>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hello and welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. I'm excited to have this next guest, CUBE alumni, K.C. Choi, Corporate EVP, Executive Vice President and General Manager at Samsung Mobile the B2B/B2G Team. K.C., great to see you, how you've been? >> John, it is wonderful to see you and it's been way too long. Great to be back on theCUBE with you looking forward to our conversation and I hope you're safe. >> Yeah and same to you. Great to see you, I'm so excited. One of the things I've really admired about you and our conversations in the past is you've always had your finger on the pulse of the waves and you're always involved with some really great engineering work. And I want to dig into this now because your role is really hitting the industry for that kind of wave which is the confluence of tech, media, entertainment, every vertical, big data, IOT and with the distributed computing now called the Cloud and edge. It really sets the table for what is now going to be the preferred architecture probably for the next 20 plus years. So give us your view on how you see the changing landscape in the industry. >> Yeah, I think you covered all of the major seismic shifts that are happening here. And then as we've all experienced over the last, over a year with the COVID pandemic, that's actually accelerated a lot of the thinking around edge. We've certainly seen news cases proliferate whether it be in things such as healthcare, manufacturing's also taken I think, a real hard look at the applicability of these types of solutions. We've seen things like, for example 5G pickup in these industrial applications as the industrial companies have thought about worker safety, as they've thought about automation, as they thought about utilizing more protocols, as well as bringing these technologies and processes together in a way that will help to reinvent their particular economic base, as well as the learnings that we've seen over the last year, coming from these new safety protocols as well as the need for now with the economies is picking back up, the need for productivity, as well as greater efficiencies coming from these types of solutions. So we've seen that confluence happen. And then certainly on our end, as our network connectivity has become much stronger, lower latency, as well as the endpoint capabilities have increased dramatically over the last few years, as SOC and others have taken root, we've seen the edge, if you will, start be more extreme, in the sense that it's pushing further and further out beyond what we originally envisioned the edge to be. >> And the SOC trend actually highlights that it's not so much about Moore's law as it is more about more chips, more performance. If you look at actual performance, Dave Vellante just put out a report on this, where there's actually more performance now than ever before coming in from the combined energy and combined processing power out there. So it's super, super amazing what you can do at the edge. Before we get into the edge, I want to just clarify what is your new role there? I mean, Samsung is known for obviously the B2C with the phones and everything else, but you have a specific focus, what is your main focus there? >> Yeah, our mission's pretty straightforward. And as everyone knows, Samsung is a powerhouse consumer electronics company. We pride ourselves in obviously our position in that, but we also have a very significant role really in the business to business and in the government and financial services sector space with our mobile devices, as well as with our Knox security platform solution and device management platform. We actually provide a large portion of the security devices for governments worldwide as well as the Knox platform that is built into the majority of our, both, consumer as well as business devices that really allows for that, if you will, that next protective layer on top of the Android OS that allows for things such as, personal and professional profiles. So we produce those solutions out of my team as well as we provide really the go-to-market support, as well as the RnD support for that platform, including an area that's growing rapidly for us which is in the rugged category, which is one of the key products that we're using for some of these edge applications that we'll be talking about. >> Great, let's jump into that. What are you guys doing specifically in the edge computing space? Let's dig into it. >> Yeah, I think maybe the place to start on that is we're really reenvisioning what the edge is. And I mentioned a little earlier that with what's occurring in the performance profile and really the functional profile, what is being produced at the device level. We're talking about in the last few years, the fidelity and the capabilities are in, what I would call the computer class type functions, as well as obviously mobile devices have always been communication gateways for a number of functions, whether they be videos or photos. They're multisensory in nature. And as this has become more practical and the connective tissue has gotten there with 5G as well as all kinds of other fast low latency communications capabilities and Wi-Fi 6, UWB, included within that. What we're finding is that the use case to bring applications especially cloud native and container native applications to these devices to be augmenting the endpoint user, the frontline worker, really the knowledge worker and moving that capability further away from, if you will, an extension to cloud services as well as MEC type services, this is where we see it going. And really what we're trying to work on with IBM and with Red Hat is how do we continue to fortify this, not only from an actual processing AI/ML capability, but also equip these devices so that they can fully participate as part of a multi-hybrid cloud architecture. The endpoint is really one of the last bastions where we have not conquered bringing cloud first container native applications really to that point. And we believe the time is right because of the capabilities that are there along with, again, the connectivity that is becoming much more ubiquitous now to allow for that type of architecture to exist. And we're starting to call this the intelligent human edge as well. We think that the applications that we'll see for this are ones that will make the human operator more productive, safer, certainly more efficient. And we think that this augmentation of that frontline worker is an area that we are, put our stakes on in terms of pioneering, just because of again, our experience in that mobility space and in that consumer space. >> That's great you brought up Red Hat and IBM. Obviously Red Hat was bought by IBM. Arvin, the CEO who I interviewed in 2019 in theCUBE at Red Hat summit, ironically, a couple months later, buys the company and a smile on his face. He likes cloud. >> K.C.: Maybe you had something to do with that, John. >> No, he wanted to, I could see he wanted to say it, but he loves the cloud. Everyone who knows Arvin knows that he's into the cloud in a new way. And this edge piece that you mentioned that you're using Red Hat and IBM for hybrid, this is what the new operating system is going to look like. It's a completely distributed system and the edge is just part of that operating model. This is what their vision is, which I love by the way. I think that redefines what that is. Are you saying that you guys are working with Red Hat and IBM for that hybrid edge piece? How does that work? Can you take me through that? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, obviously the ecosystem is bigger than that, but IBM and Red Hat really bring the expertise really around container ecosystems, certainly the work that they have done in terms a multi hybrid cloud, certainly the work that OpenShift has brought forward in terms of, you know, multi-platform capability. We really love the concept of develop bonds run, any sort of a construct. And when you think about it, the mobile platforms specifically, you know, ours, as well as others, has really been that last baskin of areas where more of the development is on a particular platform, it's more bespoke. We think that by broaching this, you know in conjunction with IBM and Red Hat this is going to give us the ability to have these device architectures become a full voting member, if you will, of that hybrid cloud architecture and of that microservice container architecture that is becoming much more prevalent. So this is really the work that we're doing. And then obviously we're working at a vertical level to see where are the applicable use cases in places such as the design studio we have in Singapore, where with the Singaporean government we're looking at really bringing a Renaissance to industry 4.0 type applications, smart factory automation, public safety, these areas where we believe that this type of architecture can be deployed. >> That's awesome. And I totally believe that, you know the edge is still going to be pushed farther and further out, honestly, having that open standards of hybrid. So I got to ask you, on the edge just while I got you here, you know, one of the things that you see clearly as the industrial edge, it's called, factories and whatnot. You've mentioned some of those. And then you've got the human piece, which is like people have phones and wearables and other things are going to be happening. So as you start to have those end points, which are then going to be connected into a distributed network, AKA a hybrid cloud, soon to be multiple clouds. But that's the sub system within the cloud construct. The complaint has been, not complaint, but the observation has been and complaint, if you look at it that the edge is limited by power and connectivity, okay. These are like key basic concepts. How is the connectivity option? I know 5G is coming, it's here, we're seeing it being deployed. We got people saying, hey, this is our business application. Clearly got higher throughput, not as much range. Give us your take on this because this becomes important, obviously, power is battery that is driven, it's getting better and better and power is not really that much of a problem, but connectivity seems to be, what's your vision of this? >> Yeah and you know, there's a lot of ways to approach that. I will tell you on the industrial side, at least in some of the deployments and PLCs that we've been involved in over the last a year or two years, connectivity is an issue. And a lot of it has to do with the infrastructure that is available in many of these plants or factories, or points of distribution, they're not necessarily leading edge, in many cases we're dealing with what I would call sub par connectivity. It's not like an office complex where you may have state-of-the-art Wi-Fi capability or 10 gig capability or whatever it might be. So what we've found on that is it requires actually quite a bit of work, in terms of fine tuning, both, on the the network infrastructure side, whatever that might be or we've also found that on the device side, the programmability of the of the device, in terms of tuning it for whatever connective environment would be there. And we've worked with everything from, you know, Bluetooth, UWB to Wi-Fi 6 and everything in between and in many cases or multiple protocols or connectivity methods that are there. So, you know, one thing we've learned is that you can't necessarily assume that in a, especially in a factory environment that those conditions are going to allow for consistency. So you have to engineer around that, you know, in some of the things that we've done are really around making sure that we've got deployable programmability at the device as well as board dynamic network tuning capabilities that will allow for better connectivity and to handle things such as consistency. >> All right, K.C., great insight. Final question for you, why Samsung and IBM? What's the bottom line? >> Yeah, I think the bottom line is really straightforward. I mean, we've had a 30 year history of working together, you know, we've been mutual customers to each other. We do a lot of work for IBM, in regards to foundry type services and semiconductor services. And that we work very closely with them over many years on applications. So number one, there's been a natural relationship, just in the services that we provided to each other. But as we look at really the go-to-market, I mean, IBM brings so much credibility from a vertical market perspective. There's a trusted advisor type status that I think is a very profound and it's been built over many years, you know, delivering on the promises. And on our end, I think what we bring is really this cycle time that is driven by our passion in the consumer space. And when we start to apply that into more of these vertical industrial, you know, vertical sectors, I think that combination is very powerful. The services piece obviously comes into play with IBM. And then really, the Red Hat piece of this really just puts the icing on the cake with really the the market leadership in hybrid cloud and in the container native architecture, so it's just a very powerful combo and the cooperation there has been strong and we continue to look forward to delivering more through that partnership. >> K.C., great to see you, great thing to hear. You know, you got scalable infrastructure, you got modern applications, got the edge, all hybrid. Great partnership. K.C. Choi, Corporate Executive Vice President and General Manager of Samsung Mobile B2B Team. Great to see you and congratulations on your mission and it's an exciting project. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing. >> Great to see you, John, take care of yourself and looking forward to seeing you again. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft upbeat music) (melodious music)

(melodious music) >> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hello and welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. I'm excited to have this next guest, CUBE alumni, K.C. Choi, Corporate EVP, Executive Vice President and General Manager at Samsung Mobile the B2B/B2G Team. K.C., great to see you, how you've been? >> John, it is wonderful to see you and it's been way too long. Great to be back on theCUBE with you looking forward to our conversation and I hope you're safe. >> Yeah and same to you. Great to see you, I'm so excited. One of the things I've really admired about you and our conversations in the past is you've always had your finger on the pulse of the waves and you're always involved with some really great engineering work. And I want to dig into this now because your role is really hitting the industry for that kind of wave which is the confluence of tech, media, entertainment, every vertical, big data, IOT and with the distributed computing now called the Cloud and edge. It really sets the table for what is now going to be the preferred architecture probably for the next 20 plus years. So give us your view on how you see the changing landscape in the industry. >> Yeah, I think you covered all of the major seismic shifts that are happening here. And then as we've all experienced over the last, over a year with the COVID pandemic, that's actually accelerated a lot of the thinking around edge. We've certainly seen news cases proliferate whether it be in things such as healthcare, manufacturing's also taken I think, a real hard look at the applicability of these types of solutions. We've seen things like, for example 5G pickup in these industrial applications as the industrial companies have thought about worker safety, as they've thought about automation, as they thought about utilizing more protocols, as well as bringing these technologies and processes together in a way that will help to reinvent their particular economic base, as well as the learnings that we've seen over the last year, coming from these new safety protocols as well as the need for now with the economies is picking back up, the need for productivity, as well as greater efficiencies coming from these types of solutions. So we've seen that confluence happen. And then certainly on our end, as our network connectivity has become much stronger, lower latency, as well as the endpoint capabilities have increased dramatically over the last few years, as SOC and others have taken root, we've seen the edge, if you will, start be more extreme, in the sense that it's pushing further and further out beyond what we originally envisioned the edge to be. >> And the SOC trend actually highlights that it's not so much about Moore's law as it is more about more chips, more performance. If you look at actual performance, Dave Vellante just put out a report on this, where there's actually more performance now than ever before coming in from the combined energy and combined processing power out there. So it's super, super amazing what you can do at the edge. Before we get into the edge, I want to just clarify what is your new role there? I mean, Samsung is known for obviously the B2C with the phones and everything else, but you have a specific focus, what is your main focus there? >> Yeah, our mission's pretty straightforward. And as everyone knows, Samsung is a powerhouse consumer electronics company. We pride ourselves in obviously our position in that, but we also have a very significant role really in the business to business and in the government and financial services sector space with our mobile devices, as well as with our Knox security platform solution and device management platform. We actually provide a large portion of the security devices for governments worldwide as well as the Knox platform that is built into the majority of our, both, consumer as well as business devices that really allows for that, if you will, that next protective layer on top of the Android OS that allows for things such as, personal and professional profiles. So we produce those solutions out of my team as well as we provide really the go-to-market support, as well as the RnD support for that platform, including an area that's growing rapidly for us which is in the rugged category, which is one of the key products that we're using for some of these edge applications that we'll be talking about. >> Great, let's jump into that. What are you guys doing specifically in the edge computing space? Let's dig into it. >> Yeah, I think maybe the place to start on that is we're really reinvisioning what the edge is. And I mentioned a little earlier that with what's occurring in the performance profile and really the functional profile, what is being produced at the device level. We're talking about in the last few years, the fidelity and the capabilities are in, what I would call the computer class type functions, as well as obviously mobile devices have always been communication gateways for a number of functions, whether they be videos or photos. They're multisensory in nature. And as this has become more practical and the connective tissue has gotten there with 5G as well as all kinds of other fast low latency communications capabilities and Wi-Fi 6, UWB, included within that. What we're finding is that the used case to bring applications especially cloud native and container native applications to these devices to be augmenting the endpoint user, the frontline worker, really the knowledge worker and moving that capability further away from, if you will, an extension to cloud services as well as MEC type services, this is where we see it going. And really what we're trying to work on with IBM and with Red Hat is how do we continue to fortify this, not only from an actual processing AI ML capability, but also equip these devices so that they can fully participate as part of a multi hybrid cloud architecture. The endpoint is really one of the last baskins where we have not conquered bringing cloud first container native applications really to that point. And we believe the time is right because of the capabilities that are there along with, again, the connectivity that is becoming much more ubiquitous now to allow for that type of architecture to exist. And we're starting to call this the intelligent human edge as well. We think that the applications that we'll see for this are ones that will make the human operator more productive, safer, certainly more efficient. And we think that this augmentation of that frontline worker is an area that we are, put our stakes on in terms of pioneering, just because of again, our experience in that mobility space and in that consumer space. >> That's great you brought up Red Hat and IBM. Obviously Red Hat was bought by IBM. Arvin, the CEO who I interviewed in 2019 in theCUBE at Red Hat summit, ironically, a couple months later, buys the company and a smile on his face. He likes cloud. >> K.C.: Maybe you had something to do with that, John. >> No, he wanted to, I could see he wanted to say it, but he loves the cloud. Everyone who knows Arvin knows that he's into the cloud in a new way. And this edge piece that you mentioned that you're using Red Hat and IBM for hybrid, this is what the new operating system is going to look like. It's a completely distributed system and the edge is just part of that operating model. This is what their vision is, which I love by the way. I think that redefines what that is. Are you saying that you guys are working with Red Hat and IBM for that hybrid edge piece? How does that work? Can you take me through that? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, obviously the ecosystem is bigger than that, but IBM and Red Hat really bring the expertise really around container ecosystems, certainly the work that they have done in terms a multi hybrid cloud, certainly the work that OpenShift has brought forward in terms of, you know, multi-platform capability. We really love the concept of develop bonds run, any sort of a construct. And when you think about it, the mobile platforms specifically, you know, ours, as well as others, has really been that last baskin of areas where more of the development is on a particular platform, it's more bespoke. We think that by broaching this, you know in conjunction with IBM and Red Hat this is going to give us the ability to have these device architectures become a full voting member, if you will, of that hybrid cloud architecture and of that microservice container architecture that is becoming much more prevalent. So this is really the work that we're doing. And then obviously we're working at a vertical level to see where are the applicable use cases in places such as the design studio we have in Singapore, where with the Singaporean government we're looking at really bringing a Renaissance to industry 4.0 type applications, smart factory automation, public safety, these areas where we believe that this type of architecture can be deployed. >> That's awesome. And I totally believe that, you know the edge is still going to be pushed farther and further out, honestly, having that open standards of hybrid. So I got to ask you, on the edge just while I got you here, you know, one of the things that you see clearly as the industrial edge, it's called, factories and whatnot. You've mentioned some of those. And then you've got the human piece, which is like people have phones and wearables and other things are going to be happening. So as you start to have those end points, which are then going to be connected into a distributed network, AKA a hybrid cloud, soon to be multiple clouds. But that's the sub system within the cloud construct. The complaint has been, not complaint, but the observation has been and complaint, if you look at it that the edge is limited by power and connectivity, okay. These are like key basic concepts. How is the connectivity option? I know 5G is coming, it's here, we're seeing it being deployed. We got people saying, hey, this is our business application. Clearly got higher throughput, not as much range. Give us your take on this because this becomes important, obviously, power is battery that is driven, it's getting better and better and power is not really that much of a problem, but connectivity seems to be, what's your vision of this? >> Yeah and you know, there's a lot of ways to approach that. I will tell you on the industrial side, at least in some of the deployments and PLCs that we've been involved in over the last a year or two years, connectivity is an issue. And a lot of it has to do with the infrastructure that is available in many of these plants or factories, or points of distribution, they're not necessarily leading edge, in many cases we're dealing with what I would call sub par connectivity. It's not like an office complex where you may have state-of-the-art Wi-Fi capability or 10 gig capability or whatever it might be. So what we've found on that is it requires actually quite a bit of work, in terms of fine tuning, both, on the the network infrastructure side, whatever that might be or we've also found that on the device side, the programmability of the of the device, in terms of tuning it for whatever connective environment would be there. And we've worked with everything from, you know, Bluetooth, UWB to Wi-Fi 6 and everything in between and in many cases or multiple protocols or connectivity methods that are there. So, you know, one thing we've learned is that you can't necessarily assume that in a, especially in a factory environment that those conditions are going to allow for consistency. So you have to engineer around that, you know, in some of the things that we've done are really around making sure that we've got deployable programmability at the device as well as board dynamic network tuning capabilities that will allow for better connectivity and to handle things such as consistency. >> All right, K.C., great insight. Final question for you, why Samsung and IBM? What's the bottom line? >> Yeah, I think the bottom line is really straightforward. I mean, we've had a 30 year history of working together, you know, we've been mutual customers to each other. We do a lot of work for IBM, in regards to foundry type services and semiconductor services. And that we work very closely with them over many years on applications. So number one, there's been a natural relationship, just in the services that we provided to each other. But as we look at really the go-to-market, I mean, IBM brings so much credibility from a vertical market perspective. There's a trusted advisor type status that I think is a very profound and it's been built over many years, you know, delivering on the promises. And on our end, I think what we bring is really this cycle time that is driven by our passion in the consumer space. And when we start to apply that into more of these vertical industrial, you know, vertical sectors, I think that combination is very powerful. The services piece obviously comes into play with IBM. And then really, the Red Hat piece of this really just puts the icing on the cake with really the the market leadership in hybrid cloud and in the container native architecture, so it's just a very powerful combo and the cooperation there has been strong and we continue to look forward to delivering more through that partnership. >> K.C., great to see you, great thing to hear. You know, you got scalable infrastructure, you got modern applications, got the edge, all hybrid. Great partnership. K.C. Choi, Corporate Executive Vice President and General Manager of Samsung Mobile B2B Team. Great to see you and congratulations on your mission and it's an exciting project. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing. >> Great to see you, John, take care of yourself and looking forward to seeing you again. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft upbeat music) (melodious music)