(gentle upbeat music) >> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright upbeat music) >> We're back in Barcelona at the Fira. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson. We're live at MWC23, day four of the coverage. The show is still rocking. You walk the floor, it's jamming. People are lined up to get in the copter, in the right. It's amazing. Planes, trains, automobiles, digitization of analog businesses. We're going to talk private wireless here with Dell. Sarvesh Sharma, the Global Director for Edge and Private Mobility Solutions practice at Dell. And John McCready is a Senior Director for 5G Solutions and product management at Dell Technologies. Guys, good to see you. >> Likewise, likewise. >> Good to see you too. >> Private wireless. It's the buzz of the show. Everybody's talking about it. What's Dell's point of view on that? >> So Dell is, obviously, interested entering the private wireless game, as it's a good part of the overall enterprise IT space. As you move more and more into the different things. What we announced here, is sort of our initial partnerships with some key players like Airspan and expedo and AlphaNet. Players that are important in the space. Dell's going to provide an overall system integration solution wrap along with our Edge BU as well. And we think that we can bring really good solutions to our enterprise customers. >> Okay, I got to ask you about AlphaNet. So HPE pulled a little judo move they waited till you announced your partnership and then they bought the company. What, you know, what's your opinion on that? You going to, you going to dump AlphaNet, you're going to keep 'em? >> No. >> We're open Ecosystem. >> Yeah, it's an open ecosystem. We announce these are our initial partners, you know we're going to announce additional partners that was always the case. You know, there's a lot of good players in this space that bring different pros and cons. We got to be able to match the solution requirements of all our customers. And so we'll continue to partner with them and with others. >> Good, good answer, I like that. So some of these solutions are sort of out of the box, others require more integration. Can you talk about your, the spectrum of your portfolio? >> So I'm glad you brought up the integration part, right? I mean, if you look at private wireless, private mobility it is not a sell by itself. At the end of the day what the enterprise wants is not just private mobility. They're looking for an outcome. Which means from an integration perspective, you need somebody who can integrate the infrastructure stack. But that's not enough. You need somebody who can bring in the application stack to play and integrate that application stack with the enterprises IT OT. And that's not enough. You need somebody to put those together. And Dell is ideally suited to do all of this, right? We have strong partners that can bring the infrastructure stack to play. We have a proven track record of managing the IT and the enterprise stack. So we are very excited to say, "Hey, this is the sweet spot for us. And if there was a right to win the edge, we have it." >> Can you explain, I mean, people might be saying, well, why do I even need private wireless? I got Wi-Fi. I know it's kind of a dumb question for people who are in the business, but explain to folks in the audience who may not understand the intersection of the two. >> So, yeah, so I think, you know, wireless is a great techno- pardon me, Wi-Fi is a great technology for taking your laptop to the conference room. You know, it's effectively wireless LAN Where private 5G and before that private LTE had come into play is where there's a number of attributes of your application, what you're using it for, for which Wi-Fi is not as well suited. And so, you know, that plays out in different verticals in different ways. Either maybe you need a much higher capacity than Wi-Fi, better security than Wi-Fi, wider coverage like outdoor, and in many cases a more predictable reliability. So cellular is just a different way of handling the wireless interface that provides those attributes. So, you know, I think at the beginning, the first several years, you know Wi-Fi and 5G are going to live side by side in the enterprise for their different roles. How that plays out in the long term? We'll see how they each evolve. >> But I think anybody can relate to that. I mean, Wi-Fi's fine, you know, we have our issues with Wi-Fi. I'm having a lot of issues with Wi-Fi this week, but generally speaking, it works just fine. It's ubiquitous, it's cheap, okay. But I would not want to run my factory on it and rely on it for my robots that are shipping products, right? So that really is kind of the difference. It's really an industry 4.0 type. >> Yeah, exactly. So I mean, manufacturing's an important vertical, but things of energy and mining and things like that they're all outdoor, right? So you actually need the scale that comes, with a higher power technology, and even, you know just basic things like running cameras in a retail store and using AI to watch for certain things. You get a much better latency performance on private 5G and therefore are able to run more sophisticated applications. >> So I could be doing realtime inference. I can imagine Dave, I got an arm processor I'm doing some realtime inference AI at the Edge. You know, you need something like 5G to be able to do that, you can't be doing that over Wi-Fi. >> Yeah >> You nailed it. I mean that's exactly the difference, right? I mean if you look at Wi-Fi, it grow out from a IT enabled mode, right? You got to replace an ethernet. It was an IT extension. A LAN extension. Cellular came up from the mode of, "Hey, when I have that call, I need for it to be consistent and I need for it to be always available," right? So it's a different way of looking at it. Not to say one is better, the other is not better. It's just a different philosophy behind the technologies and they're going to coexist because they meet diverse needs. >> Now you have operators who embrace the idea of 5G obviously, and even private 5G. But the sort of next hurdle to overcome for some, is the idea of open standards. What does the landscape look like right now in terms of those conversations? Are you still having to push people over that hump, to get them beyond the legacy of proprietary closed stacks? >> Yeah, so I think I look, there are still people who are advocating that. And I think in the carrier's core networks it's going to take a little longer their main, you know macro networks that they serve the general public. In the private network though, the opportunity to use open standard and open technology is really strong because that's how you bring the innovation. And that's what we need in order to be able to solve all these different business problems. You know, the problems in retail, and healthcare and energy, they're different. And so you need to be able to use this open stack and be able to bring different elements of technology and blend it together in order to serve it. Otherwise we won't serve it. We'll all fail. So that's why I think it's going to have a quicker path in private. >> And the only thing to add to that is if you look at private 5G and the deployment of private LTE or private 5G, right? There is no real technology debt that you carry. So it's easy for us to say, "Hey, the operators are not listening, they're not going open." But hey, they have a technical debt, they have 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, systems, right? >> Interviewer: Sure. >> But the reason we are so excited about private 5G and private 4G, is right off the bat when we go into an enterprise space, we can go open. >> So what exactly is Dell's role here? How do you see, obviously you make hardware and you have solutions, but you got to open ecosystems. You got, you know, you got labs, what do you see your role in the ecosystem? Kind of a disruptor here in this, when I walk around this show. >> Well a disruptor, also a solution provider, and system integrator. You know, Sarvesh and I are part of the telecom practice. We have a big Edge practice in Dell as well. And so for this space around private 5G, we're really teamed up with our cohort in the Edge business unit. And think about this as, it's not just private 5G. It's what are you doing with it? That requires storage, it requires compute, it requires other applications. So Dell brings that entire package. There definitely are players who are just focused on the connectivity, but our view is, that's not enough. To ask the enterprise to integrate that all themself. I don't think that's going to work. You need to bring the connectivity and the application to storage compute the whole solution. >> Explain Telecom and and Edge. They're different but they're like cousins in the Dell organization. Where do you guys divide the two? >> You're saying within Dell? >> Yeah, within Dell. >> Yeah, so if you look at Dell, right? Telecom is one of our most newest business units. And the way it has formed is like we talk Edge all the time, right? It's not new. Edge has always been around. So our enterprise Edge has always been around. What has changed with 5G is now you can seamlessly move between the enterprise Edge and the telecom Edge. And for that happen you had to bring in a telecom systems business unit that can facilitate that evolution. The next evolution of seamless Edge that goes across from enterprise all the way into the telco and other places where Edge needs to be. >> Same question for the market, because I remember at Dell Tech World last year, I interviewed Lowe's and the discussion was about the Edge. >> John: Yep. >> What they're doing in their Edge locations. So that's Edge. That's cool. But then I had, I had another discussion with an agriculture firm. They had like the massive greenhouses and they were growing these awesome tomatoes. Well that was Edge too. It was actually further Edge. So I guess those are both Edge, right? >> Sarvesh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Spectrum there, right? And then the telecom business, now you're saying is more closely aligned with that? >> Right. >> Depending on what you're trying to do. The appropriate place for the Edge is different. You, you nailed it exactly, right. So if you need wide area, low latency, the Edge being in the telecom network actually makes a lot of sense 'cause they can serve wide area low latency. If you're just doing your manufacturing plant or your logistics facility or your agricultural growing site, that's the Edge. So that's exactly right. And the tech, the reason why they're close cousins between telecom and that is, you're going to need some kind of connectivity, some kind of connectivity from that Edge, in order to execute whatever it's you're trying to do with your business. >> Nature's Fresh was the company. I couldn't think of Nature's Fresh. They're great. Keith awesome Cube guest. >> You mentioned this mix of Wi-Fi and 5G. I know it's impossible to predict with dates certain, you know, when this, how's this is going to develop. But can you imagine a scenario where at some point in time we don't think in terms of Wi-Fi because everything is essentially enabled by a SIM or am I missing a critical piece there, in terms of management of spectrum and the complicated governmental? >> Yeah, there is- >> Situation, am I missing something? It seems like a logical progression to me, but what am I missing? >> Well, there is something to be said about spectrum, right? If you look at Wi-Fi, as I said, the driver behind the technology is different. However, I fully agree with you that at some point in time, whether it's Wi-Fi behind, whether it's private 5G behind becomes a moot point. It's simply a matter of, where is my data being generated? What is the best technology for me to use to ingest that data so I can derive value out of that data. If it means Wi-Fi, so be it. If it means cellular, so be it. And if you look at cellular right? The biggest thing people talk about SIMs. Now if you look at 5G standard. In 5G standard, you have EAPTLS, which means there is a possibility that SIMs in the future go away for IoT devices. I'm not saying they need to go away for consumer devices, they probably need to be there. But who's to say going ahead for IoT devices, they all become SIM free. So at that point, whether you Wi-Fi or 5G doesn't matter. >> Yeah, by the way, on the spectrum side people are starting to think about the concept. You might have heard this NRU, new radio unlicensed. So it's running the Wi-Fi standard, but in the unlicensed bands like Wi-Fi. So, and then the last piece is of course you know, the cost, the reality it stays 5G still new technology, the endpoints, you know, what would go in your laptop or a sensor et cetera. Today that's more expensive than Wi-Fi. So we need to get the volume curve down a little bit for that to really hit every application. I would guess your vision is correct. >> David: Yep >> But who can predict? >> Yeah, so explain more about what the unlicensed piece means for organizations. What does that for everybody? >> That's more of a future thing. So you know, just- >> No, right, but let's put on our telescope. >> Okay, so it's true today that Wi-Fi traditionally runs in the bands that have been licensed by the government and it's a country by country thing, right? >> Dave: Right. >> What we did in the United States was CBRS, is different than what they've done in Germany where they took part of the Zurich C-band and gave it to the enterprises. The telco's not involved. And now that's been copied in Japan and Korea. So it's one of the complications unfortunately in the market. Is that you have this different approach by regulators in different countries. Wi-Fi, the unlicensed band is a nice global standard. So if you could run NR just as 5G, right? It's another name for 5G, run that in the unlicensed bands, then you solve the spectrum problem that Dave was asking about. >> Which means that the market really opens up and now. >> It would be a real enabler >> Innovation. >> Exactly. >> And the only thing I would add to that is, right, there are some enterprises who have the size and scale to kind of say, "Hey, I'm going the unlicensed route. I can do things on my own." There are some enterprises that still are going to rely on the telcos, right? So I don't want to make a demon out of the telcos that you own the spectrum, no. >> David: Sure. >> They will be offering a very valuable service to a massive number of small, medium enterprises and enterprises that span regional boundaries to say, hey we can bring that consistent experience to you. >> But the primary value proposition has been connectivity, right? >> Yes. >> I mean, we can all agree on that. And you hear different monetization models, we can't allow the OTT vendors to do it again. You know, we want to tax Netflix. Okay, we've been talking about that all week. But there may be better models. >> Sarvesh: Yes. >> Right, and so where does private network fit into the monetization models? Let's follow the money here. >> Actually you've brought up an extremely important point, right? Because if you look at why haven't 5G networks taken off, one of the biggest things people keep contrasting is what is the cost of a Wi-Fi versus the cost of deploying a 5G, right? And a portion of the cost of deploying a 5G is how do you commercialize that spectrum? What is going to be the cost of that spectrum, right? So the CSPs will have to eventually figure out a proper commercialization model to say, hey listen, I can't just take what I've been doing till date and say this is how I make. Because if you look at 5G, the return of investment is incremental. Any use case you take, unless, let's take smart manufacturing, unless the factory decides I'm going to rip and replace everything by a 5G, they're going to introduce a small use case. You look at the investment for that use case, you'll say Hmm, I'm not making money. But guess what? Once you've deployed it and you bring use case number two, three, four, five, now it starts to really add value. So how can a CSP acknowledge that and create commercial models to enable that is going to be key. Like one of the things that Dell does in terms of as a service solution that we offer. I think that is a crucial way of really kick starting 5G adoption. >> It's Metcalfe's Law in this world, right? The first telephone, not a lot of value, second, I can call one person, but you know if I can call a zillion now it's valuable. >> John: Now you got data. >> Yeah, right, you used a phrase, rip and replace. What percentage of the market that you are focusing on is the let's go in and replace something, versus the let's help you digitally transform your business. And this is a networking technology that we can use to help you digitally transform? The example that you guys have with the small breweries, a perfect example. >> Sarvesh: Yeah. >> You help digitize, you know, digitally transform their business. You weren't going in and saying, I see that you have these things connected via Wi-Fi, let's rip those out and put SIMs in. >> No. >> Nope, so you know- >> That's exactly right. It's enabling new things that either couldn't be achieved before or weren't. So from a private 5G perspective, it's not going to be rip and replaced. As I said, I think we'll coexist with Wi-Fi, it's still got a great role. It's enabling those, solving those business problems that either hadn't been solved before or could not be solved with other technology. >> How are you guys using AI? Everybody's talking about ChatGPT. I love ChatGPT, we use it all the time. Love it, hate it, you know, whatever. It's a fun topic. But AI generally is here in a way that it wasn't when the enterprise disaggregated. >> John: Right. >> So there's AI, there's automation, there's opportunities there. How do they fit into private 5G? >> So if you look at it, right, AI, AI/ML is actually crucial to value extraction from that data, because all private 5G is doing is giving you access to that precious data. But that data by itself means nothing, right? You get access to the data, extracting value out of the data that bring in business value is all going to be AI/ML. Whether it's computer vision, whether it's data analytics on the fly so that you can, you know do your closed loop controls or what have you. All of these are going to be AI/ML models. >> Dave: Does it play into automation as well? >> Absolutely, 'cause they drive the automation, right? You learn your AI models, drive their automation. Control, closed loop control systems are a perfect example of their automation. >> Explain that further. Like give us an example. >> So for example, let's say we're talking about a smart manufacturing, right? So you have widgets coming down the pipe, right? You have your computer vision, you have your AI/ML model that says, "Hey, I'm starting to detect a consistent error in the product being manufactured. I'm going to close loop that automation and either tweak the settings of the machine, shut down the machine, open a workflow, escalate it for human intervention." All that automation is facilitated by the AI/ML models >> And that, and by the way, there's real money in that, right? If you're making your power and you're making it wrong, you don't detect it for hours, there's real money in fixing that >> Right. >> So I've got a, I've got an example albeit a slight, not even slightly, but a tragic one. Let's say you have a train that's rolling down the tracks at every several miles or so, temperature readings are taken from bearings in the train. >> Sarvesh: Yes, yes. >> Wouldn't it be nice to have that be happening in real time? >> Sarvesh: Yes. >> So it doesn't reach that critical point >> Yes. >> Where then you have a derailment. >> Yes. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I mean, those are, it's doesn't sound sexy in terms of "Hey, what a great business use case that we can monetize." >> John: Yeah. >> But I'll bet you in hindsight that operator would've loved to have that capability. >> John: Yeah. >> Sarvesh: Right. >> To be able to shut the train down and not run. >> That's a great example where the carrier is actually, probably in a good position, right? Cause you got wide area, you want low latency. So the traditional carriers would be able in great position to provide that exact service. Telemetry is another great example. We've been talking about other kinds of automation, but just picking up measurements and so on. The other example of that is in oil and gas, right? As you've got pipelines running around you're measuring pressure, temperature, you detect a leak, >> David: Right. >> in minutes, not weeks. >> David: Right. >> So there's a lot of good examples of things like that >> To pick up in a point, Dave. You know, it's like you look at these big huge super tankers, right? They have big private networks on that super tanker to monitor everything. If on this train we had, you know, we hear about so many Edges, let's call one more the rolling Edge. >> Yeah. >> Right, that, that Edge is right on that locomotive tracking everything with AI/ML models, detecting things, warning people ahead of time shutting it down as needed. And that connectivity doesn't have to be wired. It can be a rolling wireless. It potentially could be a spectrum that's you know, open spectrum in the future. Or as you said, an operator could facilitate that. So many options, right? >> Yeah, got to double down on this. Look, I know 'cause I've been involved in some of these projects. Amusement park operators are doing this for rides. >> John: Yes. >> Sarvesh: Yep. >> So that they can optimize the amount of time the ride is up, so they can shorten lines >> Yes. >> So that they can get people into shops to buy food and souvenirs. >> John: Yes. >> Certainly we should be able to do it to protect infrastructure. >> Sarvesh: Absolutely. >> Right, so- >> But I think the ultimate point you're making is, it's actually quite finally segmented. There's so many different applications. And so that's why again, we come back to what we started with is at Dell, we're bringing the solution from Edge, compute, application, connectivity, and be able to bring that across all these different verticals and these different solutions. The other amusement park example, by the way, is as the rides start to invest in virtual reality, so you're moving, but you're seeing something, you need some technology like 5G to have low latency and keep that in sync and have a good experience on the ride. >> To 5G and beyond, gents. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> All right, thank you Dave. >> It was great to have you. >> Thank, thank you guys. >> Great to meet you guys. Thank you very much. >> Great, all right. Keep it right there. For David Nicholson and Dave Vellante, This is theCUBE's coverage of MWC23. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. theCUBE.net is where all these videos live. John Furrier is in our Palo Alto office, banging out that news. Keep it right there. Be right back after this short break. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson, day four of MWC '23. Show's winding down a little bit, but it's still pretty packed here. Lot of innovation, planes, trains, automobiles, and we're talking 5G all week, private networks, connected breweries. It's super exciting. Really happy to have Warren Jackson here as the Edge Gateway Product Technologist at Dell Technologies, and Scott Waller, the CTO of the 5G Open Innovation Lab. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. >> Good to be here. >> Really interesting stories that we're going to talk about. Let's start, Scott, with you, what is the Open Innovation Lab? >> So it was hatched three years ago. Ideated about a bunch of guys from Microsoft who ran startup ventures program, started the developers program over at Microsoft, if you're familiar with MSDN. And they came three years ago and said, how does CSPs working with someone like T-Mobile who's in our backyard, I'm from Seattle. How do they monetize the edge? You need a developer ecosystem of applications and use cases. That's always been the thing. The carriers are building the networks, but where's the ecosystem of startups? So we built a startup ecosystem that is sponsored by partners, Dell being one sponsor, Intel, Microsoft, VMware, Aspirant, you name it. The enterprise folks who are also in the connectivity business. And with that, we're not like a Y Combinator or a Techstars where it's investment first and it's all about funding. It's all about getting introductions from a startup who might have a VR or AI type of application or observability for 5G slicing, and bring that in front of the Microsoft's of the world, or the Intel's and the Dell's of the world that they might not have the capabilities to do it because they're still a small little startup with an MVP. So we really incubate. We're the connectors and build a network. We've had 101 startups over the last three years. They've raised over a billion dollars. And it's really valuable to our partners like T-Mobile and Dell, et cetera, where we're bringing in folks like Expedo and GenXComm and Firecell. Start up private companies that are around here they were cohorts from our program in the past. >> That's awesome because I've often, I mean, I've seen Dell get into this business and I'm like, wow, they've done a really good job of finding these guys. I wonder what the pipeline is. >> We're trying to create the pipeline for the entire industry, whether it's 5G on the edge for the CSPs, or it's for private enterprise networks. >> Warren, what's this cool little thing you got here? >> Yeah, so this is very unique in the Dell portfolio. So when people think of Dell, they think of servers laptops, et cetera. But what this does is it's designed to be deployed at the edge in harsh environments and it allows customers to do analytics, data collection at the edge. And what's unique about it is it's got an extended temperature range. There's no fan in this and there's lots of ports on it for data ingestion. So this is a smaller box Edge Gateway 3200. This is the product that we're using in the brewery. And then we have a bigger brother of this, the Edge Gateway 5200. So the value of it, you can scale depending on what your edge compute requirements are at the edge. >> So tell us about the brewery story. And you covered it, I know you were in the Dell booth, but it's basically an analog brewery. They're taking measurements and temperatures and then writing it down and then entering it in and somebody from your company saw it and said, "We can help you with this problem." Explain the story. >> Yeah, so Scott and I did a walkthrough of the brewery back in November timeframe. >> It's in Framingham, Mass. >> Framingham, Mass, correct. And basically, we talked to him, and we said, what keeps you guys up at night? What's a problem that we can solve? Very simple, a kind of a lower budget, didn't have a lot money to spend on it, but what problem can we solve that will realize great benefit for you? So we looked at their fermentation process, which was completely analog. Somebody was walking around with a clipboard looking at analog gauges. And what we did is we digitized that process. So what this did for them rather than being completely reactive, and by the time they realized there was something going wrong with the fermentation process, it's too late. A batch of scrap. This allowed them to be proactive. So anytime, anywhere on the tablet or a phone, they can see if that fermentation process is going out of range and do something about it before the batch gets scrapped. >> Okay. Amazing. And Scott, you got a picture of this workflow here? >> Yeah, actually this is the final product. >> Explain that. >> As Warren mentioned, the data is actually residing in the industrial side of the network So we wanted to keep the IT/OT separation, which is critical on the factory floor. And so all the data is brought in from the sensors via digital connection once it's converted and into the edge gateway. Then there's a snapshot of it using Telit deviceWISE, their dashboarding application, that is decoding all the digital readings, putting them in a nice dashboard. And then when we gave them, we realized another problem was they're using cheap little Chromebooks that they spill beer on once a week and throw them out. That's why they bought the cheap ones 'cause they go through them so fast. So we got a Dell Latitude Rugged notebook. This is a brand new tablet, but they have the dashboarding software. So no matter if they're out there on the floor, but because the data resides there on the factory they have access to be able to change the parameters. This one's in the maturation cycle. This one's in the crashing cycle where they're bringing the temperature back down, stopping the fermentation process, getting it ready to go to the canning side of the house. >> And they're doing all that from this dashboard. >> They're doing all from the dashboard. They also have a giant screen that we put up there that in the floor instead of walking a hundred yards back behind a whole bunch of machinery equipment from a safety perspective, now they just look up on the screen and go, "Oh, that's red. That's out of range." They're actually doing a bunch of cleaning and a bunch of other things right now, too. So this is real time from Boston. >> Dave: Oh okay. >> Scott: This is actually real time from Boston. >> I'm no hop master, but I'm looking at these things flashing at me and I'm thinking something's wrong with my beer. >> We literally just lit this up last week. So we're still tweaking a few things, but they're also learning around. This is a new capability they never had. Oh, we have the ability to alert and monitor at different processes with different batches, different brews, different yeast types. Then now they're also training and learning. And we're going to turn that into eventually a product that other breweries might be able to use. >> So back to the kind of nuts and bolts of the system. The device that you have here has essentially wifi antennas on the back. >> Warren: Correct. >> Pull that up again if you would, please. >> Now I've seen this, just so people are clear, there are also paddle 5G antennas that go on the other side. >> Correct. >> That's sort of the connection from the 5G network that then gets transmogrified, technical term guys, into wifi so the devices that are physically connected to the brew vats, don't know what they're called. >> Fermentation tanks. >> Fermentation tanks, thank you. Those are wifi. That's a wifi signal that's going into this. Is that correct? >> Scott: No. >> No, it's not. >> It's a hard wire. >> Okay, okay. >> But, you're right. This particular gateway. >> It could be wifi if it's hard wire. >> It could be, yes. Could be any technology really. >> This particular gateway is not outfitted with 5G, but something that was very important in this application was to isolate the IT network, which is on wifi and physically connected from the OT network, which is the 5G connection. So we're sending the data directly from the gateway up to the cloud. The two partners that we worked with on this project were ifm, big sensor manufacturer that actually did the wired sensors into an industrial network called IO-Link. So they're physically wired into the gateway and then in the gateway we have a solution from our partner Telit that has deviceWISE software that actually takes the data in, runs the analytics on it, the logic, and then visualizes that data locally on those panels and also up to their cloud, which is what we're looking at. So they can look at it locally, they're in the plant and then up in the cloud on a phone or a tablet, whatever, when they're at home. >> We're talking about a small business here. I don't know how many employees they have, but it's not thousands. And I love that you're talking about an IT network and an OT network. And so they wanted, it is very common when we talk about industrial internet of things use cases, but we're talking about a tiny business here. >> Warren: Correct. >> They wanted to separate those networks because of cost, because of contention. Explain why. >> Yeah, just because, I mean, they're running their ERP system, their payroll, all of their kind of the way they run their business on their IT network and you don't want to have the same traffic out on the factory floor on that network, so it was pretty important. And the other thing is we really, one of the things that we didn't want to do in this project is interrupt their production process at all. So we installed this entire system in two days. They didn't have to shut down, they didn't have to stop. We didn't have to interrupt their process at all. It was like we were invisible there and we spun the thing up and within two days, very simple, easy, but tremendous value for their business. >> Talk about new markets here. I mean, it's like any company that's analog that needs to go digital. It's like 99% of the companies on the planet. What are you guys seeing out there in terms of the types of examples beyond breweries? >> Yeah, I could talk to that. So I spent a lot of time over the last couple years running my own little IoT company and a lot of it being in agriculture. So like in Washington state, 70% of the world's hops is actually grown in Washington state. It's my hometown. But in the Ag producing regions, there's lack of connectivity. So there's interest in private networks because the carriers aren't necessarily deploying it. But because we have the vast amount of hops there's a lot of IPAs, a lot of hoppy IPAs that come out of Seattle. And with that, there's a ton of craft breweries that are about the same size, some are a little larger. Anheuser-Busch and InBev and Heineken they've got great IoT platforms. They've done it. They're mass scale, they have to digitize. But the smaller shops, they don't, when we talk about IT/OT separation, they're not aware of that. They think it's just, I get local broadband and I get wifi and one hotspot inside my facility and it works. So a little bit of it was the education. I have got years in IT/OT security in my background so that education and we come forward with a solution that actually does that for them. And now they're aware of it. So now when they're asking questions of other vendors that are trying to sell them some type of solution, they're inherently aware of what should be done so they're not vulnerable to ransomware attacks, et cetera. So it's known as the Purdue Model. >> Well, what should they do? >> We came in and keep it completely separated and educated them because in the end too we'll build a design guide and a starter kit out of this that other brewers can use. Because I've toured dozens of breweries in Washington, the exact same scenario, analog gauges, analog process, very manual. And in the end, when you ask the brewer, what do they want out of this? It keeps them up at night because if the temperature goes out of range, because the chiller fails, >> They ruined. >> That's $30,000 lost in beer. That's a lot to a small business. However, it's also once they start digitizing the data and to Warren's point, it's read-only. We're not changing any of the process. We augmented on top of their existing systems. We didn't change their process. But now they have the ability to look at the data and see batch to batch consistency. Quality doesn't always mean best, it means consistency from batch to batch. Every beer from exhibit A from yesterday to two months from now of the same style of beer should be the same taste, flavor, boldness, et cetera. This is giving them the insights on it. >> It's like St. Louis Buds, when we were kids. We would buy the St. Louis Buds 'cause they tasted better than the Merrimack Buds. And then Budweiser made them all the same. >> Must be an East coast thing. >> It's an old guy thing, Dave. You weren't born yet. >> I was in high school. Yeah, I was in high school. >> We like the hops. >> We weren't 21. Do me a favor, clarify OT versus IT. It's something we talk about all the time, but not everyone's familiar with that separation. Define OT for me. >> It's really the factory floor. You got IT systems that are ERP systems, billing, you're getting your emails, stuff like that. Where the ransomware usually gets infected in. The OT side is the industrial control network. >> David: What's the 'O' stand for? >> Operation. >> David: Operation? >> Yeah, the operations side. >> 'Cause some people will think objects 'cause we think internet of things. >> The industrial operations, think of it that way. >> But in a sense those are things that are connected. >> And you think of that as they are the safety systems as well. So a machine, if someone doesn't push the stop button, you'd think if there's a lot of traffic on that network, it isn't guaranteed that that stop button actually stops that blade from coming down, someone's going to lose their arm. So it's very tied to safety, reliability, low latency. It is crafted in design that it never touches the internet inherently without having to go through a security gateway which is what we did. >> You mentioned the large companies like InBev, et cetera. You're saying they're already there. Are they not part of your target market? Or are there ways that you can help them? Is this really more of a small to mid-size company? >> For this particular solution, I think so, yeah. Because the cost to entry is low. I mean, you talk about InBev, they have millions of dollars of budgets to spend on OT. So they're completely automated from top to bottom. But these little craft brewers, which they're everywhere in the US. Vermont, Washington state, they're completely manual. A lot of these guys just started in their garage. And they just scaled up and they got a cult kind of following around their beers. One thing that we found here this week, when you talk around edge and 5G and beer, those things get people excited. In our booth we're serving beer, and all these kind of topics, it brings people together. >> And it lets the little guy compete more effectively with the big giants. >> Correct. >> And how do you do more with less as the little guy is kind of the big thing and to Warren's point, we have folks come up and say, "Great, this is for beer, but what about wine? What about the fermentation process of wine?" Same materials in the end. A vessel of some sort, maybe it's stainless steel. The clamps are the same, the sensors are the same. The parameters like temperature are key in any type of fermentation. We had someone talking about olive oil and using that. It's the same sanitary beverage style equipment. We grabbed sensors that were off the shelf and then we integrated them in and used the set of platforms that we could. How do we rapidly enable these guys at the lowest possible cost with stuff that's at the shelf. And there's four different companies in the solution. >> We were having a conversation with T-Mobile a little earlier and she mentioned the idea of this sounding scary. And this is a great example of showing that in fact, at a relatively small scale, this technology makes a lot of sense. So from that perspective, of course you can implement private 5G networks at an industrial scale with tens of millions of dollars of investment. But what about all of the other things below? And that seems to be a perfect example. >> Yeah, correct. And it's one of the things with the gateway and having flexibility the way Dell did a great job of putting really good modems in it. It had a wide spectrum range of what bands they support. So being able to say, at a larger facility, I mean, if Heineken wants to deploy something like this, oh, heck yeah, they probably could do it. And they might have a private 5G network, but let's say T-Mobile offers a private offering on their public via a slice. It's easy to connect that radio to it. You just change the sims. >> Is that how the CSPs fit here? How are they monetized? >> Yeah, correct. So one of our partners is T-Mobile and so we're working with them. We've got other telco partners that are coming on board in our lab. And so we'll do the same thing. We're going to take this back and put it in the lab and offer it up as others because the baseline building blocks or Lego blocks per se can be used in a bunch of different industries. It's really that starter point of giving folks the idea of what's possible. >> So small manufacturing, agriculture you mentioned, any other sort of use cases we should tune into? >> I think it's environmental monitoring, all of that stuff, I see it in IoT deployments all over the world. Just the simple starter kits 'cause a farmer doesn't want to get sold a solution, a platform, where he's got to hire a bunch of coders and partner with the big carriers. He just wants something that works. >> Another use case that we see a lot, a high cost in a lot of these places is the cost of energy. And a lot of companies don't know what they're spending on electricity. So a very simple energy monitoring system like that, it's a really good ROI. I'm going to spend five or $10,000 on a system like this, but I'm going to save $20,000 over a year 'cause I'm able to see, have visibility into that data. That's a lot of what this story's about, just giving visibility into the process. >> It's very cool, and like you said, it gets people excited. Is it a big market? How do you size it? Is it a big TAM? >> Yeah, so one thing that Dell brings to the table in this space is people are buying their laptops, their servers and whatnot from Dell and companies are comfortable in doing business with Dell because of our model direct to customer and whatnot. So our ability to bring a device like this to the OT space and have them have that same user experience they have with laptops and our client products in a ruggedized solution like this and bring a lot of partners to the table makes it easy for our customers to implement this across all kinds of industries. >> So we're talking to billions, tens of billions. Do we know how big this market is? What's the TAM? I mean, come on, you work for Dell. You have to do a TAM analysis. >> Yes, no, yeah. I mean, it really is in the billions. The market is huge for this one. I think we just tapped into it. We're kind of focused in on the brewery piece of it and the liquor piece of it, but the possibilities are endless. >> Yeah, that's tip of the spear. Guys, great story. >> It's scalable. I think the biggest thing, just my final feedback is working and partnering with Dell is we got something as small as this edge gateway that I can run a Packet Core on and run a 5G standalone node and then have one of the small little 5G radios out there. And I've got these deployed in a farm. Give the farmer an idea of what's possible, give him a unit on his tractor, and now he can do something that, we're providing connectivity he had never had before. But as we scale up, we've got the big brother to this. When we scale up from that, we got the telco size units that we can put. So it's very scalable. It's just a great suite of offerings. >> Yeah, outstanding. Guys, thanks for sharing the story. Great to have you on theCUBE. >> Good to be with you today. >> Stop by for beer later. >> You know it. All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and the entire CUBE team, we're here live at the Fira in Barcelona MWC '23 day four. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While never really meant to be a consumer tech event, the rapid ascendancy of smartphones sucked much of the air out of Mobile World Congress over the years, now MWC. And while the device manufacturers continue to have a major presence at the show, the maturity of intelligent devices, longer life cycles, and the disaggregation of the network stack, have put enterprise technologies front and center in the telco business. Semiconductor manufacturers, network equipment players, infrastructure companies, cloud vendors, software providers, and a spate of startups are eyeing the trillion dollar plus communications industry as one of the next big things to watch this decade. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we bring you part two of our ongoing coverage of MWC '23, with some new data on enterprise players specifically in large telco environments, a brief glimpse at some of the pre-announcement news and corresponding themes ahead of MWC, and some of the key announcement areas we'll be watching at the show on theCUBE. Now, last week we shared some ETR data that showed how traditional enterprise tech players were performing, specifically within the telecoms vertical. Here's a new look at that data from ETR, which isolates the same companies, but cuts the data for what ETR calls large telco. The N in this cut is 196, down from 288 last week when we included all company sizes in the dataset. Now remember the two dimensions here, on the y-axis is net score, or spending momentum, and on the x-axis is pervasiveness in the data set. The table insert in the upper left informs how the dots and companies are plotted, and that red dotted line, the horizontal line at 40%, that indicates a highly elevated net score. Now while the data are not dramatically different in terms of relative positioning, there are a couple of changes at the margin. So just going down the list and focusing on net score. Azure is comparable, but slightly lower in this sector in the large telco than it was overall. Google Cloud comes in at number two, and basically swapped places with AWS, which drops slightly in the large telco relative to overall telco. Snowflake is also slightly down by one percentage point, but maintains its position. Remember Snowflake, overall, its net score is much, much higher when measuring across all verticals. Snowflake comes down in telco, and relative to overall, a little bit down in large telco, but it's making some moves to attack this market that we'll talk about in a moment. Next are Red Hat OpenStack and Databricks. About the same in large tech telco as they were an overall telco. Then there's Dell next that has a big presence at MWC and is getting serious about driving 16G adoption, and new servers, and edge servers, and other partnerships. Cisco and Red Hat OpenShift basically swapped spots when moving from all telco to large telco, as Cisco drops and Red Hat bumps up a bit. And VMware dropped about four percentage points in large telco. Accenture moved up dramatically, about nine percentage points in big telco, large telco relative to all telco. HPE dropped a couple of percentage points. Oracle stayed about the same. And IBM surprisingly dropped by about five points. So look, I understand not a ton of change in terms of spending momentum in the large sector versus telco overall, but some deltas. The bottom line for enterprise players is one, they're just getting started in this new disruption journey that they're on as the stack disaggregates. Two, all these players have experience in delivering horizontal solutions, but now working with partners and identifying big problems to be solved, and three, many of these companies are generally not the fastest moving firms relative to smaller disruptive disruptors. Now, cloud has been an exception in fairness. But the good news for the legacy infrastructure and IT companies is that the telco transformation and the 5G buildout is going to take years. So it's moving at a pace that is very favorable to many of these companies. Okay, so looking at just some of the pre-announcement highlights that have hit the wire this week, I want to give you a glimpse of the diversity of innovation that is occurring in the telecommunication space. You got semiconductor manufacturers, device makers, network equipment players, carriers, cloud vendors, enterprise tech companies, software companies, startups. Now we've included, you'll see in this list, we've included OpeRAN, that logo, because there's so much buzz around the topic and we're going to come back to that. But suffice it to say, there's no way we can cover all the announcements from the 2000 plus exhibitors at the show. So we're going to cherry pick here and make a few call outs. Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced an acquisition of an Italian private cellular network company called AthoNet. Zeus Kerravala wrote about it on SiliconANGLE if you want more details. Now interestingly, HPE has a partnership with Solana, which also does private 5G. But according to Zeus, Solona is more of an out-of-the-box solution, whereas AthoNet is designed for the core and requires more integration. And as you'll see in a moment, there's going to be a lot of talk at the show about private network. There's going to be a lot of news there from other competitors, and we're going to be watching that closely. And while many are concerned about the P5G, private 5G, encroaching on wifi, Kerravala doesn't see it that way. Rather, he feels that these private networks are really designed for more industrial, and you know mission critical environments, like factories, and warehouses that are run by robots, et cetera. 'Cause these can justify the increased expense of private networks. Whereas wifi remains a very low cost and flexible option for, you know, whatever offices and homes. Now, over to Dell. Dell announced its intent to go hard after opening up the telco network with the announcement that in the second half of this year it's going to begin shipping its infrastructure blocks for Red Hat. Remember it's like kind of the converged infrastructure for telco with a more open ecosystem and sort of more flexible, you know, more mature engineered system. Dell has also announced a range of PowerEdge servers for a variety of use cases. A big wide line bringing forth its 16G portfolio and aiming squarely at the telco space. Dell also announced, here we go, a private wireless offering with airspan, and Expedo, and a solution with AthoNet, the company HPE announced it was purchasing. So I guess Dell and HPE are now partnering up in the private wireless space, and yes, hell is freezing over folks. We'll see where that relationship goes in the mid- to long-term. Dell also announced new lab and certification capabilities, which we said last week was going to be critical for the further adoption of open ecosystem technology. So props to Dell for, you know, putting real emphasis and investment in that. AWS also made a number of announcements in this space including private wireless solutions and associated managed services. AWS named Deutsche Telekom, Orange, T-Mobile, Telefonica, and some others as partners. And AWS announced the stepped up partnership, specifically with T-Mobile, to bring AWS services to T-Mobile's network portfolio. Snowflake, back to Snowflake, announced its telecom data cloud. Remember we showed the data earlier, it's Snowflake not as strong in the telco sector, but they're continuing to move toward this go-to market alignment within key industries, realigning their go-to market by vertical. It also announced that AT&T, and a number of other partners, are collaborating to break down data silos specifically in telco. Look, essentially, this is Snowflake taking its core value prop to the telco vertical and forming key partnerships that resonate in the space. So think simplification, breaking down silos, data sharing, eventually data monetization. Samsung previewed its future capability to allow smartphones to access satellite services, something Apple has previously done. AMD, Intel, Marvell, Qualcomm, are all in the act, all the semiconductor players. Qualcomm for example, announced along with Telefonica, and Erickson, a 5G millimeter network that will be showcased in Spain at the event this coming week using Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset platform, based on none other than Arm technology. Of course, Arm we said is going to dominate the edge, and is is clearly doing so. It's got the volume advantage over, you know, traditional Intel, you know, X86 architectures. And it's no surprise that Microsoft is touting its open AI relationship. You're going to hear a lot of AI talk at this conference as is AI is now, you know, is the now topic. All right, we could go on and on and on. There's just so much going on at Mobile World Congress or MWC, that we just wanted to give you a glimpse of some of the highlights that we've been watching. Which brings us to the key topics and issues that we'll be exploring at MWC next week. We touched on some of this last week. A big topic of conversation will of course be, you know, 5G. Is it ever going to become real? Is it, is anybody ever going to make money at 5G? There's so much excitement around and anticipation around 5G. It has not lived up to the hype, but that's because the rollout, as we've previous reported, is going to take years. And part of that rollout is going to rely on the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, as we reported last week and in previous Breaking Analysis episodes. OpenRAN is a big component of that evolution. You know, as our RAN intelligent controllers, RICs, which essentially the brain of OpenRAN, if you will. Now as we build out 5G networks at massive scale and accommodate unprecedented volumes of data and apply compute-hungry AI to all this data, the issue of energy efficiency is going to be front and center. It has to be. Not only is it a, you know, hot political issue, the reality is that improving power efficiency is compulsory or the whole vision of telco's future is going to come crashing down. So chip manufacturers, equipment makers, cloud providers, everybody is going to be doubling down and clicking on this topic. Let's talk about AI. AI as we said, it is the hot topic right now, but it is happening not only in consumer, with things like ChatGPT. And think about the theme of this Breaking Analysis in the enterprise, AI in the enterprise cannot be ChatGPT. It cannot be error prone the way ChatGPT is. It has to be clean, reliable, governed, accurate. It's got to be ethical. It's got to be trusted. Okay, we're going to have Zeus Kerravala on the show next week and definitely want to get his take on private networks and how they're going to impact wifi. You know, will private networks cannibalize wifi? If not, why not? He wrote about this again on SiliconANGLE if you want more details, and we're going to unpack that on theCUBE this week. And finally, as always we'll be following the data flows to understand where and how telcos, cloud players, startups, software companies, disruptors, legacy companies, end customers, how are they going to make money from new data opportunities? 'Cause we often say in theCUBE, don't ever bet against data. All right, that's a wrap for today. Remember theCUBE is going to be on location at MWC 2023 next week. We got a great set. We're in the walkway in between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, stand CS-60. Look for us, we got a full schedule. If you got a great story or you have news, stop by. We're going to try to get you on the program. I'll be there with Lisa Martin, co-hosting, David Nicholson as well, and the entire CUBE crew, so don't forget to come by and see us. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, and Ken Schiffman, as well, in our Boston studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE.com. He does some great editing. Thank you. All right, remember all these episodes they are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. I publish each week on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. All the video content is available on demand at theCUBE.net, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Mobile World Congress '23, MWC '23, or next time on Breaking Analysis. (bright music)