsson and some of the big names that dropped out of the show, the time they come back, three years will have passed three years, right? This is how you feel your sales funnel is how you connect with your customers right? Tokyo is a very global, you know experience and so you gotta, you gotta get in front of people and you got to talk a >>lot of change to its happened, look at just what public clouds done in 2.5 years. You imagine three years being just >>gone, right? And I think a lot of people back to edition A. W. S. I think the industry was a little bit surprised by that announcement. So I've been telling executives if you were surprised by that, if you think that's, you know, if you don't know how that's gonna work, you need to come to cloud cities, you start meeting all the vendors are here. We have over 30 vendors, 70 demos, right? People who are pushing the technology forward, you need to learn what's going on here. We have several dish vendors here. Come learn about open rand, come learn about public cloud. So >>we're tight on time today, but we're going to have you back and we want to get into the tech, Get it to open, ran a little bit, get into what 5G and beyond and how we're going to take advantage of that and monetize it and what that all means. >>And also we want to hear what's going on the hallways. I know you got a lot of your key noting, you're gonna be a lot of events, the yacht. You've got a lot of briefings, >>yep. Yeah, I've already had two meetings this morning. I shot a video. Um, I met with one of the world's largest groups and I met with a tiny little super app company. Right? So running the gamut, doing everything reporter >>now, we could be like our roaming >>reporter. You know, I love, I love talking to execs and telco getting their perspective on what is public cloud and where are they going, what are they thinking about? And you talked to people who really, really get it and you get people who are just nascent and everywhere in between and I love mwc it's going great. >>Daniel Rose and you are a digital revolution telco DDR. There's amazing. Davis has been fantastic. Again for the folks watching, this is a hybrid events, there's an online component and we're reaching out with our remote interviews to get people brought in and we're shipping this content out to the masses all over the world. It's gonna be really amazing cube coverages here. It's gonna be rocking you guys are doing great. I just want to give you a compliment that you guys just did an amazing job. And of course we've got adam in the studio with the team. So adam, I'm gonna pass it off back to you in the studio

(soft music) >> Hi everyone. And welcome to this special cube conversation and kickoff preview of the Mobile World Congress Barcelona event. It's a physical event that's going to be taking place in person. It will probably be the first hybrid big event 68 days until the June 28th kickoff. You might've heard TelcoDr, Telco disruptor. Is on a mission to move the telco industry to the public cloud. And, and, and it's been taken of one of the biggest spaces this year from Erickson is the big story everyone's talking about. And of course the CUBE is excited to be there and broadcast and be a partner with TelcoDr. So I'm excited to bring on the founder and CEO of TelcoDr. Danielle Royston. Danielle great to see you. Thanks for coming on for this Mobile World Congress preview. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm psyched to talk to you about this, its going to be great. >> So Erickson always has the biggest booth 14 years. You're disrupting the Barcelona not people's shorts going to be on or off. It's officially on, it's happening. And there's going to be a physical event we're coming out of COVID still a risky move. It's going to be a big hybrid event. It's going to be in person. Tell us the story. How did you guys come out of nowhere a disruptor take the biggest real estate in the place and turn it into a community event. A news event, immediate event, everything tell us. >> Yeah, well, you know, I think it was March 9th a little over a month ago. Ericsson announced that they were pulling out of MWC and it's very analogous to what happened in 2020. They were one of the first vendors to bail as well. And it kind of started this like tidal wave of people saying, can't do it. And I think the distinction now is that, that was at the beginning of COVID. There was a lot of unknowns, you know, is it coming? Is it not? Is it safe? Is it not? We're now, you know, year 50 to three, four months into it. I think that when you look at where we are now cases are trending down. The vaccine is up. And I think the legacy players were sort of backward looking they're like, this is a repeat of 2020. We're going to, it's not safe to go. We're going to pull out. And I'm like with a hundred days to go. And the vaccine ramping, I think I see it a different way. I think there's a really big opportunity. John Hoffman, CEO of the GSMA had put out a two page missive on LinkedIn where he was personally responding to questions about how serious they were about making sure that the event was safe and could be held. And my, my view was this is going to happen. And with Ericsson pulling out, I mean this is hollowed ground. I mean, this is, you know, a, you know, massively successful company that has customers literally trained like Skinner's chickens to come to the same spot every year. And now I get to, you know, put out my shingle right there and say welcome and show them the future , right? And instead of the legacy past and all the normal rhetoric that you hear from those you know, sort of dinosaurs, Ericsson and Nokia now they're going to hear about the public cloud. And I'm really excited for this opportunity. I think the ROI on this event is instant. And so it was, it was a pretty easy decision. I think I thought about it for about 30 seconds. >> It's a real bold move. And it's, again, it's a risk that pays off if it happens, if it doesn't, you know, you didn't happen but you're like, it's like a, it's like the the startups that put a Superbowl commercial for the first time, it's a big hit and it's a big gamble that pays off huge. Take us through, I heard, how did it all happen? Did you just wake up and saw it was open? How do you know that it was open? Was it like, does the email go out, say hey I've got this huge space for >> Well, I mean, it was big news. It was big news in the industry that they were pulling out and all the journalists were like, Oh, here we go again. You know, everyone's going to bail, who who's next right? And, and everyone was sort of like building that sort of negative momentum energy. And I'm like, we got to squash this. So I put out a tweet on Twitter. I mean, I'm not the most followed person but I'm kind of known in telco. And I was like, hey GSMA, I'll take over the booth. And I don't think people even liked my tweet, right? Like no likes no retweets. I reached out to a couple of journalists. I'm like, let's do an interview. Let's do a story. Everyone's like, we'll have you on the podcast like in a month, I'm like what?! So, so when John Hoffman had put out that letter I had connected to him. And so I was like, Oh, I'm connected to the CEO of the GSMA. So I went out on LinkedIn and I referenced the story and I said, John Hoffman, I'll take over the booth. And I think about 30 minutes later he responded and said, let's do it. And I said, great, who do I talk to? And I was in touch with someone within a couple of hours. And I think we put the whole deal together in 48. And I think wrote the press release and announced it on Friday. So happened on Tuesday the ninth, announced by that Friday. And I really, I was like, GSMA, we've got to get this out. And we got to stop the negative momentum of the show and get people to realize it's going to be different in June. This is going to happen. Let's go do it. And so I think they are they're psyched that I stepped into the booth it's big booth it's 65,000 square feet, 6,000 square meters for for the rest of the World that use it, the metric system. And I mean, that's huge. I mean, that's the size of a professional pitch in a in a football field, a soccer field. That's a one and a half football fields. It's, it's a ton of space. It's a ton of space pull off. >> I think what's interesting is there's a points out that this new business model of being connected you were on LinkedIn, you connect to them you get a deal done so fast. This is how this is the direct to consumer as a start-up you're literally took over the primo space the best space in the area. So congratulations. And, and the other thing that's notable and why I'm excited to talk to you is that this kind of sets the table for the first global what I call hybrid event. This will probably be a cornerstone case study in and of itself because we're still kind of coming out of the pandemic. People are getting vaccinated. People want to fly. They want to get out of the house, were partnering with the CUBE and the CUBE 365 platform. And, you know, we'd love hybrid. We'd love doing events, theCUBE that's what we do with video. Now, we're going to do a partnership with you to create this hybrid experience. What can people and guests who come to Barcelona or watch remotely expect? >> Yeah, so I think there's a couple of experiences that we're trying to drive in the booth. I think obviously demonstrations, you know I can't fill 65,000 square feet on my own. I'm a startup small company. And so I am inviting like-minded forward thinking companies to join me in the booth. I'm, I'm paying for it providing a turnkey experience for those vendors. And so I think what we have in common is we're thinking about future technologies, like open ran on the network side and obviously public cloud which is a big part of my message. And so first and foremost, foremost, there's, you know come and see the companies that are driving the change the new technologies that are out there and what's available for, for carriers to start to adopt and think about. MWC is a meeting intensive event. Deals are done at this show. In 2019, I think the stat is $65 billion of deals were put together at the show. And so a big component of the booth will be a place for executives to come together and have private conversations. And so we're going to have that. So that's going to be a big piece of it. And I think the third part is driving education and thought leadership. And so there's going to be a whole, you know, talk track right? Tech topics, business topics customer case studies involve the hyperscalers and really start to educate the telco community around these new technologies. But there'll be shorter talks. They won't be like hour long keynotes. We're talking 15, 20 minutes. And I think one thing that we're going to do with you as you were just talking about with theCUBE is, you know MWC was the first big show to have to cancel with COVID I think in 2019, sorry, 2020, the the dates it's always the last Monday in February and and the rest of that week. And so that's like right at the beginning of that of the COVID stuff, Italy was just starting to take off. So it was one of the first shows that had to make a big call and decide to cancel, which they did. This is going to be one of the first shows that comes back online, post COVID right? And so I don't think things just snap back to the way that they used to be. I don't think we, as consumers are going to snap back to the way that we operating we're now used to being able to get curbside delivery from any restaurant in the city, right. I mean, it's just, it's just a sort of a different expectation. And so partnering with theCUBE, we really want to provide an experience that brings the virtual people into the booth. Typically in events like this you really have to be there to see it boosts are kind of like unveiled the day of the show. What's going on. One thing I'm trying to do is really educate people about what you can expect. What can you see? This is what it's going to look like. And so we're going to start to share some pictures of the booth of, of, you know, what it looks like. Number one, to drive excitement with the partners that are coming, right. Like you're going to be part of something really, really fabulous. I think number two attendees can wait, I don't know week of to make the decision to go. And so maybe if COVID continues to trend down and vaccines are, are picking up steam, maybe they're like it's safe for me to go and I want to go be a part of that. But I think from here on out we're going to have sort of that virtual experience. It's always going to be part of shows. And so we're going to experiment with you guys. We're going to have a live streaming event over the course of the, you know, all MWC. It's going to be a way for people who are unable to travel or, you know, can't afford it. COVID or whatever, see what's going on in the booth. And it's going to be everything from listen to a talk to watch what you guys are typically famous for, your awesome interviews. We're going to have a man on the street, you know, like you know, we're here at, at a demo station, take us through your little demo. We're going to have telepresence robots that people can reserve. And, you know, cruise to the booth, the robot can go to a talk. The robot can watch on this streaming thing the robot can go to a demo. The robot can go to a meeting and it's controlled by the the virtual attendees and so experimenting, right? Like how do we make this great for virtual people? How do we make the virtual people feel part of the physical? How do the physical people feel? The virtual people that are attending and really just make it feel like a community of both. So really excited >> That's super awesome. And I think one of the, first of all, thank you for having paying for everyone and including theCUBE in that but I think this speaks to the ecosystem of open you're bringing, you're creating an open ecosystem. And I think that is a huge thing. So for people who are at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this is going to be a nice, safe place to hang space as well as get deals done and to be comfortable doing media center, we'll get you on the digital TV, but also you're also designing the first what I call the first hybrid experience not just having people, having on-demand videos on their website, connecting Barcelona with other parts of the World, with meetings and stories and content. I think that to me is going to be a great experiment slash upgrade. We'll see, we'll get to see it. >> Well, it was really, I mean, we all lived through 2020. I mean, some of the shows went on AWS's re-invent happened. Google did like a crazy nine week program. It's very lonely to participate in those virtual events right. You know, you kind of log on by herself. No, one's really tweeting about it. You're watching, you know, an event the event is great, but it was really lonely. And so, you know, and I think what people love about the physical events is we're together and we're networking and we're meeting people. And so, you know, I think continue to evolve that experience so that virtual is not as lonely. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes. >> No, I've got to say your, your vision is really aligned with us and others that are in this open innovation World. Because if you look at like theCUBE physical went away, we had no events. We did Q virtual, a new brand. It wasn't a pivot. It was an extension, a line extension of theCUBE. Now theCUBES coming back to the physical. We're going to bring that cube virtual to connect everybody. So this is it. And it just amplifies the value of the physical event. So if done right, is so much cooler. So, so that's cool. And what I want to ask you though on the physical side to kind of bring it back to physical is there's still going to be keynotes. There's still going to be talks at Mobile World Congress. And so I saw that schedule and I just saw last week GSMA announced you're going to be doing a keynote speech. That's amazing. So how did that happen? So give us the lowdown on the keynote that you're doing. >> I'm sure the entire industry is like that happened. And it probably has something to do with the back that I have one of the biggest booths at the space. I always, you know, put in a request to speak. I feel that I have really exciting message to share with the industry. Over the last I guess it's been 9 or 10 months. I really been trying to amplify, amplify my voice. I have a podcast, I have a newsletter I'm talking to execs. I have a list that I literally go down one by one stalking each executive of like have I talked to them like how I told them about like the power of the public cloud. And so I am super thankful that I have this opportunity to spread that this message and I'm, I'm planning a really epic talk, just I really want to shake the industry. And this is, this is my opportunity, right? This is my opportunity to stand on the biggest stage in our industry. And command a presence and send out my message. And I'm absolutely thrilled to go do it. And I hope I crush it. I hope it's like a mic drop experience and can't wait to do it. >> Well, we're looking forward to covering it. And we love the open vision. We love the idea of public cloud and the enablement and the disruption, because just like you got the deal so fast, you can move fast with modern applications with the cloud moving at cloud scale, complete content, game changer, so great stuff. So totally applaud that looking forward to, and we're we're here to cheer you on and, and and ask the tough questions. I do want to get to on Twitter yesterday though, you put out on tweetstorm on Twitter, about the plans kind of teasing out the booth. How you going to plan to build the booth, are you worried that you're opening up too much of the kimono here and opened up putting too much on the table because it's usually a secret Mobile World Congress is supposed to be secret, not publicly out there. What, what's the, you know >> Well, I mean, I think this is just a little bit of a change has happened post COVID, right. You know, people usually build their booth in and don't reveal it until the first day of the show. And it's kind of like this excitement to go see what is there, what's their big message. And what's the big reveal. And there's always fun stuff. I think this year is a little bit different. So at first, like I said, at first big event back. I think I need to create a little bit of excitement for people who are going and maybe entice people that maybe you should think about coming. I realize this is a super personal decision, right? It depends on where you are and the country and your, your health and your status. But, but if you can do it I want people to know that you're going to miss out. It's going to be super fun. So, um, so yeah. >> Well, let's take it. Let's take a look at the booth though. And that's why my next question, I want to see I know we have guys, do we have that, rendering, let's pull that up and let's talk this through. Let's go look at the rendering. So you can see here on the screen, take us through this. >> Yeah. So what we want to do is give the sense of, of cloud city, right? And that's what we're calling this space in cloud cities. There's in a city there's outdoor space. Like you see here, and then there's in indoor space. And indoors is for you where you work, where you buy, where you meet. And so you can see here on the left, the demo stations that would have different vendors displaying you know, and it kind of, it goes way back. I mean, what we're feeling like I said is like a football field, an American football field and the half or a European football field a pitch it's pretty, it's pretty extensive. And so we think we're going to have, I don't know, 20 30 vendors showing their, their different software. I think we're, we're scheduling or planning for about 24 different meeting rooms that we can schedule all COVID safe with the, with the space requirements in there, but on the out in that outdoor space, it would be where you learn right. The education and then I think we're going to have this fabulous booth for the, for theCUBE. It's going to look, It's just so amazing with the backdrop of this amazing building. And, you know, I think I underappreciated or didn't really realize, you know, how devastated the both the event planning industry has been from COVID as well as construction. You know, obviously when events were shut down these companies had to lay off thousands of workers. Some of the big firms have laid off 50% of their workforce. And those people, you know they didn't just go home and sit around. They, they had to come up with a livelihood and this people have pivoted into another job. And they're not really, I mean events aren't really back yet. So some of these firms are shrunk. You know, the manpower is, is severely reduced. But then I think on the other side is and you can see this in just housing construction. There's a lumber shortage, there's a shortage of materials. And so everything that we source for the booth pretty much has to come from Spain. And so when we look at the booth, you know, we have, we have a pretty significant ceiling. Well, it looks like the roof of the building. It's an engineering feat to do. That we're still working through the sure. Someone with a protractor is doing lots of math. You know, the glass, we have those huge beautiful glass spans in the front getting a glass that spans that height. I think it's, I think it's 18 feet. It's six meters tall. That's going to be hard things like the flooring. I want to have like hardwood, laminate flooring. So it looks like hardwood floors. Don't know if we can find them right there. Like, why don't you do carpet? I'm like, can you just check one more vendor? I really want my floor. So, so we'll see how it goes. And yeah, I, I think that sharing this plan, the trials and tribulations, like how can this small startup, right? That usually, you know, take over a space that usually takes nine months to plan, right? Who is this girl? What is she doing? How are they going to pull this off? You know, I think it's like, grab your popcorn and watch the train wreck or, you know, hero's journey. We get it done. >> Well, people are on clubhouse. They're bored, they want to get out. I think this is a case study. Mobile World Congress has a huge economic impact for the, as a show it's got its own little economy built around it. Impacts the, the country of Spain in Barcelona, the city, a great city. People love it. And so it certainly is notable and newsworthy. We will be following that story. I have to ask you more of a, kind of a tactical question. If you don't mind, while I have you here, can you talk about some of the vendors that are coming and the kinds of talks you're going to have inside the booth and and how do people get involved? You mentioned it's open to people who love open ran and open public cloud, open technologies. I mean, that's pretty much everybody that's cool and relevant, which is like almost the whole World now. So like, is it going to be a space, is there a criteria? How do people get involved? What's the collaboration formula. >> Yeah, no. I had been working on putting together a list of potential vendors. You'd be surprised, not everyone is, is as bullish as I am on the public cloud. And so there was a little bit of a filtering criteria, but otherwise anyone can come right enterprise software vendors in telco where their primary customer is a communications service provider. That's their software runs on the public cloud come on in, right. People using open man. And it's still a little sort of small band of cohorts that are really trying to drive this new technology forward. And, and they're growing up, going up against some of the biggest companies in telco, right? They're going up against Huawei. They're going up against Ericcson. Both those guys are, are very anti and then not really pro open rank because it's hugely disruptive to their business. And so, you know I'm pretty sure those guys are not psyched to see open ran you know, you know, become a thing in telco. And so it's really sort of about disruptive technologies that are that are in the, in the booth. And so, yeah, I'm paying for the space. I'm paying for the, build-out bring your demos bring your people, come with your marketing message and and let's, and let's build a community. And so we're talking to open ran vendors like Mavenir. Which is a pretty big name in the open ran, open ran space. I've been talking with parallel wireless and LTO star. Those are also great players, software vendors like Totogi, which is a talk that I did a little over a month ago about this new startup that has a web-scale charger that they're trying to put out there. Aria is another company that I'm really familiar with that has some cloud for software and then little tiny startups like Zquence, and some other up-and-comers that no one's heard of. So we're really excited to invite them into the booth. I've been secretly stalking Elon, Elon Musk and Starlink and SpaceX to be a part of it. And we'll see, right. I'm kind of, you know, using Twitter and whatever I can to, to reach out and see if they want to be a part of it. But yeah, it's kind of really open arms, not really excluded. >> Oh, Elon, Elon is very disruptive and you know, he reached out on, you can reach out to him on Twitter. He's accessible. I mean, you've got to break through, but he is got this antenna up for innovators. People who think differently. They love people who break down walls and markets floor open wins. I mean, we, we know there's a history we've been covering it. I've been involved in my career. People who bet against open, always lose it's happened in every single wave of innovation. So Elons gettable, lets get him. >> Who doesn't love Elon Musk. I mean, I think some people don't, I love him, he's my hero. I model a lot of the things that I do around, around his, his approach, his vision, right, 20 years ago or close to 20 years ago, 2003 he said he was going to put people on Mars. And I think people laughed at him for being like the PayPal guy and this guy's crazy. But every year he makes progress against his goals, right. We have a real landable rocket. He's doing a manned mission this week, a second man mission or third man mission. And the guy makes progress. And I think I'm on the same, same mission here. My mission is to move telco to the public cloud. I think it's a, it's a long journey, right? I think people are like, who's this girl and she's like 12 people, and what's your story? And I'm like, I don't care. I have a singular mission is a quest. I am not going to stop until I moved the industry to the public cloud. And I it's my life's mission. And I'm psyched to do it. >> Well, we love the mojo. We'd love your style. We'd love Elon Musk, his mugshot. And again, just to bring the dots together you have that same mindset, which has, you know, as people you know, love her, love or like Elon, he's a builder. Okay, he builds things and he delivers. So as you said, so know I really appreciate the work you're doing. I love your philosophy. We're in total agreement, open, open building. Doing it together as a collective, being part of something. This is what the World needs. You got a lot of great ideas in the works and we can't wait to hear them. And what you got coming up over the next 68 days. This is the first of many conversations together. Thank you so much >> Yeah, yeah, no, it's going to be so awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Psyched to talk to you about it. >> Okay Mobile World Congress is happening in Barcelona on the June 28th. It's going to be in person and it's going to be probably the biggest hybrid event to date. Be there, check out telcoDR and theCUBE and the space that they took over 14 years at the helm there. Ericcson had it, now it's TelcoDR. Danielle Royston, founder and CEO here with me from TelcoDR. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation and kickoff preview of the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona event. It's a physical event that's going to be taking place in person. It will probably be the first hybrid big event, 68 days until the June 28th kickoff. You might've heard TelcoDR, Telco Disruptor is on a mission to move the Telco industry to the public cloud. And it's taken one of the biggest spaces this year from Ericsson, is the big story everyone's talking about. And of course theCUBE is excited to be there and broadcast and be a partner with TelcoDR. So I'm excited to bring on the founder and CEO of TelcoDR, Danielle Royston. Danielle great to see you. Thanks for coming on for this Mobile World Congress Preview. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm psyched to talk to you about this, it's going to be great. >> So Ericsson always has the biggest booth 14 years, you're disrupting Barcelona, people are not sure it's going to be on or off. It's officially on, it's happening and there's going to be a physical event, we're coming out of COVID still a risky move. It's going to be a big hybrid event, it's going to be in person. Tell us the story. How did you guys come out of nowhere, a disruptor take the biggest real estate in the place and turn it into a community event, a news event, a media event, everything, tell us. >> Yeah, well, I think it was March 9th, a little over a month ago. Ericsson announced that they were pulling out of MWC and it's very analogous to what happened in 2020. They were one of the first vendors to bail as well. And it kind of started this like tidal wave of people saying, can't do it. And I think the distinction now is that, that was at the beginning of COVID, there's a lot of unknowns. Is it coming, is it not, is it safe, is it not? We're now, year 50 to three, four months into it. I think that when you look at where we are now, cases are trending down, the vaccine is up. And I think the legacy players were sort of backward looking. They're like, this is a repeat of 2020 it's not safe to go, we're going to pull out. And I'm like with the a hundred days to go, in the vaccine ramping, I think I see the different way. I think there's a really big opportunity. John Hoffman, CEO of the GSMA had put out a two page missive on LinkedIn where he was personally responding to questions, about how serious they were about making sure that the event was safe and could be held. And my view was this is going to happen. And with Ericsson pulling out, I mean this is hollowed ground. I mean, this is massively successful company that has customers literally trained like Skinner's chickens to come to the same spot every year. And now I get to put out my shingle right there and say welcome and show them the future. And instead of the legacy past and all the normal rhetoric that you hear from those sort of dinosaurs, Ericsson and Nokia, now they're going to hear about the public cloud. And I'm really excited for this opportunity. I think the ROI on this event is instant. And so it was a pretty easy decision. I think I thought about it for about 30 seconds. >> It's a real bold move. And again it's a risk that pays off if it happens, if it doesn't, didn't happen, but it's like the startups that put a Superbowl commercial off for the first time. It's a big hit and it's a big gamble that pays off huge. Take us through, how did it all happen? Did you just wake up and saw it was open? How did you know that it was open? Was it like, does an email go out and say, hey I got this huge space for 55 years. >> Well, I mean, it was big news. It was big news in the industry that they were pulling out and all other journalists were like, oh, here we go again. Everyone's going to bail, who's next, right? And everyone was sort of like building that sort of negative momentum energy. And I'm like, we got to squash this. So I put out a tweet on Twitter. I mean, I'm not the most followed person but I'm kind of known in Telco. And I was like, hey, GSMA, I'll take over the booth. And I don't think people even liked my tweet, right? Like no likes no retweets. I reached out to a couple of journalists. I'm like, let's do an interview, let's do a story. Everyone's like, we'll have you on the podcast, like in a month, I'm like, what's? So when John Hoffman had put out that letter I had connected to him. And so I was like, oh, I'm connected to the CEO of the GSMA. So I went out on LinkedIn and I referenced the story and I said, John Hoffman, I'll take over the booth. And I think about 30 minutes later he responded and said, let's do it. And I said, great, who do I talk to? And I was in touch with someone within a couple of hours. And I think we put the whole deal together in 48. And I think wrote the press release and announced it on Friday. So happened on Tuesday the 9th, announced by that Friday. And I really, I was like, GSMA, we've got to get this out, and we got to stop the negative momentum of the show, and get people to realize it's going to be different in June. This is going to happen, let's go do it. And so I think they're psyched that I stepped into the booth. It's a big booth it's 65,000 square feet. 6,000 square meters for the rest of the world that use the metric system. And I mean, that's huge. I mean, that's the size of a professional pitch in a football field, a soccer field. That's a one and a half football fields. It's a ton of space, it's a ton of space to fill up. >> I think what's interesting, as this points out that this new business model of being connected you were on LinkedIn, you connect to them, you get a deal done so fast. This is the direct to consumer as a start up, you're literally took over the Primo space, the best face in the area, so congratulations. And the other thing that's notable and why I'm excited to talk to you is that this kind of sets the table for the first global, what I call hybrid event. This will probably be a cornerstone case study in and of itself, because we're still kind of coming out of the pandemic. People are getting vaccinated, people want to fly, they want to get out of the house. You're partnering with theCUBE, and the CUBE 365 platform. And we love hybrid, we love doing events, theCUBE, that's what we do with video. Now, we're going to do a partnership with you to create this hybrid experience. What can people and guests who come to Barcelona or watch remotely expect? >> Yeah so, I think there's a couple of experiences that we're trying to drive in the booth. I think obviously demonstrations, I can't fill 65,000 square feet on my own. I'm a startup small company. And so I am inviting like-minded, forward thinking companies to join me in the booth. I'm paying for it providing a turnkey experience for those vendors. And so I think what we have in common is we're thinking about future technologies, like open ran on the network side and obviously public cloud which is a big part of my message. And so first and foremost, come and see the companies that are driving the change, the new technologies that are out there, and what's available for carriers to start to adopt and think about. MWC is a meeting intensive event. Deals are done at this show. In 2019, I think the stat is $65 billion of deals were put together at the show. And so a big component of the booth will be a place for executives to come together and have private conversations. And so we're going to have that. So that's going to be a big piece of it. And I think the third part is driving education and thought leadership. And so there's going to be a whole talk track, right? Tech topics, business topics, customer case studies, involve the hyperscalers, and really start to educate the telco community around these new technologies. But there'll be shorter talks. They won't be like hour long keynotes. We're talking 15, 20 minutes. And I think one thing that we're going to do with you as you were just talking about with the CUBE is, you know, MWC was the first big show to have to cancel with COVID, I think in 2019, sorry, 2020, the dates, it's always the last Monday in February and the rest of that week. And so that's like right at the beginning of the COVID stuff, Italy was just starting to take off. And so it was one of the first shows that had to make a big call and decide to cancel, which they did. This is going to be one of the first shows that comes back online post COVID, right? And so I don't think things just snap back to the way that they used to be. I don't think we as consumers are going to snap back to the way that we were operating, we're now used to being able to get curbside delivery from any restaurant in the city. I mean, it's just a sort of a different expectation. And so partnering with the CUBE, we really want to provide an experience that brings the virtual people into the booth. Typically in events like this, you really have to be there to see it. Booths are kind of like unveiled the day of the show, what's going on. One thing I'm trying to do is really educate people about what you can expect. What can you see? This is what it's going to look like. And so we're going to start to share some pictures of the booth of what it looks like. Number one, to drive excitement with the partners that are coming, right? Like you're going to be part of something really, really fabulous. I think number two, attendees can wait, I don't know week off, to make the decision to go. And so maybe if COVID continues to trend down and vaccines are picking up steam, maybe they're like it's safe for me to go and I want to go be a part of that. But I think from here on now we're going to have sort of that virtual experience. It's always going to be part of shows. And so we're going to experiment with you guys. We're going to have a live streaming event, over the course of all MWC. It's going to be a way for people who are unable to travel or can't afford it, COVID or whatever, see what's going on in the booth. And it's going to be everything from listen to a talk, to watch what you guys are typically famous for, your awesome interviews. We're going to have man on the street, like we're here at at a demo station, take us through your little demo. We're going to have telepresence robots that people can reserve. And cruise through the booth the robot can go to a talk. The robot can watch on this streaming thing, the robot can go to a demo. The robot can go to a meeting and it's controlled by the the virtual attendees. And so experimenting, right? Like how do we make this great for virtual people? How do we make the virtual people feel part of the physical? How do the physical people feel the virtual people that are attending and really just make it feel like a community or both. So, we're excited. >> That's super awesome, and first of all, thank you for having paying for everyone and including theCUBE in there. But I think this speaks to the ecosystem of open, you're creating an open ecosystem. And I think that is a huge thing. So for people who are at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this is going to be a nice, safe place to hang space as well as get deals done. As we comfortable doing media center, we'll get you on the digital TV, but also you're also designing what I call the first hybrid experience, not just having people, having on-demand videos on their website, connecting Barcelona with other parts of the world, with media and stories and content. I think that to me is going to be a great experiment slash upgrade. We'll see, we'll get to see it how it goes. >> Well, it was really, I mean, we all lived through 2020. I mean, some of the shows went on, AWS's re-invent happened, Google did like a crazy nine week program. It's very lonely to participate in those virtual events. You kind of log on by ourselves. No one's really tweeting about it. You're watching an event, the event is great but it was really lonely. And so I think what people love about the physical events is we're together and we're networking and we're meeting people and so, I think continuing to evolve that experience so that virtual is not as lonely. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes. >> I got to say your vision is really aligned with us and others that are in this open innovation world. Because if you look at like theCUBE, physical went away, we had no events, we did CUBE Virtual, a new brand. It wasn't a pivot, it was an extension, a line extension of theCUBE. Now theCUBE's coming back to the physical, we're going to bring that CUBE Virtual to connect everybody. So this is it, and it just amplifies the value of the physical event. So if done right, it's so much cooler. So that's cool. And what I want to ask you on the physical side to kind of bring it back to physical is, there's still going to be keynotes, there's still going to be talks at Mobile World Congress, and so I saw that scheduled and I just saw last week, GSM may announced you're going to be doing a keynote speech. That's amazing, so, how did that happen? So give us the lowdown on the keynote that you're doing. >> I'm sure the entire industry is like that happened. And it probably has something to do with the fact that I have one of the biggest booths at the space. I always put in a request to speak. I feel that I have a really exciting message to share with the industry. Over the last, I guess it's been nine or 10 months, I really been trying to amplify my voice. I have a podcast, I have a newsletter, I'm talking to execs. I have a list that I literally go down one by one stalking each executive of like, have I talked to them? Like how I told them about like the power of the public cloud. And so I am super thankful that I have this opportunity to spread that this message and I'm planning a really epic talk. I really want to shake the industry And this is my opportunity, right? This is my opportunity to stand on the biggest stage in our industry and command a presence and send out my message. And I'm absolutely thrilled to go do it. And I hope I crush it, I hope it's like a mic drop experience. And can't wait to do it. >> Well, we're looking forward to covering it. And we love the open vision. We love the idea of public cloud and the enablement and the disruption. Because just like you got the deal so fast you can move fast with modern applications with the cloud, moving at cloud scale, complete content game changer, so great stuff. So totally applaud that looking forward to and we're here cheer you on and ask the tough questions. I do want to get to... On Twitter yesterday though, you put out on tweetstorm on Twitter about the plans kind of teasing out the booth, how are you going to plan to build the booth. Are you worried that you're opening up too much of the kimono here and putting too much on the table 'cause it's usually a secret. Mobile World Congress is supposed to be secret, not publicly out there. What's the-- >> Well, I mean, I think this is just a little bit of a change has happened post COVID, right. People usually build their booth at don't reveal it until the first day of the show and it's kind of like this excitement to go see what is their big message and what's the big reveal. And there's always fun stuff. I think this years will be different as a first, like I said, a first big event back. I think I need to create a little bit of excitement for people who are going and maybe entice people that maybe you should think about coming. I realized this is a super personal decision, right? It depends on where you are and the country and your health and your status. But if you can do it, I want people to know that you're going to miss out. It's going to be super fun. So, yeah. >> Let's take a look at the booth 'cause I'm sure my next question wants to see. I know we have guys, do we have that rendering... Let's pull that up and let's talk this through. Let's go look at the rendering. So you can see here on the screen... Take us through this. >> Yeah, so what we want to do is give the sense of of cloud city and that's what we're calling the space. In cloud city there's outdoor space, like you see here. And then there's an indoor space. And indoors is where you work, where you buy, where you meet. And so you can see here on the left, the demonstration that would have different vendors displaying and it goes way back. I mean, what we're feeling like I said is like a football field, an American football field and a half or a European football field, a pitch. It's pretty extensive. And so we think we're going to have, I don't know, 20, 30 vendors showing their different software. I think we're scheduling or planning for about 24 different meeting rooms that we can schedule. All COVID safe with the space requirements in there. But in that outdoor space, it would be where you learn, the education. And then I think we're going to have this fabulous booth for theCUBE. It's going to look just so amazing with the backdrop of this amazing building. And I think I underappreciated or didn't really realize how devastated the event planning industry has been from COVID as well as construction. Obviously when events were shut down, these companies had to lay off thousands of workers. Some of the big firms have laid off 50% of their workforce. And those people they didn't just go home and sit around, they had to come up with a livelihood and those people have pivoted into another job. And they're not really, I mean, events aren't really back yet. So some of these firms are shrunk. The manpower is severely reduced. But then I think on the other side is, and you can see this in just housing construction. There's a lumber shortage, there's a shortage of materials. And so everything that we source for the booth, pretty much has to come from Spain. And so when we look at the booth, we have a pretty significant ceiling, where it looks like the roof of the building. It's an engineering feat to do that we're still working through the... I'm sure someone with a protractor is doing lots of math. The glass, we have those huge beautiful glass spans in the front. Getting a glass that spans that height, I think it's 18 feet. It's six meters tall. That's going to be hard. Things like the flooring. I want to have like hardwood laminate flooring. So it looks like hardwood floors. Don't know if we can find them. There like, why don't you do carpet? I'm like, can you just check one more vendor. I really want my floor. So we'll see how it goes. And yeah, I think that sharing this plan, the trials and tribulations, like how can this small startup, take over a space that usually takes nine months to plan, right? Who is this girl? What is she doing? How are they going to pull this off? I think it's like, grab your popcorn and watch the train wreck or hero's journey. We get it done. And I'm obviously-- >> It's like keeping up with the Kardashians. It's the bachelor, it's theCUBE, reality TV show. We can keep track of everything. It's all the fun. >> No, totally. I don't know how many people would be interested in a reality TV show about how you build a booth but I find it absolutely fascinating. I think a lot of people have eyes on the GMA and MWC coming out of COVID and what does that look like, and what's the attendance like. And so I'm excited to share (murmurs) So, exact. >> Well, people are on clubhouse, they're bored, they want to get out. I think this is a case time. Mobile World Congress has a huge economic impact, as a show it's got its own little economy built around. It impacts the country of Spain in Barcelona, the city, a great city. People love it. And so it certainly is notable and newsworthy. We will be following that story. I have to ask you more kind of a tactical question if you don't mind, while I have you here. Can you talk about some of the vendors that are coming and the kinds of talks you're going to have inside the booth and how do people get involved? You mentioned it's open to people who love open ran and open public cloud, open technologies. I mean, that's pretty much everybody. That's cool and relevant, which is like almost the whole world now. Like, is it going to be a space as a criteria? How do people get involved? What's the collaboration formula? >> Yeah, no, I have been working on putting together a list of potential vendors. You'd be surprised, not everyone is as bullish as I am on the public cloud. And so there was a little bit of a filtering criteria but otherwise anyone can come. Enterprise software vendors in telco where their primary customer is communications service provider. That's their software runs on the public cloud, come on in. People using open ran. And it's still a little sort of small band of cohorts that are really trying to drive this new technology forward and they're going up against some of the biggest companies in telco, right? They're going up against Huawei, they're going up against Ericsson. Both those guys are very anti and they're not really pro open ran 'cause it's hugely disruptive to their business. And so I'm pretty sure those guys are not psyched to see open ran become a thing in telco. And so it's really sort of about disruptive technologies that are in the booth. And so yeah, I'm paying for the space, I'm paying for the build-out, bring your demos, bring your people, come with your marketing message and let's build a community. And so we're talking to open ran vendors like Mavenir which is a pretty big name in the open ran space. I've been talking with Parallel Wireless in LTO Star. Those are also great players. Software vendors like to Tutoki, which is a talk that I did a little over a month ago about this new startup that has a web-scale charger that they're trying to put out there. Auria is another company that I'm really familiar with that has some cloud for software. And in little tiny startups like Sequence and some other up-and-comers that no one's heard of. So we're really excited to invite them into the booth. I've been secretly stalking Elon Musk, and Starlink and Space X to be a part of it. And we'll see. I'm kind of using Twitter and whatever I can to reach out and see if they want to be a part of it. But yeah, it really open arms. Not really excluding-- >> Well, Elon is very disruptive and you can reach out to him on Twitter. He's accessible. I mean, you've got to break through and he's antenna up for innovators, people who think differently, they love people who break down walls and markets lower open wins. I mean, we know there's a history, we've been covering it. I've been involved in all my career. People who bet against open always lose. It's happened in every single wave of innovation. So Elon's gettable. Let's get him. >> Who doesn't love Elon Musk? I mean, I think some people don't, I love him. He's my hero. I model a lot of the things that I do around his approach, his vision. 20 years ago, or close to 20 years ago, 2003, he said he was going to put people on Mars. And I think people laughed at him for being like the PayPal guy and this guy is crazy, but every year he makes progress against his goals. We have a relandable rocket. He's doing a manned mission this week, the second man mission or third man mission. The guy makes progress. And I think I'm on the same mission here. My mission is to move Telco to the public cloud. I think it's a long journey, right? I think people are like, who is this girl? And she's like 12 people and what's her story. And I'm like, I don't care. I have a singular mission is a quest. I am not going to stop until I move the industry to the public cloud. And it's my life's mission and I'm psyched to do it. >> Well, we love the mojo, we love your style. We love Elon Musk's mojo. And again, just to bring the dots together you have that same mindset, which is, love like Elon, he's a builder. He builds things and he delivers. So as you said, so... Danielle, I really appreciate the work you're doing. I love your philosophy. We're in total agreement. Open building. Doing it together as a collective, being part of something? This is what the world needs. You got a lot of great ideas in the works and we can't wait to hear them. And what you got coming up over the next 68 days. This is the first of many conversations together. Thank you. >> Yeah, that's going to be so awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Psyched to talk to you about it. >> Okay. Mobile World Congress is happening in Barcelona on the June 28th. It's going to be in person and it's going to be probably the biggest hybrid event to date. Be there, check out TelcoDR and theCUBE and the space that they took over 14 years at the helm there. Ericson had it, now it's TelcoDR. Danielle Royston, founder and CEO here with me from TelcoDR. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, I'm back. I'm John Furrier with theCube. We're here in the middle of the action at Mobile World Congress at Cloud City is where the action is. Danielle Royston and Telco DR. Digital disruption here happening. This next interview I did with Casey Choi, the Executive Vice President at Samsung. I did this remotely. He couldn't be here in person. We wanted to bring him in for a conversation. I had a chance to record this with him. He talks about the intelligent Human Edge or Industry 4.0. It was about Edge computing, Samsung as a leader. Obviously we know what they do. They're part of this IOT revolution, Casey Choi, brilliant executive I really enjoyed my conversation. Take a listen. (upbeat music) Welcome to theCube's coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. I'm John Furrier host of theCube. We're here with Cube alumni, Casey Choi's Executive Vice President and GM of the Global Mobile B2B Team, Communications Team at Samsung. Casey, great to see you. Thank you for coming off for the special Remote Mobile World Congress. We're here in person, but also hybrid event. We got a lot of remote interviews. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. >> John. Great to see you. Great as always to be with you and great to be at least here, virtually with the team and in Barcelona from WC. >> You know, in Samsung, we think about the edge. You are leading a team that's driving this innovation. We've talked in the past about Industry 4.0, but the innovation at the intelligent edge, human edge is a big part of it, with 5G. It's just another G, but it's not just another G you got to have a backbone. You got to have a back haul. You got to have an interconnection. You have commercial, not just consumer technology. So the edge is becoming both this human and device commercial environment. So the industry is quickly moving to this. You call it the 4.0 trend. What do you see happening? This is a clear change over the Telco is not what it used to be. Change is coming fast. A lot of disruption, what's your view? >> Yeah, I think we see a number of things done. And certainly from our perspective, which is, I think we've got somewhat of a unique view on this because of our huge focus really in consumer use and attitudes. And certainly it's been informed by what we've seen, what we've all collectively seen over the last year and a half or so, and are still seeing today. And I think one of the things that we're certainly experiencing is I think the edge is it's expanding further out. I think it's also getting more tightly coupled in many respects to the human factor. And it's not just a set of billions of discrete sensors anymore. And I think the evolution of our thinking around this has changed quite a bit from the IOT Version One variant of this. We put more of what I would call billions of these things, communicating all kinds of information, either to the cloud or the data centers and doing it in a very voluminous way. And what we're saying is with the advent of more the human to machine interface, and certainly the capabilities that we're saying both on the network and the device side, it's really redefining how we're thinking about edge. And certainly here at Samsung and with some of our partners, and we're starting to call this more of the intelligent human edge, where the human factor really begins to play a big role in how we're defining the Internet Of Things. And those things include really people. And this is how we're looking at it. >> I love the theme, the human edge, I think that's very relevant. I want to get a human aspect of here tied into the industry side, because as we emerge from the pandemic and move to a broader economic recovery, you see the psychology of the industry where cloud is one of the shining examples of what the pandemic highlighted cloud speed, cloud agility. And now you're seeing with openness in the Teleco industry, that cloud is coming in, open cloud interoperability. So coming out of the pandemic, cloud is the theme is driving an economic recovery, which is driving the psychology of we're back to real life, we're back to business, but it's not business as usual. The fashion is changing. The attitudes are changing. You mentioned that, and now the disruption of how cloud will be implemented. And it seems to be Telco is where these edge and cloud are just completely radically changing, what was once a kind of a slow moving Telco space. So how do you see the partnerships and coming out of the pandemic, some of the response of cloud impact, cloud technology, public cloud impact on this new Telcom? >> Yeah. Let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think we see two dimensions on this, certainly on the carrier side, the operator's side of the equation, we're certainly partnered with everybody across the globe on that. Certainly there's been a definitive impact around software defined everything, right? So, and this has been accelerated really by the standards that have started to develop around 5G. And even now there's a lot of discussion and I'm sure there'll be a lot of it around WMC about 6G and what is happening there. But I think with the advent of things like O-RAN for example, and some of the activity that we're seeing really around NEC type solutions and opportunities, the traditional role of the carrier and the operator is evolving and has to evolve, right? It is now much more aligned with the provision of these types of services that are very different from the type of data or voice services that we've seen in the past. So certainly we're seeing that transition. The second big transition is really around the notion of hybridity. Now we've been talking about this now in the industry for a while, but I think it's really starting to take firm root the idea of not only multiple clouds, but clouds that are deployed either on prem or certainly, available as a service in its various forms. So I think that combination along with the advances that we're seeing in the technology, and this was both on the connectivity side. So certainly around the ultra reliable, low latency communications, what we're seeing with things like slicing, for example, starting to take root as well as frankly, the devices themselves are getting that much more powerful and compact. This is what we're saying with SOC technologies is what we're seeing with the functions being moved more and more to on device capability. So I think about hybrid, I mean, in my past to think about it more as a small data center. How do you compact it, move it out to somewhere else. Now we're thinking about it more in terms of the type of processing capability that you can put really in the hands of the human or hands of the device. And at that point, you really start to get different use cases, start to emerge from that. So this is how we're thinking about this extension and what I'm talking about more as, an expansion on the edge, further out. >> I love is it splicing or slicing, what's the term? Slicing is the technology? >> Slicing, network slicing. >> Slicing, not splicing cable. >> Yeah. >> Slicing. >> Not splicing cable, no. >> Okay so this come up a lot, so splicing kind of points to this end to end, workflows. You look at some of the modern development, the frameworks of successful, you're seeing these multifunctional teams kind of having an end to end visibility into the modern application workflow from CIC pipeline, whatever. Now, if you take the concept of O-RAN you mentioned Open Radio Access Networks, this kind of brings up this idea of interoperability, because if you're going to have end to end and you add edge to it, you have to have the ability to watch something go end to end, but it's never been like that in the past because you had to traverse multiple networks. So this becomes kind of this hybrid a little bit deeper. Can you share how you see that and how Samsung's working with folks and how you guys are addressing this because you can be at the edge, but ultimately you've got to integrate. So you've got openness, you've got the idea of interoperability issues, and you ultimately have to move around and work with other networks, other clouds and other systems. This is not, it's not always like that. So can you share how this is evolving and how real this is and what is your view on it. >> Yeah, our thinking on this. I mean, let me start by maybe tackling this in a little bit of a different angle. One of the things that we see as one of the barriers around interoperability has really been more on the application side of the equation. And this is actually the third component in making all of this work. And let me just be very clear in what I'm saying here, I think in terms of mobile architectures and really Edge architectures, it has been one of the last bastions, if you will of closed architectures, there've been very much what I would call purpose-built architectures at the edge. Certainly that's been driven by things like the industrial side coming together with more of the commercial side of the equation, but we think it's time really to extend the interoperability of what we are seeing really on the IT side of the equation and really driven by cloud native. This was really in the area of containers. It's in the area of microservices, it's in the area of cloud native development. And if we're really talking about this, we really need to extend that interoperability from the application point of view on the data point of view, really to the end point. And this is where some of the work that we're doing, and we really embarked on in earnest last year with Red Hat and IBM, and with VMware for example, in really opening up that edge architecture to really the open source community, as well as really to the microservices architectures that we have now seen propagate down from the cloud into hybrid architecture. So this has been really one of the key focus areas for us. The network interoperability has really been driven by the standards that we've seen and that have been really adopted by the industry. And when it comes to, for example 5G standards. what we've been more focused on quite honestly, is the interoperability on the application and data side. And we think that by extending, if you will, that write once run many type concepts down into the edge and into the device, that this is going to open up really a wealth of opportunity for us on the application and on the data side. >> That's awesome, I love the openness, love the innovation you guys are doing. I think that's where the action is and that's where the growth is going to be. I do have to ask you how you see edge computing in the IOT era in terms of security. Are we more vulnerable because of it now? And how are you guys addressing the issue of security and data privacy at the edge? What's your opinion on that? What's Samsung doing? >> I mean, we just have to look at the news today, it's obvious that we are more vulnerable, right? There's no doubt that points of vulnerability are being exposed and they're probably being exposed in now industrial areas, right? Certainly with what we've seen, just even recently with some of the attacks that, that have occurred. So a couple of things there, number one, we are relying very heavily on our long history around establishing root of trust in kind of zero trust environments. We've had our Knox platform as an example, we just celebrated, in fact, our 10th year of the product. In fact, it was announced at MWC back about 10 years ago. So this is something that, that we're celebrating, it's an anniversary. Our belief on this is that we really need to ensure that we maintain a hardware-based route across when it comes to the edge. We can't only rely upon software protection at that layer. We can't naturally rely upon some of the network protections that are there. So, we've shipped about 3 billion devices with our Knox Security Suite over the last 10 years. And this is something that we're relying very heavily on. Not only for again, that hardware based root of process. So one of the key solutions, there's our Knox Vault product, which we just released a few months back. This is really a safe within a safe concept, really ensuring that the biometric password and other user data is protected. It's really what drives some of our strategy around making sure that we rely upon something that protects all of the back doors that are resident, not only at the software layer, but at the hardware layer as well. And then management is the other key piece of this, security without the ability of managing these thousands to millions of devices is really somewhat compromised. So we've extended a lot of our Knox management capability at our device level really to address some of those particular attributes, as well as these fleets become more prominent. And they start to take on workloads that are more critical to IOT type workloads. >> Casey, great to have you on. Your insight's awesome. Love what you're doing at Samsung. And again, you're a leader, you've been there, you've seen those cycles of innovation. I have to ask you my final question for you is a personal one and a professional one. The last Mobile World Congress was 2019. In person, last year was canceled a lot's happened in the industry since 20 something months ago. Now we're going to be in person, a lot of hybrid still remotely, but there'll be people in person. The world's changed. What is the big change in the Telco, Telco Cloud, Telco Edge, what's happened in these 20 plus months since the last Mobile World Congress that people should pay attention to? What's the most important thing in your mind? >> Most important? Thank God John. You're putting me on the spot here, right? I think it's wisdom to be quite honest with you. I mean, we've certainly all collectively learned a lot in terms of user patterns and what people need and want. And I hope to think that collective wisdom is going to be a key part of how we drive this going forward. And then if I can just pick one more, I would say re-invention, I think what we're starting to see is that coming out of, again from 2019 to what we're seeing now, we do see this opportunity reinventing and rethinking. And I think that's the difference. And the pace of that is going to really dictate how we look at this and how we collectively solve these challenges. So I hope to think we're wiser and that we're more imaginative coming out of this. And again after being in this industry for 30 years, we've not seen the types of things that we've seen over the last couple. So I hope to think that this is a pivot point for all of us. >> Well, Samsung is certainly a leader in many areas and great to see you on theCube here and the theme in your talks around intelligence, human edge innovation, open. This is a force that's happening. And I think the big change, as you said, the wisdom combined with a reinvention is happening and it's going to be very interesting ride, should be fun to work on. >> It will be John and I thank you for our friendship and our relationship over the years. It's always great to see you and to be with you. And again, we're very optimistic as we always have, coming out of this And again, thanks for the time and have a great MWC. >> You too, Casey Choi, Executive Vice President General Manager of the Global Mobile Business to Business Unit Commercial Unit at Samsung. This is theCube's coverage of Mobile World Congress. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Okay. We're back here. That was Casey Choi. Talk about wisdom, collective wisdom coming out of the pandemic. Great friend of theCube, great friend of the industry doing great work there. Casey Choi. Like we are doing here on the ground at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City, as well as Adam and the team in the studio. So back to you, Adam and team.

>>Um, okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it. We're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have who's the managing director. Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave. We want to bring him in and get commentary while we end up Dave too. Honestly, the story here is cloud city. We are in the cloud city and all, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming >>On. Thank you, John. And very excited to be here. What Juliet. >>Well, we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert in the year. The only thing standing between bunch of LV and all the great stuff. So a lot of people watching. Thanks for coming on, sir. So you guys got some big news, um, first Erickson partners with you guys on 5g platform, deal with Anthem, as well as, uh, open ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge, a Testament to the industry. I see Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you no stranger to large scale. What's the news. Let's tell us why this Erickson news is so important. Let's start with the Erickson announcement. >>Sure. So John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Erickson for the last few months, uh, the partnership to recent retreat, which is very important to the industry is you're actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not been in isolation. You are in fact in the press release that we have already launched something to get the big telecom Italia in Italy, because you will see that also in the past. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSBs monetize 5g and edge, which is the real team at the moment using Google clouds solutions like the edge computing platform and, and POS, and Erikson's cutting edge 5g components, 5g solutions. And if we can onboard these together at the CSP, such as telecom Italia, that creates massive pain to market efficiency. So that's 0.1 because speed and agility is key John, but then point to it also unlocks a lot of edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, so on, which are already starting to launch together with that. Excellent. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuously cloud native innovation that you just highlighted. John, we are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really time created this cloud native application suite or 5g or whatever. >>Talk about the innovations around cloud, because the message we're hearing him this year at mobile world Congress, is that the public cloud is driving the innovation. And, you know, I can be a little bit over the top. So the telcos are slow. They're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there. They're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept cloud native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that encapsulate that older technology and integrated in. So this is not a rip and replace. Someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the tellers. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >>Smart Antone's photo? We believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is when you talk about that containerization and right once and deploy everywhere type architecture that we are trying to do, that's where the cloud native really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5g solutions with the operators, adjust telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to kick it back again and again, but every deployment, as long as your mantra, genetics and working, you shouldn't be able to have the same experience. >>Yeah, I'm John. I talk all the time in the cube about how developers are really going to drive the edge. You're clearly doing that with your distributed cloud, building out a telco cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving. A lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >>So I think David, first of all, it's a fan best six Sigma in how we are looked in at analytics at the edge, right? So we, uh, we have realized that is a very, very, uh, uh, uh, data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned is there something that we can offer to the edge? Why is that so important in the pandemic era, think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously meeting zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products in manufacturing, that's very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Erickson and a Google cloud carrier gives you that edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to our factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run that AI influence thing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >>Great. Thank you for that. And now the other piece of the announcement of course, is the open, open ran. We've been talking about that all weekend and you know, you well, remember when cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. Of course. Now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component, maybe first talk about the open ran piece, why that's important and how security fits? >>Sure. So first of all, open trend is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple. Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time in the radio layer. We believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and dis-aggregating that radio layer. And why is it so important? 80% of the operators spend globally is on radio. 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that. And if the internet synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware standard for software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in VCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and become still really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution. That's about to get larger in 5g and the capital clarity that 5g needs. >>You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware software with openings of Essex is an extremely important cost dimension to every new site finished that the reason we got to exact open brand was you can now run for a lot of API APIs on the radio net, cetera, that then certainly brings a whole developer community on the radio later. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing, yours and mine experiences at the waist level from the self-doubt. And so that really is what is driving us towards this open grind paper. Come on, we go and >>Got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on open source and the innovation. Um, Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of telco, Dr. She's at a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone 14 years ago was launched. Okay. And you think about open and you mentioned proprietary with the 5g and having Iran be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs increase the surface here of infrastructure. Everyone wins because everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry. And open source is driving. That is Android. The playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with the smart phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at telecom? >>Absolutely. John and the parallel and analogy that you raised is photon. Be believed in the telco world and tossed multi cloud as a unifying software development layer. The app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation, whether it's radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the side of pups, same software planning, everywhere that really allows you that whole development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for systems to come on board. >>That's great stuff. And I was just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at mobile world Congress. I'm all. Thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news and Google regulations on the Erickson Anthem platform, a deal as well as the open Ranton Alliance. Uh, congratulations. Good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on the cube featured segment. So >>Watch that in there. Thank you, John. Thank you. Glad >>To be here. Benching director telecom, industry, solicitor, Google, obviously player. He's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology. They got the chops, Dave, and we're going to now bring this Daniel. Russia says here when to bring up on the stage, Bon Jovi is about to go on behind us Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in cloud city. Dave Bon. Jovi's right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of telco. Dr. And yeah, it was great to see she's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you to Mike. Great to see you. Oh, it's great to be there. We're going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote, but thanks for coming by and closing, >>Swinging by. I never closed down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day-to-day at MWC and in cloud city, really starting to get packed. I mean, everyone's coming in the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. Um, I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening all the buzz about cloud city out there in the hallway. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited with how it's going. >>Well, this is awesome. While we got you here, we want to put you to work being the cube analyst for the segment. You just heard Google. Uh, we broke them in for a breaking news segment. So hard news Erickson partnership. We're in the factory, former Erickson booth. They're not even here, it's now the Calco VR booth, but that's a relation. And then open ran again, open source, you got five G you got open source all happening. What's your take on this? >>You see, you know, there's two big. And I, I talked about it, my keynote this morning, and there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it MWC 21. I certainly wanted to make it about the public cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is open ramp, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and, um, I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, >>Well I loved your keynote. We were here, live. Chloe was here filling in for Dave while David was going to do some research and some breaking stories to you are on stage. And we were talking well, he's like, there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, the money is at the middle of the table and it's changing hands if people don't watch it. And then you onstage that this trillions of dollars, this is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You got operators and builders trying to figure out it feels like dev ops is coming in here. Yeah. I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's >>The, yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the public cloud to double your ARPU without massive cap X expenditure. And I think the CSPs is always viewed to get the increase in ARPU. I got to build out the network. I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our poo, why not? We should do that. Absolutely. >>You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave that arrived the way you're going to become driftwood. As John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they were entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the edge. And that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. It's obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have going to have to embrace cloud native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on it. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. Well, I >>Think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And I think we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to now, historically they haven't had this opportunity historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented. It's available. There's developers out there that know it. Um, and so I think that's the big opportunity and this might be the big use case that they've been looking for with 5g and looking forward to 16th. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSS. >>I think that's an important point because you got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay. Those are pretty safe bets, right. Those guys are going to be around. >>I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. I'm like, um, are you guys nuts? If they're safe, right. Safe >>Bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you got to move fast. Yeah. That's the other piece of it. You've got to change your business model. >>Well, you gotta be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? The snowflake trust Amazon, it sure did to get them where they are. Um, but now that's a >>Great example, John. It really is because there's a company that can move fast, but at the same time they compete with the same time they add incremental value. And so yeah, >>Here, the, you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering telcos. Aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new containers. Do we'll help them manage that operational legacy. But if they don't move, they're going to have an asset. That'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building cap backs and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle Love to get your thoughts on this because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, yeah. Then you can, don't have to try and extract the rents out of the cap ex >>Yeah. I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in telco, right there. I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right. Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their, their investment and uh, for your own benefit, it starts to focus. And we heard, um, all talking about it starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us. Right? Yeah. Well, you're >>Talking about that many times they can do, but you're right. If the conversation hasn't has to go beyond, okay, we're just conductivity. It's gotta be ongoing and be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges. Ah, great. Yeah. Tick that box, right? It's those value added services that you're talking about and it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in a creativity in the industry. It's just >>A blank piece of paper for, well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right. We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving of ads and you're like, how did you write Facebook? But you know, who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother, even your telco, you take your phone with you everywhere. Right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide >>A really great, by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Toby and the investment a hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing. And there's a good, there's a whole new chain, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I don't hold that. We're going and we're going to meet tomorrow. I want, I wanna want to leave that to stay >>In the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That it's, that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that apple, Amazon, Google Facebook now trillion dollar evaluations. It's all about the data and the telcos have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >>There's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them and they certainly can't do without. And we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight it's useless. Right? And so to Togi we announced the launch to Togi, I'll get a little to Tokyo plug in there, right. To Toby is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve and would have been solved already. >>But I think the key is leveraging the public cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provides to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue. Right. And you know, we heard some keynotes from GSA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep. It's not fair. That's like right. South complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they are, they're happy to give you more. >>Yeah. And I think that's the message about the assets do, um, well, one thing I will say is this mobile world Congress is that we've been having a lot of fun here in cloud city. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote of spring to your staff, cloud cities. Beautiful. Spectacular here. Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip. So far, >>Number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered and, and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a blind, um, you know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and, and that was really fun, but yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes. The attendance has reduced, um, you know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups and yeah, the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right. The senior leadership teams are in the booth or having meetings, running amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the public cloud. I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off, I think I'm right in the right moment. Awesome. Do you think that, >>Do you think that they'd think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line struggled and then winners. Yeah. Big time tailwind booming. Obviously the zooms of the world telcos did well. They were up and running. Uh, this, this was good. You think we might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >>Yeah. I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation where digital telco we're digitally enabled, but I think the pandemic really tested this. Right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM or do you need to go to a store in person to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver Sims, all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot right. Agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big telemedicine booming. So >>If you were in a digital business during the pandemic in general, you're out of business maybe unless you were telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh, if >>We don't, I mean, I am not kidding. Right. As an ex CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, right. In some country once a month on Tuesday between 10 and two. And I'm like, how are you doing business? Like that? That's like the dark ages. >>Yeah. This is where the crypto guys got it right. With know your customer. Right. >>Because they have the data. Well, there's a lot of things that come in wrong. We don't want to get the whole show on that, but then you have great to have you drop biopsy Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy Patriots fan. We'd love it. Well, >>Yeah. I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi. Right. Um, we knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. Um, that, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging. Like the way things have been done in telco kind of just shattering the glass ceiling and lots of different ways. Right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me. Right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl? Oh, we're punk >>Rock. They're rock and roll. Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten the clash >>Right. Black flag. Right. I'm a little bit old. >>Accessible. Still >>Edgy. Yeah. So really excited to get them here. Um, I've met him before. Um, and so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk. So >>Yeah, it could be inspiration off after you've talked to space, space X and kind to star lake. >>Right. I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites. And >>I think that's really interesting for >>Rural right. In telco. Right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, um, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower. I think, I mean, that's an interesting idea right there. It's exciting. It's exciting. >>He's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming into this issue. Why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, Hey, you're a B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. Yeah. I think eventually the generation shifts >>It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it. Yeah. Great, >>Great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >>Awesome team. I'm psyched to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership has said. Yeah. >>Cuba's keep us rocking inside the cloud city. The streets of the city are packed in here. All stuff. Great stuff. Thanks for coming on. Thanks. Bon Jovi is here. We've got a shot. A bunch of we do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? Yup. There it is. Okay. He's about to come on stage and uh, we're gonna take a break here. We're gonna take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

(light music) >> Okay, we're back here in theCube On The Floor. We're at Cloud City thanks to everyone in the studio. We're here and we bring all the action from the floor. Danielle Royston is about to walk on. We got a great remote interview. Also it's a physical event but it's virtual, so it's a hybrid event with people coming in remotely we've got Mark Collins, Senior Vice President of Commercial Product Management ZephyrTel. Mark, thanks for coming on. You're head of the Product Management, you're responsible for product vision. Calling in, or remote-in in from Ireland great to see you, wish you were here. >> Thank you, John, I wish I was there, too. >> We had a great chat yesterday with Michael a CEO of the company. Public Cloud is a big driver what you guys are part of, it's a sea change. For some of the world, it's an obvious shift it's been going on for a long time, in Telco it's new. What's the story give us the vision of the product. >> So, ZephyrTel are actually a provider of multiple products within the Telco space, and one of our visions is very much about bringing those products into a marketplace capability that Telco's can start engaging in and interacting with them much more simply than they would've been with their vendor suppliers in the past. >> What's the difference between Cloud on premises and in the Public Cloud for Telco, what's the psychology right now of Telco? Most people have lifted and shifted and re-platformed with the cloud in the enterprise side, certainly that's been going on for many many years, now you're seeing people re-factor their business in the cloud and get really neat new advantages. Not just cost optimization and benefits with the re-platforming, or lift and shift, but they got new capabilities. Where's the Telco adoption on this spectrum of re-platforming and re-factoring the public cloud? Early, are they toe in the water? Are they jumping in? What's happening? >> I think very very early like, I've worked in the Telco space for the last 20 years, and certainly for the last five, all of the buzz has been about moving to cloud native solutions (applause in the background) But a lot of the Telco vendors that are right there are still very much looking ahead in supplying solutions (dialogue drowned out by thunderous applause) >> Okay, DR just walked in, sorry to interrupt, letting the folks know that we've got the big entourage here in Cloud City, Danielle Royston, is the CEO of TelcoDR and the CEO of Totogi. And we've started to see TelcoDR, DR being digital revolution or Danielle Royston, however you want to look at the DR part of it. But really a game changer in the Telco industry put a real dent in the universe here with Cloud City, Danielle Royston, just a little entourage there and a cheer for her coming back to her home base here, MWC, see where the Cube is, and where the main stage is Mark, sorry to interrupt you there, continue. So, are they there? Are they jumping in? Is there fear? Are they building? Are they just still operating? We just had a little segment discussing like, the difference between being a builder versus an operator like the confluence of war time and peace time. >> I actually think there's a lot of fear, like I think if you look at the way Telco look at clouds, one of the biggest blockers that I think a lot of them face is that they have this perception that their network, and what they provide as a solution to customers is a stable business model. Like there's been very little input as from the outside to force them into replacing some of their outdated core technologies and they have some very very legacy views on how they model TCO in the future cost to their business which, unless they change those attitudes, some of what they can benefit from the public cloud is going to be lost on them. >> You mentioned legacy, one of the things I want to get your thoughts on quickly is that, the notion of it's always been a customized game, I call it the OT world, you know, operating technologies versus IT, information technology. Different mindsets, you know, one's very IP driven write software, open source now, drives that but you have a lot of legacy, and they build custom solutions when the world seems to be spinning towards open and standardized. What's your take? >> Yeah, I see that as a huge challenge when you look at what Telcos want from a software perspective. Like, they want products, but they still have this huge expectation that their specific needs are going to be addressed, right? And the challenge I see there is that when you talk about customization, most of the time that drives a divergence away from what a product is, to a bespoke solution, which creates a huge number of issues for service providers when it comes to how they do upgrades in the future, or for that matter, what they ultimately have to pay the vendors for the professional services to build those customizations. >> Talk about the Telco's consideration for interfaces, how they should handle interfaces and other standards because, it's an EPI economy, we know that, but now as things start to get more interconnected integration is going to be a big thing, especially with the Edge becoming a much more of a competitive and dynamic, and people care about the Edge cause it's consumer, it's education, it's healthcare it's not just some device on a network it's actually, societal impact, social change, real value. >> Yeah, no, I 100% agree, like I mean, you could probably credit Telcos for what been the way of the normal for network in the last 20 years with regards to all the standardization that's happened in bodies like 3GPP, but I guess in the IT world or in the domain of how you actually deliver capabilities to your end customer, or even in the experiences that you develop for your consumers. A lot of that has been bespoke development, software plugged together, built on premise and not necessarily taking advantage of the openings that you see on the RAM and on the network side of things >> Mark, I want to ask you while I have you here I know we've got a couple of minutes left, but I want to get your thoughts on this since it's been since February 2019 since Mobile World Congress had an event so in dog years or internet years, whatever metaphor you want to use, it's been a long time and a lot of time has passed. What's your assessment of where the industry is? >> I think all you have to do is look back at the last year and a half and see the sea change that has happened in a huge amount of industries around how they've reacted to the ability to deliver new capabilities very quickly on the back of what happened to us with COVID. And I think Telco has in a lot of cases, have been at the forefront of providing network experiences for people as they move to working from home, but they haven't necessarily had the same agility or the same ability to make change when it comes to the customer experiences in the products and services that they build on top. And I think they need to take advantage of what everybody else has been able to do with public clouds in the last year. >> Yep, and I think infrastructures code changes everything DevOps, which is a cloud term, is development and operations, they have to work together, now it's DevSecOps, so I think the same thing is going to happen to Telcos and I'm a big fan and bullish on the Telcos business model because if you embrace the change, if you ride that wave, and, right, you're not going to be driftwood and that is all about keeping the change going and keeping it real relative to the value, because Telco saved us during COVID. Right? So the operational aspect of the network didn't crash, we had some bad zoom meetings here and there but for the most part, people lived and they survived. So, got to give props to that, and that's the purpose now it's next level. Edge applications have to come on board faster, we need more software. How does that happen in your mind? >> I think a lot of that has to come from vendors like ourselves who start providing a different way and a different approach for how operators can consume the software that they purchase, right? Like, if they keep working with the same vendors that they have today, they'll spec their requirements they'll write down what they need and they'll ask somebody to build it for them and that'll take a long time. By the time they've actually got it built, it'll probably be the wrong thing, or likely will have moved on if you look at the pace of change that we have seen in the last year with COVID and everything else. And I think a cloud specialist vendor like ourselves can come and provide a huge amount of value to an operator when we're building a solution that many operators can consume within our marketplace products. >> Awesome. Mark, great to have you on, 30 seconds left, put a plug in for ZephyrTel what are you working on, you hiring? You've got 30 seconds, go. >> We're hiring, we're growing, we're presenting a number of different solutions in Mobile World Congress, looking at both customer experience in IOT and a number of different areas where we're heavily involved. Absolutely come seek out the people from ZephyrTel that are there and look at the demos and meet with the guys on the ground they've got a huge amount of information to share. >> Awesome. Mark Collins CEO Vice President of Commercial Product Management, really changing the game, making service providers get the value from the network and making it easy for having meaningful exchange that's positive impact, changing the world, and really making it happen. Of course, let's send it back to the studio, Adam and the team.

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE's back on day three here in Cloud City Mobile World Congress. This is where all the action is, and this is theCUBE set. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're here with DR, Danielle Royston, who is the CEO of TelcoDR, as well as the CEO of Totogi. Great to see you again. >> Hey. >> Hey, how are you guys? >> Good. >> Great time, great boat last night, good industry executives. A lot of intimate high player, big players here in the industry, even though not a lot of attendance, but the right people are here and events are back. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think, MWC was the first event to cancel with COVID in February, end of February 2020. So first big event to come back. It's such a nice symmetry. Yeah. Typically you have big delegations, hundreds of people from the big groups coming to the show. We're seeing the executives are coming, smaller delegations, but they're all in the booth and that we're having great conversations and it's awesome. >> Yeah, and the thing I will say is that theCUBE's back too. We'd like them to be, be in here in the action, because one of the things that's happened with this hybrid events is that people are watching. And so there's a virtual space and the physical space and Cloud City has built out paradise. It's beautiful and spectacular behind us. If you look around, for the people who can't see, it's really made for the combination of on-site and virtual experience, the content, the people, Bon Jovi last night, it's just the top of Mobile World Congress and it's translating to the industry. This has been amazing. So congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Well. I got to say, you have a lot to say as we all know. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But I think it was easy for the big guys. >> Danielle: Can't shut me up. (laughing) >> That's why we love you in theCUBE. But I think it was easy for the big guys to tap out and say, hey, we can save a bunch more money. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> We don't really have much to talk about. We're going to talk about it again. Hey, let's talk about 5G. >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. >> 5G's coming. >> It's the revolution. >> And I told you about 5G though. >> Whereas the narrative here is all about the future. And it's not about the future of blah blah blah, it's about the future of, this is the journey that we're taking and here's where it's starting and with the meat in the bone. >> Yeah. And I think what's really interesting about Cloud City is the fact that we've brought these different players together that are all focused, as you said, on the future. And I'm starting to see these connections where they're collaborating. Vendors that didn't know each other probably would never have partnered before. Totally different areas. I'm hearing the conversation in the booth about like, hey, I talked to P1 security, or I went and talked to LMX and we're putting deals together 'cause we're complimentary. And it's amazing and so that's really good. >> And the integration partnership, heard that from Google yesterday on our news exclusive break in there. They see integration and they're talking about Android, with what Android did for mobile. They're seeing a whole new software paradigm coming into telco. Its partnership, its ecosystem and open. These are new kind of dynamics. >> And I think for you guys, when you say integration and open, I think those things are really paired and they're important. A lot of times Telco people will hear integration, and they'll think customization. Coding it up and customizing it so that they talk to each other. But I think the open part of that is really important where we're connecting via APIs. And I think that's bringing the hyperscalers. That's what they do. They provide these systems and the software that's all API based and you can use it very quickly and you can unravel it if you need to. And it's that feature velocity, we talked about a couple days ago. >> And automation is the underpinning. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean, that's really the theme, right? >> Right. >> It's not like a one-off hardcore custom integration that's going to be frozen. >> One time to upgrade it every 18 months or whatever it is. Yeah, it's a life. >> Dave: How about Musk yesterday? >> John: I mean, he's always a crowd pleaser. First of all, my kids love him. He's crazy. >> Who doesn't love Elon Musk? >> I mean, he is amazing. He's a builder and he takes no prisoners. He's just, you know what, my goal was not to go bankrupt. That's what he said a couple of years ago. >> Dave: Which was brilliant because everybody's gone bankrupt in that business and he's just close it off. >> And he's just like, look, we're here, we're just going to chip away at it and we're just going to keep striving, not making up excuses. He takes the failures. He takes the phase plans. He gets back up and he keeps going. He's focused on building. >> He's focused on one thing. He's not focused on everything. He's focused on getting to Mars. And I think that's what I like to compare myself to Elon Musk. Not that I'm building rockets or getting to Mars, but that the hard problem that I'm solving is getting Telco to the public cloud and that's going to take a decade. It might have been accelerated because of COVID, it might've taken 20 years and now it might take 10. But you look at what he does, and that guy, he has haters on Twitter that are pew- pew. Always like, throw in their bars, but he's like, I got my rocket company. I got my communication and space company. We're going to need the bore holes, the Boring Company. I need batteries, I got my Tesla company. And so this guy focuses. >> He's got some haters, but he's got a lot more lovers on his other side because people might not know this, but he fired the entire PR department because he's like, I don't need PR. I'm just going to go do my own, his own PR. >> Obviously, the crypto stuff's always fun. Doge coins, always a laugh. >> Danielle: I think he just plays around with that. >> And it's just more of like playing. >> Yeah, that's a watch this. >> He just likes to see what he can do. >> Doge coins app. That Saturday Night Live was an interesting thing he did, but I think he illustrates the point of a new generation. And I think my young kids, not young, they're in their twenties now. They look at him and they say, that's aspirational because he's building and he's focused on that one thing. And again, the growth that you mentioned Telco to the cloud, getting back to that is that, I want to ask you this growth question. It used to be like, okay, growth was there, people expanded cell towers, networks were networks. Now it seems that the growth of Telco, with Telco is going into, with the edge and all the open-RAN stuff, which means we need more infrastructure. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> We need more stuff. There's more needed and there's growth behind them. What's your reaction? >> I think we need more software. Software eats the world. And it's, I mean, there's a lot of hardware to chomp in Telco and it's just going to keep eating it and that's just going to accelerate. I think that's where Telco needs to start to build that muscle. They don't have great software capability. They don't have public cloud building capability. And so that's a big up-skilling. That's a new hiring. And I think it's an executive conversation. It's not just an IT thing or just a marketing thing or networking thing. >> I got to chime in here for a second because there are a lot of parallels with how the data center transition has occurred. And what's happening here. We talk about all the time. It was a mainframe, et cetera. There are parallels. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> And what happened when the data center went to software-defined a whole bunch of hardware was allocated to run all the software-defined stuff. It wasn't built for that. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But the cloud, what you guys are doing with Totogi and taking advantage of AWS's is Nitro and Graviton. That's built to be software-defined. >> Correct. >> And so the Telcos are going to go through the same thing. If they just virtualize, they're going to say, oh wow, we're wasting 30% of our power, our compute power on just supporting all this software-defined stuff, because it wasn't built for that, but the cloud is built for that. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And that is going to be a huge difference. >> And I keep trying to make this distinction. And I think people in Telco still don't get this about the public cloud. They think of it as a place. It's a place to run a workload. And that tells me, they think of it as infrastructure. They think of it as servers still like, well, I'm going to run into my closet or AWS's closet. I'm like, and I was just having a conversation about this with this senior person from GSMA. I'm like, it's actually about the software that's there. It's about the databases they're building and the analytics and the AI and the ML but they let you buy by the minutes or by the API call. And that is my, like you need to think about that because it's mind-blowing. It's a totally different way to think. >> And you're totally right. I'm just going to, again, give you props on this. I've had many one-on-one with Andy Jassy for the past seven years for exclusives, but over the years it's been consistent. Each platform lifting and shift wasn't the end game. Okay. Replatforming in the cloud, certainly a great advantage, a great starting point. It was the refactoring. And that's why you see Amazon Web Services, for instance, keep adding more services 'cause that's the model. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> They keep offering more goodness so that the businesses could refactor, not just replatform. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And that's what you're getting at. I think with the AI and machine learning, where you start getting into these new use cases, but why I couldn't do that before. >> Danielle: Right, right. >> This is going to be a huge game changer. >> Well, Forrest Brazeal. A great guy, a cloud guru wrote a great blog called a lift-and-shift is a ticking time bomb. And it's a great start to get your stuff over there. It forces your team to start to interact with like an AWS or GCP in a real way. Like now they, they got to use it. You take it away and I'm like, but once you move it, you got to re-factor. You got to rewrite. And then that's why it's a ticking time bomb. You got to get, move it over and get going. >> Danielle Royston, DR, Digital Revolution of you are one. You got it here, Telco DR. And this has been a great experience for theCUBE, as we get back to business with real life events and virtual. For the folks who couldn't make it here, Barcelona is still a great city. Obviously a great place to come and the events will be back. They'll be hybrid. They'll be different. Certainly, theCUBE will wait double them down, but, we've got a great video. I want to share for the group, the Barcelona and Cloud City. This is a montage of what it's like here and a little experiential video. So take it away and run that video. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi, I'm Katie Goldfinch, here in Barcelona for an action packed Day Two at TelcoDR's Cloud City. This morning, the focus was firmly on DR. and her MWC keynote, which told Telco execs in no uncertain terms that now is the time to act on embracing public cloud. Back in Cloud City content ruled the day with both theCUBE and Cloud City live stages, hosting public cloud, thought-leaders covering a wide range of topics to educate and inspire attendees. And in the beautiful space of Cloud City, the excitement grew throughout the day as we streamed MWC's exclusive keynotes from Elon Musk and preparations got underway for tonight's star performer, Jon Bon Jovi. (upbeat techno music) Wow! What an amazing day from groundbreaking keynotes into space and back to a star studded performance. Don't forget, you can catch up on anything you missed and join us for the rest of the week at cloudcity.telcodr.com or following #cloudcity. (upbeat techno music) >> Okay, we're back. That was great look at what's going on here in Cloud City. This next video, DR, you're going to love this. Your keynote highlights and some Bon Jovi highlights, which by the way, was the most epic thing. People were packed. >> Dave: It was exciting. >> Place was packed. It had the security clicking people, counting all the people, people are standing back. All the people from their booths are all coming in to watch. >> Dave: He was pumped. >> Let's take a look at this awesome highlight video from yesterday. (upbeat techno music) (upbeat techno music) >> Okay, we're back at theCUBE. Dave, that was a highlight reel yesterday. DR has got some action on stage, great messaging, revolution, digital revolution. >> You know your comment about how you think like Elon Musk. That's an inspiration from it. I mean, what a lot of people don't know is when you look at autonomous vehicles, remember you're driving down Palo Alto, you see one of those lidar things. He's doing away with lidars, it's too expensive. It's $7,000. He's taking it with cheap cameras and software down to a couple of hundred bucks per vehicle. >> Danielle: Wow. >> That's the way he thinks. And you're doing the same thing to Telco. >> Danielle: I am. I am I'm trying to change Telco. I mean, he's changing the world. He might be one of the most important humans on Earth right now. I don't think I'm exactly that level, but I'm trying to become a really important person in Telco. We have this great message. I think it's going to help Telcos to get better businesses. And I think it's a great idea. >> For the folks out there watching, what is that big change? If you're going to drive down this Cloud City street, main street of Cloud City and just all about Cloud. Because public clouds here, it's going to become hybrid, dynamics, operating models are changing. What is the key message that you'd like to send? >> I think all of the software in Telco needs to be rewritten. And that's how many millions of lines of code is that? And it's going to be shrunk down and put out on public cloud and rewritten using the software Legos of the public cloud. That is a big undertaking. No one's working on it. I'm working on it. I'm doing it. Let's go do it. >> Let's do it. And if you look out a couple of years, what would be a successful, what does checkmate look like in this chess game? >> I'm winning? #winning >> You're opening move is pretty good as we say in chess. >> I mean, I think it, it takes, again, it takes singular focus like Elon Musk on Mars. Someone needs to singularly focus on getting the public cloud and you can't sit there and protect your old business models, your CR revenue, if you're Amdocs. Give that up. When they start to give up their CR revenue to focus on public cloud, then they'll be, okay, there's a worthy adversary out there really focusing on it. >> I mean the late Clayton Christensen had all the same things. Innovator's dilemma. You get stuck here, what do you do? >> Danielle: What do you do? >> You kill your own, you eat your own to bring in the new, I mean, all these things are going on. This is a huge test. >> And to be willing to burn some boats. >> I think it's transparency, simplicity, and the consumer saying, hey, this is a great experience. That's the Tel sign. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And that's what we're going to see over this next decade. >> Plus consumers love their Telco. I can't wait for that. I want to love my Telco. >> Dave: Like you love Netflix. >> Yes, exactly. >> DR, we love you because you've got a bold vision. You're putting it out there and you're driving it. You're walking the talk. Congratulations. And again, Cloud City's a home run. >> Awesome. >> Great success. Thanks for having theCUBE. >> Thank you guys. As always super fun. Great day. >> Okay. >> CUBE's coverage here. And remember, we're here getting all the action and it's all going to go online after a synchronous consumption. But right now, it's all about Mobile World Congress and Cloud City. This is the action. And of course, Adam in Cloud City Studio is waiting for us and he's going to take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back here in theCUBE, this is day three of our coverage right here in the middle of all the action of Cloud City at Mobile World Congress. This is the hit of the entire show in Barcelona, not only in person, but out on the interwebs virtually, this is a hybrid event. This is back to real life, and theCUBE is here. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante and DR is here, Danielle Royston. >> Totally. >> Welcome back to theCUBE for the fourth time now at the anchor desk, coming back, we love you. >> Well, it's been a busy day, it's been a busy week. It's been an awesome week. >> John: Feeling good? >> Oh my God. >> You made the call. >> I've made the call. >> You did on your podcast what, months ago. >> Yeah, right? >> You made the call. >> Made the call. >> You're on the right side of history. >> Right, and people were like, it's going to be canceled. COVID won't be handled, blahbity blah. >> She's crazy. >> Nope, I was just crazy, I'm okay with that, right? >> Crazy good. >> Right, I'm like I'm forward looking in a lot of ways. And we were looking towards June and we're like, I think this is going to be the first event back. >> You know, the crazy ones commercial that Apple ran is one of the best commercials of all time. You can't ignore the crazy ones in a good way. You can't ignore what you're doing. And I think to me, what I'm so excited about is cause we've been covering cloud we're cloud bigots, we love the cloud, public cloud. We've been on that train from day one. But when you hear the interviews we did here in theCUBE and interviews that we talked about with the top people, Google, Amazon Web Services. We're talking about the top people, both technology leaders like Bill Vass and the people who run the telecom verticals like Alfonzo, Adolfo, I mean, Hernandez. We had Google's top networking executive, we had their industry leader and the telecom, Microsoft and the Silicon all are validating, and it's like, surround sound to what you're saying here, and it cannot be ignored. >> I mean, we are coming to a big moment in Telco, right? And I mean, I've been saying it's coming. I called 2021, the year of Public Cloud and Telco. It helped that Erickson bailed. So thank you, Erickson people. >> It was a gift. >> It was a gift. >> It was. >> It really was a gift. And it was not just for me, but I think also for the vendors in the booth, I mean, we have a Cloud City army, right? Here we go, let's start marching, and it's awesome. >> He reminds me of that baseball player that took a break, cause he had a hangover and, Cal Ripkin. >> Cal Ripkin? >> Yeah, what was that guy's name? >> Did that really happen? >> Yeah, he took a break and uh- >> New guy stepped in. >> Yeah, and so well, not Cal Ripkin. >> No, no, so before, you want to know, who was it, Lou Gehrig? >> Lou Gehrig, yeah, Lou Gehrig. >> Right, so, Lou Gehrig was nobody, and we can't remember the guy's name, nobody knows the guy's name, what was that guy's name? Nobody knows, oh, there's Lou Gehrig, he got hurt. He sat out and Lou Gehrig replaced him and never hear of him again. >> Danielle: Love it, I'll take that. >> Never, never missed a game for his entire career. So again, this is what Erickson did, they just okay, take a break. >> Yeah, but I mean, it's been great again. I had a great day yesterday, my keynote was delivered. Things are going well with the booth, we had Jon Bon Jovi. I mean, that was just epic and it was acoustic and it was right after lockdown. I think everyone was really excited to be there. But I was talking to a vendor that said we'd been able to accomplish in three days, what normally it would take three years from a sales funnel perspective. I mean, that's big and that's not me. That's not my organization. That's other organizations that are benefiting from this energy. Oh, it's awesome. >> The post isolation economy has become a living metaphor for transformation, and I've been trying to sort of grok and put the pieces together as to how this thing progresses in my interview with Portal One in particular really brought it into focus for me, anyway, I'd love to get your thoughts. One of the things we haven't talked much about is public policy, and I think about all the time, all the discussion in the United States about infrastructure, this is critical infrastructure, right? And the spectrum is a country like South Africa saying, come on in, we want to open up. We want to innovate, to me, that's the model for these tier two and tier three Telcos that are just going to disrupt the big guys, whereas, maybe China's maybe on the other end of the spectrum, very controlling, but it's the former that is going to adopt the cloud sooner, and it's going to completely transform the next decade. >> Yeah, I think this is a great technology for a smaller challenge or CSP that still is a large successful company to challenge the incumbents that are, they are dinosaurs too, they move a little bit slow, and maybe if you're a little bit faster, quicker dinosaur you'll survive longer, maybe you'll be able to transform and, and a public cloud enables that. And I think, you know I'm playing the long game here, right? Is public cloud already for every Telco in every corner of the world, no. And there's a couple of things that are barriers to that. We don't really talk about the downsides, and so maybe we sort of wrap up with- there are challenges and acknowledge there are challenges, you know, in some cases their data regulations and issues, right? And you can't right? There's not a hyperscaler in your country, right? And so you're having a little bit of challenges, but you trend this out over 10 years and then pace it with the hyperscalers that are building new data centers. They're each at 25 plus each, you know, plus or minus a few, right? They're marching along, and you trend this out over 10 years, I think one of two things happened, your data regulations are eased or a hyperscaler appears in a place you can use it, and those points converge and hopefully the software's there, and that's my effort and (claps) yeah. >> Dave: You know what's an interesting trend, DR and John, that is maybe a harbinger to this, is you just mentioned something. If the hyperscalers might not have a presence in, in a country, you know what they're doing? And our data shows this, I do that weekly series breaking analysis and the data Openstack was popping up. Like where does OpenStack come from, well, guess what, when you cut the data, it was Telcos using open source to build clouds in regions where there was no hyperscalers. >> It's a gap filler. >> Yeah, it's a gap filler, it's a bandaid. >> But I think this is where, like. outpost is such a great idea, right? Like getting outposts, and I think Microsoft has the ability to do this as well, Google less so, right? They're not providing the staff, they're doing Anthos. So you're still managing this, the rack, but they're giving you the ability to tap into their services. But I was talking to a CTO in Bolivia. He was like, we have data privacy issues in our country. There's no hyperscaler, not sure Bolivia is like next on the list for AWS, right? But he's like, I'm going to build my own public cloud. And I'm like why would you do that when you can just use outposts? And then when your data regulations release, where they get to Bolivia, you can switch and you're on the stack, and you're ready to go. I think that's what you should do. You should totally do that. >> John: Yeah, one of the things that's come up on here in the interviews, in theCUBE and here, the show is that there are risk takers and innovators and there's operators. And this has been the consistent theme around, yeah, the on-premises world you mentioned this regulation reasons, and or some workflows just have to be on premise for security reasons, whatever, that's the corner case. But the operating model of the technology architecture is shifted. And that reality, I don't think is debatable, so I find it, I got to ask you this because I'm really curious. I know you get a lot of people staring at ya, oh the public cloud's just a hosting, but why aren't people getting this architectural shift? I mean, you mentioned outpost and wavelength, which Amazon has, is a game changer. It's Amazon cloud at the hub. >> Yeah, at the edge. >> Okay, that's a low latency, again, low-hanging fruit applications, real buys, whatnot. I mean, that's an architectural dot that's been connected. Why are people getting it. >> In our industry, I think it is a lot of not invented here syndrome, right? And that's a very sort of nineties thought and I have been advocating stand on the shoulders of the greatest technologists in the world, right, and you know, there's, there is a geopolitical US thing, I think we lived through a presidency that had a sort of nationalistic approach and a lot of those conversations pop up, but I've also looked to these guys and I'm like, you're still, you still have your Huawei kit installed. And there's concerns with that too. So, and you picked it because of cost, and it's really hard to switch off of, so give me a break with your public cloud USA stuff, right? You can use it, you're just making excuses, you're just afraid. What are you afraid of, the HR implications? Let's talk about that, right? And the minute I take it there, conversation changes. >> Yeah, I talked to Teresa Carlson when she was running the public sector at AWS, she's now president of Splunk. I call her a Renaissance woman. She's been a great leader and public sector for this weird little pocket of AWS where it's a guess a sales division, but it's still its own company. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And she's, did the CIA deal, the DOD, and the public sector partnerships are now private, a lot more private relationships, So it's not like just governments, you mentioned government and national security, and these things, you started to see the ecosystem not, not just be about companies, >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Government and private sector. So this whole vibe of the telecom being regulated, unregulated, unbundled is an interesting kind of theory. What's your thoughts and reactions to this, kind of this, melting pot of ecosystem change and evolution? >> Danielle: Yeah, I mean. I think there's a very nationalistic approach by the Telcos, right? They sort of think about the countries that they operate in. There's a couple of groups that go across multiple countries, but can there be a global Telco? Can that happen, right? Just like we say, you were saying it earlier, Netflix, right? You can say Netflix, UK. Right, and so can we have a global Telco, right. That is challenging on a lot of different levels. But think about that in a public cloud start to enable that idea, right? Elon Musk is going to get to Mars. You need a planetary level Telco. And I can, I think that day is, I mean, I don't think it's tomorrow, but I think that's like 10, 20 years away. >> Dave: You're done, we're going to see it start this decade, it's already starting. We're going to see the fruits of that dividend. >> Danielle: Yeah, it's crazy. >> I've got to ask you, you're a student of the industry and you get so much experience, it's great to have you on theCUBE and chat about, riff about these things, but, the classic who's ready for disruption question comes up, and I think there's no doubt that the Telcos as an industry has been slow moving and the role and the importance has changed. People need the need to have the internet access they need to access. >> Yeah. >> So, and you've got the edge, now applications are now running on it, since the iPhone 14 years ago, as you pointed out, people now are interested in how packets move. That's fast whether it's a doctor or an emergency worker or someone. >> Danielle: What we have done in 2020 without the internet and broadband and our mobile phones, I mean? >> You know, I think about 1920 when the Spanish flu pandemic hit a hundred years ago, those guys did not have mobile phones and they must have been bored, right? I mean, what are you going to do, right? And so, yeah I think last year really moved a lot of thinking forward in this respect, so. >> Yeah, it's always like that, that animal out in the Serengeti that gets taken down, you know, by the cheetah or the lion. How do know when someone is going to be disrupted What's the, what's the tell sign in your mind, you look at the Telco landscape. What is someone waiting to be disrupted or replaced like? >> You know what they're ostriches, how do you say that word, right? They stick their head in the sand. Like I don't want to talk about it, la la la, I don't want to, I don't want to think about it. You know, they bring up all these like roadblocks, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to come visit you in another six months to a year, and let's see what happens when the guys that are moving fast that are open-minded to this, and it's, I mean, when you start to use the public cloud, you don't, like, turn it on overnight. You start experimenting, right? You start, you take an application that is non-threatening. You have, I mean, these guys are running thousands of apps inside their data centers. Pick some boring ones, pick some old ones that no one likes, and move that to the public cloud, play with it. Right, I'm not talking about moving a whole network overnight tomorrow. You got to learn, you have no, I mean, very little talent in the Telco that know how to program against the AWS stack. Start hiring, start doing it, and you're going to start to learn about the compensation, and I used to do compensation, right? I spent a lot of time in HR, right? The compensation points and structures, they compare AWS and Google, versus a Telco. Do you want Telco stock? Do you want Google stock? >> Dave: Right, where do you want to go? >> Right, right? like that's going to challenge the HR organization in terms of compensate. How do we compensate our people when they're learning these new valuable skills? >> When you think about disruption, you know, the master or the professor of disruption, Clay Christensen, one of the best lectures he ever gave was who at Cambridge, and he gave a lecture on the steel industry, and he was describing it, it was like four layers of value in the steel industry, the value chain, it started with rebar, like the lowest end, right? >> Danielle: Yeah yeah. >> And the Telco's actually the opposite, so that, you know, when, when the international companies came in, they went after rebar, and the higher end steel companies said, nah, let them have it, that's the low margin stuff. And then eventually, uh, when they got up to the high end. >> Danielle: It was over, yeah. >> The Telcos are the opposite. They're like, the, you know, in the, in the conductivity and they're hanging on to that because it's so big, but all the high value stuff, it's already gone to the, over the top players, right. >> It's being eaten away, and I'm like, what is going to wake you guys up to realize those are your competitors, that's where the battle is, right? >> John: That's really where the value is. >> The battle of the bastards, you're there by yourself, like "Game of Thrones" and they're coming at you. >> John: You need a dragon. >> What are you doing about it? >> John: I need a dragon to compete in this market. Riding a dragon would be a good strategy. >> I know, I was just watching. Cause I have a podcast, I have a podcast called "Telco In 20" and we always put like little nuggets in the show notes, I personally reviewed them, I was just reviewing the one for the keynote that we're putting out, and I had a dragon in my keynote, right? It was a really great moment, it was really fun to do, but there's, I don't know if you guys are "Game of Thrones" fans. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> Right, but there's a great moment when Daenerys gets her dragons, the baby dragons, and she takes over the Unsullied Army, right? And it's just this, right? Like all of a sudden the tables turn in an instant where she has nothing, and she's like on her quest, right. I'm on a quest. >> Dave: Comes out of the fire. >> Right, comes out of the fire, the unburnt, right? She has her dragons, right? She has them hatch. She takes over the Unsullied Army, right? Slaves, it starts her march, right? And I'm like, we're putting that clip into the show notes because I think that's where we are. I think I've hatched some dragons, right? The Cloud City army, let's go, let's go take on Telco. >> John: Well, I mean, this to me. >> Easy. >> It definitely have made, made it happen because I heard many people talking about cloud, this is turning into a cloud show. The question is, when does this going to be a cloud show? That's just Cloud City, it's a big section of the show. I mean, all the big players are behind it. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> Amazon Web Services, Google Azure, Ecosystem, startups, thinking differently, but everyone's agreeing why aren't we doing this? >> I think, like I said, I mean, people are like, you're such a visionary, and how did, why do you think this will work, I'm like, it's worked in every other industry. Am I really that visionary, and like, these are the three best tech companies in the world, like, are, are you kidding me? And so I think we've shown the momentum here. I think we're looking forward to 2022, you know? And that we see 2022, you got to start planning this the minute we get back, right? Like I wouldn't recommend doing this in a hundred days again, that was a very painful, but you know, February, I was, there's a sign inside NWC, February 28th. Right, we're talking seven months. You got to get going now. >> John: Let's get on the phone. >> With Telco, I mean, I think you're right on. I mean, you know, remember Skype, in the early days, right? >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> It wasn't regional. It was just, plug into the internet. >> Danielle: It was just Skype, it was just WhatsApp. >> Well this is a great location, if you can get a shot guys of the people behind us, I don't know if you can, if you're watching check out the scene here, It's winding down, a lot of people having happy hour. Now this is a social construct here at Cloud City, not only is it chock full of information, reporting that we're doing and getting all the data and with the presentations on the main stage, with Adam and the studio and the team, this is a place where people are meeting and there's deals being done face to face, intimate relationships, the best of the best are here, they make the trek. So there's been a successful formula. Of course theCUBE is in the middle of all the action, which we love, we're psyched to be back. I want to thank you personally, while we have you on stage here. >> I want to thank you guys, and the crew, the crew has been amazing, turning out videos on short order. We have all these crews in different cities, it's, our own show has been virtual. You know, Adam's in Bristol, right? We're here, this was an experiment, we talked about this a hundred days ago, 90 days ago. Could we get theCUBE there, do the show but also theCUBE. >> You are a visionary, you said made for TV hybrid event with your team, produce television shows, theCUBE, we're digital, we love you guys, great alignment, but it's magical because the content doesn't end here, the show might end, they might break down the beautiful plants and the exhibits, but the community is going to continue, the content and the conversations. >> Yeah. >> So, we were looking forward to it and- >> I'm super glad, super glad we did this. >> Awesome, well, any final moments that you would like to share in the last two minutes we have, favorite moments, observations, funny things that have happened to you, weird things that have happened to you, share something that people might not know, or a favorite moment? >> I think, I don't know that people know, we have a 3D printer in the coffee shops, and so you can upload any picture and they're 3d printing, coffee art, right? So I've been seeing lots of social posts around people uploading their, their logos and things like that. I think Jon Bon Jovi, he was super thankful to be back. He thanked me personally two different times of like, I'm just glad to be out in front of people. And I think just even just the people walking around, thank you for being brave, thank you for coming back. You've helped Barcelona and we're happy to be together. Even if it is with masks, it's hard to do business with masks on, everyone's happy and psyched. >> John: Well the one thing that people cannot do relative to you is they cannot ignore you. You are making a great big wave. >> Danielle: I shout pretty loud, It's kind of hard to ignore me. >> You're making a great big wave, you're on the right side, we believe, of history, public cloud is driving the bus down main street of Cloud City, and if people don't get out of the way, they will be under the bus. >> I'm, like I said, in my keynote, it's go time let's do it. >> Okay. Thank you so much for all your attention and mission behind the cloud and the success. >> Danielle: We'll do it again. We're going to do it again soon. >> After Togi's a hundred million dollar investment, you're the CEO of Togi that, let's follow that progress, and of course, Telco DR, Danielle Royston, the digital revolution. Thanks for coming on with you. >> Thank you guys, it was super fun. >> This is theCUBE I'm John Furrier with Dave Vallante, we're going to send it back to Adam in the studio. Thanks, the team here. >> Woo! (audience applauding) >> I want to thank the team, everyone here, Adam is great, Chloe. >> Great working with you guys. >> Awesome, and what a great crew. >> So great. >> Thank you everybody. That's it for theCUBE, here on the last day, Wednesday of theCUBE, stay tuned for tomorrow more action on the main stage, here in Cloud City. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, Chloe, thank you very much. Hey folks, in here in the Cloud City We with Danielle Royston. Great to see you. Watching you up on stage, I got to say, as the CEO of TelcoDR, leader and chief executive of that company. As well as a great visionary, you laid out the vision. It's hard to debate that. I mean, I think there's people who will say that vision, is like freedom, no one can debate it. It's not going to happen. >> Yeah, there's still a lot of debate in our industry about it. There's a lot of articles being written about it. I've referenced one about, you know, should we let the dragons into the castle? For me, I think it's super obvious. I think other industries are like "Duh, we've made the move." And Telco is still like, "Hmm, we're not sure." And so, am I a visionary, I don't know. I'm just sort of just Babe Ruth-ing it a little bit. I think that's where we're going. >> You know you do, you have a lot of content, podcasts, you write blogs, you do a lot of speaking. You brought it all together on stage, right? That has got to feel good. >> Yeah. >> You've got a body of work and it came together very nicely. How did you feel up there? >> Oh my God, it's absolutely nerve wrecking. I sort of feel like, you know, could you tell if my hands were shaking? Right, could you tell that my heart was racing? >> It's a good feeling. >> I don't know. >> Come on! >> I'll be honest, I'm happy it's over, I'm happy. I think I did a really great job and I'm really happy >> Yeah, you did a great job, I love the dragon reference-- >> Have it in the can. >> Fantastic, loved the Game of Thrones vibe there. It was cool-- >> Totally. >> One of the things I wanted pick up on, I thought it was very interesting and unique was the iPhone reference 14 years ago, because that really, to me, was a similar moment because that shifted the smartphone. A computer that happened to make phone calls. And then we all knew who was the leader at that time, Nokia, Blackberry with the phones, and they became toast. That ushered in a whole another era of change, wealth creation, innovation, new things. >> Yeah. Well, up until that moment, carriers had been designing the phones themselves. They were branded with their logos. And so Steve Jobs fought for the design of the iPhone. He designed it with the consumer, with the user in mind. But I think what it really, I mean, it's such a big pivotal moment in our industry because it singled the end of voice revenue and ushered in the era of data. But it also introduced the OTT players, right? That came in through the apps and started a siphon approved from the carriers. And this is like, it's a pivotal moment in the industry, like, changed the industry forever. >> It's a step function, it was a step function change, it's obvious, everyone knew it. But what's interesting is that we were riffing yesterday about O-RAN and Android. So you have iPhone, but Android became a very successful open source project that changed the landscape of the handset. Some are saying that that kind of phenomenon is coming here. Into Telco with software, kind of like an Android model where that'll come in. What's your thoughts on that, reaction to that? >> Yeah, well the dis-aggregation of the hardware, right? We're in the iconic Erickson booth, right? They get most of their revenue from RAN, from Radio Access Networks. And now with the introduction of Open RAN, right? With 50% less CapEx, 40% less OPEX, you know, I think it's easiest for Greenfield operators like Dish, that are building a brand new network. But just this month, Vodafone announced they're going to build the world's largest Open RAN network. Change is happening and the big operators are starting to adopt Open RAN in a real big way. >> So to me, riding the dragon means taking the advantage of new opportunities on top of that dragon. Developing apps like the iPhone did. And you mentioned Android, they got it right. Remember the Windows Phone, right? They tried to take Windows and shove it to the phone-- >> Barely. >> It was a kin phone too. >> I try to delete it from my, look here, beep! >> I'm going to take this old world app and I'm going to shove it into the new world, and guess what, it failed. So if the Telco is trying to do the same thing here, it will fail, but if they start building 5G apps in the cloud and pick the cloud native and think about the consumer, isn't really that the opportunity that you're talking about? >> Well, I think it is, absolutely. And I think it's a wake up call for the vendors in our space, right? And I'm certainly trying to become a vendor with Totogi. I'm really pushing my idea. But you can't take, using your Windows example on the Windows Phone, you can't take a Windows app and stuff it onto a phone and you can't take these old school applications that were written 20 years ago and just stuff them into the cloud, right? Cloud is not a place, it's a way to design applications and it all needs to be rewritten and let's go write, rewrite it. >> It's not a destination as we always say. Let's take a step back on the keynote 'cause I know we just did a couple of highlights there, wasn't the whole thing. We were watching it, by the way, we thought you did a great job, you were very cool and calm under pressure. But take us through the core ideas in the keynote. Break down the core elements of what the talk was about. >> Yeah, I think the headline really is, you know, just like there were good and bad things about the iPhone, right? It killed voice, but introduced data and all these other things. There's good and bad things about the public cloud, right? It's not going to be smooth sailing, no downsides. And so I acknowledge that, even though I'm the self appointed queen, you know? This self appointed evangelist. And so, I think that if you completely ignore the public cloud, try to stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist, I think there's nothing but downsides for Telcos. And so I think you need to learn how to maximize the advantage there, ride he dragon, like spew some fire and, you know, get some speed and height, and then you can double your ARPU. But I think, going from there, so the next three, I was trying to give examples of what I meant by that, of why it's a double-edged sword, why it's two sides of the coin. And I think there's three areas, which is the enterprise, the network, and a relationship with subscribers. And so that really what the talk, that's what the talk is about >> The three main pillars. >> Yeah, yeah! >> Future, work, enterprise, transition, Open RAN. >> The network and then the relationship with the subscribers. >> Those are the structural elements you see. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> What's the most important one you think, right now, that people are focused on? >> I mean, I think the first one, with work, that's an easy one to do, because there's not too much downside, right? I think we all learned that we could work productively from home. The reason public cloud matter there is because we had tools like Zoom and G Suite and we didn't need to be, I mean, imagine if that this had happened even 20 years ago, right? Broadband at the home wasn't ready, the tools weren't ready. I mean, it would have been, I mean a bigger disaster than it was, right? And so this is an opportunity to sort of ride this work from home wave that a lot of CEOs are saying, we're not coming back or we're going to have smaller offices. And all of those employees need fiber to their home. They need 5G at their home. I mean, if I'm a head of enterprise in a Telco, I am shifting my 5G message from like random applications or whatever, to be like, how are you getting big pipes to the home so your workers can be productive there? And that, I don't hear Telco's talking about that and that's a really big idea. >> You know, you say it's a no brainer, but it's interesting you had your buildings crumbling, which was great, very nice effect in the talk. I heard a executive, Wall Street executive the other day, talking about how, "My people will be back in the office. "I'm going to mandate vaccinations, they're going to be back "in the office, you work for me. "Even though it's an employee friendly environment "right now, I don't care". And I was shocked. I go, okay, this is just an old guy. But, and it's not just the fact that it's an old guy, old guard doing that because I take two examples of old guys, Michael Dell and Frank Slootman. >> Yeah. >> Right, Michael Dell, you know, hundred billion dollar company, Frank Slootman, hottest, you know, software company. Both of them, sort of agree. It's a no brainer. >> Yeah. >> Why should I spend all this money on buildings? And my people are going to be more productive. They love it, so. Why fight the fashion? >> Well, I think the office and I can talk about this for a long time and I know we don't have that much time, but on offices, it's a way to see when did you come in and when did you leave, and look over your shoulder and what we're working on. And that's what offices are for. Now, we tell ourselves it's about collaboration and all this other stuff. And you know, these guys are saying, "come back to the office." It's because they don't have an answer on how to manage productivity. What are you working on? Are you off, are you authentically working 40 hours a week? I want to see, I know if at least you're here, you're here. Now, you might be playing, you know, Minesweeper. You might be playing Minesweeper on your computer, but at least you were, your butt was at your computer. So yeah, I think this is a pivotal moment in work. I think Telcos could push it, to work from home. We'll get you the pipes, we'll get you the cloud-based tools to help manage productivity, to change in work style. >> Yeah, and we've covered this in theCube many times, about how software is going to enable this virtual first model, no one's actually built software for virtual first. I think that's going to happen. Again, back to your team software, but I want to ask you about software defined infrastructure. You mentioned O-RAN, and as software eats the world and eats infrastructure, you still need infrastructure. So, talk about the relationship of how you see O-RAN competing and winning with the balance of software versus the commodity argument. >> Yeah, and I think this is really where people get scared in Telco. I mean, authentically nervous, right. Where you're like, okay, really the public cloud is at that network edge, right? We're really going to like, who are we? It's an identity crisis. We're not the towers anymore. We're renting space, right? We're now dis-aggregating the network, putting the edge cloud right there and it's AWS or Google. Who are we, what do we do, are we networks? Are we a tech company? Right, and so I'm like, guys, you are your subscribers and you don't focus on that. I mean, it's kind of like a last thought. >> So you're like a therapist then too, not just an evangelist. >> I'm a little bit of a therapist. >> Okay, lay down on the couch, Telco. >> Let's talk about what your problems are. (laughs) >> They have tower issues. >> All seriousness, no but, the tower is changing is backhauling. Look at direct connects for instance. The rise of direct and killed the exchanges. I mean, broadband, backhaul, last mile, >> Yeah. >> Completely, still issues, >> Yeah. >> But it's going to software and so that's there. The other thing I want to get to quickly, I know we don't have a lot of time, is the love relationship you talk about with subscribers. We had Peter Adderton on, from a Boost Mobile, formerly Boost Mobile, earlier. He was saying, if you don't have a focus on the customer, then you're just selling minutes and that's it. >> Yeah. >> And his point was, they don't really care. >> Yeah. Let's talk about organizational energy, right? How much energy is contained within any organization, not just Telco, but any organization. To some of your people time is the hours they work per week. And then you think of that as a sack on how you're allocating your time and spending your time, right? And so I think they spend 50% of their time, maybe more, fighting servers, machines, the network, right? And having all these battles. How much of that organizational energy is dedicated to driving great subscriber experiences? And it just shrunk, right? And I think that's where the public cloud can really help them. Like ride the dragon. Let the dragon deal with some of this underlying stuff. So that you can ride a dragon, survey the land, focus on your subscriber and back to the software. Use software, just like the OTT players are doing. They are taking away your ARPU. They're siphoning your ARPU, 'cause they're providing a better customer experience. You need to compete on that dimension. Not the network, not the three Telcos in the country. You're competing again, WhatsApp, Apple, Amazon, Facebook. And you spent how much of your organizational energy to focus on that? Very small. >> And that's where digital platforms roll by, it uses the word platform, why? Because everybody wants to be a platform. Why do you want to be a platform? Because I want to be like Amazon, they're a platform. And you think about Netflix, right? It's not, you know, you don't think about Netflix UK or Netflix Spain, right? >> It's global. >> There's one Netflix >> Yeah, yeah. >> You don't think about their marketing department or their sales department or their customer service, you think about the app. >> Yeah. >> You know. One interface. And that's what digital platforms allow you to do. And granted, there's a lot of public policy to deal with, but if you're shooting satellites up in space, >> Yeah. >> You know, now, you own that space, right, global network. >> And what makes Netflix so good, I think, is that it knows you, right? It knows what you're watching and recommends things, and you're like, "Oh, I would like that, that's great." Who knows more about you than your mobile phone? Carry it everywhere you go, right? What you're watching, what you're doing, who you're calling, what time did you wake up? And right now all of that data we talked about a couple of days ago, it's trapped in siloed old systems. And like why do people think Google knows so much about you? Telco knows about you. And to start to use that to drive a great experience. >> And you've got a great relationship with Netflix. The relationship we have with our our carrier is to your admin, "can you call these guys? "I don't know, I lost the password, I can't get in". >> Right. >> It's like-- >> Or you get SIM hacked-- >> I don't have an hour and a half to call your call center 'cause you don't have a chat bot, right. >> I don't have time. >> Chat bot, right. I can't even do the chat bot because my problem is, you're like, I got to talk to someone. All of their systems are built with the intention of a human being on the other side, and there's all this awesome chat bot AI that works. >> Yeah. >> Set it free. >> Yeah, yeah, right. You almost rather go to the dentist, then calling your carrier. >> Well, we're going to wrap things up here on the keynote review. Did you achieve what you wanted to achieve? I mean, controversy, bold vision, leadership, also that came across, but people they know who you are now. You're out there and that's great news. >> Yeah. I think I rocked the Telco universe and I'm really, that was my goal, and I think I accomplish it so, very excited. >> Well, we love having you on theCUBE. It's great to have great conversations, not only are you dynamic and smart, you're causing a lot of controversy, in a good way and getting, waking people up. >> Making people talk, that's a start. >> And I think, the conversations are there. People are talking and having relationships on the ecosystem open, it's all there. Danielle Royston, you are a digital revolution, DR. Telco DR, thanks for coming to theCube. >> Thank you so much, always fun. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks. >> Of course, back to the Cloud City studios. Adam is going to take it from here and continue on day three of theCube. Adam in studio, thanks for having us and take it from here.

(cheery music) >> Thanks, Adam. Thanks for everyone in the studio. Dave, we've got some great main stage CUBE interviews. Normally we'll sit at the desk, and do a remote, but since it's a virtual event, and a physical event, it's a hybrid event. We've got two amazing Google leaders to talk with us. I had a chance to sit down with Amol who was gone yesterday during our breaking news segment. They had the big news. We had two great guests, Amol Phadke. He's our first interview. He's the head of Google's telecom industry. Again, he came in, broke into our segment yesterday with breaking news. Obviously released with Ericsson, and the O-RAN Alliance. I had a great chance to chat with him. A wide ranging conversation for 13 minutes. Enjoy my interview with Amol, right now. (cheery music) Well welcome to the CUBE's coverage for Mobile World Congress, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of the CUBE. We're here in person as well as remote. It's a hybrid event. We're on the ground at Mobile World Congress, bringing all the action here. We're remote with Amol Phadke, who's the Managing Director of the Telecom Industry Solutions team at Google Cloud, a big leader, and driving a lot of the change. Amol, thank you for coming on theCUBE here in the hybrid event from Mobile World Congress. >> Thank you, John. Thank you, John. Thank you for having me, So, hybrid event, which means it's in person, we're on the floor, as well as doing remote interviews and people are virtual. This is the new normal. Kind of highlights where we are in this telecom world, because the last time, Mobile World Congress actually had a physical event was winter of 2019. A ton has changed in the industry. Look at the momentum at the Edge. Hybrid cloud is now standard. Multi-cloud is being set up as we speak. This is all now the new normal, what is your take? And so it's pretty active in your industry. Tell us your opinion. >> Yes, John I mean the last two years have been seismic to say the least, right? I mean, in terms of the change that the CSP industries had had to do. You know, John, in the last two years, the importance of a CSP infrastructure has never become so important, right? The infrastructure is paramount. I'm talking to you remotely over the CSP infrastructure right now, and everything that we are doing in the last two years, whether it's working, or studying, or entertaining ourselves, all on that CSP infrastructure. So from that perspective, they are really becoming a critical national global information fabric on which the society is actually depending on. And that we see at Google as well, in the sense that we have seen up to 60% increase in demand, John, in the last two years, for that infrastructure. And then when we look at the industry itself, unfortunately all of that huge demand is not translating into revenue, because as an industry, the revenue is still flat-lining. In fact, the forecasted revenue for globally, for all the industry over the next 12 months is three to five per cent negative on revenue, right? So one starts to think, how come there is so much demand over the last two years, post-pandemic, and that's not translating to revenue? Having said that, the other thing that's happening is this demand is driving significant CapEx and OPEX investments in the infrastructure, as much as eight to $900 billion over the next decade is going to get spent in this infrastructure, from our perspective, Which means it's really a perfect storm. John, We have massive demand, massive need to invest to meet that demand, yet not translating to revenue, and the crux of all this is customer experience, because ultimately all of that translates into not having that kind of radically disruptive or transformational customer experience, right? So that's a backdrop that we find ourselves in the industry, and that really sets the stage for us to look at these challenges in terms of how does the CSP industry as a whole, grow top line, radically transform CSPCO, at the same time, reinventing the customer experience and finding those capital efficiencies. It's almost an impossible problem to find solution. >> It's a perfect storm. The waves are kind of coming together to form one big wave. You mentioned CapEx and OPEX. That's obviously changing the investments of their post-pandemic growth, and change in user behavior and expectations. The modern applications are being built on top of the infrastructure, that's changing. All of this is being driven by Cloud Native, and that's clear. You're seeing a lot more open kind of approaches, IT and OT coming together, whatever you want to do, this is just, it's a collision, right? It's a collision of many things. And this positive innovation coming out of it. So I have to ask you, what are you seeing as a solution that are showing the most promise for these telco industry leaders, because they're digitally transforming, so they got to re-factor their platforms while enabling innovation, which is a key growth for the revenue. >> Yes. So John, from a solution standpoint, what we actually did first and foremost as Google Cloud, was look at ourselves. So just like the transformation we just talked about in the CSP industry, we are seeing Google being transformed over the last two decades or so, right. And it's important to understand that there's a lot Google data over the last two decades that we can actually not externalize all of that innovation, all of that open source, all of that multicloud, was originally built for all the Google applications that all of us use daily, whether it's YouTube, or email or maps, you know. Same infrastructure, same open source, same multicloud. And we decided to sort of use the same paradigm to build the telecom solutions that I'm going to talk about next, right. So that's important to bear in mind, that those assets were there, and we wanted to externalize those assets, right. There are really four big solutions that are resonating really well with our CSP partners, John. You know, number one to your point, is how can they monetize the Edge? All of this happens at the Edge. All of this gets converged at the Edge. We believe with 5G acting as the brilliant catalyst to really drive this Edge deployment. CSPs would be in a very strong position, partnering with Cloud players like ourselves to drive growth, not just for their top line, but also to add value to the actual end enterprises that are seeking to use that Edge. Let me give you a couple of examples. We've been working with industries like retail and manufacturing, to create end solutions in a post-pandemic world. Solutions like contact-less shopping, or visual inspection of an assembly line in a manufacturing plant, without the need for having a human there, because of the digitalization of workforce. Which meant these kinds of solutions, can actually work well at the Edge driven by 5G. But of course they can't be done in isolation. So what we do is we partner with CSPs. We bring our set of solutions, and we actually launch in December 30 partners that are already on our Google Cloud Solutions. And then we partner with the CSPs based on our infrastructure, and their infrastructure to ultimately bring this all to life at the end customer, which often tends to be an enterprise, whether it's a manufacturing, plant, or a retail chain. >> Yeah, you guys got some great examples there. I love that Edge story. I think it's huge. I think it's only going to get bigger. I got to ask you while I got you here, because again, you're in the industry, you're the managing director, so you have to oversee this whole telecom industry. But it's bigger, it's beyond Telecom, where it's now Telecom's just one other Edge network, piece of the pie of the surety computing, as we say. So I got to ask you, one of the big things that Google brings to the table is the developer mojo, and opensource, and scale obviously. Scale's unprecedented, everyone knows that. But ecosystems are super important, and Telco's kind of really aren't good at that, right? So, you know, the Telco ecosystem was, I mean, okay, I'd say, okay, but mostly driven by carriers and moving bits from point A to point B. But now you've got a developer mindset, public cloud, developer ecosystem. How is this changing the landscape of the CSPs and how is it changing this cloud service provider's ability to execute, because that's the key in this new world? What's your opinion? >> Absolutely, John. So, there are two things, there are two dimensions to look at. One is when we came to market a couple of years ago with AnToks, we recognized exactly what you said, John, which is the world is moving to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. We needed to provide a common platform that the developer community can utilize through microservices and API. And that platform had to by definition, work not just from Google Cloud, but any cloud. It could work on any public cloud, can work on CSP's private cloud. And of course, supports on some Google Cloud, right? The reason was, once you deploy and cause, once as a seamless application development platform, you could put all kinds of developer apps on top. So I just talked about 5G Edge John, a minute ago, those apps can sit on Antoks, but at the same time, IT to your point, John, IT apps could also sit on the same AnToks paradigm, and network apps. So as networks start becoming Cloud Native, whether it's SRAN, whether it's O-Ran, whether it's 5G core, same principle. And that's why we believe when we partner with CSPs, we are saying, "Hey, you give this AnToks to an ecosystem of community, whether that community is network, whether that community is IT, whether the communities Edge apps, all of those can reside seamlessly on this sort of AnToks fabric, John. >> Yeah, and that's going to set the table for multicloud, which is basically cloud words for multi-vendor, multi app. Amol, I've got to ask you while I have you here, first of all, thank you for coming on and sharing your insights. It's really great industry perspective. And obviously Google Cloud's got huge scale, and great leadership. And again, you know, the big, cloud players are moving in and helping out, and enabling a lot of value. I got to ask you, if you don't mind sharing, if someone asked you, "Amol, tell me about the impact that public cloud is having on the Telco industry." What would you say? What's the answer to that? Because a lot of people are like, okay, public cloud, I get it. I know what it looks like, but now everyone's knows it's going hybrid. So everyone will ask you the question, "What is public cloud doing for the telecom sector?" >> Yeah, I think it's doing three things, John, and great question by the way. Number one, we are actually providing unprecedented amount of insights on data that the CSPs traditionally already had, but have never looked at it from the angle we have looked at it. Whether that insights are at the network layer, whether those insights are to personalize customer experiences on the front-end systems. Or whether those insights are to drive care solutions in contact centers, and so on, and so forth. So it's a massive uplift of customer experience that we can help with, right. So that's a very important point, because we do have a significant amount of leadership, John at Google Cloud on analytics and data and insights, right? So, and we offer those roads to these people. Number two, is really what I talked about, which is helping them build an ecosystem, because let's take retail as an example. As a minimum, there are five constituents in that ecosystem, John. There is a CSP, there is Google Cloud, there's an actual retail store. There is a hardware supplier, there's a software developer. All of them as a minimum, have to work together to build that ecosystem, which is where we give those solutions, right? So that's the second part. And then the third part is, as they move towards Cloud Native, we are really helping them change their business model to become a DevOps, a Cloud Native mindset, not just a Cloud Native network or IP. But a Cloud Native mindset that creates unparalleled agility and flexibility in how they work as a business. So those are the three things I would say, as a response to that question. >> And also the retail's a great vertical for Google to go in there, given the Amazon fear out there. People want this for certainly low hanging fruit. I think the DevOps piece is going to be a big, winning opportunity to see how the developers get driven into the landscape. I think that's a huge point. Amol, that's really great insight. A final question for you, while I got you here. If someone says, "Hey, what's happened in the industry since 2019?" Last time we had Mobile World Congress, they were talking speeds and feeds. Now the world has changed. We're coming out of the pandemic. California is opening up. There's going to be a physical event. The world's going hybrid, certainly on the event, and certainly cloud. What's different in the telecom industry, from, you know, many, many months ago, over a year and a half ago, from 2019? >> I would say primarily, it's the adoption of digital everywhere, which previously, you know, there were all these inhibitions and oh, would this work? Would my customer systems become fully digital? Would I be able to offer AR VR experiences? Ah, that's a futuristic thing, you know. And suddenly the pandemic has created this acceleration that says, "Oh, even post-pandemic, half my customers are always going to talk to me, via our digital channel only." Which means the way they experience us, has to be through these new experiences whether it's AR VR, whether it's some other thing or applications. So that has been accelerated John, and the CSPs have therefore really started to go to the application, and to the services. Which is why you are seeing less on, you know, speeds and feeds because 5G is here, 5G's been deployed. Now, how do we monetize 5G? How can we leverage that biggest number? So that's the biggest- >> There's down stack, and then there's a top of the stack for applications. And certainly there's a lot of assets in the telecom landscape, a lot of value, a lot of refactoring going on, and new opportunities that are out there. Great, great conversation. Well, thank you, Amol Phadka, Managing Director, Telecom Industry Solutions. Thanks for comin' on the CUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. Thank you having me. >> Okay, Mobile World Congress here, in person, and hybrid, and remote. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thank you for watching. We are here in person at the Cloud City Expo Community Area. Thanks for watching. Okay, that was us. That was me, online. Now, I'm here in person, as you can see Dave. That's a lot of fun. I love doing those interviews. So we had a chance to grab Google's top people when we could. They're not here, obviously. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google, the three hyperscalers, Dave, didn't make it out here. They didn't have a booth, but we had a chance to grab them. And that was head of the industry marketing, and I mean the industry group. So he's like the managing door. He runs the business side. >> It's an important sector for Google. You know, Amazon was really first, with that push into telco. Thomas Curran last March, laid out Google strategy for Telco. It's a huge sector. They know it. They understand how the cloud can disrupt it, and play a massive role there. >> Yeah. >> And Google, of course. >> They're not going to object to the public cloud narrative that Danielle Royston- >> No. >> I think they like it open source, Android coming to telco. Who knows what it's going to look like? >> That's what we call digital- >> So the next interview I did was with Shailesh Shukla. He is the Senior Vice-president. He's the Senior Leader at Google Cloud for Networking. And if you know, Google, Dave, Google's networking is really well known in the industry for being really awesome, because they power obviously Google Search, and a variety of other things. They pioneered the concept of SRE, Site Reliability Engineer, which is now a de facto position for DevOps, which is a cloud now persona inside almost every company, and certainly a very important position. And so- >> Probably the biggest global network, right? Undersea cables, and- >> I mean, Microsoft's got a big hyper-scale, because they've had MSN, and bunch of other stuff, infrastructure globally. But Amazon, Google and Microsoft all have massive scale, and Google again, very well engineered. They're total, and they're as we know, I live in Palo Alto, so I can attest that they're very strong. So this next interview is really from a networking perspective, because as infrastructure, as code gets more prolific and more penetrated, it's going to be programmable. And that's really going to be a key new enabler. So let's hear from Shailesh, Head of Networking at Google Cloud, and my interview with him. (cheery music) Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. We are here in person in Barcelona, as well as remote. It's a hybrid event. You're going to have the physical space, in Barcelona for the first time, since 2019, and virtual worlds connecting. I've got a great guest here from Google, Shailesh Shukla, Vice-president and General Manager of the Networking Team, Google Cloud. Shailesh, it's great to see you. Thank you for coming on theCUBE for the special presentation from Mobile World Congress. Obviously, the Edge networking core, Edge human devices, all coming together. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, John. It's great to see you again. And it's always a pleasure talking to theCUBE. And I want to say hello to everybody, from, you know, in Mobile World Congress. >> Yeah, and people don't know your background. You have a great history in networking. You've been there, many ways of innovation. You've been part of directly, big companies that were now known. Big names are all there. But now we haven't had a Mobile World Congress, since 2019. Think about that. That's, you know, many months, 20 something months gone by, since the world has changed in telco. I got to ask you, what is the disruption happening? Because think about that. Since 2019, a lot's changed in telco. Cloud-scale has happened. You've got the Edge developing. It's IT like now. What's your take? Shailesh, tell us. >> Yeah, John, as you correctly pointed out the last 18 months have been very difficult. And you know, I'll acknowledge that right up front, for a number of people around the world. I empathize with that. Now in the telecom, and kind of the broader Edge world, I would say that the last 18, 24 months have actually been transformative. O-RAN, it turns out was a very interesting sort of, you know, driver of completely new ways of both living, as well as working, right, as we all have experienced. I don't think that I've had a chance to see you live in 24 months. So, what we are seeing is the following. Number one, a number of telecom carriers around the world have started the investment process for 5G, right, and deployment process. And that actually changes the game, as you know, due to latency, due to all of the capabilities around kind of incalculable bandwidth, right. Much lower latency, as well as, much higher kind of enterprise oriented capabilities, right? So network's licensing, as an example, quality of service, you know, by a traffic type, and for a given enterprise. So that's number one. Number two, I would say that the cloud is becoming a lot more kind of mainstream in the world, broader world of telecom. What we are seeing is an incredible amount of partnerships between telecom carriers and cloud providers, right? So instead of thinking of those two as separate universes, those are starting to come together. So I believe that over a period of time, you will see the notion of kind of Cloud Native capability for both the IT side of the house, as well as the network side of the house is becoming, you know, kind of mainstream, right. And then the third thing is that increasingly it's a lot more about enabling new markets, new applications, in the enterprise world, right. So certainly it opens up a new kind of revenue stream for service providers and carriers around the world. But it also does something unique, which is brings together the cloud capabilities right, around elasticity, flexibility, intelligence, and so on, with the enterprise customer base that most of the cloud providers already have. And with the combination of 5G, brings it to the telecom world. And those, you know, I started to call it, as a kind of the triad, right? The triad of an enterprise, the telecom service provider, and the cloud provider, all working together to solve real business problems. >> Yeah, and it's totally a great call out there on the pandemic. I think the pandemic has shown us, coming out of it now, that cloud-scale matters. And you look at all the successes between work, play, and how we've all kind of adjusted, the cloud technologies were a big part of that, those solutions that got us through it. Now you've got the Edge developing with 5G. And I got to ask you this question, because when we have CUBE interviews with all the leaders of engineering teams, whether it's in the industry, or customers in the enterprise, and even in the telcos, the modern application teams have end-to-end visibility into the workload. You're starting to see more and more of that. You starting to see more open source in everything, right. So okay, I buy that. You got an SRE on the team, you got some modern developers, you're shifting left, you've got Devs set up. All good, all cloud. However, you're a networking guy. You know this. Routing packets across multiple networks is difficult. So if you're going to have end-to-end visibility, you got to have end-to-end intelligence on the networking. How is that being solved? Because this is a critical discussion here at Mobile World Congress. Okay, I buy Cloud Native, I buy observability, I buy open source, but I got to have end-to-end visibility for security, and workload management and managing all the data. What's the answer on the network side? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. And the simple way to think about this, is first and foremost, you need kind of global infrastructure, right? So that's a given, and of course, you know, Google with its kind of global infrastructure, and some of the largest networks in the world, we have that present, right. So that's important. Second is, to be able to abstract a way that underlying infrastructure, and make it available to applications, to a set of APIs. Right, so I'll give an analogy here. Just as you know, say 10 years ago, around 10 years ago, Android came into the market from Google, in the following way. What it did, was that it abstracted away the underlying devices with a simple kind of layer on top of operating system, which exposed APIs northbound. So then application developers can write new applications. And that actually unleashed, you know, a ton of kind of creativity right, around the world. And that's precisely what we believe is kind of the next step, as you said, on an end-to-end observability basis, right? If you can do an abstraction away from all of the underlying kind of core infrastructure, provide the right APIs, the right kind of information around observability, around telemetric, instead of making, you know, cloud and the infrastructure, the black box. Make it open, make it kind of visible to the applications. Bring that to the applications, and let the thousand flowers bloom, right? The creativity in each vertical area is so significant, because there are independent software vendors. There are systems integrators. There are individual developers. So one of the things that we are doing right now, is utilizing open source technologies, such as Kubernetes, right? Which is something that Google actually brought into the market. And it has become kind of the de facto standard for all of the container and modernization of applications. So by leveraging those open technologies, creating this common control plane, exposing APIs, right, for everything from application development, to observability, you certainly have the ability to solve business problems through a large number of entities in the systems integrator and the ISC and the developer community. So that's the approach that we are taking, John. >> I love the Android analogy of the abstraction layer, because at that time, the iPhone was closed. It still is. And they got their own little strategy there. Android went the other way. They went open, went open abstraction. Now abstraction layers are good. And now I want to get your thoughts on this, because anyone in operating systems knows abstractions are great for innovation. How does that apply to the real world on telco? Because I get how it could add some programmability in there. I get the control plane piece. Putting it into the operator's hands, how do you guys see, and how do you guys talk about the Edge service offering? What does it mean for the telco? Because if they get this right, this is going to be in telco cloud developer play. It's going to be a telco cloud ecosystem play. It's an opportunity for a new kind of telco system. How do you see that rolling out in real world? >> Great question, John. So the way I look at it, actually even we should take a step back, right? So the confluence of 5G, the kind of cloud capabilities and the Edge is, you know, very clear to me that it's going to unleash a significant amount of innovation. We are in early stages, no question, but it's going to drive innovation. So one almost has to start by saying what exactly is Edge, right? So the way I look at it, is that the Edge can be a continuum all the way from kind of an IOT device in automobiles, right? Or an enterprise Edge, like a factory location, or a retail store, or kind of a bank branch. To the telecom Edge, which is where the service providers have, not only their points of presence, and central offices, but increasingly a very large amount of intelligent RAN sites as well, right. And then the, kind of public cloud Edge, right. Where, for example, Google has, you know, 25 plus kind of regions around the world. 144, you know, PoPS, lots of CDN locations. We have, you know, few thousand nodes deployed deep inside service provider networks for caching of content, and so on. So if you think about these as different places in the network that you can deploy, compute, storage and intelligence act, right. And do that in a smart way, right? For example, if you were to run the learning algorithms in the cloud with its flexibility and elasticity, and run the inferencing at the Edge, very Edge, at the point of sort of a sale, or a point, a very consumer standing. Now you suddenly have the ability to create a variety of Edge applications. So going back to the new question, what have we seen, right? So what we are seeing, is depending on the vertical, there are different types of Edge applications, okay. So let's take a few examples. And I'll give you some, a favorite example of mine, which is in the sports arena, right? So in baseball, when you are in a stadium, and soon there are people sort of starting to be in stadiums, right? And a pitcher is throwing the pitch, right, the trajectory of the ball, the speed of the pitch, where the batter is, you know, what the strike zone is, and all of these things, if they can be in a stadium in real time, analyzed, and presented to the consumer as additional intelligence, and additional insight, suddenly it actually creates kind of a immersive experience. Even though you may be in the stadium, looking at the real thing, you are also seeing an immersive experience. And of course at home, you get a completely different experience, right? So the idea is that in sports, in media and entertainment, the power of Edge compute, and the power of AI ML, right, can be utilized to create completely new immersive experiences. Similarly, in a factory or an automotive environment, you have the ability to use AI ML, and the power of the Edge and 5G coming together, to find where the defects are, in a manufacturing environment, right? So every vertical, what we're finding is, there are very specific applications, which you can call as kind of killer apps, right in the Edge world, that over time will become prevalent and mainstream. And they will drive the innovation. They will drive deployment, and they also will drive ultimately, kind of the economics of all of this. >> You're laying out, essentially the role of the public cloud in the telco market. I'd love to get your thoughts, because a lot of people are saying, "Oh, the cloud, it's all Edge now. It's going back to on-premises." This is not the case. I mean, I've been really vocal on this. The public cloud and cloud operations is now the new normal. So developers are there. So I want you to explain real quick, the role of the public cloud in the telecom market and the Telecom Edge, because now they're working together. You've got abstraction, you mentioned that Android-like environment coming, there's going to be an Android-like effect, that abstraction. You got O-RAN out there, creating these connection points, for interoperability, for radio signals, and the End Transceivers or the Edge of the radios. All of this is happening. How is Google powering this? What is the role of public cloud in this? >> Yeah, so let me first talk about genetically the role of public cloud. Then I'll talk about Google, okay, in particular. So, if at the end of the day, the goal here is to create applications in a very simple and efficient manner, right? So what do you like, if you look for that as the goal, then the public cloud brings, you know, three fundamental things. Number one, is what I would call as elasticity and flexibility, right? So why is this important? Because as we discussed earlier, Edge is not one place, it's a variety of kind of different locations. If there is a mechanism to create this common control plane, and have the ability to kind of have elastic compute, elastic networking, elastic storage, and have this deployed in a flexible manner. Literally if you think, think about it like an effortless Edge is what we are starting to call it. You can move workload and capability, and run it precisely where it makes sense, right? Like I said, earlier, training and learning algorithms in the deep cloud. Inferencing, at the very edge, right? So if you can make that decision, then it becomes very powerful. So that's the first point, you know, elasticity and flexibility that cloud can bring. Second is, intelligence. The whole notion of leveraging the power of data, and the power of AI and ML is extremely crucial for creation of new services. So that's something that the public cloud brings. And the third is this notion of, write once, deploy anywhere, right? This notion of kind of a full stack capability that when open, kind of developer ecosystem can be brought in, right? Like we talked about Kubernetes earlier. So if there's a way in which you can bring in those developer and ISV ecosystem, which is already present in the world of public cloud, that's something that is the third thing that public cloud brings. And Google strategy very simply, is to play on all of these, right? Because we, you know, Google has incredibly rich deployment experience around the world for some of the largest services on the planet, right? With some of the biggest infrastructure in the networking world. Second, is we have a very open and flexible approach, right? So open as you know, we not only leverage kind of the Kubernetes environment, but also there are many other areas, Key Native, and so on where Google has brought a lot of open kind of capabilities to the broader market. And the third, is the enablement of the ecosystem. So last year we actually announced 200 applications, you know, from 30 ISVs in multiple verticals that we're now going to be deployed on Google Cloud, in order to solve specific business pain points, right. And building out that ecosystem, working with telecom service providers, with systems integrators, with equipment players, is the way that we believe Google Cloud can make a difference in this world of developing Edge applications. We are seeing great traction, John, you know, whether it is in the carrier world. Carrier such as Orange, Telecom Italia, TELUS, SK Telecom, Vodafone. These have all publicly announced their work with Google Cloud, leveraging the power of data, analytics, AI ML, and our very flexible infrastructure. And then a variety of kind of partners and OEM players, in the industry. As an example, Nokia, right, Amdocs, and Netcracker, and many others. So we are really excited in the traction that we are getting. And we believe that public cloud is going to be a key part of the evolution of the telecom industry. >> Shailesh, it's great to have you on. Shailesh Shukla, VP and GM of Networking at Google Cloud. And I would just add to that final point there, that open and this Android-like open environment is going to create a thousand flowers to bloom. Those are new applications, new modern applications, new companies, a new ecosystem in the Telco Cloud. So congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Google Cloud, you guys are about the data, and being open. Thanks for comin' on. >> Thank you, John. Good to talk to you. >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Mobile World Congress. Google Cloud, featured interview here on theCUBE. Really a big part of the public cloud is going to be a big driver. Call it public cloud, hybrid cloud, whatever you want to call it. It's the cloud, cloud and Edge with 5G, making a big difference and changing the landscape, and trying innovation for the telco space. I'm John Furrier, your CUBE host. Thanks for watching. Okay, Dave, that's the Google support. They are obviously singing the same song as Danielle Royston, every vertical. >> Two great interviews, John. Really nice job. We can see the tech. The strategy is becoming more clear. You know, one of the big four. >> Yeah, I just love, these guys are so smart. Every vertical is going to be impacted by elastic infrastructure, AI, machine learning, and this new code deployment, write once, deploy anywhere. That's theCUBE. We love being here it's a cloud show now. Mobile World Congress, back to the studio for more awesome Cloud City content.