(upbeat music) >> And, welcome back to theCube's coverage of Red Hat Summit, 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. We've got a great segment here on how Red Hat is working with telcos and the disruption in the telco cloud. We've got a great guest Cube alumni, Darrell Jordan Smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts at Red Hat. Darrell, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on theCube. >> Oh, it's been, it's great to be here and I'm really excited about having the opportunity to talk to you today. >> Yeah, we're not in person, in real life's coming back soon. Although I hear Mobile World Congress, might be in person this year, looking like it's good. A lot of people are going to be virtual and activating I know. A lot to talk about. This is probably one of the most important topics in the industry because when you talk about telco industry, you're really talking about the edge. You're talking about 5G, talking about industrial benefits for business, because it's not just edge for connectivity access. We're talking about innovative things from self-driving cars to business benefits. It's not just consumer, it's really bringing that together. You guys are really leading with the cloud-native platform from REL, OpenShift managed services. Everything about the cloud-native underpinnings, you guys have been successful as a company. But now in your area, telco is being disrupted. You're leading the way >> Absolutely. Give us your take on this, this is super exciting. >> Well, it's actually one of the most exciting times. I've been in the industry for 30 years. I'm probably aging myself now, but in the telecommunications industry, this for me, is the most exciting. It's where, you know, technology is actually going to visibly change, the way, that everyone interacts with the network. And with the applications that are being developed out there on, on our platform. and, you know, as you mentioned, IoT, and a number of the other AI and ML innovations, that are occurring in the marketplace. We're going to see a new wave of applications and innovation. >> What's the key delivery workload you're seeing, with 5G environment. Obviously it's not just, you know 5G in the sense of thinking about mobile phones or mobile computers as they are now. It's not just that consumer, "Hey surf the web and check your email and get an app and download and, and communicate". It's bigger than that now. Can you tell us, where you see the workloads coming in on the 5G environment? >> You, you hit the nail on the head. The, the, the, the killer application, isn't the user or the consumer and the way that we traditionally have known it. Because you might be able to download a video and that might take 20 seconds less, but you're not going to pay an awful lot more money for that. The real opportunity around 5G, is the industrial applications. Things like connected car. You know automotive driving, factory floor automation. How you actually interface digitally with your bank. How we're doing all sorts of things, more intelligently at the edge of the network, using artificial intelligence and machine learning. So all of those things are going to deliver a new experience, for everyone that interacts with the network and the telcos are at the heart of it. >> You know, I want to get into the real kind of underpinnings, of what's going on with the innovations happening. You just kind of laid out kind of the implications of the use cases and the target application workloads, but there's kind of two big things going on with the edge and 5G. One is under the hood networking, you know, what's going on with the moving the packets around the workload, throughput, bandwidth, et cetera, and all that, that goes on under the hood. And then there's the domain expertise in the data, where AI and machine learning have to kind of weave in. So let's take the first part, first. OpenShift is out there. Red Hat's got a lot of products, but you have to nail the networking requirements and cloud native with containerization, because at large scales, not just packets, it's all kinds of things going on, security, managing compute at the edge. There's a lot of things under the hood, if you will, from a networking perspective. >> Could you share what Red Hat's doing in that area? >> Yep, so, so that's a very good question, in that we've been building on our experience with OpenStack and the last time I was on theCube, I talked about, you know, people virtualizing network applications and network services. We're taking a lot of that knowledge, that we've learned from OpenStack and we're bringing that into the container based world. So we're looking at how we accelerate packets. We're looking at how we build cloud-native applications, on bare metal, in order to drive that level of performance. We're looking at actually how we do, the certification around these applications and services, because they may be sitting in different applets across the cloud. And in some instances running on multiple clouds, at the same time. So we're building on our experience from OpenStack. We're bringing all of that into OpenShift, our container based environment. With all of the tooling necessary to make that effective. >> It's interesting with all the automation going on and certainly with the edge developing nicely, the way you're describing it, it's certainly disrupting the telco cloud. You have an operator mindset a cloud-native operator thinking, kind of, I mean it's distributed computing. We know that, but it's hybrid. So it's essentially cloud operations. So there's an operator mindset here, that's just different. Could you just share quickly, before we move on to the next segment, what's different about this operating model, for the, these new kinds of operators. As, as you guys have been saying, the CIO is the new cloud operator. That's the skill set they have to be thinking. And certainly IT, to anyone else provisioning and managing infrastructure has to think like an operator, what's your view? >> Exactly. They certainly do need to think like an operator. They need to look at how they automate a lot of these functions, because they're actually deployed in many different places, all at the same time. They have to live independently of each other, that's what cloud-native actually really is. So the whole, the whole notion of five nines and vertically orientated stacks of five nines availability that's kind of going out the window. We're looking at application availability, across a hybrid cloud environment and making sure the application can live and sustain itself. So operators as part of OpenShift is one element of that, operations in terms of management and orchestration and all the tooling that we actually also provide as Red Hat, but also in conjunction with a big partner ecosystem, such as companies like Netcracker, for example, or IBM as another example. Or Ericsson bringing their automation tool sets and their orchestration tool sets, to that whole equation, to address exactly that problem. >> Yeah. You bring up the ecosystem and this is really an interesting point. I want to, just hit on that real quick, because it reminds me of the days, when we had this massive innovation wave in the nineties. During that era, the client server movement, really was about multi-vendor, right? And that, you start to see that now and where this ties into here I think, is and I want to get your reaction to this is that, you know, moving to the cloud was all about to 2015, moved to the cloud, move to the cloud, cloud-native. Now it's all about not only being agile and better performance, but you're going to have smaller footprints, with more security requirements, more net, enterprise requirements. This is now, it's more complicated. So you have to kind of make the complication go away. And now you have more people in the ecosystem, filling in these white spaces. So, you have to be performance and purpose built, if you will. I hate to use that word, but, or, or at least performing and agile, smaller footprint, greater security, enabling other people to participate. That's a requirement. Can you share your reactions to that? >> Well, that's core of what we do at Red Hat. I mean, we take open source community software, into a hardened distribution, fit for the telecommunications marketplace. So we're very adapt to working with communities and third parties. That ecosystem is really important to us. We're investing hundreds of engineers, literally hundreds of engineers, working with our ecosystem partners, to make sure that their application is services certified running on our platform. But also importantly, is certified to be running in conjunction with other cloud-native applications that sit under the same cloud. So that, that is not trivial to achieve, in any stretch of the imagination. And a lot of IT technology skills come to bear. And as you mentioned earlier a lot of networking skills, things that we've learned, and we build with a lot of these traditional vendors as we bring that to the marketplace. >> You know, I've been saying on theCube, I think five years ago, I started talking about this and it was kind of a loose formulation. I want to get your reaction, because you brought up ecosystem. Now saying, you know, you're going to see the big clouds develop obviously Amazon and Microsoft came in after and now Google and others. And then I said, there's going to be a huge wave of, of what I call secondary clouds. And you see companies, like Snowflake building on top of Amazon. And so you start to see the power law, of new cloud service providers emerging, that can either sit and work with, across multiple clouds, either one cloud or others, that's now multi-cloud and hybrid. But this rise of the new, more CSPs, more cloud service providers. This is a huge part of your area right now because some call that telco, telco cloud, edge hits that. What is Red Hat doing in this cloud service provider market specifically? How do you help them? If I'm a cloud service provider, what do I get in working with Red Hat? How do I be successful? Because it's very easy to be a cloud service provider now more than ever. What do I do? How do you help? How do you help me? >> Well, we, we, we offer a, a platform called OpenShift which is our containerized based platform, but it's not just a container. It involves huge amounts of tooling associated with operating it, developing in and around it. So the, the concept that we have, is that you can bring those applications, develop them once, on one, one single platform, and run it on premise. You can run it natively as a service in Microsoft's environment. You can actually run it natively as a service in Amazon's environment. You can run it natively in IBM's environment. You can build an application once and run it in all of them, depending on what you want to achieve and who actually provides you the best zoning, the best terms and conditions, the best, the best tooling in terms of other services, such as an AI, associated with that. So it's all about developing it once, certifying it once, but deploying it in many, many different locations, leveraging the largest possible developer ecosystem, to drive innovation through applications on that common platform. >> So the assumption there, is that's going to drive down costs. Can you tell me about why the benefits, the economics are there? Talk about the economics. >> Well, Yeah, so, so, A, it does drive down costs and that's an important aspect but more importantly, it drives up agility, so time to market advantage is actually attainable for you. So many of the telcos when they deploy a network service, traditionally it would take them literally, maybe a year to roll it all out. They have to do it in days, they have to do updates in real time, in day two operations, in literally minutes. So we were building the fabric necessary, in order to enable those applications and services to occur. And as you move into the edge of the network and you look at things like private 5G networks, service providers or telcos, in this instance, will be able to deliver services all the way out to the edge, into that private 5G environment and operate that, in conjunction with those enterprise clients. >> So OpenShift allows me if I get this right, from the CSP to run, have a horizontally scalable organization. Okay. And from a unification platform standpoint. Okay. Whether it's 5G and other functions, is that correct? >> Darrell: That's correct. >> Okay. So you've got that. Now I want to come in and bring in the top of the stack with the other element that's been been a big conversation here at Red Hat Summit and in the industry. That is AI and the use of data. One of the things that's emerging is the ability to have both the horizontal scale, as well as the specialism of the data and have that domain expertise. You're in the industries for Red Hat. This is important because you're going to have, one industry is going to have different jargon, different language, different data, different KPIs. So you got to have that domain expertise, to enable the ability, to, to write the apps and also enable AI. Can you comment on how that works and what's Red Hat do in there? >> So, so, so, we, we're developing OpenShift and a number of our, other technologies, to be fit for the edge of the network, where a lot of these AI applications will reside, because you want them at the closest to the client or the, or the application itself, where it needs to reside. We're, we're creating that edge fabric, if you like. The next generation of hybrid cloud is really going to be, in my view at the edge. We're enabling a lot of the service providers to go after that, but we're also igniting by industry. You mentioned different industries. So if I look at, for example, manufacturing with MindSphere, we recently announced with Siemens, how they do at the edge of the network, factory automation, collecting telemetry, doing real-time data and analytics, looking at materials going through the factory floor, in order to get a better quality result, with lower, lower levels of imperfections, as they run through that system. It's just one industry and they have, their own private and favorite AI platforms and data sets they want to work with. With their own data scientists who understand that, that, that ecosystem inherently. You can move that to healthcare. And you can imagine, you know, how you actually interface with your healthcare professionals here in North America, but also around the world. How those applications and services and what the AI needs to do, in terms of understanding x-rays and looking at, you know common errors associated with different x-rays, so, so our practitioner can make a more specific diagnosis, faster, saving money and potentially lives as well. So different, different vertical markets in this space, have different AI and ML requirements and needs, different data sciences and different data models. And what we're seeing is an ecosystem of companies, that are starting up there in that space, you know, we have Watson as part of IBM, but you have Perceptor Labs, you have H2O and a number of other, very very important AI based companies in that ecosystem. >> Yeah. And you've got the horizontal scalability of the control plane then in the platform, if you will, that gives us cross-organizational leverage and enable that, that vertical domain expertise. >> Exactly. And you'd want to build an AI application, that might run on a factory floor for certain reasons, it's location and what they're actually physically building. You might want to run that on premise. You might actually want to put it in the IBM cloud, or in Zuora or into AWS. You develop it once to OpenShift, you can deploy it in all of those as a service, sitting natively in those environments. >> Darrell, great chat. You got a lot going on. telco cloud, there is a lot of cloud-native disruption going on. It's a challenge and an opportunity. And some people have to be on the right side of history, on this one, if they're going to get it right. We'll know, and the scoreboard will be very clear, 'cause this is a shift, it's a shift. So again, you hit all the key points that I wanted to get out, but I want to ask you two more areas that are hot here at Red Hat Summit 21, as well, again as well in the industry. I want to get your reaction and thoughts on. And they are DevSecOps and automation. Okay. Two areas everyone's talking about, DevOps, which we know is infrastructure as code, programmability, under the hood, modern application development, all good. You add the second there, security, DevSecOps, it's critical. Automation is continuing to be the benefits of cloud-native. So DevSecOps and automation, what's your take, and how's that impact the telco world and your world? >> You can't, you can't operate a network without having security in place. You're talking about very sensitive data. You're talking about applications that could be real-time critical And this is actually, even lifesaving or life threatening, if you don't get them right. So the acquisition that Red Hat recently made around StackRox, really helps us, make that next level of transition into that space. And we're looking at about how we go about securing containers, in a cloud-native environment. As you can imagine, there'll be many many thousands, tens of thousands of containers running. If one is actually misbehaving for want of a better term, that creates a security risk and a security loophole. We're shoring that up. That's important for the deployment OpenShift in the telco domain and other domains. In terms of automation, if you can't do it at scale and if you look at 5G and you look at the radios at the edge of the network and how you're going to provision those services. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of nodes, hundreds of thousands. So you have to automate a lot of those processes, otherwise you can't scale to meet the opportunity. You can't physically deploy. >> You know, Darrell this is a great conversation, you know as a student of history and Dave Vellante and I always kind of joke about that. And you've been in and around the industry for a long time. Telcos have been balancing this evolution of digital business for many, many decades. And now with cloud-native, it's finally a time where you're startin' to see, that it's just the same game, now, new infrastructure. You know, video, voice, text, data, all now happening, all transformed and going digital, all the way, all aspects of it. In your opinion, how should telcos be thinking about, as they put their plans in place for next generation? Because you know, the world is, is now cloud-native. There's a huge surface here of opportunities, different ecosystem relationships. The power dynamics are shifting. It's, it's really a time where there will be winners and there will be losers. What's your, what's your view on on how the telco industry needs to Cloudify, and how to be positioned for success? >> So, so one of the things I, I truly believe very deeply, that the telcos need to create a platform, horizontal platform that attracts developer and ecosystems to their platform, because innovation is going to sit elsewhere. Then you know, there might be a killer application that one telco might create, but in reality, most of those innovations, the most of those disruptors are going to occur from outside of that telco company. So you want to create an environment, where you're easy to engage and you've got maximum sets of tools and versatility and agility in order to attract that innovation. If you attract the innovation, you're going to ignite the business opportunity that 5G and 6G and beyond is going to actually provide you, or enable your business to drive. And you've really got to unlock that innovation. And you can only unlock it, in our view at Red Hat innovation, if you're open. You know, you follow open standards, you're using open systems and open source, is a method or a tool, that you guys, if you're a telco I would ask, you guys need to leverage and harness. >> Yeah. And there's a lot. And there's a lot of upside there if you get that right. >> Yes. >> There's plenty of upside. A lot of leverage, a lot of assets, take advantage of the whole offline, online, coming back together. We are living in a hybrid world, certainly with the pandemic. We've seen what that means. It's put a spotlight, on critical infrastructure and the critical shifts. If you had to kind of get pinned down Darrell, how would you describe that learnings from the pandemic. As folks start to come out of the pandemic, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. As we come out of this pandemic, companies want a growth strategy. Want to be positioned for success. What's your learning coming out of the pandemic? >> So from, from my perspective, which really kind of in one respect was, was very admirable, but, in another respect is actually deeply, a lot of gratitude, is the fact that the telecommunications companies, because of their carrier grade capabilities and their operational prowess, were able to keep their networks up and running and they had to move significant capacity from major cities to rural areas, because everyone was working from home. And in many different countries around the world, they did that extremely, extremely well. And their networks held up. I don't know, and maybe someone will correct me and email me, but I don't know one telco had a huge network outage, through this pandemic. And that kept us connected. It kept us working. And it also, what I also learned is, that in certain countries, particularly Latam, where they have a very large prepaid market. They were worried that the prepaid market in the pandemic would go down, because they felt that people would have less money to spend. And therefore they wouldn't top up their phones as much. The opposite effect occurred. They saw prepaid grow. And that really taught me, that, that connectivity is critical, in times of stress, that we are also, where everyone's going through. So, I think there were some key learnings there. >> Yeah, I think you're right on the money there. It's like they pulled the curtain back of all the FUD and said, you know, necessity's the mother of invention. And when you look at what happened and what had to happen, to survive in the pandemic and be functional, you're, you nailed it. The network stability, the resilience, but also the new capabilities that were needed, had to be delivered in an agile way. And I think, you know, it's pretty much a forcing function, for all the projects that are on the table, to know which ones to double down on. So, I think you pretty much nailed it. >> Thank you. Darrell Jordan Smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts for Red Hat, theCube alumni. Thanks for that insight. Thanks for sharing. Great conversation around telcos and telco clouds and all the edge opportunities. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay. It's theCube's coverage of Red Hat Summit 21. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>mhm >>Yes, >>everyone welcome back to the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube, we've got a great segment here on how Red Hat is working with telcos and the disruption in the telco cloud. We've got a great guest cube alumni Darrell Jordan smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts at Red Hat, uh Darryl, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the cube. >>It's great to be here and I'm really excited about having the opportunity to talk to you >>today. Yeah, we're not in person in real life is coming back soon, although I hear mobile world congress might be in person this year looking like it's good a lot of people gonna be virtual activating. I know a lot to talk about this is probably one of the most important topics in the industry because when you talk about telco industry, you're really talking about um the edge, talking about five G talking about industrial benefits for business because it's not just Edge for connectivity access. We're talking about internet of things from self driving cars to business benefits. It's not just consumer, it's really bringing that together, you guys are really leading with the cloud native platform from rail, open shift men and services. Everything about the cloud native underpinnings you guys have been successful as a company but now in your area, telco is being disrupted. Absolutely. Give us your take on this is super exciting. >>Well, it's actually one of the most exciting times I've been in the industry for 30 years are probably aging myself now. But in the telecommunications industry, this, for me is the most exciting. It's where technology is actually going to visibly change the way that everyone interacts with the network and with the applications that are being developed out there on our platform and as you mentioned IOT and a number of the other ai and Ml innovations that are occurring in the market place. We're going to see a new wave of applications and innovation. >>What's the key delivery workloads you're seeing with Five G environment? Um, obviously it's not just, you know, five G in the sense of thinking about mobile phones or mobile computers as they are now. Um, it's not just that consumer, hey, surf the web and check your email and get an app and download and communicate. It's bigger than that. Now, can you tell us Where you see the workloads coming in on the 5G environment? >>You hit the nail on the head, The the the, the killer application isn't the user or the consumer and the way that we traditionally have known it, because you might be able to download a video in that take 20 seconds less, but you're not going to pay an awful lot more money for that. The real opportunity around five years, the industrial applications, things that I connected car, automotive, driving, um factory floor automation, how you actually interface digitally with your bank, how we're doing all sorts of things more intelligently at the edge of the network using artificial intelligence and machine learning. So all of those things are going to deliver a new experience for everyone that interacts with the network and the telcos are at the heart of it. >>You know, I want to get into the real kind of underpinnings of what's going on with the innovations happening. You just kind of laid out kind of the implications of the use cases and the target application workloads. But there's kind of two big things going on with the edge in five G one is under the hood, networking, you know, what's going on with the moving the packets around the workload, throughput, bandwidth etcetera, and all that goes on under the hood. And then there's the domain expertise in the data where AI and machine learning have to kind of weaving. So let's take the first part first. Um open shift is out there. Red hat's got a lot of products, but you have to nail the networking requirements and cloud Native with container ization because at large scales, not just packaged, it's all kinds of things going on security, managing a compute at the edge. There's a lot of things under the hood, if you will from a networking perspective, could you share what red hats doing in that area? >>So when we last spoke with the cube, we talked a lot about GMOs and actually people living Darryl, >>can I Cause you really quickly? I'm really sorry. Keep your answer in mind. We're gonna >>go right from that question. >>We're just kidding. Um, are you, is anything that you're >>using or touching running into the desk? We're just getting >>a little bit of shakiness on your camera >>and I don't want to. >>So anyway, >>that is my, my elbows. No worries. So no >>worries. Okay, so take your answer. I'll give you like a little >>321 from behind the scenes >>and and we'll go right as if >>john just ask >>the questions, we're gonna stay running. >>So I think, uh, >>can you ask the question just to get out of my mind? Perfect. Well let's, let's do >>from that. So we'll stay on your shot. So you'll hear john, but it'll be as if >>he just asked the question. So jOHn >>team up. Here we go. I'm just gonna just jimmy and just keep my other question on the okay, here we go. So Darryl, open shift is optimized for networking requirements for cloud native. It's complex into the hood. What is red hat doing under the hood to help in the edge in large complex networks for large scale. >>Yeah. So, so that's a very good question in that we've been building on our experience with open stack and the last time I was on the cube, I talked about, you know, people virtualizing network applications and network services. We're taking a lot of that knowledge that we've learned from open stack and we're bringing that into the container based world. So we're looking at how we accelerate packets. We're looking at how we build cloud native applications on bare metal in order to drive that level of performance. We're looking at actually how we do the certification around these applications and services because they may be sitting in different app lets across the cloud, but in some instances running on multiple clouds at the same time. So we're building on our experience from open stack, we're bringing all of that into open shipping, container based environment with all of the tallinn necessary to make that effective. >>It's interesting with all the automation going on. Certainly with the edge developing nicely the way you're describing it, certainly disrupting the Telco cloud, you have an operator mindset of cloud Native operator thinking, kind of, it's distributed computing, we know that, but it's hybrid. So it's essentially cloud operations. So there's an operator mindset here that's just different. Could you just share quickly before we move on to the next segment? What's different about this operating model for the, these new kinds of operators? As you guys been saying, the C I O is the new cloud operator, That's the skill set they have to be thinking and certainly to anyone else provisioning and managing infrastructure has to think like an operator, what's your >>view? They certainly do need anything like an operator. They need to look at how they automate a lot of these functions because they're actually deployed in many different places will at the same time they have to live independently of each other. That's what cloud native actually really is. So the whole, the whole notion of five nines and vertically orientated stacks of five nines availability that's kind of going out the window. We're looking at application availability across a hybrid cloud environment and making sure the application can live and sustain itself. So operators as part of open shift is one element of that operations in terms of management and orchestration and all the tooling that we actually also providers red hat but also in conjunction with a big partner ecosystem, such as companies like net cracker, for example, or IBM as another example or Erickson bringing their automation tool sets and their orchestration tool sets of that whole equation to address exactly that problem >>you bring up the ecosystem. And this is really an interesting point. I want to just hit on that real quick because reminds me of the days when we had this massive innovation wave in the nineties during that era. The client server movement really was about multi vendor, right. And that you're starting to see that now and where this ties into here I think is when we get your reaction to this is that, you know, moving to the cloud was all about 2 2015. Move to the cloud moved to the cloud cloud native. Now it's all about not only being agile and better performance, but you're gonna have smaller footprints with more security requires more enterprise requirements. This is now it's more complicated. So you have to kind of make the complications go away and now you have more people in the ecosystem filling in these white spaces. So you have to be performance and purpose built if you will. I hate to use that word, but or or at least performing an agile, smaller footprint grade security enabling other people to participate. That's a requirement. Can you share your reaction to that? >>Well, that's the core of what we do. A red hat. I mean we take open source community software into a hardened distribution fit for the telecommunications marketplace. So we're very adapt to working with communities and third parties. That ecosystem is really important to us. We're investing hundreds of engineers, literally hundreds of engineers working with our ecosystem partners to make sure that their applications services certified, running on our platform, but but also importantly is certified to be running in conjunction with other cloud native applications that sit over the same cloud. So that that is not trivial to achieve in any stretch of the imagination. And a lot of 80 technology skills come to bear. And as you mentioned earlier, a lot of networking skills, things that we've learned and we've built with a lot of these traditional vendors, we bring that to the marketplace. >>You know, I've been saying on the cube, I think five years ago I started talking about this, it was kind of a loose formulation, I want to get your reaction because you brought up ecosystem, you know, saying, you know, you're gonna see the big clouds develop out. The amazon Microsoft came in after and now google and others and I said there's gonna be a huge wave of of what I call secondary clouds and you see companies like snowflake building on on top of amazon and so you start to see the power law of new cloud service providers emerging that can either sit and work with across multiple clouds. Either one cloud or others that's now multi cloud and hybrid. But this rise of the new more C. S. P. S, more cloud service providers, this is a huge part of your area right now because some call that telco telco cloud edge hits that. What is red hat doing in this cloud service provider market specifically? How do you help them if I'm a cloud service provider, what do I get in working with Red Hat? How do I be successful because it's very easy to be a cloud service provider now more than ever. What do I do? How do you help? How do you help me? >>Well, we we we offer a platform called open shift which is a containerized based platform, but it's not just a container. It involves huge amounts of tooling associated with operating it, developing and around it. So the concept that we have is that you can bring those applications, developed them once on 11 single platform and run it on premise. You can run it natively as a service in Microsoft environment. You can actually run it natively as a service in amazon's environment. You can running natively on IBM's Environment. You can build an application once and run it in all of them depending on what you want to achieve, who actually provide you the best, owning the best terms and conditions the best, the best tooling in terms of other services such as Ai associated with that. So it's all about developing it once, certifying it once but deploying it in many, many different locations, leveraging the largest possible developing ecosystem to drive innovation through applications on that common platform. >>So assumption there is that's going to drive down costs. Can you why that benefits the economics are there? We talk about the economics. >>Yeah. So it does drive down costs a massive important aspect but more importantly it drives up agility. So time to market advantages actually attainable for you so many of the tell coast but they deploy a network service traditionally would take them literally maybe a year to roll it all out. They have to do it in days, they have to do updates in real time in data operations in literally minutes. So we were building the fabric necessary in order to enable those applications and services to occur. And as you move into the edge of the network and you look at things like private five G networks, service providers or telcos in this instance will be able to deliver services all the way out to the edge into that private five G environment and operate that in conjunction with those enterprise clients. >>So open shit allows me if I get this right on the CSP to run, have a horizontally scalable organization. Okay. From a unification platform standpoint. Okay, well it's 5G and other functions, is that correct? That's correct. Ok. So you've got that now, now I want to come in and bring in the top of the stack or the other element. That's been a big conversation here at Redhead Summit and in the industry that is A I and the use of data. One of the things that's emerging is the ability to have both the horizontal scale as well as the special is um of the data and have that domain expertise. Uh you're in the industries for red hat. This is important because you're gonna have one industry is going to have different jargon, different language, different data, different KPI S. So you've got to have that domain expertise to enable the ability to write the apps and also enable a I can, you know how that works and what were you doing there? >>So we're developing open shift and a number of other of our technologies to be fit for the edge of the network where a lot of these Ai applications will reside because you want them closer to the client or the the application itself where it needs to reside. We're creating that edge fabric, if you like. The next generation of hybrid cloud is really going to be, in my view at the edge we're enabling a lot of the service providers to go after that but we're also igniting by industry, You mentioned different industries. So if I look at, for example, manufacturing with mind sphere, we recently announced with Seaman's how they do at the edge of the network factory automation, collecting telemetry, doing real time data and analytics, looking at materials going through the factory floor in order to get a better quality results with lower, lower levels of imperfections as they run through that system and just one industry and they have their own private and favorite Ai platforms and data sets. They want to work with with their own data. Scientists who understand that that that ecosystem inherently you can move that to health care and you can imagine how you actually interface with your health care professionals here in north America, but also around the world, How those applications and services and what the Ai needs to do in terms of understanding x rays and looking at common errors associated with different x rays to. A practitioner can make a more specific diagnosis faster saving money and potentially lives as well. So different different vertical markets in this space have different AI and Ml requirements and needs different data science is different data models. And what we're seeing is an ecosystem of companies that are starting up there in that space that we have, what service part of IBM. But you have processed the labs of H T H 20 and a number of other very, very important AI based companies in that ecosystem. >>Yeah. And you get the horizontal scalability of the control plane and in the platform if you will, that gives you cross organizational leverage uh and enable that than vertical expertise. >>Exactly. And you want to build an Ai application that might run on a factory floor for for certain reasons to its location and what they're actually physically building. You might want to run their on premise, you might actually want to put it into IBM cloud or in Zur or into AWS, You develop, it wants to open shift, you can deploy it in all of those as a service sitting natively in those environments. >>Darrell, great chat. I got a lot going on telco cloud, There's a lot of cloud, native disruption going on. It's a challenge and an opportunity and some people have to be on the right side of history on this one if they're going to get it right. Well, no, and the scoreboard will be very clear because this is a shift, it's a shift. So again, you hit all the key points that I wanted to get out. But I want to ask you to more areas that are hot here at red hat summit 21 as well again and as well in the industry and get your reaction and thoughts on uh, and they are def sec ops and automation. Okay. Two areas. Everyone's talking about DEV ops which we know is infrastructure as code programming ability under the hood. Modern application development. All good. Yeah, the second their security to have sex shops. That's critical automation is continuing to be the benefits of cloud native. So Deb see cops and automation. What you're taking has that impact the telco world in your world. >>You can't you can't operate a network without having security in place. You're talking about very sensitive data. You're talking about applications that could be real time chris pickling mrs actually even life saving or life threatening if you don't get them right. So the acquisition that red hat recently made around stack rocks, really helps us make that next level of transition into that space. And we're looking about how we go about securing containers in a cloud native environment. As you can imagine, there will be many, many thousands tens of thousands of containers running if one is actually misbehaving for what one of a better term that creates a security risk in a security loophole. Were assuring that up that's important for the deployment, open shift in the Tokyo domain and other domains in terms of automation. If you can't do it at scale and if you look at five G and you look at the radios at the edge of the network and how you're gonna provision of those services. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of nodes, hundreds of thousands. You have to automate a lot of those processes, otherwise you can't scale to meet the opportunity, you can't physically deploy, >>you know, Darryl, this is a great conversation, you know, as a student of history and um development and I always kind of joke about that and you you've been around the industry for a long time. Telcos have been balancing this um evolution of digital business for many, many decades. Um and now with Cloud Native, it's finally a time where you're starting to see that it's just the same game now, new infrastructure, you know, video, voice, text data all now happening all transformed and going digital all the way, all aspects of it in your opinion. How should telcos be thinking about as they put their plans in place for next generation because you know, the world is now cloud Native. There's a huge surface here of opportunities, different ecosystem relationships, the power dynamics are shifting. It's it's really a time where there will be winners and there will be losers. What's your, what's your view on on how the telco industry needs to clarify and how they be positioned for success. >>So, so one of the things I truly believe very deeply that the telcos need to create a platform, horizontal platform that attracts developer and ecosystems to their platform because innovation is gonna sit elsewhere, then there might be a killer application that one telco might create. But in reality most of those innovations that most of those disruptors are going to occur from outside of that telco company. So you want to create an environment where you're easy to engage and you've got maximum sets of tools and versatility and agility in order to attract that innovation. If you attract the innovation, you're going to ignite the business opportunity that 5G and 60 and beyond is going to actually provide you or enable your business to drive. And you've really got to unlock that innovation and you can only unlock in our view, red hat innovation. If you're open, you follow open standards, you're using open systems and open source is a method or a tool that you guys, if you're a telco, I would ask you guys need to leverage and harness >>and there's a lot, there's a lot of upside there if you get that right, there's plenty of upside, a lot of leverage, a lot of assets to advantage the whole offline online. Coming back together, we are living in a hybrid world, certainly with the pandemic, we've seen what that means. It's put a spotlight on critical infrastructure and the critical shifts. If you had to kind of get pinned down Darryl, how would you describe that learnings from the pandemic as folks start to come out of the pandemic? There's a light at the end of the tunnel as we come out of this pandemic, companies want a growth strategy, wanna be positioned for success what you're learning coming out of the pandemic. >>So from my perspective, which really kind of 11 respect was was very admirable. But another respect is actually deeply uh a lot of gratitude is the fact that the telecommunications companies because of their carrier, great capabilities and their operational prowess were able to keep their networks up and running and they had to move significant capacity from major cities to rural areas because everyone was working from home and in many different countries around the world, they did that extremely and with extremely well. Um and their networks held up I don't know and maybe someone will correct me and email me but I don't know one telco had a huge network outage through this pandemic and that kept us connected. It kept us working. And it also what I also learned is that in certain countries, particularly at a time where they have a very large prepaid market, they were worried that the prepaid market in the pandemic would go down because they felt that people would have enough money to spend and therefore they wouldn't top up their phones as much. The opposite effect occurred. They saw prepaid grow and that really taught me that that connectivity is critical in times of stress that we're also everyone's going through. So I think there are some key learnings that >>yeah, I think you're right on the money there. It's like they pulled the curtain back of all the fun and said necessity is the mother of invention and when you look at what happened and what had to happen to survive in the pandemic and be functional. Your, you nailed it, the network stability, the resilience, but also the new capabilities that were needed had to be delivered in an agile way. And I think, you know, it's pretty much the forcing function for all the projects that are on the table to know which ones to double down on. So I think you pretty much nailed it. Darrell Jordan smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts for red hat kibble, unnatural. Thanks for that insight. Thanks for sharing great conversation around telcos and telco clouds and all the edge opportunities. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you john >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 21. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm mhm

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Boston Massachusetts, it's The CUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat and additional ecosystem support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host John Troyer. You're watching The CUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program Darrell Jordan-Smith who's the Vice President of Telecommunications at Red Hat. Thanks so much for joining us. >> It's great to be here thank you >> All right so Darrell last year at the show you know the telcos were like all in force. I got to interview Verizon. We're going to have Beth who was on the keynote stage on Monday on our coverage tomorrow. I know they're a Red Hat customer. When I hear at Red Hat summit, there were some really big telcos that are red hat customers. So to tell us why telco and OpenStack you know go so well together these days? >> Well telcos are looking for a open source for innovation. They need to change the way that they deliver services today and modernize their network infrastructure to become more agile, and a lot of them are doing that because of 5G, the next generation of services that they will be deploying over their network infrastructure. They can't do that unless they have an agile infrastructure fabric and an agile software capability to deliver those applications over those networks. >> All right well there's a lot to dig into yet. Let's start with NFV was the use case last year. Well 5G IOT definitely want to get into though but my understanding, I simplified it. NFV is just how the telcos can help deliver via software services they have. I mean think about how your set-top box, I can get channels and I can get certain programming. Is that kind of what you see, and how do they do their business model? >> Yeah traditionally, they bought appliances, hardware specific appliances. They put them in network operation centers and many thousands of those around the world. In the US there's tens of thousands of them. They're really moving more to a software based model where they don't necessarily need to buy a fixed appliance with its own silicone. They're going with commercial off-the-shelf x86 based technology and they're actually deploying that in what I call next generation data centers around Open Compute platform being an architecture, where you're looking at storage, compute, networking in a scalable fashion using open source technologies to deploy that in at massive scale. >> Very different from you think about like cloud might be a place where you have services run but the telcos are pushing services with their software out to their consumers. >> Yeah they're changing the core network infrastructure to support that and at the mobile edge in these network operation centers at the edge, they're making those more agile as well in order to push as many services out closely to the customer but also to aggregate content and data that their customers would acquire. So for example, you take a video clip on your phone, there's no point in storing that in the core of the network. You want to maybe store that at the edge, where maybe some of your friends would share it at that point in time, more efficient ways of drive that. >> I wonder if you can expand a little bit. That that term edge because we hear is that the edge of the network? Is that a mobile device? Is that a sensor for IOT in the telecom world? Is it all of the above? >> Well a lot of people use it is all the above but in the context I'm using it, it's at the edge of the network. It's not the device. That is a whole separate set of conversations, and things reach a very IOT-centric. At the moment, the telecommunications companies want to make the edge more efficient. They want to build clouds around the edge. They want to aggregate all those different clouds, and they want to build agile based infrastructure. So similarly to the way that Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google deliver their services today, they need to get into that space in order to be agile enough to develop and deploy their next generation of applications and services. >> So at this point OpenStack in its evolution with this customer vertical, it seems like we're not only talking about a cloud but maybe a cloud of clouds. >> Yes absolutely, I mean telcos again, they typically have one of everything. They are looking at decoupled solutions in terms of their network-based infrastructure. They want to be able to manage every layer of that infrastructure independently of the other layers in order to drive maximum flexibility and agility into their infrastructure but also so they don't get locked in to any one particular vendor. That's a big, big theme in the telco space. >> So you use the words agility and flexibility. So I in a previous lifetime, I did work with some telecom providers and they were not known for those words of agility and flexibility. We're in a world now with open source, with CICD, we talked about upgradability, a lot of the talk here at OpenStack is about manageability and flexibility and building, putting containers on top. Maybe we can go there next but do you, as you work with your customers and partners in the telecom space. It seems like they've had to have a cultural shift. I see a lot of people from the carriers here, right. They're as long haired and shaggy, and barefoot as any other engineer here at OpenStack summit. Has there been a real cultural shift inside telecom to accomplish this? >> Yeah, there's a real cultural shift that's ongoing. It's got a ways to go. The telcos themselves are engineeringly orientated. So they traditionally have come from an environment where we'll build it and customers will come. Now they're looking at we need to build it quicker and faster in order to attract customers, get them to come and view our services, get them addicted to a certain degree. Maybe the wrong word but to our content. So building sticky services, trying to reduce the churn they have in their business, driving innovation through open source because I think they've realized that innovation isn't necessarily within their own company. It sits elsewhere so which is the new Uber as it were? Which is new Airbnb? What is the new WhatsApp-based application? They want to create a network infrastructure that's flexible enough with all of those attributes through API so those companies can develop innovative next-generation content and services over their network infrastructure, in order to attract and make services sticky for their customers. >> Darrell, I wonder if you can speak to the complexity of the solutions in the telco space? Last year we spoke to Verizon, and they love what they have but they had to choose some glass, walk over some hot coals to be able to get the solution together. These are big complicated solutions. We've talked in general about OpenStack, and trying to simplify some of the complexity but can you speak to some of the how long it takes to roll these out and some of the effort involved for the telcos? >> Well it's it's sort of a walk, a cruel walk run process to a lot of that because A working with open source is very different than what they traditionally have done, and as you mentioned earlier, traditionally they'll buy an application through our appliance. They'll take nine months to deploy in all their centers. Then another three to six months later, they might switch it off. In the software agile world, they've got to condense that sort of 12 to 18 month period down to maybe three or four weeks. They may stand up a service for an event like the Olympics and then take it down after the Olympics. So there's a lot of complexity and change in the way that they need to deliver those services, and that complexity isn't trivial. So it involves delivering quality of service through the deployment of next generation network infrastructure because they are regulated companies. So they've got to maintain that quality of service in order to be able to bill, and meet the regulations that they they have to adhere to in the markets that they operate their network infrastructure. Very different from the Googles, the Facebooks of the world. They don't have that sort of regulation over their head. The telcos do so they have a level of discipline that they need to achieve in terms of availability of their network infrastructure, the availability of their services, the availability of their applications, and that links into a whole quality of service experience for their customers, and linked into their operation systems support, into their billing system and the list goes on, and on and on. So what we found at Red Hat is that, that is not trivial, that is hard, and a lot of the telcos are very engineeringly oriented. It's great working with them because they really understand the difficulties, and the fact that this is particularly hard. They also know that they want to build it and own it, and understand it themselves, because it's their business model. To them, the network is an asset. It's not something that they can just outsource to someone else, that doesn't necessarily understand that same degree of that asset. So they want to get their heads around that. >> So they need that reliability. From the eyes of a service provider how mature is OpenStack right now? Is it in production? Can they trust it? We're a few more than a few years into the OpenStack evolution so where are we in deployment? >> That, number of operators are in deployment. You mentioned one on a few months ago like Verizon. >> Stu: Yeah, AT&T is on stage. >> Absolutely, AT&T-- >> Deutsche Telekom, the headlines sponsored the event. >> Exactly, I mean, and what they're doing is they're starting very pragmatically. They're looking at specific services, and they're building slowly a service upon service upon service so they go from a crawl to walking, then to a run. I think, what we're seeing in OpenStack is not if but when these guys will deploy at mass scale. We're beginning now to see a general acceptance that this is a methodology and or a technology that they can deploy and will deploy in the NFE context. The other thing that's occurring in the space is they're looking at traditional IT workloads. So a telco-based cloud if you want to use that terminology is just as capable of running IT-based workloads and services as well. So a number of them are looking at their own enterprise and running those environments. Some of them are partnering with some of our partners to build OpenStack public cloud instances. So they want to try and attract services to that environment as well. >> It's interesting you point that out. There's been that ebbing flow of can the telco players be cloud as John pointed out. I worked in telecommunications back in the '90s. Agile and fast was not the thing of the day. One of the big companies who had bought a cloud company just sold off lots of their data centers. Do they feel that they're going to compete against the Amazon, Microsoft, Googles of the world? Do they think they'll be service providers? Where do they see is their natural fit in the cloud ecosystem? >> So my role is on a global basis. In North America, they don't want to, I don't think they feel they can compete in the way that you were intimating in that regard. However, where they do think they can compete and since we're going to probably talk about 5G and IOT, that is the area where they see public cloud applications and services being developed. So they're looking at the insurance industry, the automotive industry, the manufacturing industry, and creating an environment where those applications can be built to many many thousands of millions of devices connected to them. So I think the definition of in North America, of a public cloud infrastructure is going to evolve in that direction. In other markets such as Latin America and in Europe, some of the telecommunications companies believe that they can be competitive in that space. So more recently, Orange announced that they're working with OpenStack to deploy public cloud. Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile, America Movil, they're all using OpenStack to try and enter that specific market space. >> Okay, please talk to us about the 5G angles here. Obviously like Mobile World Congress, it was like be number one conversation. When we went to the Open Networking Summit, it was there. You're the first person to talk about it that I heard I didn't, maybe I missed it in one of the keynotes but you know none of our interviews has come out yet. So how does that fit into the OpenStack picture? >> So 5G is the reason why telcos are building NFEI, that they were NFE because they realize that to connect all of those devices to their network-based infrastructure, they need to do it intelligently, they need to do it at the edge, and they need to have a high degree of flexibility and agility to their network-based infrastructure to create an innovation environment for application developers to connect all those devices. So we talked about smart cars as a good example around 5G. You need low latency, you need the high availability, you need to be reliable, you need to provide all of that network infrastructure as an example plus you need a portfolio of developers that are going to create all sorts of different applications for those vehicles that we driving around on the street. So that without 5G, that does not happen. You're not, you know some metropolitan areas, the amount of connectivity that you have access to in terms of the traditional cloud-based access networking infrastructure doesn't facilitate the amount of density that 5G will actually facilitate. So you need to be able to change the basis in which you're building that infrastructure to lower the cost of the network in terms of being able to drive that. >> All right and I'm curious I think about the global reach we were just talking about. Usually, the global reach of a new technology like 5G lags a little bit in the rest of the world compared to Western Europe and North America. >> Well, I think in Asia, 5G is, if I look at what they're trying to do, the leading vendors ZTE, Samsung, Huawei, they're heavily invested in 5G-based infrastructure, and they don't have, their operators in those part of the world don't have an awful lot of legacy-based infrastructure to be able to have to replace. They can get there a lot faster. The other thing is with 5G, for them, the applications and services in the way that people experience network-based access or Internet if for want of another word is very different than way that maybe we experience it here in the US or in Europe. So I think you're going to see different applications and different business models evolve in different markets in Asia than you would say here in North America. In North America, I think that it's going to take a lot of the operators different business models to look at maybe some of the higher order of applications and services that drive stickiness for their own infrastructure and network services but also some of the more advanced applications like I mentioned smart cars or smart homes, or smart cities or energy or better ways of delivering products in terms of distribution to your home, those those types of applications and services we won't necessarily in some of those other markets be there and similarly for Europe. >> All right Darrell Jordan-Smith, really appreciate you joining us, giving us all the updates on telco, how it fits with OpenStack. Jon Troyer and I will be back with lots more coverage here from the OpenStack summit 2017 in Boston. You're watching The CUBE (upbeat music)