>>Okay. We're back here at the cube. We're in the middle of all the action at mobile world. Cause we're in cloud city, uh, physically in onset here, we got the virtual space. People are watching remotely. We do a remote interviews, but now we're in person with. Who's the transformational leader, head of innovation in his previous Zane telecom, 50 million customers, big projects. You've seen it all, you know, you know all about the operators and you know about innovation. Those are two great topics that we're going to talk about. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So we were talking about on the open, uh, with Chloe this morning about the difference between building and operating and operators. Technically it's in the definition of running large networks, but now the change is here. You've got cloud scale, you've got edge developing with 5g, open, ran for standardization and off the shelf equipment that will give more infrastructure surface area, which will bring more innovation. A lot of change, a lot of build-out. This is a mindset change you want to it's like war time, peace time. It's not a mature market. It's a growing turbulent opportunity and the trillions of dollars at stake. And, um, >>I, I believe that we as humans on anything that we do so much of our learning comes from doing, and whatever you do is what you learn. So what have we, as an operator's been doing, we have been buying things. So our learning has been on procurement, how to do a business casing, how to get approvals, but not necessarily how to really introduce something new to our customers. And what has, what has said to us as an industry is that all the innovation and there's been a lot of innovation on communication space has been done either by the handset people or has been done by the internet people, but not so much as some operators. So I think that's really something that you have to have to change, but you have to change what you learn. You have to change how you actually do it. >>It's interesting. You know, I'm very pro telecom, but people think I'm, I'm not because I tend to criticize and pontificate around the change. But if you look at the telecon, it's been a bunch of dumb pipes and that's been a good thing and it's been reliable. We've had great connectivity growth. The internet was stable during the pandemic. It literally saved people's lives and change things that we survived and it worked great. But now when you have applications and infrastructure as code, new opportunities are going to be forcing that change quicker. So it's not so much, it needs to radically change. It just needs to get more versatile, more >>Get on the >>Program. So if you look what has happened on other industries, WhatsApp, how the internet payers do it, how does apple do it? How does Google do it? How does Facebook do it? They are using these new technologies. They are using cloud first approaches. They are building huge scale and they able to innovate. So the way I'm looking at it, that you guys are an operator you need to get on the program. And it's not, it's not the question. Should I do it? Should I not do it? Question is how do you do it? It's not the question when you should do it, you should do it. Now, the question is, how do you do it? How do you get started? I think, no, I think >>You're exactly right. It's in the here and now we're going to have a exclusive Google news conference later in the day, but you've mentioned the cloud players. If you look at the success of say Android, Android is a great use case that I think might be something that you can look at to the telecom industry and say, Hmm, how open source software changed the handset business? I think there's kind of a movement here in the telco space. And this ecosystem where you hear open, you got the Linux foundation participated with the software group for Iran. You got other things happening with open gardens, not walled gardens. Interesting. What's your take on how the, the innovation from the software side might come in here because you want to preserve the legacy operational stability, but bringing in new >>For you to be able to do a new, you need to have those software skills, because that's how the new things happen. You have to build them, you have to program them. But then the, then the issue is that your organization, most likely something good for this. So you don't have the designers. You don't have the software engineers, you don't have, uh, how to do customer experience, how to do, how to do the planning. You don't have it. So then the, then the challenge is how are you going to do that? And I'm a big saver off of operators starting to build some of the internal teams, have them separate teams and have them start to trial on these things. Give don't be so hard on yourself, allow yourself to try and try. Some things, allow yourself to fail. Don't make them huge programs because then the failure becomes a huge issue also. And then once you learn, once you know how to do it, then scale it up. But yes, these new skills software, you have to do it. And open is very well. >>You know, we were talking yesterday about this new world where feature creep used to be a bad thing. But now with cloud scale, you can develop rapid features quickly and get data and then abandon those things quickly. The time to do that is now part of the development process. So as software changes, you're starting to see the human resources configurations, where teams are formed differently. What's your take on this? Because end to end workloads can have multiple layers on an SRE, an operator, a developer, and a UX person, all on one team. I >>Agree. And I think that, and this is not something we have to invent as a telecom industry. Let's just go look at what the software guys are doing, right? So for decades, over the better part of a decade, there have been having HR teams. They're having the actual, working more working on sprains. All the tools already exist. All it's, it's all available for us. So all we have to do is just look at how they are doing that and start to use some of those practices and on our business. And by the way, we have been trying, this is not very good at it because we tend to kind of take it to the previous way of doing patients. And then we get ourselves into trouble. You know, >>It's the classic old playbook. We're good at procuring things. We know how to get that email, checking the list, done cost efficiency, drive more revenue chip away at it, moved the ball down the field slowly. Now the new playbook is agility, software economics, software playbook. So I have to ask you on, on that piece of it, how do you think the operators are psychologically right now? Are they, are they have a frog in boiling water? Do they know what's happening? Are they open to it? Or they just need more repetition? What's the psychology of the, with the progress and the progress bar of the operators relative to the trends. >>I think they might be a little bit desperate, right? So also telecom people. I like to think they're relatively smart people. They are not dummies. They know what they are doing, but th there's 30 years of history, maybe more and there's large organizations, maybe thousands of people who are, who are, who they have to work with. So somehow you have to have to figure out how do you get these new skills? And, and we're getting older. Also. I was in 1995, working for telecom. TSM standard loans. We were young at that point. I'm not young anymore. >>So this is your whole experience. I appreciate that. Well, >>I mean, old is good because now if you look at, I mean, I would, again, not to bring up ageism, but um, young, young guns, they never really loaded a Linux operating system before they never really wired splice cable. Um, and also there's also the systems thinking. And I think one of the things that's coming out of this show, that's clear to us here at the cube is if you're a systems thinker you tend to do well because the edge Springs distributed computing to the table. So, you know, I think this experience collision with the young talent. Yeah. >>And I had a, a program where I actively wanted to bring new talent into the organization. We didn't want to hire it. As people have five to 10 years of working experience. Now let's give us some guys fresh out of the college. It's fine. We have plenty of telecom knowledge. We can teach them no issues, but we need some of the newer more, more open-minded approaches to what we can do. It's >>Funny, mark Zuckerberg said once years ago, it's a young man's game, a young person's game. And we were all like, yeah, screw you. But the point was is that now he looked at all the best players. Amazon has Gosling over there. A lot of these pioneers in the computing industry and the telecom industry are now leaders on the new architecture because there's an architectural change over, but it's not a rip and replace. It's a net abstraction. So it's not like it's going away. So the skills are there. So how do you talk about that? Because this is the big, an untold story, this new arc and architectural shift or tweak, uh, >>On architecture side. I think we, as an operators, we are really focused on building the networks and our networks started site. It's all about standard, uh, days. And it's all about buying buying boxes. And unfortunately, a lot of our leaders are then coming, growing up on that thinking. So then they trying to do the same thing on software side and it just doesn't work. So software is a totally different animal. So I think you need to really have a different mindset, different way of looking at that. When you start to get on the software side of business and how do you do your architectures? You need to have this flexibility. TSMA is a standard that evolves in a 10 year cycle. Your software architecture can evolve and 10, 10 year cycle. It has to move faster than that >>While you've used it to our ears. You're definitely come back on the cube. We're going to have you back because this is the most important story in this industry is the software paradigm. Um, and our minutes that we have left, why have you here, what do you think of the show? Mobile world Congress, uh, speeds and feeds radios boxes. Now you got chips software. What does this show turning into? What is this about? >>I think it's amazing to start to see this year. What, because of the COVID a lot of the old players are not here. So suddenly that space has been filled more of a newer company. It's different kinds of things. And I think that's really important for this conference. I think it's really important for the industry and it's really good for all of us. It's nice to see something, something new, something, something else, >>Another team of >>Edge brings up education, health care, societal change, cyber defenses, peace and challenges >>With that. Also security and how to control. And yeah, I >>Mean, a lot of people were watching people participating so well. Great to have you on great expertise and congratulations on your new role as a transformation leader in Washington, DC. And again, Nate, we need you there. So did you get up there on the hill and help educate some of those, uh, leaders that need to write the new laws? Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Okay. We are here in the cube. We're breaking down all the action here at the middle of cloud city. I'm John from the cube. David lump is on assignment. I'm gonna send it back to the studio, Adam.