(upbeat music) >> Okay, I'm back. I'm John Furrier with theCube. We're here in the middle of the action at Mobile World Congress at Cloud City is where the action is. Danielle Royston and Telco DR. Digital disruption here happening. This next interview I did with Casey Choi, the Executive Vice President at Samsung. I did this remotely. He couldn't be here in person. We wanted to bring him in for a conversation. I had a chance to record this with him. He talks about the intelligent Human Edge or Industry 4.0. It was about Edge computing, Samsung as a leader. Obviously we know what they do. They're part of this IOT revolution, Casey Choi, brilliant executive I really enjoyed my conversation. Take a listen. (upbeat music) Welcome to theCube's coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. I'm John Furrier host of theCube. We're here with Cube alumni, Casey Choi's Executive Vice President and GM of the Global Mobile B2B Team, Communications Team at Samsung. Casey, great to see you. Thank you for coming off for the special Remote Mobile World Congress. We're here in person, but also hybrid event. We got a lot of remote interviews. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. >> John. Great to see you. Great as always to be with you and great to be at least here, virtually with the team and in Barcelona from WC. >> You know, in Samsung, we think about the edge. You are leading a team that's driving this innovation. We've talked in the past about Industry 4.0, but the innovation at the intelligent edge, human edge is a big part of it, with 5G. It's just another G, but it's not just another G you got to have a backbone. You got to have a back haul. You got to have an interconnection. You have commercial, not just consumer technology. So the edge is becoming both this human and device commercial environment. So the industry is quickly moving to this. You call it the 4.0 trend. What do you see happening? This is a clear change over the Telco is not what it used to be. Change is coming fast. A lot of disruption, what's your view? >> Yeah, I think we see a number of things done. And certainly from our perspective, which is, I think we've got somewhat of a unique view on this because of our huge focus really in consumer use and attitudes. And certainly it's been informed by what we've seen, what we've all collectively seen over the last year and a half or so, and are still seeing today. And I think one of the things that we're certainly experiencing is I think the edge is it's expanding further out. I think it's also getting more tightly coupled in many respects to the human factor. And it's not just a set of billions of discrete sensors anymore. And I think the evolution of our thinking around this has changed quite a bit from the IOT Version One variant of this. We put more of what I would call billions of these things, communicating all kinds of information, either to the cloud or the data centers and doing it in a very voluminous way. And what we're saying is with the advent of more the human to machine interface, and certainly the capabilities that we're saying both on the network and the device side, it's really redefining how we're thinking about edge. And certainly here at Samsung and with some of our partners, and we're starting to call this more of the intelligent human edge, where the human factor really begins to play a big role in how we're defining the Internet Of Things. And those things include really people. And this is how we're looking at it. >> I love the theme, the human edge, I think that's very relevant. I want to get a human aspect of here tied into the industry side, because as we emerge from the pandemic and move to a broader economic recovery, you see the psychology of the industry where cloud is one of the shining examples of what the pandemic highlighted cloud speed, cloud agility. And now you're seeing with openness in the Teleco industry, that cloud is coming in, open cloud interoperability. So coming out of the pandemic, cloud is the theme is driving an economic recovery, which is driving the psychology of we're back to real life, we're back to business, but it's not business as usual. The fashion is changing. The attitudes are changing. You mentioned that, and now the disruption of how cloud will be implemented. And it seems to be Telco is where these edge and cloud are just completely radically changing, what was once a kind of a slow moving Telco space. So how do you see the partnerships and coming out of the pandemic, some of the response of cloud impact, cloud technology, public cloud impact on this new Telcom? >> Yeah. Let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think we see two dimensions on this, certainly on the carrier side, the operator's side of the equation, we're certainly partnered with everybody across the globe on that. Certainly there's been a definitive impact around software defined everything, right? So, and this has been accelerated really by the standards that have started to develop around 5G. And even now there's a lot of discussion and I'm sure there'll be a lot of it around WMC about 6G and what is happening there. But I think with the advent of things like O-RAN for example, and some of the activity that we're seeing really around NEC type solutions and opportunities, the traditional role of the carrier and the operator is evolving and has to evolve, right? It is now much more aligned with the provision of these types of services that are very different from the type of data or voice services that we've seen in the past. So certainly we're seeing that transition. The second big transition is really around the notion of hybridity. Now we've been talking about this now in the industry for a while, but I think it's really starting to take firm root the idea of not only multiple clouds, but clouds that are deployed either on prem or certainly, available as a service in its various forms. So I think that combination along with the advances that we're seeing in the technology, and this was both on the connectivity side. So certainly around the ultra reliable, low latency communications, what we're seeing with things like slicing, for example, starting to take root as well as frankly, the devices themselves are getting that much more powerful and compact. This is what we're saying with SOC technologies is what we're seeing with the functions being moved more and more to on device capability. So I think about hybrid, I mean, in my past to think about it more as a small data center. How do you compact it, move it out to somewhere else. Now we're thinking about it more in terms of the type of processing capability that you can put really in the hands of the human or hands of the device. And at that point, you really start to get different use cases, start to emerge from that. So this is how we're thinking about this extension and what I'm talking about more as, an expansion on the edge, further out. >> I love is it splicing or slicing, what's the term? Slicing is the technology? >> Slicing, network slicing. >> Slicing, not splicing cable. >> Yeah. >> Slicing. >> Not splicing cable, no. >> Okay so this come up a lot, so splicing kind of points to this end to end, workflows. You look at some of the modern development, the frameworks of successful, you're seeing these multifunctional teams kind of having an end to end visibility into the modern application workflow from CIC pipeline, whatever. Now, if you take the concept of O-RAN you mentioned Open Radio Access Networks, this kind of brings up this idea of interoperability, because if you're going to have end to end and you add edge to it, you have to have the ability to watch something go end to end, but it's never been like that in the past because you had to traverse multiple networks. So this becomes kind of this hybrid a little bit deeper. Can you share how you see that and how Samsung's working with folks and how you guys are addressing this because you can be at the edge, but ultimately you've got to integrate. So you've got openness, you've got the idea of interoperability issues, and you ultimately have to move around and work with other networks, other clouds and other systems. This is not, it's not always like that. So can you share how this is evolving and how real this is and what is your view on it. >> Yeah, our thinking on this. I mean, let me start by maybe tackling this in a little bit of a different angle. One of the things that we see as one of the barriers around interoperability has really been more on the application side of the equation. And this is actually the third component in making all of this work. And let me just be very clear in what I'm saying here, I think in terms of mobile architectures and really Edge architectures, it has been one of the last bastions, if you will of closed architectures, there've been very much what I would call purpose-built architectures at the edge. Certainly that's been driven by things like the industrial side coming together with more of the commercial side of the equation, but we think it's time really to extend the interoperability of what we are seeing really on the IT side of the equation and really driven by cloud native. This was really in the area of containers. It's in the area of microservices, it's in the area of cloud native development. And if we're really talking about this, we really need to extend that interoperability from the application point of view on the data point of view, really to the end point. And this is where some of the work that we're doing, and we really embarked on in earnest last year with Red Hat and IBM, and with VMware for example, in really opening up that edge architecture to really the open source community, as well as really to the microservices architectures that we have now seen propagate down from the cloud into hybrid architecture. So this has been really one of the key focus areas for us. The network interoperability has really been driven by the standards that we've seen and that have been really adopted by the industry. And when it comes to, for example 5G standards. what we've been more focused on quite honestly, is the interoperability on the application and data side. And we think that by extending, if you will, that write once run many type concepts down into the edge and into the device, that this is going to open up really a wealth of opportunity for us on the application and on the data side. >> That's awesome, I love the openness, love the innovation you guys are doing. I think that's where the action is and that's where the growth is going to be. I do have to ask you how you see edge computing in the IOT era in terms of security. Are we more vulnerable because of it now? And how are you guys addressing the issue of security and data privacy at the edge? What's your opinion on that? What's Samsung doing? >> I mean, we just have to look at the news today, it's obvious that we are more vulnerable, right? There's no doubt that points of vulnerability are being exposed and they're probably being exposed in now industrial areas, right? Certainly with what we've seen, just even recently with some of the attacks that, that have occurred. So a couple of things there, number one, we are relying very heavily on our long history around establishing root of trust in kind of zero trust environments. We've had our Knox platform as an example, we just celebrated, in fact, our 10th year of the product. In fact, it was announced at MWC back about 10 years ago. So this is something that, that we're celebrating, it's an anniversary. Our belief on this is that we really need to ensure that we maintain a hardware-based route across when it comes to the edge. We can't only rely upon software protection at that layer. We can't naturally rely upon some of the network protections that are there. So, we've shipped about 3 billion devices with our Knox Security Suite over the last 10 years. And this is something that we're relying very heavily on. Not only for again, that hardware based root of process. So one of the key solutions, there's our Knox Vault product, which we just released a few months back. This is really a safe within a safe concept, really ensuring that the biometric password and other user data is protected. It's really what drives some of our strategy around making sure that we rely upon something that protects all of the back doors that are resident, not only at the software layer, but at the hardware layer as well. And then management is the other key piece of this, security without the ability of managing these thousands to millions of devices is really somewhat compromised. So we've extended a lot of our Knox management capability at our device level really to address some of those particular attributes, as well as these fleets become more prominent. And they start to take on workloads that are more critical to IOT type workloads. >> Casey, great to have you on. Your insight's awesome. Love what you're doing at Samsung. And again, you're a leader, you've been there, you've seen those cycles of innovation. I have to ask you my final question for you is a personal one and a professional one. The last Mobile World Congress was 2019. In person, last year was canceled a lot's happened in the industry since 20 something months ago. Now we're going to be in person, a lot of hybrid still remotely, but there'll be people in person. The world's changed. What is the big change in the Telco, Telco Cloud, Telco Edge, what's happened in these 20 plus months since the last Mobile World Congress that people should pay attention to? What's the most important thing in your mind? >> Most important? Thank God John. You're putting me on the spot here, right? I think it's wisdom to be quite honest with you. I mean, we've certainly all collectively learned a lot in terms of user patterns and what people need and want. And I hope to think that collective wisdom is going to be a key part of how we drive this going forward. And then if I can just pick one more, I would say re-invention, I think what we're starting to see is that coming out of, again from 2019 to what we're seeing now, we do see this opportunity reinventing and rethinking. And I think that's the difference. And the pace of that is going to really dictate how we look at this and how we collectively solve these challenges. So I hope to think we're wiser and that we're more imaginative coming out of this. And again after being in this industry for 30 years, we've not seen the types of things that we've seen over the last couple. So I hope to think that this is a pivot point for all of us. >> Well, Samsung is certainly a leader in many areas and great to see you on theCube here and the theme in your talks around intelligence, human edge innovation, open. This is a force that's happening. And I think the big change, as you said, the wisdom combined with a reinvention is happening and it's going to be very interesting ride, should be fun to work on. >> It will be John and I thank you for our friendship and our relationship over the years. It's always great to see you and to be with you. And again, we're very optimistic as we always have, coming out of this And again, thanks for the time and have a great MWC. >> You too, Casey Choi, Executive Vice President General Manager of the Global Mobile Business to Business Unit Commercial Unit at Samsung. This is theCube's coverage of Mobile World Congress. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Okay. We're back here. That was Casey Choi. Talk about wisdom, collective wisdom coming out of the pandemic. Great friend of theCube, great friend of the industry doing great work there. Casey Choi. Like we are doing here on the ground at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City, as well as Adam and the team in the studio. So back to you, Adam and team.

>> 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)

>>from around >>The globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM Hello and welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm john for your host of the cube. I'm excited to have this next guest cube alumni Casey choi corporate E V P. Executive vice president and general manager at Samsung Mobile, the B to B and B to G team Casey, great to see you how you been >>john it is wonderful to see you and it's been way too long. Great to be back on the cube with you. Looking forward to our conversation and hope you're safe >>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 as you've always had your finger on the pulse of the waves and you've always involved with some really great engineering work and I want to dig into this now because um your role is really hitting the industry four dot oh kind of wave, which is the confluence of tech, media, entertainment, every vertical big data IOT and the the 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 the changing landscape in the industry. >>Yeah, I think I think you you covered you know, all of the major seismic shifts that are happening here and then, you know, as we've all experienced over the last, you know, over a year with the covid pandemic, that's actually accelerated a lot of the thinking around the edge. We've certainly seen use cases proliferate whether it be in things such as health care, Manufacturing is also taken. I think a real hard look at the applicability of these types of solutions. Uh we've seen things like for example 5G pick up in these sort of industrial applications as um you know as the industrial companies have thought about worker safety as they thought about automation as they thought about, you know, utilize being more protocols as well as you know, bringing these technologies and processes together in a way that will help to kind of reinvent their their particular economic base as well as kind of the learnings that we've seen over the last year coming from these new uh safety protocols as well as the need for now with the economy is picking back up the need for productivity as well as you know, greater efficiencies coming from these types of solutions. So we've seen that confluence happened 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 S O C. S and others have taken root. We've seen the edge, if you will start to 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 S O C trend actually highlights that it's not so much about moore's law as it is more about more chips, more more performance if you look at actual performance, David and they just put out a report on this where there's much more performance now than ever before coming in from the combined energy. So uh 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, I'll see the B2C with the phones and everything else, but you have a specific focus uh what is your main focus there? >>Yeah, our missions pretty straightforward and as everyone knows, you know, Samsung is this uh you know, powerhouse uh consumer electronics company we pride ourselves in and obviously uh our our position in that, but um we also have a very significant role really in the business to business and in the government and financial services sector space uh with our mobile devices as well as with our knock security platform solution and device management platform. We actually provide a large portion of the secure 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 uh really allows for uh that uh if you will that next protective layer on top of the android. Os that allows for things such as personal and professional profile. So we produce those solutions out of my team um as well as we provide really the the go to market support as well as the R and D support for that platform, including uh an area that's growing rapidly for us, which is in the rugged category, which is, you know, one of the key products that we're using for some of these edge applications that will be talking about. >>Great, let's jump into that. What are you guys doing specifically on the edge computing space? Let's dig into it. >>Yeah, I think, you know, maybe the place to start on that is uh we're really kind of re envisioning what the edges and uh I mentioned a little earlier that uh with what's occurring in the performance profile and really the functional profile, what is being produced at the device level, You know, we're talking about in the last few years, the fidelity and the capabilities are, you know, in, you know, what I would call the the computer class type uh, functions as well as obviously mobile devices have always been um, communication gateways for a number of functions, whether they be, you know, videos or photos, their multi sensory in nature. And as this has become more practical and the connective tissue has gotten there with five G as well as all kinds of other, you know, fast, low latency communications capabilities and wifi six U w b, you know, included within that. What we're finding is that the use case to bring applications, especially cloud, native and container native applications uh, to these devices to be, you know, augmenting the the endpoint user, the frontline worker, uh really the Knowledge Worker and moving that capability further away from if you will and an extension to cloud services as well as the M E C type services. This is where we see it going and really what we're trying to to work on with IBM and with red hat is how do we, you know, continue to fortify this, not only from a actual processing ai Ml capability, but also equipped these devices so that they can fully participate as part of a multi hybrid cloud architecture. Uh the endpoint is really one of the last baskets where we have not uh kind of conquered bringing uh, you know, 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, uh the connectivity that is becoming much more ubiquitous now to allow for that type of architecture to exist. And uh, we're starting to call this the intelligent human edge as well. We think that the applications that will see for this are you know, ones that will uh, you know, make the, the human operator more productive, safer, uh certainly more efficient and uh we think that this augmentation of that front line workers is an area that we, we are, you know, put put our, our steaks on in terms of pioneering just because of our experience in that mobility space and in the consumer space. >>That's great. You brought up red hat and IBM obviously red hat was bought by IBM Arvin Arvin Ceo. Well I interviewed in 2019 and the cube that red hat summit, ironically a couple months later by the company just smile on his face. He likes clowns. >>You had something to do with that. You know, >>he wanted to, I could see he wanted to say it, but but he loves the cloud. Everyone who knows Arvin knows that he's into the cloud in a new way in 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 this is a obviously the ecosystems bigger than that, but IBM and red Hat really bring the expertise really around uh container ecosystems, certainly the work that they have done in terms of multi hybrid cloud, uh certainly the work that open ship has brought forward in terms of, you know, multi platform capability. We really love the concept of developed once run any sort of a construct. And uh when you think about it, the mobile platforms specifically, you know, ours as well as others has really been that last bastion of, of areas where more of the development is on a particular platform, it's more bespoke. We think that by broaching this uh, you know, in conjunction with IBM and Red Hat, um this is going to give us the ability to have these device architecture has become a full voting member if you will of of that hybrid cloud architecture and of that microservices can contain 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 ford auto type application, smart factory automation, public safety. These areas where we believe that this type of architecture can be, can be deployed. >>That's awesome. And totally believe that the edge um it's still gonna be pushed further and further out, honestly having that open, open standards of of hybrid. So I gotta ask you on the edge just well 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 mentioned some of those and then you got the human piece, which is like people have phones and wearables and other things are gonna be happening. So as you start to have those endpoints which are then gonna be connected into a distributed network, take a hybrid cloud, so to be multiple clouds. But yeah, that's the subsystem within the cloud construct. The complaint has been not complaint, but the observation has been and complain if you look at it that the edges limited by power and connectivity. Okay. These are like key basic concepts, How is the connectivity option? I know five Gs 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. I'll see powers battery driven, getting better and better and and power is getting uh 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 pOC is that we've been involved in over the last year to two years, um connectivity is an issue uh and a lot of it has to do with the infrastructure that is available in many of these uh you know, plants or factories or you know, points of distribution. Uh they're not necessarily, you know, leading edge in many cases we're dealing with uh you know what I would call subpar connectivity, it's not like an office complex where You may have, you know, kind of state of the art wifi capability or you know, 10 gig capability or whatever it might be. Um So what we've, what we've found on that is it requires actually quite a bit of work in terms of fine tuning both on the network infrastructure side, whatever that might be. Uh Or we've also found that on the device side, the program ability of the of the device in terms of tuning it for whatever connective environment would be there. And we worked with everything from, you know, bluetooth, you w b uh to wifi six and everything in between and in many cases they're multiple uh you know, protocols or connectivity methods that are there. So, you know, one thing we've learned is that um you can't you can't necessarily assume that in a especially in a factory environment that those conditions are going to allow for um uh you know, consistency, so you have to engineer around that, you know, and some of the things that we've done are really around making sure that we've got uh, you know, deployable program ability at the device as well as, you know, uh more dynamic network tuning capabilities that will allow for, you know, better connectivity and handle things such as consistency. >>All right, Casey, Great to incite 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, you know, 30 year history of working together, uh 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 then we work very closely with them over many years on applications. So number one, there's been a natural relationship just in the the the services that we provided to each other. But as as we look at really to go to market, I mean, IBM brings so much credibility from a vertical market perspective. Um there's a trusted advisor type status that I think is is 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 uh this uh 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, uh you know, vertical sectors, I think that combination is very powerful. Um 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 market leadership in uh you know, hybrid cloud and in the container native architecture. So it's just a very powerful combo. And um you know, the cooperation there has been strong and we continue to look forward to delivering more through that partnership. >>Casey great to see a great, great thing to hear. You know, you got scalable infrastructure, you get modern applications at the edge, all of hybrid. Great, great partnership. Casey Choi Executive Vice Corporate Executive Vice President and General Manager of Samsung Mobile B two B team. Great to see you and congratulations on your mission. It's exciting project. Thanks for coming on the cube and sharing. >>Great to see you, jOHn take care of yourself and looking forward to seeing you again. >>Okay, this is the cubes coverage. IBM think 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.