>>Okay, welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del tech world. I'm john for your host of the cube we're here for virtual coverage were not yet face to face as we start to come out of covert, we're still doing the remote but we got the cube virtual. We're here with Dennis Hoffman, senior Vice President, General Manager for the telecom Systems business group within Dell Technologies dead. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming in CUba alumni. Thanks for coming on. >>My pleasure, john great to see you and look forward to the days when we can stop doing this virtually. >>Well, you guys have been certainly pumping out a lot of content and right now telco cloud telco disruption is big. We heard Michael Dell last event and even when we were in person in real life, we he was really laying down the five G leadership now with hybrid cloud, um, standardized, pretty much I mean, consensus is no, no debate really. It's hybrid multi cloud on the horizon. That's still just a subsystem of basically distributed computing A. K. A hybrid cloud makes the edge a huge part of the story this year. And the innovations all around telecom, Edge in five G have been around and they're changing really fast. What's how are these Edge in five G technologies impacting the market today? >>Yeah, it's uh is fascinating times, I'll tell you they are providing really the ultimate carrots, you know, the catalyst for um innovation in the market and really driving the world's network operators To uh want to take advantage of all the opportunity that the edge presents and that 5G enables. And it's, you know, at the end of the day, it's really forcing folks to think hard about if they have the right network architectures to enable that to capture that opportunity to have the right kind of capabilities. And so we're seeing an awful lot of interest in network desegregation, network modernization, various forms of adopting the technology is you and I are familiar with from years of what's going on in data center evolution are really starting to hit the telco network now at a really, really interesting time >>while we're on the landscape. Do you want to get your opinion on something? I've been hearing a lot, certainly in interviewing other folks here at Dell tech world and in the industry about how the edge and the data compute equation and the connectivity has changed how they're going to lay out essentially their factory, their plants, their operations and certainly covid pushing everyone at home has changed the game on how data is being computed on and how apps are being built. This is a huge five G opportunity certainly when you start to get into the business impact, autonomous vehicles, I've been doing stories about autonomous boats and everything we could have an autonomous cube soon. So, you know, everything is autonomous which drives to this whole edge piece, What's your take on that? >>Yeah, you know, it's, it's funny for years we've been talking about on prem and off prem, like there's two problems there turns out there's a third Prem, right? There is the other premises and that is not the private data center and not the public cloud. And when you stop and think about it, it it makes sense because at the end of the day, wherever we can get data, we can create digital advantage and it's always been cheaper and more effective and faster to move compute to data than to move data to compute. So technology is like 5G are beginning to make it possible to run very interesting applications in very different places and capture what is predicted to be some 3/4 of the data created over the next decade is going to get created somewhere other than a private data center or a public cloud. And that's the edge, you know, in telcos, look at that third premises as their opportunity to get another bite of the apple on services. Four G was kind of a story of the over the top. Players really took the profit pool and made a lot of money from the over to the netflix is to the itunes and so on and so forth. But when you come back to Five G and think of it kind of as the Enterprise G, it's a chance now for the world's network operators to really get a chunk of that profit pool that comes from the emergence of this third premises called the edge >>Enterprise G. I love that, I'm gonna steal that from you. It's a great, great uh >>somebody else >>uh Yeah, the new trend, but it's a business, it's a business opportunity again, totally cool. And consumers to um okay, so you got your out on the road a lot. I know that we've talked in the past on the cube. There's a lot of discussions in the industry, as well as customers that you're having. What are you hearing? What are the some of the pain points are, see Covid has unveiled unveiled new use cases, people had had adapted to it. There's adaptations that are out there that are new and then things that might not happen again. What are you hearing from customers? >>Yeah, I would say in summary, we're hearing a mix of optimism and uncertainty, optimism around all the stuff we just talked about and that you mentioned, you know, it's it's a blank from anywhere. World right work from anywhere, learn from anywhere. Medicine from anywhere. And you know, if the pandemic has taught us anything, it's about the absolute necessity of communications technology to the world we live in today. The uncertainty comes from this question of, okay, so I know that there's this big opportunity and I know that I need to modernize my network architecture and kind of change the way I operate to capture it all. But the architecture is I run on today, make that really hard. And the architecture is that that the modern data center is built on, We know they work. But how do I get them in a way that allows me to build a resilient, high performance agile communications network. Um, you know, today we uh we face a world in which we see, we have a world in which solutions are delivered very fairly monolithically in the network uh for network operators but going forward, the power to potentially decompose all of that is wonderful provided it can be recomposed in a way they can consume. And I think that's where the uncertainty lies. There's a lot of testing and trialing of pieces of applications of underlying hardware, infrastructure, servers, accelerators, um certainly different types of virtualization and container ization technologies. But in the end these networks need to run it many many many nines um and they need to be extremely robust and pulling together a lot of different components from the open ecosystem is a daunting challenge for most of the network operators. >>You know, I hear you saying about the opportunity recognition and the re factoring how we called re composing this opportunity here and again. I like this enterprise G angle because what it means is that it's not the consumer the only it's it's everything. It's a complete consumer ization of I. T. So it's a whole another edge landscape. Prem third, the third premise is the edge. All good. I've always so set on the cube and certainly Dave and I have David and I have riffed on this is that you know, everything is now cloud operations and the data center is a big edge and then you've got other pieces that are just edges. A distributed system kind of sounds like a computer in the cloud. So this is kind of operating model. So I have to ask the question which is in telco, if it's gonna be distributed like that and it's going to be operated at scale, how is Dell responding to capture the mind share and customers using Dell in this new telco disruption? Because it's kind of you got to keep the lights on and you gotta also get them in a position to take advantage of the new opportunity. How are you responding? >>Yeah, Well, we're trying to we're literally trying to fill that gap, you know, the talking to the world's uh modern or say the world's telecom network operations leaders. We've uh we've had a lot of conversations with folks about what they need to do and what's holding them back from really in many ways taking advantage of the digital transformation that that's kind of rippling through the economy. And as they kind of laid that out to us, we decided that it was an enormous opportunity for Dell that this this uh you know, this new network will be fundamentally built on computer technology uh and it will be open industry standard computer technology. And on top of that we will use virtualization. And if this begins to sound like the way data centers are being built, because that's exactly what's happening. But more than that, I think there's a need for an at scale substantial provider that the world's biggest carriers can bet on and feel they can trust as a strategic partner to not only pull the ecosystem together, validated, certified, curated a little bit uh, and deliver it as an outcome, but then stand behind it running and importantly, do all of that in a way that doesn't constrain the continuous innovation. That's really the hallmark of some of these modern architecture. So for us, we see, you know, an opportunity that is literally perfectly built for a company like dealt and that's why we decided to invest in it. That's why you hear Michael talking about it a lot. Uh it's um, you know, it's it's really super well aligned with our strategy, we think it's actually key to winning the edge. Uh and and it's also really well aligned with our purpose, you know what this company exists to accelerate human progress through technology. And this little slice of it is all about accelerating communications and the transformation of modern networks to do exactly that right, To help close the digital divide, to bring fair and equitable medicine and learning to all, um and to allow us all to work from wherever we're working. So it's uh it's something that we're excited about on multiple levels and we think the company is really built for the distributed computing environment that a modern telco network represents. >>Yeah, what's interesting is that the value that you guys can enable at the edge, his real impact, It's not just data center and compute and have applications. Remember the old days I got my crm in my E. R. P and I got my apps on my systems and it's all good now. Business is completely software enables, it's the entire business and the business is software naval, which means that you have to have that edge. So I totally love of the positioning and strategy. I have to ask you if you don't mind, where is the residents with customers when you look at the telco enablement there that you're enabling them to do what's resonating the most, what's jumping out from the telescopes in terms of what Dell's doing for them And the customers, you mentioned tele medicine, which by the way, is an amazing impact to the world. Just one example. But where's the residence? >>Yeah. You know, first we we are what we are. Right. So it's, I think with a lot of conversations, it begins with, um, the telecommunications network needs server technology, but it needs very specific kinds of server technology built in very specific ways. Um, the, you know, the needs of compute at the base of a cell tower on a hill in Montana in the middle of winter are different than we've been building for data centers for years. So I think the first thing that resonates it, I need it, I need a very specific kind of open compute, uh, infrastructure hardware foundation that is industry standard. And, and we turn to somebody like Delta do do exactly that. But what we've learned is there's so much more than that because really we need to begin to deliver outcomes on top of that foundation. Uh, First outcome, we need to deliver his modern operations and maintenance of a distributed network. Zero touch provisioning, zero touch upgrading. How can we impact the total cost of maintenance and ownership in a meaningful way, um, for a network that is in fact constructed out of a fabric of server. On top of that there's the actual network core network services, Edge, the radio access network. And how do we successively open up each section of the network, driving computing storage all the way to the edge? Because for many organizations in the world, many enterprises, their edge will actually be on the telco premises. Right. The telco edge will be their edge. Some of the bigger companies certainly can build their own. But as you get in the world of medium and small business, the person they buy their circuits from and their communications from. If they have the ability to deliver them private slices of networks and virtual compute and storage, that's going to be how they get after it. So you know for us that next piece that resonates is the ability to pull together solutions like we've been doing for years with the ex rail hyper converged the stuff we did with the C. E. Back in the day and then last >>I'm just saying that you know you're bringing up things that kind of sound. It's super complex physical plant and equipment. You're talking about real hard and purpose built devices in the past very operational technology oriented stuff and then that has to have I. T. Agility right? And then have scalability behind it and complete you know integration this is not obvious and easy. It's hard. >>Yeah. No I mean software doesn't run on software right? Software runs on hardware and so as much as a lot of the power and the interest comes from what the application can do underlying it all is a capability to distribute, compute and storage to where the application or the software wants to run or runs best. That's what's really cool about five G is its ability to do the stuff you mentioned earlier on, you know, the, the G Wiz stuff, drones and autonomous and a AR and VR and all the things that ultra reliable, low latency communication would make possible on a grand scale that really bring the machines into the picture, not just humans on the edge. It's the stuff, right? That that's on the edge and we've been talking about it for a long time, but none of it's gonna matter if we don't put this infrastructure foundation in place. Then we got to lay an open marketplace of containerized network functions. Virtualized network functions on top of that all to enable our network operators to deliver interesting services to end users. It's >>super exciting. I got to say that it's a super exciting because you know, it's coming it's like the energies there, it's like the, you know, the storm's coming of disruption in the innovation because you think about what containers and cloud native kubernetes the cloud native technologies can do for legacy because its shelf life and more headroom, right? So you can you can win these telcos can actually not only pivot but line extension into new capabilities. So they tend to be very strong technically is an operator, operator networks, the hard tech stuff, physical stuff and software but not known for it. I mean but now there's a huge opportunity that's gonna come around the corner. I'm bullish on Iot and edge where you have the O. T. And I. T. Coming together. It's really compelling And it's going to be radically different I think in the next 5 to 10 years what's your take on that in terms of outlook? >>Couldn't agree more. Yeah I mean it's you know it's for those of us are in the industry always the knowledge of what's coming or the belief in what's coming. The hype precedes the actual development. But you know just as I don't know 15 20 years ago the idea that you can completely disrupt the taxi industry with an app and a four G smartphone service was in nobody's mind except maybe a couple of people. You >>know it >>makes you wonder what is the what is the uber equivalent of a business service that will be fundamentally enabled by the architecture we just described that we're not thinking about right now and that's why every time we move from a centralized computing model to a decentralized computing models that decentralized computing models dramatically larger than a centralized, >>way >>bigger than mainframe. Edge, way bigger than client server, which is already way bigger than cloud, Public. Cloud. And so I think it's, you know, there's a, there's a lot of promise, a lot of excitement. Still a long way to go though. A lot of the stuff we're talking about still is not actually rolled out into the network. Um and that's kind of the opportunity for somebody like them. >>Yeah. And decentralized and open winds. It's funny you mentioned high, we were talking David was just talking with Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger in 2013. We're talking hybrid cloud, that's 78 years ago. Okay, so good stuff. Let's get into the news real quick. Um Deltek World, you've got some news coming. Uh Let's dig into it. Please share some of the outlook of the news. You're gonna be you're you're announcing here? >>Yeah, thanks. Sure, john, I mean, we're gonna be announcing two things relative to the telecom portfolio. Uh and they're both reference architectures with VM ware. One is the second edition of the telco cloud platform for five G. Um, so that's a Delvian where reference architecture, that is exactly what we just talked about. It's this open software defined on industry standard hardware platform, um for running 5G applications. And then the other one is the first version of the telco cloud platform for the radio access network, TCP ran as we would call it. Um and as we start to push this technology from the core out towards the edge of the telecom network. So to really interesting developments in in deep partnership with VM ware and stuff, we've been working on for a while stuff, we are in fact working on with customers and delivering today and we'll be making formal announcements about those at the D T W show. >>Awesome. Dennis, thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing the update and thanks for the industry insight. Uh, I love the telco shift that's going on. It's an extension of existing, I think cloud native saves the day here with telco and allows the completely different landscape to evolve. So you guys were on top of it. Thanks for sharing S VP and general manager, the telecom systems business with Dell Dennis. Hoffman. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks john Okay >>cube coverage here. Del Tech world. I'm john for a year. Thanks for watching. Yeah.