>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with David Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also here. This is day two of our coverage of MWC 23 on theCUBE. We're super excited. We're in between hall four and five. Stop by if you're here. Dennis Hoffman is here. He's the senior vice president and general manager of the Telecom systems business at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Yousef Khalidi, who's the corporate vice president of Azure for Operators from Microsoft. Gents, Welcome. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you. >> So we saw Satya in the keynote. He wired in. We saw T.K. came in. No AWS. I don't know. They're maybe not part of the show, but maybe next year they'll figure it out. >> Indeed, indeed. >> Lots of stuff happened in the Telecom, but the Azure operator distributed service is the big news, you guys got here. What's that all about? >> Oh, first of all, we changed the name. >> Oh, you did? >> You did? >> Oh, yeah. We have a real name now. It's called the Azure Operator Nexus. >> Oh, I like Nexus better than that. >> David: That's much better, much better. >> Dave: The engineers named it first time around. >> I wish, long story, but thank you for our marketing team. But seriously, not only did we rename the platform, we expanded the platform. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So it now covers the whole spectrum from the far-edge to the public cloud as well, including the near-edge as well. So essentially, it's a hybrid platform that can also run network functions. So all these operators around you, they now have a platform which combines cloud technologies with the choice where they want to run, optimized for the network. >> Okay and so, you know, we've talked about the disaggregation of the network and how you're bringing kind of engineered systems to the table. We've seen this movie before, but Dennis, there are differences, right? I mean, you didn't really have engineered systems in the 90s. You didn't have those integration points. You really didn't have the public cloud, you didn't have AI. >> Right. >> So you have all those new powers that you can tap, so give us the update from your perspective, having now spent a day and a half here. What's the vibe, what's the buzz, and what's your take on everything? >> Yeah, I think to build on what Yousef said, there's a lot going on with people still trying to figure out exactly how to architect the Telecom network of the future. They know it's got to have a lot to do with cloud. It does have some pretty significant differences, one of those being, there's definitely got to be a hybrid component because there are pieces of the Telecom network that even when modernized will not end up centralized, right? They're going to be highly distributed. I would say though, you know, we took away two things, yesterday, from all the meetings. One, people are done, I think the network operators are done, questioning technology readiness. They're now beginning to wrestle with operationalization of it all, right? So it's like, okay, it's here. I can in fact build a modern network in a very cloud native way, but I've got to figure out how to do that all. And another big part of it is the ecosystem and certainly the partnership long standing between Dell and Microsoft which we're extending into this space is part of that, making it easier on people to actually acquire, deploy, and importantly, support these new technologies. >> So a lot of the traditional carriers, like you said, they're sort of beyond the technology readiness. Jose Maria Alvarez in the keynote said there are three pillars to the future Telecom network. He said low latency, programmable networks, and then cloud and edge, kind of threw that in. You agree with that, Yousef? (Dave and Yousef speaking altogether) >> I mean, we've been for years talking about the cloud and edge. >> Yeah. >> Satya for years had the same graphic. We still have it. Today, we have expanded the graphic a bit to include the network as one, because you can have a cloud without connectivity as well but this is very, very, very, very much true. >> And so the question then, Dennis, is okay, you've got disruptors, we had Dish on yesterday. >> Oh, did you? Good. >> Yeah, yeah, and they're talking about what they're doing with, you know, ORAN and all the applications, really taking account of it. What I see is a developer friendly, you know, environment. You got the carriers talking about how they're going to charge developers for APIs. I think they've published eight APIs which is nowhere near enough. So you've got that sort of, you know, inertia and yet, you have the disruptors that are going to potentially be a catalyst to, you know, cross the chasm, if you will. So, you know, put on your strategy hat. >> Yeah. >> Dave: How do you see that playing out? >> Well, they're trying to tap into three things, the disruptors. You know, I think the thesis is, "If I get to a truly cloud native, communications network first, I ought to have greater agility so that I can launch more services and create more revenue streams. I ought to be lower cost in terms of both acquisition cost and operating cost, right, and I ought to be able to create scale between my IT organization, everything I know how to do there and my Telecom network." You know, classic, right? Better, faster, cheaper if I embrace cloud early on. And people like Dish, you know, they have a clean sheet of paper with which to do that. So innovation and rate of innovation is huge for them. >> So what would you do? We put your Clay Christensen hat on, now. What if you were at a traditional Telco who's like, complaining about- >> You're going to get me in trouble. >> Dave: Come on, come on. >> Don't do it. >> Dave: Help him out. Help him out, help him out. So if, you know, they're complaining about CapEx, they're highly regulated, right, they want net neutrality but they want to be able to sort of dial up the cost of those using the network. So what would you do? Would you try to disrupt yourself? Would you create a skunkworks? Would you kind of spin off a disruptor? That's a real dilemma for those guys. >> Well for mobile network operators, the beauty of 5G is it's the first cloud native cellular standard. So I don't know if anybody's throwing these terms around, but 5G SA is standalone, right? >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> So a lot of 'em, it's not a skunkworks. They're just literally saying, "I've got to have a 5G network." And some of 'em are deciding, "I'm going to stand it up all by itself." Now, that's duplicative expense in a lot of ways, but it creates isolation from the two networks. Others are saying, "No, it's got to be NSA. I've got to be able to combine 4G and 5G." And then you're into the brownfield thing. >> That's the hybrid. >> Not hybrid as in cloud, but hybrid as in, you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a converge network. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> So, you know, I would say for a lot of them, they're adopting, probably rightly so, a wait and see attitude. One thing we haven't talked about and you got to get on the table, their high order bit is resilience. >> Dave: Yeah, totally. >> David: Yeah. >> Right? Can't go down. It's national, secure infrastructure, first responder. >> Indeed. >> Anytime you ask them to embrace any new technology, the first thing that they have to work through in their minds is, you know, "Is the juice worth the squeeze? Like, can I handle the risk?" >> But you're saying they're not questioning the technology. Aren't they questioning ORAN in terms of the quality of service, or are they beyond that? >> Dennis: They're questioning the timing, not the inevitability. >> Okay, so they agree that ORAN is going to be open over time. >> At some point, RAN will be cloud native, whether it's ORAN the spec, open RAN the concept, (Yousef speaking indistinctly) >> Yeah. >> Virtual RAN. But yeah, I mean I think it seems pretty evident at this point that the mainframe will give way to open systems once again. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> ERAN, ecosystem RAN. >> Any RAN. (Dave laughing) >> You don't have to start with the ORAN where they're inside the house. So as you probably know, our partner AT&T started with the core. >> Dennis: They almost all have. >> And they've been on the virtualization path since 2014 and 15. And what we are working with them on is the hybrid cloud model to expand all the way, if you will, as I mentioned to the far-edge or the public cloud. So there's a way to be in the brownfield environment, yet jump on the new bandwagon of technology without necessarily taking too much risk, because you're quite right. I mean, resiliency, security, service assurance, I mean, for example, AT&T runs the first responder network for the US on their network, on our platform, and I'm personally very familiar of how high the bar is. So it's doable, but you need to go in stages, of course. >> And they've got to do that integration. >> Yes. >> They do. >> And Yousef made a great point. Like, out of the top 30 largest Telcos by CapEx outside of China, three quarters of them have virtualized their core. So the cloudification, if you will, software definition run on industry standard hardware, embraced cloud native principles, containerized apps, that's happened in the core. It's well accepted. Now it's just a ripple-down through the network which will happen as and when things are faster, better, cheaper. >> Right. >> So as implemented, what does this look like? Is it essentially what we used to loosely refer to as Azure stacked software, running with Dell optimized Telecom infrastructure together, sometimes within a BBU, out in a hybrid cloud model communicating back to Azure locations in some cases? Is that what we're looking at? >> Approximately. So you start with the near-edge, okay? So the near-edge lives in the operator's data centers, edges, whatever the case may be, built out of off the shelf hardware. Dell is our great partner there but in principle, it could be different mix and match. So once you have that true near-edge, then you can think of, "Okay, how can I make sure this environment is as uniform, same APIs, same everything, regardless what the physical location is?" And this is key, key for the network function providers and the NEPs because they need to be able to port once, run everywhere, and it's key for the operator to reduce their costs. You want to teach your workforce, your operations folks, if you will, how to manage this system one time, to automation and so forth. So, and that is actually an expansion of the Azure capabilities that people are familiar with in a public cloud, projected into different locations. And we have technology called Arc which basically models everything. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So if you have trained your IT side, you are halfway there, how to manage your new network. Even though of course the network is carrier graded, there's different gear. So yes, what you said, a lot of it is true but the actual components, whatever they might be running, are carrier grade, highly optimized, the next images and our solution is not a DIY solution, okay? I know you cater to a wide spectrum here but for us, we don't believe in the TCO. The proper TCO can be achieved by just putting stuff by yourself. We just published a report with Analysys Mason that shows that our approach will save 36 percent of the cost compared to a DIY approach. >> Dave: What percent? >> 36 percent. >> Dave: Of the cost? >> Of, compared to DIY, which is already cheaper than classical models. >> And there's a long history of fairly failed DIY, right, >> Yeah. >> That preceded this. As in the early days of public cloud, the network operators wrestled with, "Do I have to become one to survive?" >> Dave: Yeah. Right. >> So they all ended up having cloud projects and by and large, they've all dematerialized in favor of this. >> Yeah, and it's hard for them to really invest at scale. Let me give you an example. So, your biggest tier one operator, without naming anybody, okay, how many developers do they have that can build and maintain an OS image, or can keep track of container technology, or build monitoring at scale? In our company, we have literally thousands of developers doing it already for the cloud and all we're doing for the operator segment is customizing it and focusing it at the carrier grade aspects of it. But so, I don't have half a dozen exterior experts. I literally have a building of developers who can do that and I'm being literal, here. So it's a scale thing. Once you have a product that you can give to multiple people, everybody benefits. >> Dave: Yeah, and the carriers are largely, they're equipment engineers in a large setting. >> Oh, they have a tough job. I always have total respect what they do. >> Oh totally, and a lot of the work happens, you know, kind of underground and here they are. >> They are network operators. >> They don't touch. >> It's their business. >> Right, absolutely, and they're good at it. They're really good at it. That's right. You know, you think about it, we love to, you know, poke fun at the big carriers, but think about what happened during the pandemic. When they had us shift everything to remote work, >> Dennis: Yes. >> Landline traffic went through the roof. You didn't even notice. >> Yep. That's very true. >> I mean, that's the example. >> That's very true. >> However, in the future where there's innovation and it's going to be driven by developers, right, that's where the open ecosystem comes in. >> Yousef: Indeed. >> And that's the hard transition for a lot of these folks because the developers are going to win that with new workloads, new applications that we can't even think of. >> Dennis: Right. And a lot of it is because if you look at it, there's the fundamental back strategy hat back on, fundamental dynamics of the industry, forced investment, flat revenues. >> Dave: Yeah. Right. >> Very true. >> Right? Every few years, a new G comes out. "Man, I got to retool this massive thing and where I can't do towers, I'm dropping fiber or vice a versa." And meanwhile, most diversification efforts into media have failed. They've had to unwind them and resell them. There's a lot of debt in the industry. >> Yousef: Yeah. >> Dennis: And so, they're looking for that next big, adjacent revenue stream and increasingly deciding, "If I don't modernize my network, I can't get it." >> Can't do it. >> Right, and again, what I heard from some of the carriers in the keynote was, "We're going to charge for API access 'cause we have data in the network." Okay, but I feel like there's a lot more innovation beyond that that's going to come from the disruptors. >> Dennis: Oh yeah. >> Yousef: Yes. >> You know, that's going to blow that away, right? And then that may not be the right model. We'll see, you know? I mean, what would Microsoft do? They would say, "Here, here's a platform. Go develop." >> No, I'll tell you. We are actually working with CAMARA and GSMA on the whole API layer. We actually announced a service as well as (indistinct). >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, right. >> And the key there, frankly, in my opinion, are not the disruptors as in operators. It's the ISV community. You want to get developers that can write to a global set of APIs, not per Telco APIs, such that they can do the innovation. I mean, this is what we've seen in other industries, >> Absolutely. >> That I critically can think of. >> This is the way they get a slice of that pie, right? The recent history of this industry is one where 4G LTE begot the smartphone and app store era, a bevy of consumer services, and almost every single profit stream went somewhere other than the operator, right? >> Yousef: Someone else. So they're looking at this saying, "Okay, 5G is the enterprise G and there's going to be a bevy of applications that are business service related, based on 5G capability and I can't let the OTT, over the top, thing happen again." >> Right. >> They'll say that. "We cannot let this happen." >> "We can't let this happen again." >> Okay, but how do they, >> Yeah, how do they make that not happen? >> Not let it happen again? >> Eight APIs, Dave. The answer is eight APIs. No, I mean, it's this approach. They need to make it easy to work with people like Yousef and more importantly, the developer community that people like Yousef and his company have found a way to harness. And by the way, they need to be part of that developer community themselves. >> And they're not, today. They're not speaking that developer language. >> Right. >> It's hard. You know, hey. >> Dennis: Hey, what's the fastest way to sell an enterprise, a business service? Resell Azure, Teams, something, right? But that's a resale. >> Yeah, that's a resale thing. >> See, >> That's not their service. >> They also need to free their resources from all the plumbing they do and leave it to us. We are plumbers, okay? >> Dennis: We are proud plumbers. >> We are proud plumbers. I'm a plumber. I keep telling people this thing. We had the same discussion with banks and enterprises 10 years ago, by the way. Don't do the plumbing. Go add value on the top. Retool your workforce to do applications and work with ISVs to the verticals, as opposed to either reselling, which many do, or do the plumbing. You'd be surprised. Traditionally, many operators do around, "I want to plumb this thing to get this small interrupt per second." Like, who cares? >> Well, 'cause they made money on connectivity. >> Yes. >> And we've seen this before. >> And in a world without telephone poles and your cables- >> Hey, if what you have is a hammer, everything's a nail, right? And we sell connectivity services and that's what we know how to do, and that both build and sell. And if that's no longer driving a revenue stream sufficient to cover this forced investment march, not to mention Huawei rip and government initiatives to pull infrastructure out and accelerate investment, they got to find new ways. >> I mean, the regulations have been tough, right? They don't go forward and ask for permission. They really can't, right? They have to be much more careful. >> Dennis: It is tough. >> So, we don't mean to sound like it's easy for these guys. >> Dennis: No, it's not. >> But it does require a new mindset, new skillsets, and I think some of 'em are going to figure it out and then pff, the wave, and you guys are going to be riding that wave. >> We're going to try. >> Definitely. Definitely. >> As a veteran of working with both Dell and Microsoft, specifically Azure on things, I am struck by how you're very well positioned in this with Microsoft in particular. Because of Azure's history, coming out of the on-premises world that Microsoft knows so well, there's a natural affinity to the hybrid nature of Telecom. We talk about edge, we talk about hybrid, this is it, absolutely the center of it. So it seems like a- >> Yousef: Indeed. Actually, if you look at the history of Azure, from day one, and I was there from day one, we always spoke of the hybrid model. >> Yeah. >> The third point, we came from the on-premises world. >> David: Right. >> And don't get me wrong, I want people to use the public cloud, but I also know due to physics, regulation, geopolitical boundaries, there's something called on-prem, something called an edge here. I want to add something else. Remember our deal on how we are partner-centric? We're applying the same playbook, here. So, you know, for every dollar we make, so many of it's been done by the ecosystem. Same applies here. So we have announced partnerships with Ericson, Nokia, (indistinct), all the names, and of course with Dell and many others. The ecosystem has to come together and customers must retain their optionality to drum up whatever they are on. So it's the same playbook, with this. >> And enterprise technology companies are, actually, really good at, you know, decoding the customer, figuring out specific requirements, making some mistakes the first time through and then eventually getting it right. And as these trends unfold, you know, you're in a good position, I think, as are others and it's an exciting time for enterprise tech in this industry, you know? >> It really is. >> Indeed. >> Dave: Guys, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Dave: It's great to see you. Have a great rest of the show. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. Thank you, Dave. >> All right, keep it right there. John Furrier is live in our studio. He's breaking down all the news. Go to siliconangle.com to go to theCUBE.net. Dave Vellante, David Nicholson and Lisa Martin, we'll be right back from the theater in Barcelona, MWC 23 right after this short break. (relaxing music)

>>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.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's the CUBE, covering VeeamON2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. This is Dave Vellate with Peter Burris here. Day One of VeeamOn2019, at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. Rat Pack used to hang out here Which is kind of the big theme of the reception last night. Dale Hoffman is here. He's the Director of Offering Management for VMWare Solutions at IBM. Dale, thanks for coming to the group. >> Thanks, David. It's a pleasure to be here and Peter, nice to meet you. >> Okay, yeah, pleasure to meet you as well. So lets unpack the sort of notion of Offering Management that sort of people generally refer to as Product Management. IBM calls it Offering Management. So you are focused on the public cloud, but specific to the VMWare swimlane. Is that right? >> Yeah, that is correct. So, if you think about it I own the VMWare Offering Solutions on our cloud. So, that is everything associated with the whole VMWare software defined data center stack, but also a lot of our partner solutions. Many solutions in the security space. Many solutions in the business resiliency space. And that's kind of where Veeam had came in on that aspect. >> So the first public cloud deal that VMWare did, correct me if I'm wrong, was with IBM, was it not? >> Yeah, so if you just go back a little bit in time, IBM itself is probably the largest, if not the largest, provider of VMWare workloads. And mainly that's due to a lot of our GTS services business. But back in 2016, this looked like a great opportunity to actually go on the public cloud and actually stand up a software defined data center stack from VMWare. So, we started on that in that partnership with VMware and started to just basically grow that business. That business has been growing at about a 75% CAGR, and then that was kind of like step one, get the stack, and then step two was how do you get those security services in, and some of those business resiliency services in. And that's where we started to go in and do a real deep partnership with Veeam and happy to say that we started that in 2017 and we have about 12,000 plus VMs, both bare metal and also on virtualized VMWare on our cloud. Its been about 170% year to year growth rate. So Veeam's killing it on our cloud. They really are. >> And your scope is anything in the IBM cloud that's VMWare related so it could be >> That is correct. >> Data base services, it could be >> Absolutely. >> Object stores, obviously data protection with Veeam. What do you think is driving the Veeam-IBM momentum? >> Well, I think what's driving it is if you think about a lot of these, you know, critical customers, first thing they're going to want to do is take advantage of a lot of things that you get with the cloud. Whether its moving from a capex to an opex model with being able to get that capacity expansion. And there's a whole bunch of different use cases that you've got, but one of the key things to them is this whole business continuity. The ability to make sure that I can back it up, I can recover as quickly as I possibly can, and maybe more importantly, we have about 60 data centers worldwide. And being able to, essentially, have that geographic span is a huge advantage. And also the, fact that, just take backup as a simple example. When I back up I may be moving data back and forth in a particular region. I'm looking for some latency. And not to be able to be charged for that is a powerful value proposition for the customer. So, we don't charge for any type of data movement inside our cloud. And also, when you go outside, maybe for high availability, outside into the geographic reach, the same thing happens. So I think those are some very key things. That it's the security, the very fast backup and recovery, and knowing that you're not getting charged for that private secure network. It brings a real good value proposition to our customers that are leveraging Veeam and other services. >> So we think that we're now entering into a third era of cloud where the first one was basically makers, companies that created SAS companies, gaming companies, and then people moved analytics into there for a variety of reasons. Now the enterprise seems to be getting in it in a big way. Certainly at the large size. But that's starting to move down into the mid-range as well. Your advantage, IBM's advantage, has always been your ability to engage and bind with your customer base. How are you, how is IBM helping to move these customers forward, and what is the backup restore conversation in that process? Is it an afterthought? Is it something that's becoming more central to their thinking? How is it working? >> Yeah, so that's a great question, Peter. So, the way I think we in IBM cloud have thought about this is we've kind of divided the journey to cloud into two pieces. The 20% that are there, they weren't the real I'll call them business critical type of workloads that are going on, but that next 80% that's where we really see a huge advantage to us. Its out enterprise relationships. Its what we do from a security aspect on the cloud, and how easily we could help them, what we call lift and shift and migrate things over. And then once you're there, how can I help give you that assurance that we're going to give you the best backup, the best recovery in the event of a disaster, something that can, if you do see a failure, being able to have a very fast recovery point, you know, objective, and get you knowing that everything is secure and backed up and has this wide geographic spread. And even think about in the areas of compliance these days. GDPR. I mean, you have to have these data centers worldwide and sometimes they have to be you know, fixed. So, we provide that whole value proposition, I think, to those clients, in that essence. And I think the business critical, and, eventually, what we call mission critical workloads that will eventually move over, its probably the best choice to be able to have that trusted place to put workloads. >> So, the other, related to that, is you've got customers who are now moving and we're going to see them moving at varieties of speeds, but increasingly, the enterprises are going to move faster to do this than they've done in almost anything previously. And you've got Veeam, a very hard charging vendor, that has a reputation for great quality stuff, but a lot of innovation, moving very quickly. How is, how are you ensuring that there's no impedance mismatch between you, IBM, IBM customers, and Veeam and the technology vectors that it's on. >> Yeah, well first of all, its a very, very deep partnership. I mean very, very6 close relationship with them. This is not a vendor supplier relationship. This is a very, very deep partnership. And the other thing is, from a technology standpoint, one of our big differentiators on the cloud is, we actually provide that access all the way down to the hypervisor level. So, you have full freedom of action to do whatever you want to be able to do. So, from a Veeam standpoint, since its really based on a hypervisor type of technology, that gives us a real big advantage, because let's say, David, you're using Veeam on-prem. I give it the exact same look and feel as if you're off-prem, and I essentially make that data center look like an extension, like it was just in the next building and such. >> It's just another group, it's just another pool of VMs. >> Absolutely. And that whole, control and management of that gives you extreme flexibility that you really can't get in any other type of cloud. I like to say that You can come in and custom build your infrastructure, your VMWare software defined data center stack, your services such as Veeam. You custom build it any way that you want. It's like leasing a car. After you custom built that car, we hand you the keys. It's client managed. You go out and do whatever you want with that. And if you don't like it you can turn those keys back in, because we just do things not on a long term commitment, but on monthly commitments and such. >> And I want to, I want to maybe drill down on that a little bit, Dale. >> Sure. >> And try to better understand some of the flexibility that I'm inferring from your statement. So, you're a mainframer. You remember the days of SMS, and one of the things about it was that I could set policy for data protection, for backup, based upon the workload. I could say back this up once a week or back this up every day or back this up every hour or what is was. I had a granular level of capability. It was mainframe so it was, you know, big stuff. A lot of the challenges within, certainly the mid-size and smaller businesses, it's like one size fits all. This has been a, you know, a problem for everybody for years. Danny Allen, this morning, in the analyst and media session was talking about... >> This is the products guy here at VM. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talking about the ability to sort of set granular levels, the pressures of RPO and RTO. And I want to sort of test how challenging it is to do that by workload or by application, and how IBM and Veeam are supporting that. How complicated is it? Are your clients doing it or is it still kind of a one size fits all world. >> I wouldn't say its one size fits all, but what I would say is by giving the clients full control and having the freedom and flexibility to do things that they want, the tight integration of this Veeam technology into the V-Center console and such, it gives them the ability, I like to say, do it at your own pace. Do it when you want to. Even something as simple as, lets say, managing VMWare and patching it, instead of having somebody else do it for you at their pace, we essentially allow you to do it at your pace when you want to. And its the same thing with the backup. You do it when you want to, at your frequency, what regions you want to go, or your whole geographic spread. And we try to provide the maximum flexibility and control to our mutual clients to enable that. >> And on the automation scale, or you know, the 9-inning game of automation, where are we? How, how automated can I make that, but more importantly, how fast are customers adopting that sort of automation scenario. >> Yeah, so you're experience when you come into our, our cloud, and essentially you click on "I want to go to the cloud," you click on the VMWare offering, its a very simple menu. You pick your infrastructure, compu... network storage. I'll keep it simple for now. You pick your software defined data center stack and we even enable a BYOL. A lot of people have their own Vsphere licenses. We enable them to go in and insert their key which is a cost advantage to them. Then you pick your partner services and such. So you pick your Veeam, and then you go in there and say "Well, where do I want to put it? Do I want to put it into Vsan? Do I want to put it into a file based storage?" And I think what we're really excited about is, we just recently announced being able to put this into IBM's cloud object storage. And that's huge, because, if you think about it, we all live in this area of regulatory and compliance and you can't throw anything away and the data is just exploding all over the place. So, having that ability to put it into a lower cost storage and all automated and essentially Veeam can essentially point to any of those multiple storage tiers. It gives our customers a big advantage so that they could essentially, I'll call it right-tune what they want to do and where they want to do their backups. So, they want something there quick or they say "Nah, you know, that could be a cold vault. I can keep that out there for a while and when I need it I'll go back and get it." So a lot of flexibility on storage options, a lot of flexibility on the pricing. But Veeam essentially is that powerhouse behind it that's actually interfacing that VMWare world as well as on the bare metal side over to those various levels of storage. >> So David, to answer your question, where are we in that 9 innings. I would have said bottom of the 1st, 1 out, 2 men on, 1 of them is Manny Ramirez. [Laughter] Because you just don't know what's going to happen next, and that's what I want to bring up. Veeam talked about... >> Is he a Boston fan? >> No, I'm not. [Laughter] I'm not. But Veeam talked about the "with Veeam" and I'm wondering how IBM sees it bringing its, this massive innovation, you still are one of the leading generators of patents in certainly the tech industry, but globally. How do you see IBM bringing IBM intellectual property, IBM invention, to this "with Veeam" platform to increase the degree to which it can serve a broader range of customers of different sizes, different geographies, and different workload forms. How do you see IBM participating in that process? >> Yeah, let me give you a couple examples. So, let me just take a non-Veeam example, just to talk about some IBM innovation. So, about a month ago we actually introduced something called hyperprotect cryptoservices. That's a big word there. Basically, it is, it's the same technology that we have in system Z, that's used by our large enterprise customers that gives you that, that FIPS 140-2, level 4. We are the only cloud in the world that has that technology that's on there. Basically, once you put your keys in there nobody's going to get to them at all. And it's an innovation of taking something that was done in a different division within IBM and now making that as an endpoint service within our cloud. Now, let me give you an example of doing a little bit of innovation even with Veeam. So, one of the things that we're trying to do is, you know, we started out hey, let's lay down the software data center stack, let's lay down partner services. Now, let's focus on what's that solution layer on top of it. How do we add more value into our clients? So, just take SAP, for example. We just recently announced both on a bare metal and also on our VMWare side, to be able to have a, we're the only cloud that has a certified SAP server in the cloud. And what we've just recently done is, we've integrated and put Veeam as that backup choice for that. So, now what that really enables everyone to do is leverage a lot of innovative work that Veeam was doing to make sure that you can back up SAP correctly. We married that with our infrastructure and our bare metal/VMWare stack with Veeam as that backup. And just a little bit of foreshadowing in the future, we're going to look at ways to further automate a lot of that SAP landscape so that our clients see, you know, a much better automated solution so that they essentially, using your baseball analogy, are going to see that full range of automation and say "Wow. I think we're at the end of the game here. This thing truly is automated, easy to consume, and I'll have the confidence of the security and the business resiliency knowing that it's got the trusted IBM name behind it. >> You know, give us the summary of 2019. Maybe some of the first half highlights and maybe show a little leg for the second half. >> Sure, sure. Why not? >> What can we expect leading up to IBM thing. >> So, I mentioned a few things about what we did in the security space already. So, we've enabled, besides our, what we've done with high trust, with data and key protection. We've also enabled IBM's key protect services. We brought the System Z hyperprotect services into the mix. We've enabled things like cavionics to bring the risk foresight. So, now, we can monitor a lot of compliance and keep things in compliance and monitor that for you. We brought some app modernization to essentially help people on their journey modernize their apps, leveraging both a tight integration of VMWare and what we call ICP-hosted or IBM Cloud Private hosted to get that tight integration and such. But moving forward I see a couple big things, and I'll try to maybe put them in the Veeam perspective and such. You heard me mention before about this 80% of that real key workload coming over to the cloud that, you know, business critical or mission critical. We announced last year something called mission critical VMWare, and basically what it is, it's two, two active, active type of sites with a witness site and you essentially are moving things back and forth so if you have a failure within a region you instantly can go in and switch over. And the idea is to give you the highest availability into the cloud. And Veeam is a very much integral part of that solution in the sense that it'll be our backup. And then since you said do a little bit of foreshadowing, say what's coming in the future. We have a very very strong single tenant VMWare offering on the cloud. Like I was saying, you know, it's client managed, the hypervisor access. You've got that extreme flexibility and control. But what we like to do is kind of look into a little bit more of that multi-tenant type of space. And we think it opens up a whole new market segment for us in that emerging market and commercial market space. Guess who's going to be our partner in that to make the backup happen? That's going to be Veeam. >> Cool. Dale Hoffman, thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and sharing. >> Oh, thank you for having me. >> Some of the ways in which IBM is differentiating, not doing infrastructure service and just racing to zero, but really trying to pick your spots and I really appreciate your insights and thanks again. >> Okay, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. Day one at VeeamON2019, and from Miami you're watching the CUBE. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2017! Brought to you by Red Hat! (electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit, I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, I'm here with Stu Miniman, our guest today is Jason Hoffman. He is the vice president and global head of cloud infrastructure at Ericsson. Thanks so much for joining us here. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Thank you. So, I want to start out by talking about the cloud market today, and where we are. We've heard here at the summit that the number one thing on customers' minds is cloud strategy. Is that, does that resonate with you? And what are you hearing from customers? >> Cloud's an interesting topic. Because it's both an infrastructure approach, sometimes people use it for a delivery model, sometimes people use it to describe a business model, sometimes people use it to describe a number of things. For me, for most companies, cloud's not strategic. Cloud's tactical. Cloud may be strategic to Amazon, cloud may be strategic to Microsoft, we've yet to see whether it's truly strategic for Google, and that, but for most people it's tactical. And I think it's a fine distinction to make, because tactical means there's stuff to do, and if you look at the thing to do, it's pretty clear that that approach to infrastructure is on highly accessible, industrialized infrastructure. And I anchor that in infrastructure because in the absence of that type of infrastructure then your delivery models and business models and stuff don't apply, basically. >> Jason, you bring up an interesting point, we heard in the first day keynote, they said, "One of the top priorities for end users is, "to build a cloud strategy." Because when I talk to most users, they've been very tactical, it's like, well, we moved our scene around, to SaaS. Everybody did. I'm starting to move certain business apps to SaaS. I've, everybody tried Dev, you know, on Amazon, and played with a number of other clouds, but you look at that, I had a guy who wrote for me, he was like, "We don't have hybrid cloud. "We have composite cloud." Because I've got all those things there, it's like, "How do I shop?" It's like, well, I stop at a convenience store where I need, I go to the store, and I get lots of stuff from Amazon. Sounds like how we do cloud! So where do you see, from the users that you talk to, I mean, you've been involved in this since the early days, so it feels like we talk a lot about cloud stuff, but it feels like we're getting a little bit more real, I'm heartened to see that users are starting to, you know, think about strategic, how they put things together, where do you see the customers you're talking to? >> Well, I mean, I think a lot of the customers are educated by the market. And the market tends to use a lot of these marketing terms, like composite, rather than getting down to what the actual sort of issues are. The issues, even if we go back to the highly accessible, industrialized type of infrastructure, I mean, the issue there is. Customers need to simplify things. They largely would like to do that through some type of, quote unquote, "automation". And they would like everything that they do under one governance model. Essentially, what you'd call life cycle management, or governance, or whatever. But these types of things that both the infrastructure, and the nature of the things that you do on it, are too complex. And they tend not to be, you know, once they're basically put in place, they tend not to be touched again. You know, so in fact, if you look at a good definition of like, legacy. Legacy, for me, is when the cost of keeping something as is, is basically cheaper than the replacement process. And actually if you look at that sort of cost curve, the day that something is best to leave as is, and it's very expensive to replace, is the day it goes live. >> So the legacy curve-- >> It's like driving a car off the lot. >> The legacy curve is actually a U-shaped curve. You know, in there. And in fact, the day something goes live, it's like a sieve and at some point, three, four, five years down the road, it's not legacy, and then about three, four, five years after that, it's legacy again. >> Reminds me of what Jeff Baso said, "There will never be a day two for us, "we are always going to stay day one, "focused on creating new stuff, "because otherwise once you go kind of steady state, "the decline is coming soon after." >> Yeah, and I think, I mean, if you look at now, myself having started I dunno, 20 plus years ago in scientific computing, and then, you know, meeting HPC and these types of efforts, and then showing up in sort of what one would call the quote unquote, "cloud world", the effort there has largely been the same, I mean, it's one of these ones where, infrastructure by its very nature is always risky to manage. You know, meaning things like, continuously deploying things into infrastructure, always runs the risk of making infrastructure inaccessible to people. You know, you don't instantly like, if a new operating system image comes out, you don't reboot 100, 000 servers. And then the applications that sit on top of it, and have historically inherited that risk from the infrastructure. And the effort has largely been separating those two. So that applications get freed of the risk from the underlying infrastructure, and then you can start applying a certain approach to the infrastructure, not really caring about what's on it. And cloud is pretty much this emergence of infrastructure, as its own practice. And it's going from traditional IT environments, where that sort of operational model, and that economic model, is not the center of anybody's product designs, to an operational and economic model that is at the center of everybody's sort of product designs. And the KPIs around what you're doing there, and whether you're successful, are relatively simple. And that is, you know, are you continuously improving, in terms of capacity, capabilities, and unit economics. You know, if you're not, if you don't have an exponentially decreasing unit economic curve, within, you know, a five year period of time, then you're probably not doing, you know, quote unquote, "cloud" right. >> Jason, we know with Ericsson's background, you've got strong positions in the telecom space, working a lot on the NFB solutions, expect that's a hot area of working with Red Hat, can you kind of sketch out for us, just where Ericsson sits in the marketplace today of where customers are coming to you, with kind of key partnerships? >> The element for us is that we're a 141 year old Swedish multinational. And we've been in the same business for 141 years. And that we provide the communication backbone for the world. And so, on one part of the business, is that if you see 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE, or stuff on the phone, or if you use a mobile phone in somewhere like North America, 100% of all that traffic goes over Ericsson applications. And so you know, we're a very dominant provider of that radio edge, if you will. The other thing we have, from an application portfolio perspective, is everything you need to be a telecom. So everything ranging from the network functions, through OSS environments, PSS environments, customer front ends. And the like. And the telecom space, has been undergoing some pretty dramatic changes, in some ways. Or not dramatic changes, depending on one sort of attitude over the last few years. The first one, is even though that far radio edge, if you will, has tens of millions of points of presence globally, that talk to billions of devices, that's a very algorithmically driven, event driven, very industrialized type of infrastructure. It's fair to say that if you look at the typical definition one would apply to hyperscale, it applies to the radio edge. It also applies to the sort of hyperscale cloud providers. In between those two things, is roughly about one to two trillion U.S. dollars of investments that sits in tens of thousands of facilities globally with pretty much the computer history museum of hardware and operating systems and everything else inside of it. It's effectively this whole middle mile infrastructure. For us, we sort of view the virtualization of everything that's in the telecom space, and uplifting it to a common infrastructure approach, is pretty critical to get a handle on that middle mile infrastructure. >> Jason, you know, when I think about the telecom space, we're talking about 5G now, these roll outs tend to take a while, we measure things in years, if not decades, before they roll out. Jim Whitehurst got on stage this morning, said, you know, "Planning is dead, "we don't do a 10 year big data plan, "we won't do a ten year AI plan." How does, you know, your set of the market live in this greater changing world, how do you look forward, can you predict like we did in the past? That's a, so I think yes and no. I mean, we, you're correct in that if you take a market like India, India's going to hit 200% 2G penetration in 2020. And so, we're talking about something that's going to happen 20 years after it started in other parts of the market. You have spots like Papua New Guinea, that are, have 2G networks throwing 200, 300% year over year. And so when you look at this globally, the roll out of these technologies are on, typically, a 30 year time schedule, overall. And they result in people owning assets that they have for at least 30 years. In many cases as well. So on one aspect, there is very long term planning that has to exist, and we have some customers we've had for a century. From that point of view, they have to know those types of plans. On the other end, is if you look at what we have to start doing from a technology standpoint, is enabling just a tremendous amount of flexibility, to be able to just get out of this legacy hamster wheel. This idea that the second you go and deploy something somewhere, you can't touch it again, and you can't continuously improve it again. You know, we're trying to sit down and say, "If we go out and do these types of deployments, "we need the ability "to actually continuously improve these." In fact, that's really what the industrialized word means for us. And so, for many of these things, you know, we've been taking certain approaches. I mean, interestingly enough, if you look at the actual mobile edge of things, the radio edge of things, that is one where there is one hardware platform, it comes in tens of form factors, we'll go and deploy out that infrastructure, and whether it's a 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, narrow band ILT infrastructure, it's purely unlocked in software. And so that is a good software to find, sort of infrastructure. And you do it that way because at the end of the day, somebody's got to go into a jungle and put a cell tower up, and you don't want to go out there again. And we want to take that same sort of thinking throughout the rest of the infrastructure. >> Jason, it always fascinates me, if you look at this space, I mean, I remember we interviewed you back at Joint, we were talking a lot of the show about containers, and there's things that we've tried in the past, and now it's coming at it again on edge computing, is something we're starting to talk about, it's a little bit difficult to predict how long some of that will take, and some of the cycles, but maybe to wrap us up, talk to us a little bit about this, you know, Ericsson's planning for the future, what are some of those big challenges that you see, that we as an industry need to tackle, and maybe some of the things that will earlier wins and stuff, that you know, might take a little bit longer. >> Yeah I mean, a little bit longer, and if I look out really, probably the next 15, 20 years, I mean the type of middle mile industrialization they're doing today is a prerequisite for all the IOTUs cases to show up on 5G. Because there's simply not enough middle mile capacity in the world, or capabilities there, to even have it go to an amazon type perspective. So even if that all ends up there, so, now it's going to be this very large effort of I think, bringing these two worlds together, and on the hyperscale cloud providers, you have a very industrialized approach in infrastructure, and it's very supply chain driven, and it's very sort of, easy to cookie cutter out. On the extreme end of the infrastructure, on the radio edge, it's the same what. And, but all the stuff in the middle's not. And if you look at the channelage from a cloud perspective, it's about taking those sort of learnings from the book ends of the infrastructure, bringing it to the middle, if you will. And starting to think about what, because edge computing's a great example, it's like, what does it mean when you start using that, from an end user perspective? You're not going to go to a pull down menu, and pick 12, 418 availability zones from a list of 120, 000 global availability zones. You're not going to automatically have issues around data sovereignty and everything else like that, just sort of be tackled. So I think in many ways, when we start looking at some core concepts that live in hundreds of facilities, and sort of large cloud providers, and some of these concepts where we manage to do things in tens of millions of base stations, talking to billions of devices, the reality for me is when you look at the redo, and now the more global use of that infrastructure that's in the middle, it's going to require developer accessibility, and a certain degree of programmability that doesn't actually exist yet. And you know, of course it's an open question of how much you do it. I mean, you know, you're going to have to scale topologically, rather than sort of scale in other ways. And a lot of that stuff's just not done yet. >> Jason, thank you so much for joining us, we really appreciate your time. >> Anytime. >> We'll be back with more of theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit, after this. (electronic music)

(electronic music) (graphics whooshing) (graphics tinkling) >> Telecommunications is well north of a trillion-dollar business globally, that provides critical services on which virtually everyone on the planet relies. Dramatic changes are occurring in the sector, and one of the most important dimensions of this change is the underlying infrastructure that powers global telecommunications networks. Telcos have been thawing out, if you will, they're frozen infrastructure, modernizing. They're opening up, they're disaggregating their infrastructure, separating, for example, the control plane from the data plane, and adopting open standards. Telco infrastructure is becoming software-defined. And leading telcos are adopting cloud native microservices to help make developers more productive, so they can respond more quickly to market changes. They're embracing technology consumption models, and selectively leveraging the cloud where it makes sense. And these changes are being driven by market forces, the root of which stem from customer demand. So from a customer's perspective, they want services, and they want them fast. Meaning, not only at high speeds, but also they want them now. Customers want the latest, the greatest, and they want these services to be reliable and stable with high quality of service levels. And they want them to be highly cost-effective. Hello and welcome to this preview of Mobile World Congress 2023. My name is Dave Vellante, and at this year's event, theCUBE has a major presence at the show made possible by Dell Technologies, and with me to unpack the trends in telco, and look ahead to MWC23 are Dennis Hoffman, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Dell's telecom business, and Aaron Chaisson, who is the Vice President of Telecom and Edge Solutions Marketing at Dell Technologies, gentlemen, welcome, thanks so much for spending some time with me. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> So, Dennis, let's start with you. Telcos in recent history have been slow to deliver and to monetize new services, and a large part because their purpose-built infrastructure could been somewhat of a barrier to responding to all these market forces. In many ways, this is what makes telecoms, really this market so exciting. So from your perspective, where is the action in this space? >> Yeah, the action Dave is kind of all over the place, partly because it's an ecosystem play. I think it's been, as you point out, the disaggregation trend has been going on for a while. The opportunity's been clear, but it has taken a few years to get all of the vendors, and all of the components that make up a solution, as well as the operators themselves, to a point where we can start putting this stuff together, and actually achieving some of the promise. >> So Aaron, for those who might not be as familiar with Dell's a activities in this area, here we are just ahead of Mobile World Congress, it's the largest event for telecoms, what should people know about Dell? And what's the key message to this industry? >> Sure, yeah, I think everybody knows that there's a lot of innovation that's been happening in the industry of late. One of the major trends that we're seeing is that shift from more of a vertically-integrated technology stack, to more of a disaggregated set of solutions, and that trend has actually created a ton of innovation that's happening across the industry, or along technology vendors and providers, the telecoms themselves. And so, one of the things that Dell's really looking to do is, as Dennis talked about, is build out a really strong ecosystem of partners and vendors that we're working closely together to be able to collaborate on new technologies, new capabilities that are solving challenges that the networks are seeing today. Be able to create new solutions built on those in order to be able to bring new value to the industry. And then finally, we want to help both partners, as well as our CSP providers activate those changes, so that they can bring new solutions to market, to be able to serve their customers. And so, the key areas that we're really focusing on with our customers is, technologies to help modernize the network, to be able to capitalize on the value of open architectures, and bring price performance to what they're expecting, and availability that they're expecting today. And then also, partner with the lines of business to be able to take these new capabilities, produce new solutions, and then deliver new value to their customers. >> Great, thank you, Aaron. So Dennis, you and I, known you for a number of years. I've watched you, you're are a trend spotter. You're a strategic thinker. I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze, and now you got to make it happen. So, how would you describe Dell's strategy in this market? >> Well, it's really two things. And I appreciate the comment, I'm not sure how much of a trend spotter I am, but I certainly enjoy, and I think I'm fascinated by what's going on in this industry right now. Our two main thrusts, Dave, are first round, trying to catalyze that ecosystem, be a force for pulling together a group of folks, vendors that have been flying in fairly loose formation for a couple of years, to deliver the kinds of solutions that move the needle forward, and produce the outcomes that our network operator customers can actually buy and consume, and deploy, and have them be supported. The other thing is, there's a couple of very key technology areas that need to be advanced here. This ends up being a much anticipated year in telecom. Because of the delivery of some open infrastructure solutions that have being developed for years. With the Intel Sapphire Rapids program coming to market, we've of course got some purpose-built solutions on top of that for telecommunications networks. Some expanded partnerships in the area of multi-cloud infrastructure. And so, I would say the second main thrust is, we've got to bring some intellectual property to the party. It's not just about pulling the ecosystem together. But those two things together really form the twin thrusts of our strategy. >> Okay, so as you point out, you obviously not going to go alone in this market, it's way too broad, there's so many routes to market, partnerships, obviously very, very important. So, can you share a little bit more about the ecosystem and partners, maybe give some examples of some of the key partners that you'd be highlighting or working with, maybe at Mobile World Congress, or other activities this year? >> Yeah, absolutely. As Aaron touched on, I'm a visual thinker. The way I think about this thing is a very, very vertical architecture is tipping sideways. It's becoming horizontal. And all of the layers of that horizontal architecture are really where the partnerships are at. So, let's start at the bottom, silicon. The silicon ecosystem is very much focused on this market. And producing very specific products to enable open, high performance telecom networks. That's both in the form of host processors, as well as accelerators. One layer up, of course, is the stuff that we're known for, subsystems, compute storage, the hardware infrastructure that forms the foundation for telco clouds. A layer above that, all of the cloud software layer, the virtualization and containerization software, and all of the usual suspects there, all of whom are very good partners of ours, and we're looking to expand that pretty broadly this year. And then at the top of the layer cake, all of the network functions, all of the VNF's and CNF's that were once kind of the top of proprietary stacks, that are now opening up and being delivered, as well-formed containers that can run on these clouds. So, we're focusing on all of those, if you will, product partnerships, and there is a services wrapper around all of it. The systems integration necessary to make these systems part of a carrier's network, which of course, has been running for a long time, and needs to be integrated with in a very specific way. And so, all of that, together kind of forms the ecosystem, all of those are partners, and we're really excited about being at the heart of it. >> Interesting, it's not like we've never seen this movie before, which is, it's sort of repeating itself in telco. Aaron, you heard my little intro up front about the need to modernize infrastructure, I wonder if I could touch on another major trend, which we're seeing is the cloud, and I'm talkin' about not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. Telcom providers are lookin' to the public cloud for specific use cases, you think about like bursting for an iPhone launch or whatever. But at the same time, these cloud vendors, they're sort of competing with telcos. They're providing local zones, for example, sometimes trying to do an end run on the telco connectivity services, so telecom companies, they have to find the right balance between what they own and what they rent. And I wonder if you could add some color as to what you see in the market and what Dell specifically is doing to support these trends. >> Yeah, and I think the most important thing is what we're seeing, as you said, is these aren't things that we haven't seen before. And I think that telecom is really going through their own set of cloud transformations, and so, one of the hot topics in the industry now is, what is telco cloud? And what does that look like going forward? And it's going to be, as you said, a combination of services that they offer, services that they leverage. But at the end of the day, it's going to help them modernize how they deliver telecommunication services to their customers, and then provide value added services on top of that. From a Dell perspective, we're really providing the technologies to provide the underpinnings to lay a foundation on which that network can be built, whether that's best of breed servers that are built in design for the telecom environments. Recently, we announced our Infer block program, in partnering with virtualization providers, to be able to provide engineered systems that dramatically simplify how our customers can deploy, manage, and lifecycle manage throughout day two operations, an entire cloud environment. And whether they're using Red Hat, whether they're using Wind River, or VMware, or other virtualization layers, they can deploy the right virtualization layer at the right part of their network to support the applications they're looking to drive. And Dell is looking to solve how they simplify and manage all of that, both from a hardware, as well as on management software perspective. So, this is really what Dell's doing to, again, partner with the broader technology community, to help make that telco cloud a reality. >> Aaron, let's stay here for a second, I'm interested in some of the use cases that you're going after with customers. You've got Edge infrastructure, remote work, 5G, where's security fit, what are the focus areas for Dell, and can we double click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's two main areas of telecommunication industry that we're talking to. One, we've really been talking about the sort of the network buyer, how do they modernize the core, the network Edge, the RAN capabilities to deliver traditional telecommunication services, and modernize that as they move into 5G and beyond. I think the other side of the business is, telecoms are really looking from a line of business perspective to figure out how do they monetize that network, and be able to deliver value added services to their enterprise customers on top of these new networks. So, you were just touching on a couple of things that are really critical. In the enterprise space, AI and IoT is driving a tremendous amount of innovation out there, and there's a need for being able to support and manage Edge compute at scale, be able to provide connectivity, like private mobility, and 4G and 5G, being able to support things like mobile workforces and client capabilities, to be able to access these devices that are around all of these Edge environments of the enterprises. And telecoms are seeing as that, as an opportunity for them to not only provide connectivity, but how do they extend their cloud out into these enterprise environments with compute, with connectivity, with client and connectivity resources, and even also provide protection for those environments as well. So, these are areas that Dell is historically very strong at. Being able to provide compute, be able to provide connectivity, and being able to provide data protection and client services, we are looking to work closely with lines of businesses to be able to develop solutions that they can bring to market in combination with us, to be able to serve their end user customers and their enterprises. So, those are really the two key areas, not only network buyer, but being able to enable the lines of business to go and capitalize on the services they're developing for their customers. >> I think that line of business aspect is key, I mean, the telcos have had to sit back and provide the plumbing, cost per bit goes down, data consumption going through the roof, all the over at the top guys have had the field day with the data, and the customer relationships, and now it's almost like the revenge (chuckles) of the telcos. Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell, if you break out the binoculars a little bit. >> Yeah, I think you hit it earlier. We've seen the movie before. This has happened in the IT data center. We went from proprietary vertical solutions to horizontal open systems. We went from client server to software-defined open hardware cloud native. And the trend is likely to be exactly that, in the telecom industry because that's what the operators want. They're not naive to what's happened in the IT data center, they all run very large data centers. And they're trying to get some of the scale economies. Some of the agility, the cost of ownership benefits for the reasons Aaron just discussed. It's clear as you point out, this industry's been really defined by the inability to stop investing, and the difficulty to monetize that investment. And I think now, everybody's looking at this 5G, and frankly, 5G plus 6G, and beyond, as the opportunity to really go get a chunk of that revenue, and Enterprise Edge is the target. >> And 5G is touching so many industries, and that kind of brings me, Aaron into Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got Industry 4.0, you've got our traditional industry and telco colliding. There's public policy. So, give us a teaser to Mobile World Congress 23, what's on deck at the show from Dell? >> Yeah, we're really excited about Mobile World Congress. This, as you know, is a massive event for the industry every year. And it's really the event that the whole industry uses to kick off this coming year. So, we're going to be using this obviously to talk to our customers and our partners about what Dell's looking to do, and what we're innovating on right now, and what we're looking to partner with them around. In the front of the house, we're going to be doin', we're going to be highlighting 13 different solutions and demonstrations to be able to show our customers what we're doing today, and show them the use cases, and put into action, so they get to actually look and feel, and touch, and experience what it is that we're working around. Obviously, meetings are important, everybody knows Mobile World Congress is the place to get those meetings and kickoff for the year. So, we're going to have, we're lookin' at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be lookin' to have across the industry with our customers and partners in the broader community. And of course, we've also got technology that's going to be in a variety of different partner spaces as well. So, you can come and see us in hall three, but we're also going to have technologies, kind of spread all over the floor. And of course, there's always theCUBE. You're going to be able to see us live all four days, all day, every day. You're going to be hearing our executives, our partners, our customers, talk about what Dell is doing to innovate in the industry, and how we're looking to leverage the broader, open ecosystem to be able to transform the network, and what we're lookin' to do. So, in that space, we're going to be focusing on what we're doing from an ecosystem perspective, our infrastructure focus. We'll be talking about what we're doing to support telco cloud transformation. And then finally, as we talked about earlier, how are we helping the lines of business within our telecoms monetize the opportunity? So, these are all different things we're really excited to be focusing on, and look forward to the event next month. >> Yeah, it's going to be awesome in Barcelona at the FITA, as you say, Dell's big presence in hall three, Orange is in there, Deutsche Telecom, Intel's in hall three. VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone, you got some great things to see there. Check that out, and of course, theCUBE, we are super excited to be collaborating with you, we got a great setup. We're in the walkway right between halls four and five, right across from the government of Catalonia, who are the host partners for the event, so there's going to be a ton of action there. Guys, can't wait to see you there, really appreciate your time today. >> Great, thanks. >> Alright, Mobile World Congress, theCUBE's coverage starts on February 27th right after the keynotes. So, first thing in the morning, east coast time, we'll be broadcasting is, Aaron said all week, Monday through Thursday in the show floor, check that out at thecube.net. siliconangle.com has all the written coverage, and go to dell.com, see what's happenin' there, have all the action from the event. Don't miss us, this is Dave Vellante, we'll see you there. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Telecommunic^ations is well north of a trillion-dollar business globally that provides critical services on which virtually everyone on the planet relies. Dramatic changes are occurring in the sector, and one of the most important dimensions of this change is the underlying infrastructure that powers global telecommunications networks. Telcos have been thawing out, if you will, their frozen infrastructure, modernizing. They're opening up. They're disaggregating their infrastructure, separating, for example, the control plane from the data plane and adopting open standards. Telco infrastructure is becoming software-defined, and leading telcos are adopting cloud-native microservices to help make developers more productive, so they can respond more quickly to market changes. They're embracing technology consumption models and selectively leveraging the cloud where it makes sense, and these changes are being driven by market forces, the root of which stem from customer demand. So from a customer's perspective, they want services, and they want them fast, meaning not only at high speeds, but also they want them now. Customers want the latest, the greatest, and they want these services to be reliable and stable with high quality of service levels, and they want them to be highly cost effective. Hello and welcome to this preview of Mobile World Congress 2023. My name is Dave Vellante and at this year's event, theCUBE has a major presence at the show, made possible by Dell Technologies, and with me, to unpack the trends in Telco and look ahead to MWC 23, Dennis Hoffman. He's the senior vice-president and general manager of Dell's telecom business and Aaron Chaisson, who is the vice-president of telecom and edge solutions marketing at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks so much for spending some time with me. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, glad to be here. So, Dennis, let's start with you. Telcos in recent history have been slow to deliver and to monetize new services, in a large part, because their purpose-built infrastructure can been somewhat of a barrier to respondent to these market forces. In many ways, this is what makes telecoms, really, this market, so exciting. So from your perspective, where is the action in this space? >> Yeah, the action, Dave, is kind of all over the place, partly because it's an ecosystem play. You know, I think it's been, as you point out, the disaggregation trend has been going on for a while. The opportunity's been clear, but it has taken a few years to get all of the vendors and all of the components that make up a solution, as well as the operators themselves, to a point where we can start putting this stuff together and actually achieving some of the promise. >> So, Aaron, for those who might not be as familiar with Dell's a activities in this area, you know, here we are just ahead of Mobile World Congress. It's the largest event for telecoms. What should people know about Dell, and what's the key message to this industry? >> Sure, yeah, I think everybody knows that there's a lot of innovation that's been happening in the industry of late. One of the major trends that we're seeing is that shift from more of a vertically-integrated technology stack to more of a disaggregated set of solutions, and that trend has actually created a ton of innovation that's happening across the industry, well, along technology vendors and providers, the telecoms themselves, and so one of the things that Dell's really looking to do is, as Dennis talked about, is build out a really strong ecosystem of partners and vendors that we're working closely together to be able to collaborate on new technologies, new capabilities, that are solving challenges that the networks are seeing today, be able to create new solutions built on those in order to be able to bring new value to the industry and then finally, we want to help both partners as well as our CSP providers activate those changes so that they can bring new solutions to market to be able to serve their customers, and so the key areas that we're really focusing on, with our customers, is technologies to help modernize the network to be able to capitalize on the value of open architectures and bring price performance to what they're expecting and availability that they're expecting today and then also partner with the lines of business to be able to take these new capabilities, produce new solutions and then deliver new value to their customers. >> Great, thank you, Aaron. So, Dennis, I have known you for a number of years. I've watched you. You are a trend spotter, and you're a strategic thinker, and I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze, and now you got got to make it happen. So how would you describe Dell's strategy in this market? >> Well, it's really two things, and I appreciate the comment. I'm not sure how much of a trend spotter I am, but I certainly enjoy, and I think I'm fascinated by what's going on in this industry right now. Our two main thrusts, Dave, are, first round, trying to catalyze that ecosystem, you know, be a force for pulling together a group of folks, vendors, that have been flying in fairly loose formation for a couple of years to deliver the kinds of solutions that move the needle forward and produce the outcomes that our network-operator customers can actually buy, and consume, and deploy, and have them be supported. The other thing is there's a couple of very key technology areas that need to be advanced here. This ends up being a much anticipated year, in telecom, because of the delivery of some open infrastructure solutions that have been being developed for years, with the Intel Sapphire Rapids program coming to market. We've of course got some purpose-built solutions on top of that for telecommunications networks, some expanded partnerships in the area of multi-cloud infrastructure, and so I would say the second main thrust is we've got to bring some intellectual property to the party. It's not just about pulling the ecosystem together, but those two things together really form the twin thrusts of our strategy. >> Okay, so as you point out, you're obviously not going to go alone in this market. It's way too broad. There's so many routes to market, partnerships, obviously, very, very important. So can you share a little bit more about the ecosystem and partners, maybe give some examples of some of the key partners that you'd be highlighting or working with, maybe at Mobile World Congress or other activities this year? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, as Aaron touched on. I'm a visual thinker. The way I think about this thing is a very, very vertical architecture is tipping sideways. It's becoming horizontal, and all of the layers of that horizontal architecture are really where the partnerships are at. So let's start at the bottom, silicon. The silicon ecosystem is very much focused on this market and producing very specific products to enable open, high-performance telecom networks. That's both in the form of host processors as well as accelerators. One layer up, of course, is the stuff that we're known for, subsystems, compute, storage, the hardware infrastructure that forms the foundation for telco clouds. A layer above that, all of the cloud software layer, the virtualization and containerization software and all of the usual suspects there, all of whom are very good partners of ours, and we're looking to expand that pretty broadly this year, and then at the top of the layer cake, all of the network functions, all of the VNFs and CNFs that were once kind of the top of proprietary stacks that are now opening up and being delivered as well-formed containers that can run on these clouds. So, you know, we're focusing on all of those, if you will, product partnerships, and there is a services wrapper around all of it, the systems integration necessary to make these systems part of a carrier's network, which, of course, has been running for a long time and needs to be integrated with in a very specific way, and so all of that together kind of forms the ecosystem. All of those are partners, and we're really excited about being at the heart of it. >> Interesting, it's not like we've never seen this movie before, which is sort of repeating itself in telco. Aaron, you heard my little intro up front about the need to modernize infrastructure. I wonder if I could touch on, you know, another major trend which we're seeing, is the cloud, and I'm talking about, not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. You know, telecom providers are looking to the public cloud for specific use cases. You think about, like, bursting for an iPhone launch or whatever but at the same time, these cloud vendors, they're sort of competing with telcos. They're providing, you know, local zones, for example, sometimes trying to do an end run on the telco connectivity services. So telecom companies, they have to find the right balance between what they own and what they rent, and I wonder if you could add some color as to what you see in the market and what Dell, specifically, is doing to support these trends. >> Yeah, I think the most important thing is what we're seeing, as you said, is these aren't things that we haven't seen before, and I think that telecom is really going through their own set of cloud transformations, and so one of the hot topics in the industry now is what is telco cloud and what does that look like going forward? And it's going to be a, as you said, a combination of services that they offer, services that they leverage, but at the end of the day, it's going to help them modernize how they deliver telecommunication services to their customers and then provide value-added services on top of that. From a Dell perspective, you know, we're really providing the technologies to provide the underpinnings to lay a foundation on which that network can be built, whether that's best-of-breed servers that are built and designed for the telecom environments. Recently we announced our, our Infra Block program in partnering with virtualization providers to be able to provide engineered systems that dramatically simplify how our customers can deploy, manage and lifecycle-manage throughout day-two operations, an entire cloud environment, and whether they're using Red Hat, whether they're using Wind River or VMware or other virtualization layers, they can deploy the right virtualization layer at the right part of their network to support the applications they're looking to drive, and Dell is looking to solve how they simplify and manage all of that, both from a hardware as well as a management software perspective. So this is really what Dell's doing to, again, partner with the broader technology community to help make that telco cloud a reality. >> Aaron, let's stay here for a second. I'm interested in some of the use cases that you're going after with customers. You've got edge infrastructure, remote work, 5G. Where's security fit? What are the focus areas for Dell, and can we double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's two main areas of telecommunication industry that we're talking to. One, we've really been talking about sort of the network buyer, how do they modernize the core, the network edge, the RAN capabilities, to deliver traditional telecommunication services and modernize that as they move into 5G and beyond. I think the other side of the business is telecoms are really looking, from a line of business perspective, to figure out how do they monetize that network and be able to deliver value-added services to their enterprise customers on top of these new networks. So you were just touching on a couple of things that are really critical. You know, in the enterprise space, AI and IoT is driving a tremendous amount of innovation out there, and there's a need for being able to support and manage edge compute at scale, be able to provide connectivity, like private mobility and 4G and 5G, being able to support things like mobile workforces and client capabilities to be able to access these devices that are around all of these edge environments of the enterprises, and telecoms are seen as that, as an opportunity for them to not only provide connectivity, but how do they extend their cloud out into these enterprise environments with compute, with connectivity, with client and connectivity resources, and even also provide protection for those environments as well. So these are areas that Dell's historically very strong at, being able to provide compute, being able to provide connectivity and being able to provide data protection and client services. We are looking to work closely with lines of businesses to be able to develop solutions that they can bring to market in combination with us to be able to serve their end user customers and their enterprises. So those are really the two key areas, not only network buyer, but being able to enable the lines of business to go and capitalize on the services they're developing for their customers. >> I think that line of business aspect is key. I mean, the telcos have had to sit back and provide the plumbing. Cost per bit goes down. Data consumption going through the roof. All the way over to the top guys, you know, had the field day with the data and the customer relationships, and now it's almost like the revenge of the telcos. (chuckles) Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell, if you, you know, break out the binoculars a little bit? >> Yeah, I think you hit it earlier. We've seen the movie before. This has happened in the IT data center. We went from proprietary vertical solutions to horizontal open systems. We went from client server to software-defined, open-hardware, cloud-native and you know, the trend is likely to be exactly that, in the telecom industry, because that's what the operators want. They're not naive to what's happened in the IT data center. They all run very large data centers, and they're trying to get some of the scale economies, some of the agility, the cost of ownership benefits for the reasons Aaron just discussed. You know, it's clear, as you point out, this industry's been really defined by the inability to stop investing and the difficulty to monetize that investment, and I think now everybody's looking at this 5G, and, frankly, 5G plus, 6G and beyond, as the opportunity to really go get a chunk of that revenue, and enterprise edge is the target. >> And 5G is touching so many industries, and that kind of brings me here into Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got industry 4.0. You've got, you know, our traditional industry and telco colliding. There's public policy. So give us a teaser to Mobile World Congress '23. What's on deck at the show for from Dell? >> Yeah, we're really excited about Mobile World Congress. This, as you know, is a massive event for the industry every year, and it's really the event that the whole industry uses to kick off this coming year. So we're going to be using this, obviously, to talk to our customers and our partners about what Dell's looking to do and what we're innovating on right now, and what we're looking to partner with them around. In the front of the house, we're going to be highlighting 13 different solutions and demonstrations to be able to show our customers what we're doing today and show them the use cases and put it into action, so they get to actually look and feel and touch and experience what it is that we're working around. Obviously, meetings are important. Everybody knows Mobile World Congress is the place to get those meetings and kick off for the year. You know, we're looking at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be looking to have across the industry with our customers and partners and the broader community, and, of course, we've also got technology that's going to be in a variety of different partner spaces as well. So you can come and see us in hall three, but we're also going to have technologies kind of spread all over the floor, and, of course, there's always theCUBE. You're going to be able to see us live all four days, all day, every day. You're going to be hearing our executives, our partners, our customers, talk about, you know, what Dell is doing to innovate in the industry and how we're looking to leverage the broader open ecosystem to be able to transform, you know, the network and what we're looking to do. So in that space, we're going to be focusing on what we're doing from an ecosystem perspective, our infrastructure focus. We'll be talking about what we're doing to support telco cloud transformation and then finally, as we talked about earlier, how are we helping the lines of business within our telecoms monetize the opportunity. So these are all different things we're really excited to be focusing on and look forward to the event next month. >> Yeah, it's going to be awesome In Barcelona at the Fira. As you say, Dell's big presence in Hall three. Orange is in there, Deutsche Telekom. Intel's in Hall three. VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone. You got great things to see there. Check that out and of course, theCUBE, we are super excited to be collaborating with you. We got a great setup. We're in the walkway, right between halls four and five, right across from the Government of Catalonia, who are the host partners for the event. So there's going to be a ton of action there. Guys, can't wait to see you there. Really appreciate your time today. >> Great, thanks. >> All right, Mobile World Congress, theCUBE's coverage starts on February 27th, right after the keynotes. So first thing in the morning, East coast time, we'll be broadcasting, as Aaron said, all week, Monday through Thursday, on the show floor. Check that out at thecube.net. Siliconangle.com has all the written coverage, and go to dell.com, see what's happening there. Have all the action from the event. Don't miss us. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you 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. >> OpenAI The company, and ChatGPT have taken the world by storm. Microsoft reportedly is investing an additional 10 billion dollars into the company. But in our view, while the hype around ChatGPT is justified, we don't believe OpenAI will lock up the market with its first mover advantage. Rather, we believe that success in this market will be directly proportional to the quality and quantity of data that a technology company has at its disposal, and the compute power that it could deploy to run its system. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the excitement around ChatGPT, and debate the premise that the company's early entry into the space may not confer winner take all advantage to OpenAI. And to do so, we welcome CUBE collaborator, alum, Sarbjeet Johal, (chuckles) and John Furrier, co-host of the Cube. Great to see you Sarbjeet, John. Really appreciate you guys coming to the program. >> Great to be on. >> Okay, so what is ChatGPT? Well, actually we asked ChatGPT, what is ChatGPT? So here's what it said. ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI that can generate human-like text. It could be fine tuned for a variety of language tasks, such as conversation, summarization, and language translation. So I asked it, give it to me in 50 words or less. How did it do? Anything to add? >> Yeah, think it did good. It's large language model, like previous models, but it started applying the transformers sort of mechanism to focus on what prompt you have given it to itself. And then also the what answer it gave you in the first, sort of, one sentence or two sentences, and then introspect on itself, like what I have already said to you. And so just work on that. So it it's self sort of focus if you will. It does, the transformers help the large language models to do that. >> So to your point, it's a large language model, and GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer. >> And if you put the definition back up there again, if you put it back up on the screen, let's see it back up. Okay, it actually missed the large, word large. So one of the problems with ChatGPT, it's not always accurate. It's actually a large language model, and it says state of the art language model. And if you look at Google, Google has dominated AI for many times and they're well known as being the best at this. And apparently Google has their own large language model, LLM, in play and have been holding it back to release because of backlash on the accuracy. Like just in that example you showed is a great point. They got almost right, but they missed the key word. >> You know what's funny about that John, is I had previously asked it in my prompt to give me it in less than a hundred words, and it was too long, I said I was too long for Breaking Analysis, and there it went into the fact that it's a large language model. So it largely, it gave me a really different answer the, for both times. So, but it's still pretty amazing for those of you who haven't played with it yet. And one of the best examples that I saw was Ben Charrington from This Week In ML AI podcast. And I stumbled on this thanks to Brian Gracely, who was listening to one of his Cloudcasts. Basically what Ben did is he took, he prompted ChatGPT to interview ChatGPT, and he simply gave the system the prompts, and then he ran the questions and answers into this avatar builder and sped it up 2X so it didn't sound like a machine. And voila, it was amazing. So John is ChatGPT going to take over as a cube host? >> Well, I was thinking, we get the questions in advance sometimes from PR people. We should actually just plug it in ChatGPT, add it to our notes, and saying, "Is this good enough for you? Let's ask the real question." So I think, you know, I think there's a lot of heavy lifting that gets done. I think the ChatGPT is a phenomenal revolution. I think it highlights the use case. Like that example we showed earlier. It gets most of it right. So it's directionally correct and it feels like it's an answer, but it's not a hundred percent accurate. And I think that's where people are seeing value in it. Writing marketing, copy, brainstorming, guest list, gift list for somebody. Write me some lyrics to a song. Give me a thesis about healthcare policy in the United States. It'll do a bang up job, and then you got to go in and you can massage it. So we're going to do three quarters of the work. That's why plagiarism and schools are kind of freaking out. And that's why Microsoft put 10 billion in, because why wouldn't this be a feature of Word, or the OS to help it do stuff on behalf of the user. So linguistically it's a beautiful thing. You can input a string and get a good answer. It's not a search result. >> And we're going to get your take on on Microsoft and, but it kind of levels the playing- but ChatGPT writes better than I do, Sarbjeet, and I know you have some good examples too. You mentioned the Reed Hastings example. >> Yeah, I was listening to Reed Hastings fireside chat with ChatGPT, and the answers were coming as sort of voice, in the voice format. And it was amazing what, he was having very sort of philosophy kind of talk with the ChatGPT, the longer sentences, like he was going on, like, just like we are talking, he was talking for like almost two minutes and then ChatGPT was answering. It was not one sentence question, and then a lot of answers from ChatGPT and yeah, you're right. I, this is our ability. I've been thinking deep about this since yesterday, we talked about, like, we want to do this segment. The data is fed into the data model. It can be the current data as well, but I think that, like, models like ChatGPT, other companies will have those too. They can, they're democratizing the intelligence, but they're not creating intelligence yet, definitely yet I can say that. They will give you all the finite answers. Like, okay, how do you do this for loop in Java, versus, you know, C sharp, and as a programmer you can do that, in, but they can't tell you that, how to write a new algorithm or write a new search algorithm for you. They cannot create a secretive code for you to- >> Not yet. >> Have competitive advantage. >> Not yet, not yet. >> but you- >> Can Google do that today? >> No one really can. The reasoning side of the data is, we talked about at our Supercloud event, with Zhamak Dehghani who's was CEO of, now of Nextdata. This next wave of data intelligence is going to come from entrepreneurs that are probably cross discipline, computer science and some other discipline. But they're going to be new things, for example, data, metadata, and data. It's hard to do reasoning like a human being, so that needs more data to train itself. So I think the first gen of this training module for the large language model they have is a corpus of text. Lot of that's why blog posts are, but the facts are wrong and sometimes out of context, because that contextual reasoning takes time, it takes intelligence. So machines need to become intelligent, and so therefore they need to be trained. So you're going to start to see, I think, a lot of acceleration on training the data sets. And again, it's only as good as the data you can get. And again, proprietary data sets will be a huge winner. Anyone who's got a large corpus of content, proprietary content like theCUBE or SiliconANGLE as a publisher will benefit from this. Large FinTech companies, anyone with large proprietary data will probably be a big winner on this generative AI wave, because it just, it will eat that up, and turn that back into something better. So I think there's going to be a lot of interesting things to look at here. And certainly productivity's going to be off the charts for vanilla and the internet is going to get swarmed with vanilla content. So if you're in the content business, and you're an original content producer of any kind, you're going to be not vanilla, so you're going to be better. So I think there's so much at play Dave (indistinct). >> I think the playing field has been risen, so we- >> Risen and leveled? >> Yeah, and leveled to certain extent. So it's now like that few people as consumers, as consumers of AI, we will have a advantage and others cannot have that advantage. So it will be democratized. That's, I'm sure about that. But if you take the example of calculator, when the calculator came in, and a lot of people are, "Oh, people can't do math anymore because calculator is there." right? So it's a similar sort of moment, just like a calculator for the next level. But, again- >> I see it more like open source, Sarbjeet, because like if you think about what ChatGPT's doing, you do a query and it comes from somewhere the value of a post from ChatGPT is just a reuse of AI. The original content accent will be come from a human. So if I lay out a paragraph from ChatGPT, did some heavy lifting on some facts, I check the facts, save me about maybe- >> Yeah, it's productive. >> An hour writing, and then I write a killer two, three sentences of, like, sharp original thinking or critical analysis. I then took that body of work, open source content, and then laid something on top of it. >> And Sarbjeet's example is a good one, because like if the calculator kids don't do math as well anymore, the slide rule, remember we had slide rules as kids, remember we first started using Waze, you know, we were this minority and you had an advantage over other drivers. Now Waze is like, you know, social traffic, you know, navigation, everybody had, you know- >> All the back roads are crowded. >> They're car crowded. (group laughs) Exactly. All right, let's, let's move on. What about this notion that futurist Ray Amara put forth and really Amara's Law that we're showing here, it's, the law is we, you know, "We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run." Is that the case, do you think, with ChatGPT? What do you think Sarbjeet? >> I think that's true actually. There's a lot of, >> We don't debate this. >> There's a lot of awe, like when people see the results from ChatGPT, they say what, what the heck? Like, it can do this? But then if you use it more and more and more, and I ask the set of similar question, not the same question, and it gives you like same answer. It's like reading from the same bucket of text in, the interior read (indistinct) where the ChatGPT, you will see that in some couple of segments. It's very, it sounds so boring that the ChatGPT is coming out the same two sentences every time. So it is kind of good, but it's not as good as people think it is right now. But we will have, go through this, you know, hype sort of cycle and get realistic with it. And then in the long term, I think it's a great thing in the short term, it's not something which will (indistinct) >> What's your counter point? You're saying it's not. >> I, no I think the question was, it's hyped up in the short term and not it's underestimated long term. That's what I think what he said, quote. >> Yes, yeah. That's what he said. >> Okay, I think that's wrong with this, because this is a unique, ChatGPT is a unique kind of impact and it's very generational. People have been comparing it, I have been comparing to the internet, like the web, web browser Mosaic and Netscape, right, Navigator. I mean, I clearly still remember the days seeing Navigator for the first time, wow. And there weren't not many sites you could go to, everyone typed in, you know, cars.com, you know. >> That (indistinct) wasn't that overestimated, the overhyped at the beginning and underestimated. >> No, it was, it was underestimated long run, people thought. >> But that Amara's law. >> That's what is. >> No, they said overestimated? >> Overestimated near term underestimated- overhyped near term, underestimated long term. I got, right I mean? >> Well, I, yeah okay, so I would then agree, okay then- >> We were off the charts about the internet in the early days, and it actually exceeded our expectations. >> Well there were people who were, like, poo-pooing it early on. So when the browser came out, people were like, "Oh, the web's a toy for kids." I mean, in 1995 the web was a joke, right? So '96, you had online populations growing, so you had structural changes going on around the browser, internet population. And then that replaced other things, direct mail, other business activities that were once analog then went to the web, kind of read only as you, as we always talk about. So I think that's a moment where the hype long term, the smart money, and the smart industry experts all get the long term. And in this case, there's more poo-pooing in the short term. "Ah, it's not a big deal, it's just AI." I've heard many people poo-pooing ChatGPT, and a lot of smart people saying, "No this is next gen, this is different and it's only going to get better." So I think people are estimating a big long game on this one. >> So you're saying it's bifurcated. There's those who say- >> Yes. >> Okay, all right, let's get to the heart of the premise, and possibly the debate for today's episode. Will OpenAI's early entry into the market confer sustainable competitive advantage for the company. And if you look at the history of tech, the technology industry, it's kind of littered with first mover failures. Altair, IBM, Tandy, Commodore, they and Apple even, they were really early in the PC game. They took a backseat to Dell who came in the scene years later with a better business model. Netscape, you were just talking about, was all the rage in Silicon Valley, with the first browser, drove up all the housing prices out here. AltaVista was the first search engine to really, you know, index full text. >> Owned by Dell, I mean DEC. >> Owned by Digital. >> Yeah, Digital Equipment >> Compaq bought it. And of course as an aside, Digital, they wanted to showcase their hardware, right? Their super computer stuff. And then so Friendster and MySpace, they came before Facebook. The iPhone certainly wasn't the first mobile device. So lots of failed examples, but there are some recent successes like AWS and cloud. >> You could say smartphone. So I mean. >> Well I know, and you can, we can parse this so we'll debate it. Now Twitter, you could argue, had first mover advantage. You kind of gave me that one John. Bitcoin and crypto clearly had first mover advantage, and sustaining that. Guys, will OpenAI make it to the list on the right with ChatGPT, what do you think? >> I think categorically as a company, it probably won't, but as a category, I think what they're doing will, so OpenAI as a company, they get funding, there's power dynamics involved. Microsoft put a billion dollars in early on, then they just pony it up. Now they're reporting 10 billion more. So, like, if the browsers, Microsoft had competitive advantage over Netscape, and used monopoly power, and convicted by the Department of Justice for killing Netscape with their monopoly, Netscape should have had won that battle, but Microsoft killed it. In this case, Microsoft's not killing it, they're buying into it. So I think the embrace extend Microsoft power here makes OpenAI vulnerable for that one vendor solution. So the AI as a company might not make the list, but the category of what this is, large language model AI, is probably will be on the right hand side. >> Okay, we're going to come back to the government intervention and maybe do some comparisons, but what are your thoughts on this premise here? That, it will basically set- put forth the premise that it, that ChatGPT, its early entry into the market will not confer competitive advantage to >> For OpenAI. >> To Open- Yeah, do you agree with that? >> I agree with that actually. It, because Google has been at it, and they have been holding back, as John said because of the scrutiny from the Fed, right, so- >> And privacy too. >> And the privacy and the accuracy as well. But I think Sam Altman and the company on those guys, right? They have put this in a hasty way out there, you know, because it makes mistakes, and there are a lot of questions around the, sort of, where the content is coming from. You saw that as your example, it just stole the content, and without your permission, you know? >> Yeah. So as quick this aside- >> And it codes on people's behalf and the, those codes are wrong. So there's a lot of, sort of, false information it's putting out there. So it's a very vulnerable thing to do what Sam Altman- >> So even though it'll get better, others will compete. >> So look, just side note, a term which Reid Hoffman used a little bit. Like he said, it's experimental launch, like, you know, it's- >> It's pretty damn good. >> It is clever because according to Sam- >> It's more than clever. It's good. >> It's awesome, if you haven't used it. I mean you write- you read what it writes and you go, "This thing writes so well, it writes so much better than you." >> The human emotion drives that too. I think that's a big thing. But- >> I Want to add one more- >> Make your last point. >> Last one. Okay. So, but he's still holding back. He's conducting quite a few interviews. If you want to get the gist of it, there's an interview with StrictlyVC interview from yesterday with Sam Altman. Listen to that one it's an eye opening what they want- where they want to take it. But my last one I want to make it on this point is that Satya Nadella yesterday did an interview with Wall Street Journal. I think he was doing- >> You were not impressed. >> I was not impressed because he was pushing it too much. So Sam Altman's holding back so there's less backlash. >> Got 10 billion reasons to push. >> I think he's almost- >> Microsoft just laid off 10000 people. Hey ChatGPT, find me a job. You know like. (group laughs) >> He's overselling it to an extent that I think it will backfire on Microsoft. And he's over promising a lot of stuff right now, I think. I don't know why he's very jittery about all these things. And he did the same thing during Ignite as well. So he said, "Oh, this AI will write code for you and this and that." Like you called him out- >> The hyperbole- >> During your- >> from Satya Nadella, he's got a lot of hyperbole. (group talks over each other) >> All right, Let's, go ahead. >> Well, can I weigh in on the whole- >> Yeah, sure. >> Microsoft thing on whether OpenAI, here's the take on this. I think it's more like the browser moment to me, because I could relate to that experience with ChatG, personally, emotionally, when I saw that, and I remember vividly- >> You mean that aha moment (indistinct). >> Like this is obviously the future. Anything else in the old world is dead, website's going to be everywhere. It was just instant dot connection for me. And a lot of other smart people who saw this. Lot of people by the way, didn't see it. Someone said the web's a toy. At the company I was worked for at the time, Hewlett Packard, they like, they could have been in, they had invented HTML, and so like all this stuff was, like, they just passed, the web was just being passed over. But at that time, the browser got better, more websites came on board. So the structural advantage there was online web usage was growing, online user population. So that was growing exponentially with the rise of the Netscape browser. So OpenAI could stay on the right side of your list as durable, if they leverage the category that they're creating, can get the scale. And if they can get the scale, just like Twitter, that failed so many times that they still hung around. So it was a product that was always successful, right? So I mean, it should have- >> You're right, it was terrible, we kept coming back. >> The fail whale, but it still grew. So OpenAI has that moment. They could do it if Microsoft doesn't meddle too much with too much power as a vendor. They could be the Netscape Navigator, without the anti-competitive behavior of somebody else. So to me, they have the pole position. So they have an opportunity. So if not, if they don't execute, then there's opportunity. There's not a lot of barriers to entry, vis-a-vis say the CapEx of say a cloud company like AWS. You can't replicate that, Many have tried, but I think you can replicate OpenAI. >> And we're going to talk about that. Okay, so real quick, I want to bring in some ETR data. This isn't an ETR heavy segment, only because this so new, you know, they haven't coverage yet, but they do cover AI. So basically what we're seeing here is a slide on the vertical axis's net score, which is a measure of spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis's is presence in the dataset. Think of it as, like, market presence. And in the insert right there, you can see how the dots are plotted, the two columns. And so, but the key point here that we want to make, there's a bunch of companies on the left, is he like, you know, DataRobot and C3 AI and some others, but the big whales, Google, AWS, Microsoft, are really dominant in this market. So that's really the key takeaway that, can we- >> I notice IBM is way low. >> Yeah, IBM's low, and actually bring that back up and you, but then you see Oracle who actually is injecting. So I guess that's the other point is, you're not necessarily going to go buy AI, and you know, build your own AI, you're going to, it's going to be there and, it, Salesforce is going to embed it into its platform, the SaaS companies, and you're going to purchase AI. You're not necessarily going to build it. But some companies obviously are. >> I mean to quote IBM's general manager Rob Thomas, "You can't have AI with IA." information architecture and David Flynn- >> You can't Have AI without IA >> without, you can't have AI without IA. You can't have, if you have an Information Architecture, you then can power AI. Yesterday David Flynn, with Hammersmith, was on our Supercloud. He was pointing out that the relationship of storage, where you store things, also impacts the data and stressablity, and Zhamak from Nextdata, she was pointing out that same thing. So the data problem factors into all this too, Dave. >> So you got the big cloud and internet giants, they're all poised to go after this opportunity. Microsoft is investing up to 10 billion. Google's code red, which was, you know, the headline in the New York Times. Of course Apple is there and several alternatives in the market today. Guys like Chinchilla, Bloom, and there's a company Jasper and several others, and then Lena Khan looms large and the government's around the world, EU, US, China, all taking notice before the market really is coalesced around a single player. You know, John, you mentioned Netscape, they kind of really, the US government was way late to that game. It was kind of game over. And Netscape, I remember Barksdale was like, "Eh, we're going to be selling software in the enterprise anyway." and then, pshew, the company just dissipated. So, but it looks like the US government, especially with Lena Khan, they're changing the definition of antitrust and what the cause is to go after people, and they're really much more aggressive. It's only what, two years ago that (indistinct). >> Yeah, the problem I have with the federal oversight is this, they're always like late to the game, and they're slow to catch up. So in other words, they're working on stuff that should have been solved a year and a half, two years ago around some of the social networks hiding behind some of the rules around open web back in the days, and I think- >> But they're like 15 years late to that. >> Yeah, and now they got this new thing on top of it. So like, I just worry about them getting their fingers. >> But there's only two years, you know, OpenAI. >> No, but the thing (indistinct). >> No, they're still fighting other battles. But the problem with government is that they're going to label Big Tech as like a evil thing like Pharma, it's like smoke- >> You know Lena Khan wants to kill Big Tech, there's no question. >> So I think Big Tech is getting a very seriously bad rap. And I think anything that the government does that shades darkness on tech, is politically motivated in most cases. You can almost look at everything, and my 80 20 rule is in play here. 80% of the government activity around tech is bullshit, it's politically motivated, and the 20% is probably relevant, but off the mark and not organized. >> Well market forces have always been the determining factor of success. The governments, you know, have been pretty much failed. I mean you look at IBM's antitrust, that, what did that do? The market ultimately beat them. You look at Microsoft back in the day, right? Windows 95 was peaking, the government came in. But you know, like you said, they missed the web, right, and >> so they were hanging on- >> There's nobody in government >> to Windows. >> that actually knows- >> And so, you, I think you're right. It's market forces that are going to determine this. But Sarbjeet, what do you make of Microsoft's big bet here, you weren't impressed with with Nadella. How do you think, where are they going to apply it? Is this going to be a Hail Mary for Bing, or is it going to be applied elsewhere? What do you think. >> They are saying that they will, sort of, weave this into their products, office products, productivity and also to write code as well, developer productivity as well. That's a big play for them. But coming back to your antitrust sort of comments, right? I believe the, your comment was like, oh, fed was late 10 years or 15 years earlier, but now they're two years. But things are moving very fast now as compared to they used to move. >> So two years is like 10 Years. >> Yeah, two years is like 10 years. Just want to make that point. (Dave laughs) This thing is going like wildfire. Any new tech which comes in that I think they're going against distribution channels. Lina Khan has commented time and again that the marketplace model is that she wants to have some grip on. Cloud marketplaces are a kind of monopolistic kind of way. >> I don't, I don't see this, I don't see a Chat AI. >> You told me it's not Bing, you had an interesting comment. >> No, no. First of all, this is great from Microsoft. If you're Microsoft- >> Why? >> Because Microsoft doesn't have the AI chops that Google has, right? Google is got so much core competency on how they run their search, how they run their backends, their cloud, even though they don't get a lot of cloud market share in the enterprise, they got a kick ass cloud cause they needed one. >> Totally. >> They've invented SRE. I mean Google's development and engineering chops are off the scales, right? Amazon's got some good chops, but Google's got like 10 times more chops than AWS in my opinion. Cloud's a whole different story. Microsoft gets AI, they get a playbook, they get a product they can render into, the not only Bing, productivity software, helping people write papers, PowerPoint, also don't forget the cloud AI can super help. We had this conversation on our Supercloud event, where AI's going to do a lot of the heavy lifting around understanding observability and managing service meshes, to managing microservices, to turning on and off applications, and or maybe writing code in real time. So there's a plethora of use cases for Microsoft to deploy this. combined with their R and D budgets, they can then turbocharge more research, build on it. So I think this gives them a car in the game, Google may have pole position with AI, but this puts Microsoft right in the game, and they already have a lot of stuff going on. But this just, I mean everything gets lifted up. Security, cloud, productivity suite, everything. >> What's under the hood at Google, and why aren't they talking about it? I mean they got to be freaked out about this. No? Or do they have kind of a magic bullet? >> I think they have the, they have the chops definitely. Magic bullet, I don't know where they are, as compared to the ChatGPT 3 or 4 models. Like they, but if you look at the online sort of activity and the videos put out there from Google folks, Google technology folks, that's account you should look at if you are looking there, they have put all these distinctions what ChatGPT 3 has used, they have been talking about for a while as well. So it's not like it's a secret thing that you cannot replicate. As you said earlier, like in the beginning of this segment, that anybody who has more data and the capacity to process that data, which Google has both, I think they will win this. >> Obviously living in Palo Alto where the Google founders are, and Google's headquarters next town over we have- >> We're so close to them. We have inside information on some of the thinking and that hasn't been reported by any outlet yet. And that is, is that, from what I'm hearing from my sources, is Google has it, they don't want to release it for many reasons. One is it might screw up their search monopoly, one, two, they're worried about the accuracy, 'cause Google will get sued. 'Cause a lot of people are jamming on this ChatGPT as, "Oh it does everything for me." when it's clearly not a hundred percent accurate all the time. >> So Lina Kahn is looming, and so Google's like be careful. >> Yeah so Google's just like, this is the third, could be a third rail. >> But the first thing you said is a concern. >> Well no. >> The disruptive (indistinct) >> What they will do is do a Waymo kind of thing, where they spin out a separate company. >> They're doing that. >> The discussions happening, they're going to spin out the separate company and put it over there, and saying, "This is AI, got search over there, don't touch that search, 'cause that's where all the revenue is." (chuckles) >> So, okay, so that's how they deal with the Clay Christensen dilemma. What's the business model here? I mean it's not advertising, right? Is it to charge you for a query? What, how do you make money at this? >> It's a good question, I mean my thinking is, first of all, it's cool to type stuff in and see a paper get written, or write a blog post, or gimme a marketing slogan for this or that or write some code. I think the API side of the business will be critical. And I think Howie Xu, I know you're going to reference some of his comments yesterday on Supercloud, I think this brings a whole 'nother user interface into technology consumption. I think the business model, not yet clear, but it will probably be some sort of either API and developer environment or just a straight up free consumer product, with some sort of freemium backend thing for business. >> And he was saying too, it's natural language is the way in which you're going to interact with these systems. >> I think it's APIs, it's APIs, APIs, APIs, because these people who are cooking up these models, and it takes a lot of compute power to train these and to, for inference as well. Somebody did the analysis on the how many cents a Google search costs to Google, and how many cents the ChatGPT query costs. It's, you know, 100x or something on that. You can take a look at that. >> A 100x on which side? >> You're saying two orders of magnitude more expensive for ChatGPT >> Much more, yeah. >> Than for Google. >> It's very expensive. >> So Google's got the data, they got the infrastructure and they got, you're saying they got the cost (indistinct) >> No actually it's a simple query as well, but they are trying to put together the answers, and they're going through a lot more data versus index data already, you know. >> Let me clarify, you're saying that Google's version of ChatGPT is more efficient? >> No, I'm, I'm saying Google search results. >> Ah, search results. >> What are used to today, but cheaper. >> But that, does that, is that going to confer advantage to Google's large language (indistinct)? >> It will, because there were deep science (indistinct). >> Google, I don't think Google search is doing a large language model on their search, it's keyword search. You know, what's the weather in Santa Cruz? Or how, what's the weather going to be? Or you know, how do I find this? Now they have done a smart job of doing some things with those queries, auto complete, re direct navigation. But it's, it's not entity. It's not like, "Hey, what's Dave Vellante thinking this week in Breaking Analysis?" ChatGPT might get that, because it'll get your Breaking Analysis, it'll synthesize it. There'll be some, maybe some clips. It'll be like, you know, I mean. >> Well I got to tell you, I asked ChatGPT to, like, I said, I'm going to enter a transcript of a discussion I had with Nir Zuk, the CTO of Palo Alto Networks, And I want you to write a 750 word blog. I never input the transcript. It wrote a 750 word blog. It attributed quotes to him, and it just pulled a bunch of stuff that, and said, okay, here it is. It talked about Supercloud, it defined Supercloud. >> It's made, it makes you- >> Wow, But it was a big lie. It was fraudulent, but still, blew me away. >> Again, vanilla content and non accurate content. So we are going to see a surge of misinformation on steroids, but I call it the vanilla content. Wow, that's just so boring, (indistinct). >> There's so many dangers. >> Make your point, cause we got to, almost out of time. >> Okay, so the consumption, like how do you consume this thing. As humans, we are consuming it and we are, like, getting a nicely, like, surprisingly shocked, you know, wow, that's cool. It's going to increase productivity and all that stuff, right? And on the danger side as well, the bad actors can take hold of it and create fake content and we have the fake sort of intelligence, if you go out there. So that's one thing. The second thing is, we are as humans are consuming this as language. Like we read that, we listen to it, whatever format we consume that is, but the ultimate usage of that will be when the machines can take that output from likes of ChatGPT, and do actions based on that. The robots can work, the robot can paint your house, we were talking about, right? Right now we can't do that. >> Data apps. >> So the data has to be ingested by the machines. It has to be digestible by the machines. And the machines cannot digest unorganized data right now, we will get better on the ingestion side as well. So we are getting better. >> Data, reasoning, insights, and action. >> I like that mall, paint my house. >> So, okay- >> By the way, that means drones that'll come in. Spray painting your house. >> Hey, it wasn't too long ago that robots couldn't climb stairs, as I like to point out. Okay, and of course it's no surprise the venture capitalists are lining up to eat at the trough, as I'd like to say. Let's hear, you'd referenced this earlier, John, let's hear what AI expert Howie Xu said at the Supercloud event, about what it takes to clone ChatGPT. Please, play the clip. >> So one of the VCs actually asked me the other day, right? "Hey, how much money do I need to spend, invest to get a, you know, another shot to the openAI sort of the level." You know, I did a (indistinct) >> Line up. >> A hundred million dollar is the order of magnitude that I came up with, right? You know, not a billion, not 10 million, right? So a hundred- >> Guys a hundred million dollars, that's an astoundingly low figure. What do you make of it? >> I was in an interview with, I was interviewing, I think he said hundred million or so, but in the hundreds of millions, not a billion right? >> You were trying to get him up, you were like "Hundreds of millions." >> Well I think, I- >> He's like, eh, not 10, not a billion. >> Well first of all, Howie Xu's an expert machine learning. He's at Zscaler, he's a machine learning AI guy. But he comes from VMware, he's got his technology pedigrees really off the chart. Great friend of theCUBE and kind of like a CUBE analyst for us. And he's smart. He's right. I think the barriers to entry from a dollar standpoint are lower than say the CapEx required to compete with AWS. Clearly, the CapEx spending to build all the tech for the run a cloud. >> And you don't need a huge sales force. >> And in some case apps too, it's the same thing. But I think it's not that hard. >> But am I right about that? You don't need a huge sales force either. It's, what, you know >> If the product's good, it will sell, this is a new era. The better mouse trap will win. This is the new economics in software, right? So- >> Because you look at the amount of money Lacework, and Snyk, Snowflake, Databrooks. Look at the amount of money they've raised. I mean it's like a billion dollars before they get to IPO or more. 'Cause they need promotion, they need go to market. You don't need (indistinct) >> OpenAI's been working on this for multiple five years plus it's, hasn't, wasn't born yesterday. Took a lot of years to get going. And Sam is depositioning all the success, because he's trying to manage expectations, To your point Sarbjeet, earlier. It's like, yeah, he's trying to "Whoa, whoa, settle down everybody, (Dave laughs) it's not that great." because he doesn't want to fall into that, you know, hero and then get taken down, so. >> It may take a 100 million or 150 or 200 million to train the model. But to, for the inference to, yeah to for the inference machine, It will take a lot more, I believe. >> Give it, so imagine, >> Because- >> Go ahead, sorry. >> Go ahead. But because it consumes a lot more compute cycles and it's certain level of storage and everything, right, which they already have. So I think to compute is different. To frame the model is a different cost. But to run the business is different, because I think 100 million can go into just fighting the Fed. >> Well there's a flywheel too. >> Oh that's (indistinct) >> (indistinct) >> We are running the business, right? >> It's an interesting number, but it's also kind of, like, context to it. So here, a hundred million spend it, you get there, but you got to factor in the fact that the ways companies win these days is critical mass scale, hitting a flywheel. If they can keep that flywheel of the value that they got going on and get better, you can almost imagine a marketplace where, hey, we have proprietary data, we're SiliconANGLE in theCUBE. We have proprietary content, CUBE videos, transcripts. Well wouldn't it be great if someone in a marketplace could sell a module for us, right? We buy that, Amazon's thing and things like that. So if they can get a marketplace going where you can apply to data sets that may be proprietary, you can start to see this become bigger. And so I think the key barriers to entry is going to be success. I'll give you an example, Reddit. Reddit is successful and it's hard to copy, not because of the software. >> They built the moat. >> Because you can, buy Reddit open source software and try To compete. >> They built the moat with their community. >> Their community, their scale, their user expectation. Twitter, we referenced earlier, that thing should have gone under the first two years, but there was such a great emotional product. People would tolerate the fail whale. And then, you know, well that was a whole 'nother thing. >> Then a plane landed in (John laughs) the Hudson and it was over. >> I think verticals, a lot of verticals will build applications using these models like for lawyers, for doctors, for scientists, for content creators, for- >> So you'll have many hundreds of millions of dollars investments that are going to be seeping out. If, all right, we got to wrap, if you had to put odds on it that that OpenAI is going to be the leader, maybe not a winner take all leader, but like you look at like Amazon and cloud, they're not winner take all, these aren't necessarily winner take all markets. It's not necessarily a zero sum game, but let's call it winner take most. What odds would you give that open AI 10 years from now will be in that position. >> If I'm 0 to 10 kind of thing? >> Yeah, it's like horse race, 3 to 1, 2 to 1, even money, 10 to 1, 50 to 1. >> Maybe 2 to 1, >> 2 to 1, that's pretty low odds. That's basically saying they're the favorite, they're the front runner. Would you agree with that? >> I'd say 4 to 1. >> Yeah, I was going to say I'm like a 5 to 1, 7 to 1 type of person, 'cause I'm a skeptic with, you know, there's so much competition, but- >> I think they're definitely the leader. I mean you got to say, I mean. >> Oh there's no question. There's no question about it. >> The question is can they execute? >> They're not Friendster, is what you're saying. >> They're not Friendster and they're more like Twitter and Reddit where they have momentum. If they can execute on the product side, and if they don't stumble on that, they will continue to have the lead. >> If they say stay neutral, as Sam is, has been saying, that, hey, Microsoft is one of our partners, if you look at their company model, how they have structured the company, then they're going to pay back to the investors, like Microsoft is the biggest one, up to certain, like by certain number of years, they're going to pay back from all the money they make, and after that, they're going to give the money back to the public, to the, I don't know who they give it to, like non-profit or something. (indistinct) >> Okay, the odds are dropping. (group talks over each other) That's a good point though >> Actually they might have done that to fend off the criticism of this. But it's really interesting to see the model they have adopted. >> The wildcard in all this, My last word on this is that, if there's a developer shift in how developers and data can come together again, we have conferences around the future of data, Supercloud and meshs versus, you know, how the data world, coding with data, how that evolves will also dictate, 'cause a wild card could be a shift in the landscape around how developers are using either machine learning or AI like techniques to code into their apps, so. >> That's fantastic insight. I can't thank you enough for your time, on the heels of Supercloud 2, really appreciate it. All right, thanks to John and Sarbjeet for the outstanding conversation today. Special thanks to the Palo Alto studio team. My goodness, Anderson, this great backdrop. You guys got it all out here, I'm jealous. And Noah, really appreciate it, Chuck, Andrew Frick and Cameron, Andrew Frick switching, Cameron on the video lake, great job. And Alex Myerson, he's on production, manages the podcast for us, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and our newsletters. Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE, does some great editing, thanks to all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast, wherever you listen. Publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Want to get in touch, email me directly, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me at dvellante, or comment on our LinkedIn post. And by all means, check out etr.ai. They got really great 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 time on Breaking Analysis. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science, 2022. I'm Lisa Martin, excited to be coming to you live from Stanford University at the Ariaga alumni center. I'm pleased to welcome fresh keynote stage Alex Hanna the director of research at the dare Institute. Alex, it's great to have you on the program. >> Yeah, lovely to be here. >> Talk to me a little bit about yourself. I know your background is in sociology. We were talking before we went live about your hobbies and roller derby, which I love. >> Yes. >> But talk to me a little bit about your background and what the DAIR Institute this is, distributed AI research Institute, what it actually is doing. >> Sure, absolutely. So happy to be here talking to the women in data science community. So my background's in sociology, but also in computer science and machine learning. So my dissertation work was actually focusing on developing some machine learning and natural language processing tools for analyzing protest event data and generating that and applying it to pertinent questions within social movement scholarship. After that, I was a faculty at University of Toronto and then research scientist at Google on the ethical AI team where I met Dr. Timnit Gebru who is the founder of DAIR. And so, DAIR is a nonprofit research Institute oriented on around independent community based AI work, focused really on, the kind of, lots of discussions around AI are done by big companies or companies focus on solutions that are very much oriented around collecting as much data as they can. Not really knowing if it's going to be for community benefit. At DAIR, we want to flip that, we want to really want to prioritize what that would mean if communities had input into data driven technologies what it would mean for those communities and how we can help there. >> Double click and just some of your research, where do your passions lie? >> So I'm a sociologist and a lot of that being, I think one of the big insights of sociology is to really highlight at how society can be more just, how we can interrogate inequality and understanding how to make those distances between people who are underserved and over served who already have quite a lot, how we can reduce the disparities. So finding out where that lies, especially in technology that's really what I'm passionate about. So it's not just technology, which I think can be helpful but it's really understanding what it means to reduce those gaps and make the world more just. >> And that's so important. I mean, as more and more data is generated, exponentially growing, so are some of the biases and the challenges that that causes. You just gave your tech vision talk which I had a chance to see most of it. And you were talking about something that's very interesting. That is the biases in facial recognition software. Maybe on a little bit about what you talked about and why that is such a challenge. And also what are some of the steps being made in the right direction where that's concerned? >> Yeah. So there's the work I was talking about in the talk was highlighting, not work I've done, but the work by doctors (indistinct) and (indistinct) focusing on the distance that exists and the biases that exist in facial recognition as a technical system. The fact remains also that facial recognition is used and is disproportionately deployed on marginalized population. So in the U.S, that means black and brown communities. That's where facial recognition is used disproportionately. And we also see this in refugee context where refugees will be leaving the country. And those facial recognition software will be used in those contexts and surveilling them. So these are people already in a really precarious place. And so, some of the movements there have been to debias some of the facial recognition tools. I actually don't think that's far enough. I'm fundamentally against facial recognition. I think that it shouldn't be used as a technology because it is used so pervasively in surveillance and policing. And if we're going to approach that we really need to think, rethink our models of security models of immigration and whatnot. >> Right, it's such an important topic to discuss because I think it needs more awareness about some of the the biases, but also some to your point about some of those vulnerable communities that are really potentially being harmed by technologies like that. We have to be, there's a fine line. Or maybe it's not so fine. >> I don't think it's that fine. So like, I think it's used, in an incredibly harsh way. And for instance there's research that's being done in which, so I'm a transgender woman and there's a research being done by researchers who collected data sets that people had on YouTube documenting their transitions. And already there was a researcher collecting those data and saying, well, we could have terrorists or something take hormones and cross borders. And you talk to any trans person, you're like, well, that's not how it works, first off. Second off, it's already viewing trans people and a trans body as kind of a mode of deception. And so that's, whereas researchers in this space were collecting those data and saying that well, we should collect these data to help make these facial recognitions more fair. But that's not fair if it's going to be used on a population that's already intensely surveilled and held in suspicion. >> Right. That's, the question of fairness is huge, absolutely. Were you always interested in tech, you talked about your background in sociology. Was it something that you always, were you a stem kid from the time you were little? Talk to me about your background and how you got to where you are now? >> Yeah. I've been using computers since I was four. I've been using, I was taking a part, my parents' gateway computer. yeah, when I was 10. Going to computer shows, slapping hard drives into things, seeing how much we could upgrade computer on our own and ruining more than in one computer, to my parents chagrin but I've always been that. I went to undergrad in triple major to computer science, math and sociology, and originally just in computer science and then added the other two where I got interested in things and understanding that, was really interested in this section of tech and society. And I think the more and more I sat within the field and went and did my graduate work in sociology and other social sciences really found that there was a place to interrogate those, that intersection of the two. >> Exactly. What are some of the things that excite you now about where technology is going? What are some of the positives that you see? >> I talk so much about the negatives. It's really hard to, I mean, there's I think, some of the things that I think that are positive are really the community driven initiatives that are saying, well, what can we do to remake this in such a way that is going to more be more positive for our community? And so seeing projects like, that try to do community control over certain kinds of AI models or really try to tie together different kinds of fields. I mean, that's exciting. And I think right now we're seeing a lot of people that are super politically and justice literate and they how to work and they know what's behind all these data driven technologies and they can really try to flip the script and try to understand what would it mean to kind of turn this into something that empowers us instead of being something that is really becoming centralized in a few companies >> Right. We need to be empowered with that for sure. How did you get involved with WIS? >> So Margo, one of the co-directors, we sit on a board together, the human rights data analysis group and I've been a huge fan of HR dag for a really long time because HR dag is probably one of the first projects I've seen that's really focused on using data for accountability for justice. Their methodology has been, called on to hold perpetrators of genocide to accounts to hold state violence, perpetrators to account. And I always thought that was really admirable. And so being on their board is sort of, kind of a dream. Not that they're actually coming to me for advice. So I met Margo and she said, come on down and let's do a thing for WIS and I happily obliged >> Is this your first Wis? >> This is my very first Wis. >> Oh, excellent. >> Yeah. >> What's your interpretation so far? >> I'm having a great time. I'm learning a lot meeting a lot of great people and I think it's great to bring folks from all levels here. Not only, people who are a super senior which they're not going to get the most out of it it's going to be the high school students the undergrads, grad students, folks who, and you're never too old to be mentored, so, fighting your own mentors too. >> You know, it's so great to see the young faces here and the mature faces as well. But one of the things that I was, I caught in the panel this morning was the the talk about mentors versus sponsors. And that's actually, I didn't know the difference until a few years ago in another women in tech event. And I thought it was such great advice for those panelists to be talking to the audience, talking about the importance of mentors, but also the difference between a mentor and sponsor. Who are some of your mentors? >> Yeah, I mean, great question. It's going to sound cheesy, but my boss (indistinct) I mean, she's been a huge mentor for me and with her and another mentor (indistinct) Mitchell, I wouldn't have been a research scientist. I was the first social scientist on the research scientist ladder at Google before I left and if it wasn't for their, they did sponsor but then they all also mentored me greatly. My PhD advisor, (indistinct) huge mentor by, and I mean, lots of primarily and then peer mentors, people that are kind of at the same stage as me academically but also in professionally, but are mentors. So folks like Anna Lauren Hoffman, who's at the UDub, she's a great inspiration in collaborating, co-conspirator, so yeah. >> Co-conspirator, I like that. I'm sure you have quite a few mentees as well. Talk to me a little bit about that and what excites you about being a mentor. >> Yeah. I have a lot of mentees either informally or formally. And I sought that out purposefully. I think one of the speakers this morning on the panel was saying, if you can mentor do it. And that's what I did and sought out that, I mean, it excites me because folks, I don't have all the answers, no one person does. You only get to those places, if you have a large community. And I think being smart is often something that people think comes like, there's kind of like a smart gene or whatever but like there probably is, like I'm not a biologist or a cognitive, anything, but what really takes cultivation is being kind and really advocating for other people and building solidarity. And so that's what mentorship really means to me is building that solidarity and really trying to lift other people up. I mean, I'm only here and where I'm at in my career, because many people were mentors and sponsors to me and that's only right to pay that forward. >> I love that, paying that forward. That's so true. There's nothing like a good community, right? I mean, there's so much opportunity that that ground swell just generates, which is what I love. We are, tomorrow is international women's day. And if we look at the numbers, women are 50% of the workforce, but only less than a quarter in stem positions. What's your advice and recommendation for those young girls who might be intimidated or might be being told even to this day, no, you can't do physics. You can't do computer science. What can you tell them? >> Yeah, I mean, so individual solutions to that are putting a bandaid on a very big wound. And I mean I think, finding other people in a working to change it, I mean, I think building structures of solidarity and care are really the only way we'll get out of that. >> I agree. Well, Alex, it's been great to have you on the program. Thank you for coming and sharing what you're doing at DAIR. The intersection of sociology and technology was fascinating and your roller derby, we'll have to talk well about that. >> For sure. >> Excellent. >> Thanks for joining me. >> Yeah, thank you Lisa. >> For Alex Hanna, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage live, of women in data science worldwide conference, 2022. Stick around, my next guest is coming right up. (upbeat music)

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

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM, welcome back to IBM. Think 2021. And we're going to dig into the intersection of finance and business strategy. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of IBM. Thinking with me is Brian Hoffman is the chief operating officer of IBM global financing. Brian, thanks for coming to the cube today. Good morning. Great to be here. Hey, good morning. So I think we've heard a lot about the impact of hybrid cloud AI, digital transformation, and I wonder as a finance person and a former CFO, what do you see and how do you think about some of the key considerations in financials and strategies that are supporting these major projects? Right. We've got to come to the CFO and say, Hey, we want to spend some money and here's the benefit. Here's the cost? How can CEOs and their teams work with CFOs to try to really accelerate that digital transformation? >>Right, right. Great question. And actually that question, I think I might've answered it a little bit differently. Like two years ago, a year ago before the pandemic, I think it's actually changed a little bit with the pandemic. Um, in, in my experience as a CFO, people would come into me for projects and there was three ways that you could justify it, right? You can justify short-term immediate quick payback kind of hitters. You can justify it with, um, you know, improving our efficiency or effectiveness, um, you know, reducing costs in the long run or making the client experience better or more from a strategic point of view. Um, you know, uh, growing revenue, getting to new clients, uh, improving margins, right? And so the, the hybrid cloud transformation journey really still addresses those three things. And when we come in, a lot of people focus, like you said, on that third strategic point. >>Uh, but, but all three of those come into play. And what's really interesting now is as I'm dealing with it, I'm talking to other CFOs. Uh, the pandemic is really, if you will throw in a wrinkle in here, right? So the, the, the clients that I'm talking to the IBM clients, they have to operate their business very differently. And, and their business models, some of them are changing. Clearly their clients, their business models are changing. They're operating differently as well. Um, so, so our clients have to react to that and hybrid cloud, and that, that, that type of a, of a structure really can support that. So there's really an emphasis here now to act with much more speed on this journey to get moving on it, to get there, because you have to make these changes and doing those two things in concert really has a ton of business value. >>Yeah. I mean, the CFOs that I've talked to and the CIO is it's really kind of industry dependent, right. If you're an airlines or hospitality, it was like, yeah, we got to cut costs. A lot of organizations said, okay, we're going to support remote workers, put in VDI or deal with end point security or whatever it was, but we're actually going double down on our digital transformation. This is where we're going to lean in. There's an opportunity for us to come out stronger. How did you guys approach it in terms of your own internal digital transformation? >>Yeah, we, we, um, we were working on our digital transformation, uh, you know, a little bit before the pandemic and it kind of followed those, those three, uh, those three items when they, when they first started implementing it, they came in and said, Hey, if we can, if we can move to a cloud, uh, platform, our infrastructure savings will be pretty significant. You know, the it infrastructure savings will be 30 to 40%. So, you know, quick payback, CFO types love that. So, you know, we went forward with that. Um, but then quickly we saw the, the real benefits of moving to a, a hybrid cloud strategy. So just as an example, as we were making some of these changes, we found a workflow tool in one of our markets in Europe. That was a great tool. And, uh, if we wanted to implement that across the business, um, in the old days, you know, we're in 40 countries, we've got 2,500 employees, three lines of business. >>It would have been very complex cause our, our operating structure is, is very robust, very complex. Um, it probably would've taken us a year, two years to do that, but since we are now on a cloud platform, we got that rolled out that workflow tool rolled out across our business in months saving, you know, 20 to 30% of, of workload being much more efficient in getting to our clients and reacting quilted with them. And in fact, that tool got adopted across IBM because that cloud platform enabled that to happen. And then the great thing, which I didn't even realize at the time, but now thinking more strategically, um, our, my it resource earlier was running at about 50, 50, 50 people were working on maintenance. He kind of thinks we 50 on development as we've now transitioned to this cloud, my it resources now 70 plus percent dedicated to new development. So now we can go attack new things that really provide customer value in the pandemic. You know, the first thing you look at is can we get into more, um, you know, electronic contracts, e-signatures things that, that would provide value to customers anyway, but in the pandemic is like really, uh, a significant, uh, no differentiator for us. So, so all those things were enabled by that, that, uh, journey that we've been taking. >>I know most of the CFO, in fact, every CFO I know of a public company took advantage of, you know, cheap debt and improving their balance sheets. And, you know, liquidity is not the problem today, especially in the tech industry. Uh, and at the same time, you know, I'm interested in how companies are using financing. They don't want to necessarily build out data centers, but they do want to fund their digital transformation. So what are you seeing in terms of how your customers are using financing? You know, what's the conversation, like, what advice are you giving? >>Yeah. So, um, you know, it, it depends a little bit on the type of customer, like you said, you know, we, we deal with a lot of the biggest strongest customers in the world. And, and as, as we deal with them, financing really helps the return on their investment, right. Aligning the payments of those cash flows for when they're getting the benefits. Uh, and, and we see a real good value in improving the return on those investments and helping, you know, if it's something that's going to go to the board, that really makes a difference to them. Uh, so you know, that that's always been a value proposition. It continues to be, um, the other thing that's helped them now, like you said, is, is even in this environment, people want to accelerate this transition. Um, but it's a, it's a, it's a big time of uncertainty. >>So, you know, some of the smaller clients, some of the more, uh, um, you know, the industries that are a little more cash, constrained airlines, et cetera, you know, they're looking for the, the immediate cashflow benefits. Um, but many of the C F O is, you're saying, Hey, listen, you know, I can, I want to go as fast as I can help me put together a structure that lets me, you know, get this in place as quick as possible. Uh, but not blow my budgets, not make me take too much risk in this time of uncertainty, uh, but keeps me moving. And I think that's where financing really comes in as well. Um, and we're, we're kind of talking much more about that value proposition than just if you will, the improved ROI proposition that we've had all along. >>I want, we can talk a little bit more about IBM global financing. I mean, people may have a lot of times people misunderstand it. You know, when you look at IBM's debt, you gotta, you gotta take out the, the piece that I've hit in global financing, because that's a significant portion and that's sort of self, you know, self fulfilling. Uh, but what do people need to know about, uh, IBM global financing? >>We actually run three different businesses, uh, and we've been transforming our strategy over time. So, you know, right now with, with, uh, IBM being all in on hybrid, we are very focused on helping IBM and IBM's clients on this digital journey on IBM growing their revenue. Um, you know, we, we, in the past had been more of, if you will, the full service, it finance are doing a lot more than just IBM, but we are really focused now on, on helping IBM. So I think the best thing for, for IBM clients to know is as you're talking to IBM about the total solution, that total value prop, that IBM brings that financing, that cashflow solution should be embedded in what they're looking at and can provide a lot of value. Um, you know, the second thing I think most people know is we provide, uh, financing for IBM's channels. >>So, you know, distributors, resellers, et cetera, if you're an IBM distributor or reseller, you know, about us, because just about a hundred percent of IBM's partners use us to provide that working capital financing. Uh, you know, we ha we have state-of-the-art platforms. We're, we're, uh, we're just so integrated with them. Again, I don't have to, I don't have to be a sales pitch on that because they all know us. Um, and the third one, just because people might not realize this is we do have an, we call it an asset recovery business. Um, it's a pretty small business, you know, springing back equipment that comes off lease or that, uh, is used by IBM internally. Um, and while, you know, it's not, it's not, uh, as well known, I'm pretty proud of it because it really does help with the focus that the world that IBM has on sustainability and reuse and, um, and making sure that, that, you know, we're, we're treating the planet fairly here, so that that's a, a small but powerful piece of our business. >>Well, you're quite broader than leasing mainframes in the eighties. That's for sure. So talk a bit more about, let me give you a double click on that sort of hybrid cloud and obviously machine intelligence is a big piece of those digital transformation. So, so how specifically are you, are you helping clients really take advantage of things like hybrid cloud? >>So, yeah, so, um, what we have typically have been doing, and I can, you know, give you a couple different examples if you will, you know, for, for larger clients, what we tend to be doing is helping them, like I said, accelerate their business. So, um, you know, they're looking to modernize their applications, uh, but they still have a big infrastructure in place. And so they'll run into, uh, you know, budget constraints and, and, you know, cash is still be careful advantage. So for them, we are much more typically focused on, on, you know, if you will, project based financing that allows those cash flows, uh, to line up with the savings. Again, those are tend to be bigger projects that often go to boards that return, uh, benefit is very important, uh, a little bit different value proposition for more, uh, mid-market customers. So, you know, uh, as I was kinda just looking recently, we have a couple of different customers like form engineering, um, or, or Novi still there, there are two smaller, uh, compared to some of the other customers we use, uh, they are again, much more focused on, on how do I, how do I conserve and best use my cash immediately. >>Uh, but they want to get this, they want to get this transformation going. So, uh, you know, we provide flexible payment plans to them, so they can go at the rate and pace that they need to, they can align up those cash flows with their budgets, for their business cycles, et cetera. So again, we're, we're smaller customers where timing of the cash flow in their business cycle is very important. We provide that benefit as well. >>You know, I wonder if I could ask you, so you remember, of course, the early days of, of public cloud, one of the first tailwinds for public cloud was the pen was not the pandemic, the, uh, the, the, the, the financial crisis of 2007. And a lot of CFOs said, okay, let's shift to, uh, to an OPEX model. Uh, and now you could always provide financial solutions to customers, but it seems like today, you know, when I talk to clients, it's, it's much more integrated. It's not just the public cloud, you can do that for on premises. And again, you always could do that, but it seems like there's much more simpatico, uh, in the way in which you provide that, that, that solution. >>Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And this might be a little too finance geeky, I don't know, but if you go back, well, if you go back to the financial crisis and all that, and at that time, um, a lot of people were looking to financing for you called it, but, you know, if a CFO is talking about off balance sheet transaction, right. Um, and, and, you know, between regulation, et cetera, et cetera, that, that balance sheet thing, first of all, are seeing through it that much more clearly. But second, you know, the, the, uh, financial disclosure say, you kind of have to show that stuff. So that, that if you will, window dressing benefit has gone away. So now, which is great for me, we really get to talk about what's the real benefit. What is the, you know, what is the real benefit of, you know, you, you want to make sure that you have known timed, uh, expenditures, you know, that if your business grows, that, that your, your expenses can grow evenly with those, with that business growth, you don't have to take big chunky things. And so, you know, uh, financing under the covers of an integrated solution, and IBM has a lot of those integrated solutions allows businesses to have that, you know, known timing, known quantities, most of the benefits that people were looking for from that op ex cloud model, um, without, you know, some of the, the, uh, the problems that you have when you try to have to go straight to a public cloud for very, you know, big sensitive businesses, confidential, confidential, uh, data, et cetera. >>Right. Thanks for that. So, okay. We're, we're basically out of time, but I wonder if you could give us the bumper sticker or key takeaways, maybe you could summarize for our audience. >>Yeah. If for those that know, uh, IBM global financing or dealing with IBM, my view would be, uh, in the past, we, might've been a little more, you know, uh, out there with our own, with our own banner, et cetera, in the future. I think that, that you should expect to see us very well integrated into anything you're doing. I think our value prop is clear and compelling and, and, and will be included in these hybrid cloud transformations to the, to the benefit of our clients. So, uh, that's, that's our objective and, and we're well on our way there, >>Great. Diane work anywhere. I'm going to go for more, more familiar, obviously. ibm.com. You've got some resources there, but there was there any.com >>There's, there's a, I think you just probably a slash financing, but yeah, there's, it's loaded with information. Yeah. >>Excellent. Brian, thanks so much for coming to the cube. Really great to have you today and appreciate the time. Yeah, my pleasure. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube and our coverage of IBM think 20, 21, the virtual edition, right back.

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

>>from >>Around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to IBM Think 2021 we're gonna dig into the intersection of finance and business strategy. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of IBM thinking with me is brian Hoffman is the chief operating officer of IBM Global financing, brian, thanks for coming on the cube today. >>Good morning, Great to be here. >>Hey, good morning. So I think we've heard a lot about the impact of hybrid cloud ai digital transformation and I wonder as a finance person in a former CFO, what do you see? And how do you think about some of the key considerations and financials and strategies that are supporting these major projects? Right? We got to come to the CFO and say, hey, we want to spend some money and here's the benefit, here is the cost. How can see IOS and their teams work with CFOs to try to really accelerate that digital transformation. >>Great question. And actually that question, I think I might have answered it a little bit differently, like two years ago, a year ago before the pandemic, I think it's actually changed a little bit with pandemic in my experience is the CFO people would come into me for projects and there's three ways you can justify it, but you can justify short term immediate, quick payback kind of hitters, you can justify it with, you know, improving our efficiency or effectiveness, um you know, reducing costs in the long run, making the client experience better or more from a strategic point of view, um you know, growing revenue getting to new clients, improving margins right? And so the the hybrid cloud transformation journey really still addresses those three things and when we come in, a lot of people focus like I said, on that third strategic point, but but all three of those come into play, and what's really interesting now is is as I'm dealing with it, I'm talking to other Cfos. The pandemic is really, if you will throw in a wrinkle in here, right? So the clients that I'm talking to, the IBM clients, they have to operate their business very differently and and their business models, some of them are changing clearly. Their clients, their business models are changing their operating differently as well. Um So, so our clients have to react to that and Hybrid Cloud and that that that type of of a structure really can support that. So there's really an emphasis here now to act with much more speed on this journey to get moving on it to get there because you have to make these changes and doing those two things in concert really has a ton of business value. >>Yeah I mean the cfos that I've talked to in the C. I. O. S. It's really kind of industry dependent, right? If you're in airlines or hospitality was like uh we got to cut costs. A lot of organizations said okay we're gonna support remote workers put in V. D. I. Or deal with endpoint security or whatever it was. But we're actually gonna double down on our digital transformation. This is we're gonna lean into an opportunity for us to come out stronger. How did you guys approach it in terms of your own internal digital >>transformation? Yeah. We we we were working on our digital transformation uh a little bit before the pandemic and it kind of followed those those three uh those three items when they when they first started implementing it, they came in and said hey if we can if we can move to a cloud platform, our infrastructure savings will be pretty significant. You know the I. T. Infrastructure savings will be 30 to 40%. So you know, quick payback CFO types love that. So you know, we went forward with that. Um but then quickly we saw the real benefits of moving to a hybrid cloud strategy. So just as an example as we were making some of these changes, we found a workflow tool in one of our markets in europe, that was a great tool and uh if we wanted to implement that across the business um in the old days, You know, we're in 40 countries, we've got 2500 employees, three lines of business. It would have been very complex because our operating structure is is very robust, very complex. Um Probably have taken a year, two years to do that. But since we are now on a cloud platform we got that rolled out that workflow tool rolled out across our business in months, Saving 20-30 of of workload. Being much more um efficiently getting to our clients and reacting quickly to them. And in fact that tool got adopted across IBM because that cloud platform enabled that to happen. And then the great thing which I didn't even realize at the time but now thinking more strategically um are my I. T. Resource earlier was running at about 50 50 50 people working on maintenance. The kind of things with 50 on development as we've now transition to this cloud. My I. T. Resources now 70 plus percent dedicated to new development. So now we can go attack new things that really provide customer value in the pandemic. You know the first thing to look at is can we get into more um you know electronic contracts, E signatures, things that would provide value to customers anyway. But in the pandemic is like really a significant, you know differentiator for us. So all those things were enabled by that journey that we've been taking, >>interesting. I mean most of the CF I uh in fact every CFO I know of a public company took advantage of cheap debt and improving their balance sheets. And liquidity is not the problem today, especially in the tech industry at the same time. You know I'm interested in how companies are using financing. They don't want to necessarily build out data centers but they do want to fund their digital transformation. So what are you seeing in terms of how your customers are using financing? You know, what's the conversation like? What advice are you giving? >>Yeah. So um you know, it depends a little bit on the type of customer, like you said, you know, we we deal with a lot of the biggest, strongest customers in the world. And, and as we deal with them, financing really helps the return on their investment, right, aligning the payments of those cash flows for when they're getting the benefits. Uh And and we see a real good value in improving the return on those investments in helping, you know, if it's something that's going to go to the board that really makes a difference to them. Uh So, you know, that that's always been a value proposition. It continues to be. Um The other thing that's helping now, like you said, is even in this environment, people want to accelerate this transition. Um but it's a, it's a, it's a big time of uncertainty. So, you know, some of the smaller clients, some of the more uh you know, the industries that are a little more cash constrained airlines, et cetera, you know, they're looking for the the immediate cash flow benefits. Um But many of the cfos are saying, hey, listen, you know, I can I want to go as fast as I can help me put together a structure that lets me, you know, get this in place as quick as possible, but not below my budget is not make me take too much risk in this time of uncertainty, but keeps me moving and I think that's where financing really comes in as well. Um And we're kind of talking much more about that value proposition than just if you will be improved ri proposition that we've had all along. >>I want to talk a little bit more about IBM global financing. I mean, people, a lot of times people misunderstand it. You know when you look at I. B. M. S. Debt, you gotta you gotta take out the piece that IBM global financing because that's a significant portion and that's sort of self self fulfilling. But what do people need to know about IBM global financing, >>We actually run three different businesses and we've been transforming our strategy over time. So you know right now with with IBM being all in on hybrid, we are very focused on helping IBM and IBM clients on this digital journey on IBM growing their revenue. Um you know, we we in the past have been more of if you're really full service. It finance are doing a lot more than just IBM but we are really focused now on on helping IBM. So I think the best thing for for IBM clients to know is as you're talking to IBM about the total solution, the total value profit IBM brings that financing, that cash flow solution should be embedded in what they're looking at and can provide a lot of value. Um You know, the second thing I think most people know is we provide financing for IBM s channel, so you know, distributors, resellers etcetera, if you're an IBM distributor or reseller, you know about us, because just about 100% of IBM partners use us to provide that working capital financing, uh you know, we have a state of the art platforms were just so integrated with them. Again, I don't have to I don't have to do a sales pitch on that because they don't know us. Um and the third one just because people might not realize this is, we do haven't we call it an asset recovery business, um it's a pretty small business, you know, it's bringing back equipment that comes off lease, so that uh is used by IBM internally. Um and while, you know, it's not, it's not as well known, I'm pretty proud of it because it really does help with the focus that the world that IBM has on sustainability and reuse and um and making sure that, you know, we're treating the planet fairly here, so that that's a small but powerful piece of our business well, >>You're quite broader than leasing mainframes in the 80s, >>that's for sure. >>Talking more about give, you can double click on that sort of hybrid cloud and obviously machine intelligence is a big piece of those digital transformation. So, so how specifically are you, are you helping clients really take advantage of things like hybrid cloud? >>So yeah, so um what we have typically had been doing and I can give you a couple different examples if you will, you know, for larger clients. What we tend to be doing is helping them like I said, accelerate their business. So um, you know, they're looking to modernize their applications but they still have a big infrastructure in place and so they'll run into uh you know, budget constraints and and you know, cash is still be careful to managed. So for them we are much more typically focused on, you know, if you will project based financing that allows those cash flows to line up with the savings. Again, those are tend to be bigger projects that often go to boards that return benefit is very important. Ah a little bit different value proposition for more mid market customers. So, you know, as I was kind of just looking recently, we have a couple of different customers like form engineering um or or Novi still there to smaller uh compared to some of the other customers we use uh they are again much more focused on how do I, how do I conserve and best use my cash immediately? But they want to get this, they want to get this transformation going. So you know we provide flexible payment plans to them so they can go at the rate and pace that they need to, they can align up those cash deals with their budgets for their business cycles etcetera. So again, where smaller customers where timing of the cash flow in their business cycle is very important. We provide that benefit as well. >>You know, I wonder if I could ask you. So you remember of course the early days of public cloud, one of the first tail winds for public cloud was the pen was not the pandemic, the for the financial crisis of 2007. And a lot of CFO said, Okay let's shift to uh to an apex model. And now you can always provide financial solutions to customers. But it seems like today when I talk to clients, it's it's much more integrated, it's not just the public cloud, you can do that for on premises and again you always could do that. But it seems like there's much more simpatico uh in the way in which you provide that that that solution is that >>fair? Absolutely. And this might be a little to finance geeky, I don't know. But if you go back, well if you go back to the financial crisis and all that and at that time um a lot of people were looking to financing for you call that ah please. But you know if if I was talking about off balance sheet transactions right? Um and and you know between regulation etcetera etcetera, that that off balance sheet thing. First of all, people are seeing through it that much more clearly. But second, you know the the uh financial disclosure say you kind of have to show that stuff so that that if you will, window dressing benefit has gone away. So now which is great for me, we really get to talk about what's the real benefit, what is the, you know, what is the real benefit of? You know, you want to make sure that you have known timed expenditures. You know that if your business grows that your your expenses can grow evenly with those with that business growth, you don't have to take big chunky things and so you know uh financing under the covers of an integrated solution and IBM has a lot of those integrated solutions allows businesses to have that, you know, known timing known quantities. Most of the benefits that people were looking for from that affects cloud model. Um without, you know, some of the problems that you have, when you try to have to go straight to a public cloud for very, you know, big sensitive businesses, confidential confidential data etcetera. >>Thanks for that. So, okay, we're basically out of time. But I wonder if you could give us the bumper sticker and key takeaways, maybe you could summarize for our audience. >>Yeah. For those that noah global financing or dealing with IBM, my view would be in the past we might have been a little more, you know, out there with our own with our own banner etcetera. In the future. I think that you should expect to see us very well integrated into anything you're doing. I think our value proper is clear and compelling and and and will be included uh in these hybrid con transformations to the benefit of our clients. So that's that's our objective and we're well on our way there. >>Great. Anywhere, anywhere I'm gonna go for more, more familiar, obviously IBM dot com. You got some resources there. But there is >>there any Absolutely dot com? There's there's a thank you. Just probably a slash financing. But yeah, there's >>were >>loaded with information of people. >>Excellent brian thanks so much for coming to the cube. Really great to have you today. >>I appreciate the time. >>My pleasure. Thank you for watching everybody's day. Volonte for the Cuban. Our coverage of IBM think 2021, the virtual edition right back.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Del Tech World 2020. With me is Jeff Boudreau, the president general manager of Infrastructure Solutions group Deltek. Jeff, always good to see you, my friend. How you doing? >>Good. Good to see you. >>I wish we were hanging out a Sox game or a pat's game, but, uh, I guess this will dio But, you know, it was about a year ago when you took over leadership of I s G. I actually had way had that sort of brief conversation. You were in the room with Jeff Clark. I thought it was a great, great choice. How you doing? How you feeling Any sort of key moments the past 12 months that you you feel like sharing? >>Sure. So I first I want to say, I do remember that about a year ago. So thank you for reminding me. Yeah, it's, uh it's been a very interesting year, right? It's been it's been one year. It was in September was one year since I took over I s G. But I'm feeling great. So thank you for asking. I hope you're doing the same. And I'm really optimistic about where we are and where we're heading. Aziz, you know, it's been an extremely challenging year in a very unpredictable year, as we've all experienced. And I'd say for the, you know, the first part of the year, especially starting in March on I've been really focused on the health and safety of our, you know, the families, our customers and our team members of the team on a lot of it's been shifting, you know, in regards to helping our customers around, you know, work from home or education and learn from home. And, you know, during all this time, though, I'll tell you, as a team, we've accomplished a lot. There's a handful of things that I'm very proud of, you know, first and foremost, that states around the customer experience we have delivered on our best quality in our product. NPS scores in our entire history. So something I'm extremely proud of during this time around our innovation and innovation engine, we part of the entire portfolio which you're well aware of. We had nine launches in nine weeks back in that May in June. Timeframe. So something I'm really proud of the team on, uh, on. Then last, I'd say it's around the team and right, we shifted about 90% of our workforce from the office tow home, you know, from an engineering team. That could be, you know, 85% of my team is engineers and writing code. And so, you know, people were concerned about that. But we didn't skip a beat, so, you know, pretty impressed by the team and what they've done there. So, you know, the strategy remains unchanged. Uh, you know, we're focused on our customers integrating across the entire portfolio and the businesses like VM ware and really focused on getting share. So despite all the uncertainty in the market, I'm pretty pleased with the team and everything that's been going on. So uh, yeah, it's it's been it's been an interesting year, but it's really great. I'm really optimistic about what we have in front of us. >>Yeah, I mean, there's not much you could do a control about the macro condition on it, you know it. Z dealt to us and we have to deal with it. I mean, in your space. It's the sort of countervailing things here one is. Look, you're not selling laptops and endpoint security. That's not your business right in the data center. Eso. But the flip side of that is you mentioned your portfolio refresh. You know, things like Power Store. You got product cycles now kicking in. So that could be, you know, a buffer. What are you seeing with Power Store and what's the uptake look like? They're >>sure. Well, specifically, let me take a step back and the regards the portfolio. So first, you know, the portfolio itself is a direct reflection in the feedback from all our partners and our customers over the last couple of years on Day two, ramp up that innovation. I spent a lot of time in the last few years simplifying under the power brands, which you're well aware of, right? So we had a lot of for a legacy EMC and Legacy dollars. Really? How do we simplify under a set of brands really over delivering innovation on a fewer set of products that really accelerating in exceeding customer needs? And we did that across the board. So from power edge servers, you know, power Max, the high end storage, the Powerball, all that we didn't hear one. And just most recently. And, you know, it's part of the big launches. We had power scale. We have power flex for software to find. And, of course, the new flagship offer for the mid range, which is power store. Um, Specifically, the policy of the momentum has been building since our launch back in May. And the feedback from our partners and our customers has been fantastic. And we've had a lot of big wins against, you know, a lot of a lot of our core competitors. A couple examples one is Arrow Electronics SAA, Fortune 500 Global Elektronik supplier. They leverage power Store to provide, you know, basically both, you know, enterprise computing and storage needs for their for their broader bases around the world on there, really taking advantage of the 41 data reduction, really helping them simplify their capacity planning and really improve operational efficiencies specifically without impacting performance. So it's it's one. We're given the data reductions, but there's no impact on performance, which is a huge value proffer for arrow another big customers tickets and write a global law firm on their reporting to us that over 90 they've had a 90% reduction in their rack space, and they've had over five times two performance over a core competitors storage systems azi. They've deployed power store around the world, really, and it's really been helping them. Thio easily migrate workloads across, so the feedback from the customers and partners has been extremely positive. Um, there really citing benefits around the architecture, the flexibility architecture around the micro services, the containers they're loving, the D M or integration. They're loving the height of the predictable data reduction capabilities in line with in line performance or no performance penalties with data efficiencies, the workload support, I'd say the other big things around the anytime upgrades is another big thing that customers we're really talking about so very excited and optimistic in regards as we continue to re empower store the second half of the year into next year really is the full full year for power store. >>So can I ask you about that? That in line data reduction with no performance hit is that new ipe? I mean, you're not doing some kind of batch data reduction, right? >>No, it's It's new, I p. It's all patented. We've actually done a lot of work in regards to our technologies. There's some of the things we talk about GPS and deep use and smart Knicks and things like that. We've used some offload engines to help with that. So between the software and the hardware, we've had leverage new I. P. So we can actually provide that predictable data reduction. But right with the performance customers need, So we're not gonna have a trade off in regards. You get more efficiencies and less performance or more performance and less efficiency. >>That's interesting. Yeah, when I talked to the chip guys, they talk about this sort of the storage offloads and other offloads we're seeing. These alternative processors really start to hit the market videos. The obvious one. But you're seeing others. Aziz. Well, you're really it sounds like you're taking advantage of that. >>Yeah, it's a huge benefit. I mean, we should, you know, with our partners, if it's Intel's and in videos and folks like that broad comes, it's really leveraging the great innovation that they do, plus our innovation. So if you know the sum of the parts, can you know equal Mauritz a benefit to our customers in the other day? That's what it's all about. >>So it sounds like Cove. It hasn't changed your strategy. I was talking toe Dennis Hoffman and he was saying, Look, you know, fundamentally, we're executing on the same strategy. You know, tactically, there's things that we do differently. But what's your summarize your strategy coming in tow 2021. You know, we're still early in this decade. What are you seeing is the trends that you're trying to take advantage of? What do you excited about? Maybe some things that keep you up at night? >>Yeah, so I'd say, you know, I'll stay with what Dennis said. You know, it's our strategy is not changing its a company. You probably got that from Michael and from job, obviously, Dennis just recently. But for me, it's a two pronged approach. One's all about winning the consolidation in the core infrastructure markets that we could just paid in today. So I think Service Storage Network, we're already clear leader across all those segments that we serve in our you know, we'll continue to innovate within our existing product categories. And you saw that with the nine launches in the nine weeks in my point on that one is we're gonna always make sure that we have best debris offers. If it's a three tier, two tier or converge or hyper converged offer, we wanna make sure that we serve that and have the best innovation possible. In addition to that, though, the secondary piece of the strategy really is around. How do we differentiate value across or innovating across I S G? You know, Dell Technologies and even the broader ecosystems and some of the examples I'll give you right now that we're doing is if you think about innovating across icy, that's all about providing improved customer experience, a set of solutions and offers that really helped simplify customer operations, right? And really give them better T CEOs or better. S L. A. An example of something like that's cloud like it's a SAS based off of that we have. That really helps provide great insights and telemetry to our customers. That helps them simplify their I T operations, and it's a major step forward towards, you know, autonomous infrastructure which is really what they're asking for. Customers of a very happy with the work we've done around Day one, you know, faster, time to value. But now it's like Day two and beyond. How do you really helped me Kinda accelerate the operations and really take that away from a three other big pieces innovating across all technologies. And you know, we do this with VM Ware now live today, and that's just writing. So things like VX rail is an example where we work together and where the clear leader in H C I. Things like Delta Cloud Uh, when we built in V M V C F A, B, M or cloud foundation in Tan Xue delivering an industry leading hybrid cloud platform just recently a VM world. I'm sure you heard about it, but Project Monterey was just announced, and that's an effort we're doing with VM Ware and some other partners. They're really about the next generation of infrastructure. Um, you know, I guess taking it up a notch out of the infrastructure and I've g phase, you know, some of the areas that we're gonna be looking at the end to end solutions to help our customers around six key areas. I'm sure John Rose talking about the past, but things like cloud Edge five g A i m l data management security. So those will be the big things. You'll see us lean into a Z strategies consistent. Some big themes that you'll see us lean into going into next year. >>Yeah, I mean, it is consistent, right? You guys have always tried to ride the waves, vector your portfolio into those waves and add value. I'm particularly impressed with your focus on customer experience, and I think that's a huge deal. You know, in the past, a lot of companies yours included your predecessor. You see, Hey, throwing so many products at me, I can't I don't understand the portfolio. So I mean, focusing on that I think is huge right now because people want that experience, you know, to be mawr cloudlike. And that's that's what you got to deliver. What about any news from from Dell Tech world? Any any announcements that you you wanna highlight that we could talk about? >>Sure. And actually, just touching back on the point you had no about the simplification that is a major 10 of my in regards the organization. So there's three key components that I drive once around customer focus, and that's keeping customers first and foremost. And everything we do to is around axillary that innovation. Engine three is really bringing everything together as one team. So we provide a better outcome to our customers. You know, in that simplification after that you talk about is court toe what we're driving. So I want to do less things, I guess better in the notion of how we do that. What that means to me is, as I make decisions that want to move away from other technologies and really leverage our best of breed type shared type, that's technology. I p people I p I can, you know, e can exceed customer needs in those markets that were serving. So it's actually allows me to x Sorry, my innovation engine, because I shift more and more resource is onto the newer stock now for Del Tech world. Yes, We got some cool stuff coming. You probably heard about a few of them. Uh, we're gonna be announcing a project project Apex. Hopefully you've been briefed on that already. This isn't new news or I'll be in trouble. But that's really around. Our strategy about delivering, simple, consistent as a service experiences for our customers bringing together are dealt technology as a service offering and our cloud strategy together. Onda also our technology offerings in our go to market all under a single unified effort, which Ellison do would be leading. Um, you know, on behalf of our executive leadership team s, that's one big area. And there is also another big one that I'll talk about a sui expand our as a service offers. And we think there's a big power to that in regards to our Dell Technologies. Cloud console solving will be launching a new cloud console that will provide uniformed experience across all the resources and give users and ability toe instantly managed every aspect of their cloud journey with just a few clicks. So going back to your broader point, it's all about simplicity. >>Yeah, we definitely all over Apex. That's something I wanted to ask you about this notion of as a service, really requiring it could have a new mindset, certainly from a pricing and how you talk about the customer experience that it's a whole new customer experience. Your you're basically giving them access. Thio What I would consider more of a platform on giving them some greater flexibility. Yeah, there's some constraints in there, but of course, you know the physical only put so much capacity and before him. But the idea of being ableto dial up, dial down within certain commitments is, I think, a powerful one. How does it change the way in which you you think about how you go about developing products just in terms of you know, this AP economy Infrastructure is code. How how you converse about those products internally and externally. How would you see that shaking >>out Dave? That's an awesome question. And it's actually for its front center. For everything we do, obviously, customers one choice and flexibility what they do. And to your point as we evolved warm or as a service, no specific product and product brands and logos on probably the way of the future. It's the services. It's the experience that you provide in regards to how we do that. So if you think about me, you know, in in infrastructure making infrastructure as a service, you really want to define what that customer experiences. That s L. A. That they're trying toe realize. And then how do we make sure that we build the right solutions? Products feature functions to enable that a law that goes back to the core engineering stuff that we need to dio right now, a lot of that stuff is about making sure that we have the right things around. If it's around developer community. If it's around AP rich, it's around. SdK is it's all about how do we leverage if it's internal source or external open source, if you will. It's regards to How do we do that? No. A thing that I think we all you know what you're well aware but we ought to keep in mind is that the cloud native applications are really relevant. Toe both the on premises, wealthy off premise. So think about things around portability reusability. You know, those are some great examples of just kind of how we think about this as we go forward. But those modern applications were required modern infrastructure, and regardless of how that infrastructure is abstracted now, just think about things like this. Aggregation or compose ability or Internet based computing. It's just it's a huge trend that we have to make sure we're thinking of. So is we. We just aggregate between the physical layers to the software layers and how we provide that to a service that could be think of a modern container based asset that could be repurposed. Either could be on a purpose built thing. It could be deployed in a converge or hyper converged. Or it could be two points a software feature in a cloud. Now, that's really how we're thinking about that, regards that we go forward. So we're talking about building modern assets or components That could be you right once we used many type model, and we can deploy that wherever you want because of some of the abstraction of desegregation that we're gonna do. >>E could see customers in the in the near term saying, I don't care so much about the product. I want the fast one all right with the cheaper one e. >>It's kind of what you talking about, that I talked about the ways. If you think about that regards, you know, maybe it's on a specific brand or portfolio. You look into and you say, Hey, what's the service level that I'd wanted to your point like Hey, for compute or for storage, it's really gonna end up being the specific S l A. And that's around performance or Leighton see, or cost or resiliency they want. They want that experience in that that you know, And that's why they're gonna be looking for the end of the end state. That's what we have to deliver is an engineering. >>So there's an opportunity here for you guys that I wonder if you could comment on. And that's the storage admin E. M. C essentially created. You know, you get this army of people that you know pretty good of provisioning lungs, although that's not really that's a great career path for folks. But program ability is, and this notion of infrastructure is code as you as you make your systems more programmable. Is there a skill set opportunity to take that army of constituents that you guys helped train and grow and over their careers and bring them along into sort of the next decade? This new era? >>I think the the easy answer is yes, I obviously that's a hard thing to do and you go forward. But I think embracing the change in the evolution of change, I think is a great opportunity. And I think there is e mean if you look step back and you think about data management, right? And you think about all the you know all data is not created equal and you know, and it has a life cycle, if you will. And so if it's on edge to Korda, Cloward, depending think about data vaults and data mobility and all that stuff. There's gonna be a bunch of different personas and people touching data along the way. I think the I T advance and the storage admin. They're just one of those personas that we have to help serve and way talk about How do we make them heroes, if you will, in regards to their broader environment. So if they're providing, if they evolve and really helped provide a modern infrastructure that really enables, you know infrastructure is a code or infrastructure as a service, they become a nightie hero, if you will for the rest of team. So I think there's a huge opportunity for them to evolve as the technology evolves. >>Yeah, you talked about you know, your families, your employees, your team s o. You obviously focused on them. You got your products going hitting all the marks. How are you spending your time these days? >>Thes days right now? Well, we're in. We're in our cycle for fiscal 22 planning. Right? And right now, a lot of that's above the specific markets were serving. It's gonna be about the strategy and making sure that we have people focused on those things. So it really comes back to some of the strategy tents were driving for next year. Now, as I said, our focus big time. Well, I guess for the for this year is one is consolidation of the core markets. Major focus for May 2 is going to be around winning in storage, and I want to be very specific. It's winning midrange storage. And that was one of the big reasons why Power Store came. That's gonna be a big focus on Bennett's really making sure that we're delivering on the as a service stuff that we just talked about in regards to all the technology innovation that's required to really provide the customer experience. And then, lastly, it's making sure that we take advantage of some of these growth factors. So you're going to see a dentist. Probably talked a lot about Telco, but telco on edge and as a service and cloud those things, they're just gonna be key to everything I do. So if you think about from poor infrastructure to some of these emerging opportunities Z, I'm spending all my time. >>Well, it's a It's a big business and a really important one for Fidel. Jeff Boudreau. Thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. Really a pleasure seeing you. I hope we can see each other face to face soon. >>You too. Thank you for having me. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for watching everybody keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Our continuing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break