>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell World Technologies here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We have two guests for this segment. We have Honore LaBourdette. She is the VP, Global Market Development, Telco Business Group. Welcome, VMware, thank you, sorry. >> Thank you, yes. >> Welcome. And we have Kevin Shatzkamer, Senior VP, Networking and Solutions, Dell EMC. Thank you both so much for coming on the show. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> So Kevin I want to start with you. There was a big announcement this morning, signing with Orange of France. Tell our viewers a little bit more about this. >> Yeah, sure. So, I think as overall Dell Technologies continues to focus on helping our service providers through what is a very complex transition, both in their business, in their operations, in their technology investments, in the operational skill set gaps, in the business models, the architecture's use cases kind of comes across the board of how their businesses are evolving. What we continue to do is focus on a core set of telecommunication service providers that we can partner with very deeply to help in that transformation and use the knowledge gained through that collaboration as a means to expand the Dell Technologies capabilities globally. So, I think that the belief is that when we help solve problems, it not only benefits the service provider we're working with, it benefits the industry as a whole with the lessons learned, so that we can then contribute back. >> And so far, there's been some enthusiasm about this? >> There certainly has. I think it's been a big day for us. Obviously, the first two days at Dell Technologies World, we're extremely focused on new product introductions across the Dell portfolio, and today, with the opportunity to expand the messaging and announce some of the great things we're doing with partners, we're doing with out customers, and we're doing within the ecosystem, I think we continue to drive a very positive message. >> Honore, the networking component is something that we know service providers have a need and is ever-changing. We've watched that expand greatly in the VMware portfolio over the years. I've done plenty of interviews with telcos talking about things like NFV, network functions virtualization, but the big thing everybody's been talking about, the last couple of years it feels like, is 5G. So, maybe we could start there, but talk a little bit about what you're hearing from service providers and how VMware and VMware plus Dell are helping to meet some of those requirements. >> Sure, well, needless to say, 5G is the topic of every conversation we have with our telecommunication customers, and I think that there's a number of areas around 5G that are most prevalent in those conversations. One is really how does the service provider get a return on investment for the huge amounts of monies that they're investing in this infrastructure, right? So, 5G is a new infrastructure, a new technology, that's going to require a refresh of the entire infrastructure. And so, while they're making all of those investments, and they are doing so very aggressively to have a first-mover advantage, in terms of the first to deliver on a 5G technology, they want to work with vendors who can, in fact, accelerate their time to a return on the investment for that infrastructure. So, many of our conversations are really focused around how can we help these service providers actually accomplish that, right? Not just build out, or take advantage of a software-defined infrastructure and all of the technologies that both Dell and WMware offer to them under the umbrella of the Dell Technology Companies, but also, how can we help them accelerate services that they want to to put on top of the 5G technology? I think one of the key differentiators of 5G over its predecessors is that the industry has recognized that it's going to require partnerships in order for the service providers to really get their return on investment. And that's where the partnership with VMware and with Dell and the work that Kevin and I are doing together to focus on service providing is really anchored, right? It's bringing together those partnerships, so that these telecommunication customers can take advantage of our technology and do it very quickly. >> So, there's a real acknowledgement of the need for partnerships? >> Yes. >> So then, how do you show customers that the VMware-Dell partnership is the right direction? >> Well, needless to say, it's anchored in our technology. Kevin and I have been working together for a number of years now, and our partnership really started out focusing on just making sure that the components of the stack worked as promised, right? That we could deliver a high degree of confidence to our customers that when they software-defined the infrastructure on Dell Technology hardware, and then layered on top of that, their virtual network functions, that it would perform our outperform their legacy, bare-metal, vertical-stack equipment. Over time, however, our partnership has progressed to where we're actually collaborating to bring new technology to market together. And one example of that is the City of Las Vegas. We recently announced a Smart City IoT use case, and that technology, that solution, was co-developed with NTT, Dell EMC, and VMware using VMware software, Dell hardware, as well as Dell Storage, Dell Data Analytics and Intelligence, and NTT's infrastructure and points of presence. >> Yeah, I think there's both a technical reality and an operational reality to the technologies that we speak of, right? The technical reality is that the transformation that the telcos are going through around NFV and the direction toward network edge, edge computing, cloud environments, is really just software-defined data center similar to what we've done on the IT side for a long time. So, the technologies that the telecommunications industry is adopting are the technologies that both Dell EMC and VMware have been working on for a very long time. The operational reality is that just taking what you've done in IT and applying it into a telco network is not sufficient. Understanding of the workloads, how those workloads layer on top of infrastructure, understanding that those workloads are in a transformation of their own, and that virtual network functions were not designed to natively consume and compute. They were designed for network appliances, and that there are still requirements that they drive down to the infrastructure was, I think, where Honore and I have been investing for the last several years, right? How do we complement the broad capabilities of both Dell EMC and VMware in IT virtualization software-defined data center, and bring in telco service provider networking expertise and domain knowledge that we can use to be able to really ramp up and accelerate the partnerships we have in the service provider industry? >> That's great stuff. We actually got to do an interview on the smarter cities earlier this week, and a fascinating discussion to see how there's, Kevin, I like what you laid out there. When I look at this space, scale gets talked about a lot, but you talk to telcos, they have a little bit of a different scale, and the management for these kind of environments is also quite a bit different than if you were talking to the enterprise. Are those some of the key items? Where would you say your focus? >> I also think that even further. That the challenges of scale that have been solved in the public cloud are a different set of challenges than the telco industry is really trying to wrestle with, right? In the public cloud, we're taking about a very small number of facilities, and we can build a homogenous architecture within there. We define a standard server. We replicate that server across a rack, replicate that rack across rows, replicate those rows across a data center. The reality is, as we get further and further towards the edge of the telco network, it looks more heterogeneous, right? I need GPUs for particular instances. I have cloud-native applications. I have virtualized applications that sit inside of VMs. I have native Linux environments. I need to handle dense networking topologies. I have east-west traffic, north-south traffic that I need to take into account. And I think that what we've figured out and what we've learned in automating and orchestrating the public cloud is how to handle hundreds of thousands of things at single-digit number of locations. And what we're talking about here is hundreds of thousands of locations with single-digit number of things. >> And that's another key area of the collaboration between the two groups, in terms of how we deliver value to our telco customers. So, rather than us working in silos and delivering yet another disparate technology for managing the edge, cloud, or all these different locations, we're working together so we can bring a cohesive technology to market for them. >> That's right, I think the infrastructure demands and openness and a willingness to be a productive member of a complex and consistently changing ecosystem, and I think that, obviously, Dell EMC does that in our way. VMware does it in their way, but there's clear recognition that the better capabilities are when we work together to really drive the platform and bring the true capabilities of the broader Dell technologies together. >> So, telcoms is a hugely competitive industry, and as you've talked about, there's a lot of challenges, and it's a real transformative moment for this sector. Can you lay out some of sort of what you're thinking about for after 5G, which as you've said, is a hugely expensive investment for these companies? But sort of post-5G, what are we looking at? What's on their minds of your customers? >> So, I don't know that there's going to be distinct, post-5G event, right? I think that 5G, in and of itself, is going to take some time to roll out and proliferate, to the extent that its predecessors is now deployed across all locations all over the world. I do think that 5G, in addition to the infrastructure technology, or the refresh of that technology, a lot of what is going to happen around 5G is, in fact, the applications and use cases that's going to take advantage of 5G. If we about what 5G is capable of enabling, it doesn't just address consumer applications. 5G also will address enterprise applications. And that opens up a whole world of innovation, and again, applications, partnerships, and vendors coming together, who can really help the service providers put those pieces together and deliver on those applications. There's already talk about 6G, although it's very limited. So, it's easy for me to say what's coming next after 5G will be 6G, but I think that there's still a lot of activity and a lot of innovation that will happen around 5G for some time to come. >> Yeah, we know that standards and the consortiums always have to be working. I was looking at terabit ethernet on the networking side. So, I wanted to help kind of bring this conversation together. If you have maybe a customer example, love if you could share who it is, but if not, give us a little bit of anonymity around what it is to help highlight this partnership. >> Sure, I think Honore shared the City of Las Vegas as a great example of where we're enabling the Smart Cities use case. We can speak to MetTel, in terms of the capabilities of Dell Technologies to be able to transform their NFV offerings and really help them bring NFV to market at scale. We can speak to at least one tier-one service provider in AMIA that is delivering a full-stack offering, in which we extended the capabilities of our Ericsson partnership that both Dell EMC, as well as VMware have, to build a complete stack offering of Ericsson, VMware, as well as Dell EMC. >> Yeah, and to Ericsson, there's some of the edge computing in there. I've talked to them quite a bit about what they're doing on their edge offering. >> Yeah, so I think we have a number of examples that we also can't share as publicly. But we continue to collaborate. I think we're driving fantastic innovation. The industry is responding extremely favorably across the board, and I think that the strategy that we have jointly to not just develop technology, but really change the way we engage with telecommunications organizations and service providers to work with them well before they're ready to deploy technology, and also, help them scale their own operations and understand this transformation is really key to the success here. Because just having the best technology at this inflection point in the industry is not enough. We really have to partner to help them understand how to operationalize and monetize that infrastructure. >> And we do have a number of innovation projects, with regards to the edge and far edge with some of the top-tier service providers, in particular, in the Americas, where we're working together for edge solutions. I've got to hear what this far-edge is in a future conversation, because I thought I was getting my arms around it, but -- >> I know, it was edge, and now it's edge and far-edge. >> That's for Dell Technologies World 2020. >> That's right. >> Honore, Kevin, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's a great time. >> You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World. There's more to come after this. (upbeat music)