(low-key music) >> The cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting electronic music) (crowd chattering in background) >> Welcome back to Spain, everybody. My name's Dave Vellante. I'm here with Dave Nicholson. We are live at the Fira in Barcelona, covering MWC23 day four. We've been talking about, you know, 5G all week. We're going to talk about it some more. Jillian Kaplan is here. She's the head of Global Telecom Thought Leadership at Dell Technologies, and we're pleased to have Meg Knauth, who's the Vice President for Digital Platform Engineering at T-Mobile. Ladies, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right, Meg, can you explain 5G and edge to folks that may not be familiar with it? Give us the 101 on 5G and edge. >> Sure, I'd be happy to. So, at T-Mobile, we want businesses to be able to focus on their business outcomes and not have to stress about network technology. So we're here to handle the networking behind the scenes for you to achieve your business goals. The main way to think about 5G is speed, reduced latency, and heightened security. And you can apply that to so many different business goals and objectives. You know, some of the use cases that get touted out the most are in the retail manufacturing sectors with sensors and with control of inventory and things of that nature. But it can be applied to pretty much any industry because who doesn't need more (chuckles) more speed and lower latency. >> Yeah. And reliability, right? >> Exactly. >> I mean, that's what you're going to have there. So it's not like it's necessarily going to- you know, you think about 5G and these private networks, right? I mean, it's not going to, oh, maybe it is going to eat into, there's a Venn there, I know, but it's not going to going to replace wireless, right? I mean, it's new use cases. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, they definitely coexist, right? And Meg touched a little bit on like all the use cases that are coming to be, but as we look at 5G, it's really the- we call it like the Enterprise G, right? It's where the enterprise is going to be able to see changes in their business and the way that they do things. And for them, it's going to be about reducing costs and heightening ROI, and safety too, right? Like being able to automate manufacturing facilities where you don't have workers, like, you know, getting hit by various pieces of equipment and you can take them out of harm's way and put robots in their place. And having them really work in an autonomous situation is going to be super, super key. And 5G is just the, it's the backbone of all future technologies if you look at it. We have to have a network like that in order to build things like AI and ML, and we talk about VR and the Metaverse. You have to have a super reliable network that can handle the amount of devices that we're putting out today, right? So, extremely important. >> From T-Mobile's perspective, I mean we hear a lot about, oh, we spent a lot on CapEx, we know that. You know, trillion and a half over the next seven years, going into 5G infrastructure. We heard in the early keynotes at MWC, we heard the call to you know, tax the over the top vendors. We heard the OTT, Netflix shot back, they said, "Why don't you help us pay for the content that we're creating?" But, okay, so I get that, but telcos have a great business. Where's T-Mobile stand on future revenue opportunities? Are you looking to get more data and monetize that data? Are you looking to do things like partner with Dell to do, you know, 5G networks? Where are the opportunities for T-Mobile? >> I think it's more, as Jillian said, it's the opportunities for each business and it's unique to those businesses. So we're not in it just for ourselves. We're in it to help others achieve their business goals and to do more with all of the new capabilities that this network provides. >> Yeah, man, I like that answer because again, listening to some of the CEOs of the large telcos, it's like, hmm, what's in it for me as the customer or the business? I didn't hear enough of that. And at least in the early keynotes, I'm hearing it more, you know, as the show goes on. But I don't know, Dave, what do you think about what you've heard at the event? >> Well, I'm curious from T-Mobile's perspective, you know when a consumer thinks about 5G, we think of voice, text, and data. And if we think about the 5G network that you already have in place, I'm curious, if you can share this kind of information, what percentage of that's being utilized now? How much is available for the, you know, for the Enterprise G that we're talking about, and maybe, you know, in five years in the future, do you have like a projected mix of consumer use versus all of these back office, call them processes that a consumer's not aware of, but you know the factory floor being connected via 5G, that frontiers that emerges, where are we now and what are you looking towards? Does that make sense? Kind of the mixed question? >> Hand over the business plan! (all laugh) >> Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, I- >> I want numbers Meg, numbers! >> Wow. (Dave and Dave laugh) I'm probably actually not the right person to speak to that. But as you know, T-Mobile has the largest 5G network in North America, and we just say, bring it, right? Let's talk- >> So you got room, you got room for Jillian's stuff? >> Yeah, let's solve >> Well, we can build so many >> business problems together. >> private 5G networks, right? Like I would say like the opportunities are... There's not a limit, right? Because as we build out these private networks, right? We're not on a public network when we're talking about like connecting these massive factories or connecting like a retail store to you and your house to be able to basically continue to try on the clothes remotely, something like that. It's limitless and what we can build- >> So they're related, but they're not necessarily mutually exclusive in the sense that what you are doing in the factory example is going to interfere with my ability to get my data through T-mobile. >> No, no, I- >> These are separated. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Okay. >> As we build out these private networks and these private facilities, and there are so many applications in the consumer space that haven't even been realized yet. Like, when we think about 4G, when 4G launched, there were no applications that needed 4G to run on our cell phones, right? But then the engineers got to work, right? And we ended up with Uber and Instagram stories and all these applications that require 4G to launch. And that's what's going to happen with 5G too, it's like, as the network continues to get built, in the consumer space as well as the enterprise space, there's going to be new applications realized on this is all the stuff that we can do with this amazing network and look how many more devices and look how much faster it is, and the lower latency and the higher bandwidth, and you know, what we can really build. And I think what we're seeing at this show compared to last year is this stuff actually in practice. There was a lot of talk last year, like about, oh, this is what we can build, but now we're building it. And I think that's really key to show that companies like T-Mobile can help the enterprise in this space with cooperation, right? Like, we're not just talking about it now, we're actually putting it into practice. >> So how does it work? If I put in a private network, what are you doing? You slice out a piece of the network and charge me for it and then I get that as part of my private network. How does it actually work for the customer? >> You want to take that one? >> So I was going to say, yeah, you can do a network slice. You can actually physically build a private network, right? It depends, there's so many different ways to engineer it. So I think you can do it either way, basically. >> We just, we don't want it to be scary, right? >> Yep. >> So it starts with having a conversation about the business challenges that you're facing and then backing it into the technology and letting the technology power those solutions. But we don't want it to be scary for people because there's so much buzz around 5G, around edge, and it can be overwhelming and you can feel like you need a PhD in engineering to have a conversation. And we just want to kind of simplify things and talk in your language, not in our language. We'll figure out the tech behind the scenes. Just tell us what problems we can solve together. >> And so many non-technical companies are having to transform, right? Like retail, like manufacturing, that haven't had to be tech companies before. But together with T-Mobile and Dell, we can help enable that and make it not scary like Meg said. >> Right, so you come into my factory, I say, okay, look around. I got all these people there, and they're making hoses and they're physically putting 'em together. And we go and we have to take a physical measurement as to, you know, is it right? And because if we don't do that, then we have to rework it. Okay, now that's a problem. Okay, can you help me digitize that business? I need a network to do that. I'm going to put in some robots to do that. This is, I mean, I'm making this up but this has got to be a common use case, right? >> Yeah. >> So how do you simplify that for the business owner? >> So we start with what we can provide, and then in some cases you need additional solution providers. You might need a robotics company, you might need a sensor company. But we have those contacts to bring that together for you so that you don't have to be the expert in all those things. >> And what do I do with all the data that I'm collecting? Because, you know, I'm not really a data expert. Maybe, you know, I'm good at putting hoses together, but what's the data layer look like here? (all laughing) >> It's a hose business! >> I know! >> Great business. >> Back to the hoses again. >> There's a lot of different things you can do with it, right? You can collect it in a database, you can send it up to a cloud, you can, you know, use an edge device. It depends how we build the network. >> Dave V.: Can you guys help me do that? Can you guys- >> Sure, yeah. >> Help me figure that out. Should I put it into cloud? Should I use this database or that data? What kind of skills do I need? >> And it depends on the size of the network, right? And the size of the business. Like, you know, there's very simple. You don't have to be a massive manufacturer in order to install this stuff. >> No, I'm asking small business questions. >> Yeah. >> Right, I might not have this giant IT team. I might not have somebody who knows how to do ETL and PBA. >> Exactly. And we can talk to you too about what data matters, right? And we can, together, talk about what data might be the most valuable to you. We can talk to you about how we use data. But again, simplifying it down and making it personal to your business. >> Your point about scary is interesting, because no one has mentioned that until you did in four days. Three? Four days. Somebody says, let's do a private 5G network. That sounds like you're offering, you know, it's like, "Hey, you know what we should do Dave? We'll build you a cruise ship." It's like, I don't need a cruise ship, I just want to go bass fishing. >> Right, right, right. >> But in fact, these things are scalable in the sense that it can be scaled down from the trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It needs to be focused on your outcome, right? And not on the tech. >> When I was at the Dell booth I saw this little private network, it was about this big. I'm like, how much is that? I want one of those. (all laugh) >> I'm not the right person to talk about that! >> The little black one? >> Yes. >> I wanted one of those, too! >> I saw it, it had a little case to carry it around. I'm like, that could fit in my business. >> Just take it with you. >> theCUBE could use that! (all laugh) >> Anything that could go in a pelican case, I want. >> It's true. Like, it's so incredibly important, like you said, to focus on outcomes, right? Not just tech for the sake of tech. What's the problem? Let's solve the problem together. And then you're getting the outcome you want. You'll know what data you need. If you know what the problem is, you're like, okay this is the data I need to know if this problem is solved or not. >> So it sounds like 2022 was the year of talking about it. 2023, I'm inferring is the year of seeing it. >> Yep. >> And 2024 is going to be the year of doing it? >> I think we're doing it now. >> We're doing it now. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Yeah, yeah. We're definitely doing it now. >> All right. >> I see a lot of this stuff being put into place and a lot more innovation and a lot more working together. And Meg mentioned working with other partners. No one's going to do this alone. You've got to like, you know, Dell especially, we're focused on open and making sure that, you know, we have the right software partners. We're bringing in smaller players, right? Like ISVs too, as well as like the big software guys. Incredibly, incredibly important. The sensor companies, whatever we need you've got to be able to solve your customer's issue, which in this case, we're looking to help the enterprise together to transform their space. And Dell knows a little bit about the enterprise, so. >> So if we are there in 2023, then I assume 2024 will be the year that each of your companies sets up a dedicated vertical to address the hose manufacturing market. (Meg laughing) >> Oh, the hose manufacturing market. >> Further segmentation is usually a hallmark of the maturity of an industry. >> I got a lead for you. >> Yeah, there you go. >> And that's one thing we've done at Dell, too. We've built like this use case directory to help the service providers understand what, not just say like, oh, you can help manufacturers. Yeah, but how, what are the use cases to do that? And we worked with a research firm to figure out, like, you know these are the most mature, these are the best ROIs. Like to really help hone in on exactly what we can deploy for 5G and edge solutions that make the most sense, not only for service providers, right, but also for the enterprises. >> Where do you guys want to see this partnership go? Give us the vision. >> To infinity and beyond. To 5G! (Meg laughing) To 5G and beyond. >> I love it. >> It's continuation. I love that we're partnering together. It's incredibly important to the future of the business. >> Good deal. >> To bring the strengths of both together. And like Jillian said, other partners in the ecosystem, it has to be approached from a partnership perspective, but focused on outcomes. >> Jillian: Yep. >> To 5G and beyond. I love it. >> To 5G and beyond. >> Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson, keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE. Go to silliconANGLE.com. John Furrier is banging out all the news. theCUBE.net has all the videos. We're live at the Fira in Barcelona, MWC23. We'll be right back. (uplifting electronic music)

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

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

>>Good morning friends. Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube Day four of our coverage of AWS. Reinvent continues. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. You >>Can tell it's day four. Yeah. >>You can tell, you >>Get punchy. >>Did you? Yes. Did you know that the Vegas rodeo is coming into town? I'm kind of bummed down, leaving tonight. >>Really? You rodeo >>Fan this weekend? No, but to see a bunch of cowboys in Vegas, >>I'd like to see the Raiders. I'd like to see the Raiders get tickets. >>Yeah. And the hockey team. Yeah. We have had an amazing event, Dave. The cubes. 10th year covering reinvent 11th. Reinvent >>Our 10th year here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean we covered remotely in during Covid, but >>Yes, yes, yes. Awesome content. Anything jump out at you that we really, we, we love talking to aws, the ecosystem. We got a customer next. Anything jump out at you that's really a kind of a key takeaway? >>Big story. The majority of aws, you know, I mean people ask me what's different under a Adam than under Andy. And I'm like, really? It's the maturity of AWS is what's different, you know, ecosystem, connecting the dots, moving towards solutions, you know, that's, that's the big thing. And it's, you know, in a way it's kind of boring relative to other reinvents, which are like, oh wow, oh my god, they announced outposts. So you don't see anything like that. It's more taking the platform to the next level, which is a good >>Thing. The next level it is a good thing. Speaking of next level, we have a couple of next level guests from T-Mobile joining us. We're gonna be talking through their customers story, their business transformation with aws. Glenn Curing joins us, the director product and technology. And Nick Chris, senior manager, product and technology guys. Welcome. Great to have you on brand. You're on T-Mobile brand. I love it. >>Yeah, >>I mean we are always T-Mobile. >>I love it. So, so everyone knows T-Mobile Blend, you guys are in the digital commerce domain. Talk to us about what that is, what functions that delivers for T-Mobile. Yeah, >>So the digital commerce domain operates and runs a platform called the Digital commerce platform. What this essentially does, it's a set of APIs that are headless that power the shopping experiences. When you talk about shopping experiences at T-Mobile, a customer comes to either a T-Mobile website or goes to a store. And what they do is they start with the discovery process of a phone. They take it through the process, they decide to purchase the phone day at, at the phone to cart, and then eventually they decide to, you know, basically pull the trigger and, and buy the phone at, at which point they submit the order. So that whole experience, essentially from start to finish is powered by the digital commerce platform. Just this year we have processed well over three and a half million orders amounting to a billion and a half dollars worth of business for T-Mobile. >>Wow. Big outcomes. Nick, talk about the before stage, obviously the, the customer experience is absolutely critical because if, if it goes awry, people churn. We know that and nobody wants, you know, brand reputation is is at stake. Yep. Talk about some of the challenges before that you guys faced and how did you work with AWS and part its partner ecosystem to address those challenges? >>Sure. Yeah. So actually before I started working with Glen on the commerce domain, I was part of T-Mobile's cloud team. So we were the team that kind of brought in AWS and commerce platform was really the first tier one system to go a hundred percent cloud native. And so for us it was very much a learning experience and a journey to learn how to operate on the cloud and which was fundamentally different from how we were doing things in the old on-prem days. When >>You talk about headless APIs, you talk, I dunno if you saw Warren a Vogel's keynote this morning, but you're talking about loosely coupled, a loosely coupled system that you can evolve without ripping out the whole system or without bringing the whole system down. Can you explain that in a little bit more >>Detail? Absolutely. So the concept of headless API exactly opens up that possibility. What it allows us to do is to build and operator platform that runs sort of loosely coupled from the user experiences. So when you think about this from a simplistic standpoint, you have a set of APIs that are headless and you've got the website that connects to it, the retail store applications that connect to it, as well as the customer care applications that connect to it. And essentially what that does is it allows us to basically operate all these platforms without being sort of tightly coupled to >>Each other. Yeah, he was talking about this morning when, when AWS announced s3, you know, there was just a handful of services maybe at just two or three. I think now there's 200 and you know, it's never gone down, it's never been, you know, replaced essentially. And so, you know, the whole thing was it's an asynchronous system that's loosely coupled and then you create that illusion of synchronicity for the customer. >>Exactly. >>Which was, I thought, you know, really well described, but maybe you guys could talk about what the genesis was for this system. Take us kind of to the, from the before or after, you know, the classic as as was and the, and as is. Did you talk about that? >>Yeah, I can start and then hand it off to Nick for some more details. So we started this journey back in 2016 and at that point T-Mobile had seven or eight different commerce platforms. Obviously you can think about the complexity involved in running and operating platforms. We've all talked about T-Mobile being the uncarrier. It's a brand that we have basically popularized in the telco industry. We would come out with these massive uncarrier moves and every time that announcement was made, teams have to scramble because you've got seven systems, seven teams, every single system needs to be updated, right? So that's where we started when we kicked off this transformational journey over time, essentially we have brought it down to one platform that supports all these experiences and what that allows us to do is not only time to market gets reduced immensely, but it also allows us to basically reduce our operational cost. Cuz we don't have to have teams running seven, eight systems. It's just one system with one team that can focus on making it a world class, you know, platform. >>Yeah, I think one of the strategies that definitely paid off for us, cuz going all the way back to the beginning, our little platform was powering just a tiny little corner of the, of the webspace, right? But even in those days we approached it from we're gonna build functions in a way that is sort of agnostic to what the experience is gonna be. So over time as we would build a capability that one particular channel needed primary, we were still thinking about all the other channels that needed it. So now over a few years that investment pays off and you have basically the same capabilities working in the same way across all the channels. >>When did the journey start? >>2016. >>2016, yeah. It's been, it's been six years. >>What are some of the game changers in, in this business transformation that you would say these are some of the things that really ignited our transformation? >>Yeah, there's particularly one thing that we feel pretty proud about, which is the fact that we now operate what we call active active stacks. And what that means is you've got a single stack of the eCommerce platform start to finish that can run in an independent manner, but we can also start adding additional stacks that are basically loosely coupled from each other but can, but can run to support the business. What that basically enables is it allows us to run in active active mode, which itself is a big deal from a system uptime perspective. It really changes the game. It allows us to push releases without worrying about any kind of downtime. We've done canary releases, we are in the middle of retail season and we can introduce changes without worrying about it. And more importantly, I think what it has also allowed us to do is essentially practice disaster recovery while doing a release. Cuz that's exactly what we do is every time we do a release we are switching between these separate stacks and essentially are practicing our DR strategy. >>So you do this, it's, it's you separate across regions I presume? Yes. Is that right? Yes. This was really interesting conversation because as you well know in the on-prem world, you never tested that disaster recovery was too risky because you're afraid you're gonna take your whole business down and you're essentially saying that the testing is fundamental to the implementation. >>Absolutely. >>It, it is the thing that you do for every release. So you know, at least every week or so you are doing this and you know, in the old world, the active passive world on paper you had a bunch of capabilities and in in incidents that are even less than say a full disaster recovery scenario, you would end up making the choice not to use that capability because there was too much complexity or risk or problem. When we put this in place. Now if I, I tell people everything we do got easier after that. >>Is it a challenge for you or how do you deal with the challenge? Correct me if it's not a, a challenge that sometimes Amazon services are not available in both regions. I think for instance, the observability thing that they just announced this week is it's not cross region or maybe I'm getting that wrong, but there are services where, you know, you might not be able to do data sharing across region. How do you manage that? Or maybe there's different, you know, levels of certifications. How do you manage that discontinuity or is that not an issue for you? >>Yeah, I mean it, it is certainly a concern and so the stacks, like Glen said, they are largely decoupled and that what that means is practically every component and there's a lot of lot of components in there. I have redundancy from an availability zone point of view. But then where the real magic happens is when you come in as a user to the stack, we're gonna initially kind of lock you on one stack. And then the key thing that we do is we, we understand the difference between what, what we would call the critical data. So think of like your shopping carts and then contextual data that we can relatively easily reload if we need to. And so that critical data is constantly in an async fashion. So it's not interrupting your performance, being broadcast out to a place where we can recover it if we need to, if we need to send you to another stack and then we call that dehydration. And if you end up getting bumped to a new stack, we rehydrate you on that stack and reload that, that contextual data. So to make that whole thing happen, we rely on something we call the global cart store and that's basically powered by Dynamo. So Dynamo is highly, highly reliable and multi >>Reason. So, and, and presume you're doing some form of server list for the stateless stuff and, and maybe taking control of the run time for the stateful things you, are you leaning into to servers and lambda or Not yet cuz you want control over the, the, the EC two and the memory configs. What, what's, I mean, I know we're going inside the plumbing a little bit, but it's kind of fun. >>That's always fun. You >>Went Yeah, and, and it has been a journey. Back in 2016 when we started, we were all on EC twos and across, you know, over the last three or four years we have kind of gone through that journey where we went from easy two to, to containers and we are at some point we'll get to where we will be serverless, we've got a few functions running. But you know, in that journey, I think when you look at the full end of the spectrum, we are somewhere towards the, the process of sort of going from, you know, containers to, to serverless. >>Yeah. So today your team is setting up the containers, they're fencing 'em off, fencing off the app and doing all that sort of sort of semi heavy lifting. Yeah. How do you deal with the, you know, this is one of the things Lisa, you and I were talking about is the skill sets. We always talk about this. What's that? What's your team look like and what are the skill sets that you've got that you're deploying? >>Yeah, I mean, as you can imagine, it's a challenge and it's a, a highly specialized skill set that you need. And you talk about cloud, you know, I, I tell developers when we bring new folks in, in the old days, you could just be like really good at Java and study that for and be good at that for decades. But in the cloud world, you have to be wide in, in your breadth. And so you have to understand those 200 services, right? And so one of the things that really has helped us is we've had a partner. So UST Global is a digital services company and they've really kind of been on the journey up the same timeline that we were. And I had worked with them on the cloud team, you know, before I came to commerce. And when I came to, to the commerce team, we were really struggling, especially from that operational perspective. >>The, the team was just not adapting to that new cloud reality. They were used to the on-prem world, but we brought these folks in because not only were they really able to understand the stuff, but they had built a lot of the platforms that we were gonna be leveraging for commerce with us on the cloud team. So for example, we have built, T-Mobile operates our own customized Kubernetes platform. We've done some stuff for serverless development, C I C D, cloud security. And so not only did these folks have the right skill sets, but they knew how we were approaching it from a T-mobile cloud perspective. And so it's kind of kind of fun to see, you know, when they came on board with this journey with us, we were both, both companies were relatively new and, and learning. Now I look and, you know, I I think that they're like a, a platinum sponsor these days here of aws and so it's kind of cool to see how we've all grown together, >>A lot of evolution, a lot of maturation. Glen, I wanna know from you when we're almost out of time here, but tell me the what the digital commerce domain, you kind of talked about this in the beginning, but I wanna know what's the value in it for me as a customer? All of this under the hood plumbing? Yeah, the maturation, the transformation. How does it benefit mean? >>Great question. So as a customer, all they care about is coming into, going to the website, walking into a store, and without spending too much time completed that transaction and walkout, they don't care about what's under the hood, right? So this transformational journey from, you know, like I talked about, we started with easy twos back in the day. It was what we call the wild west in the, on a cloud native platform to where we have reached today. You know, the journey we have collectively traversed with the USD has allowed us to basically build a system that allows a customer to walk into a store and not spend a whole hour dealing with a sales rep that's trying to sell them things. They can walk in and out quickly, they go to the website, literally within a couple minutes they can complete the transaction and leave. That's what customers want. It is. And that has really sort of helped us when you think about T-Mobile and the fact that we are now poised to be a leader in the US in telco at this whole concept of systems that really empower the customers to quickly complete their transaction has been one of the key components of allowing us to kind of make that growth. Right. So >>Right. And a big driver of revenue. >>Exactly. >>I have one final question for each of you. We're making a Instagram reel, so think about if you had 30 seconds to describe T-Mobile as a technology company that sells phones or a technology company that delights people, what, what would you say if you had a billboard, what would it say about that? Glen, what do you think? >>So T-Mobile, from a technology company perspective, the, the whole purpose of setting up T-mobile's, you know, shopping experience is about bringing customers in, surprising and delighting them with the frictionless shopping experiences that basically allow them to come in and complete the transaction and move on with their lives. It's not about keeping them in the store for too long when they don't want to do it. And essentially the idea is to just basically surprise and delight our customers. >>Perfect. Nick, what would you say, what's your billboard about T-Mobile as a technology company that's delivering great services to its customers? >>Yeah, I think, you know, Glen really covered it well. What I would just add to that is I think the way that we are approaching it these days, really starting from that 2016 period is we like to say we don't think of ourselves as a telco company anymore. We think of ourselves as a technology company that happens to do telco among other things, right? And so we've approached this from a point of view of we're here to provide the best possible experience we can to our customers and we take it personally when, when we don't reach that high bar. And so what we've done in the last few years as a transformation is really given us the toolbox that we need to be able to meet that promise. >>Awesome. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on the program, talking about the transformation of T-Mobile. Great to hear what you're doing with aws, the maturation, and we look forward to having you back on to see what's next. Thank you. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and Dave Ante, I'm Lisa Martin, you watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE presents UiPath FORWARD5 brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody you're watching theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD5. We're here at the Venetian Convention Center Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson this morning. Dave, we heard these boomers, these thunder boomers. We thought it was the sound system. (Dave laughing) >> Thought it was something fake. >> But it was actually some crazy weather out here in Vegas. It's rare to see that kind of nuttiness out here. John Morrison is the director of Product and Technology at T-Mobile and Naga Chakravarthy is the Chief Digital Officer at iOpex. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> Next, so John, (commentator booming) so okay, we're serving automation. I don't know if you guys can hear that S0 let's just give him a second here. >> (Commentator) Three different tracks >> I think it's pretty loud. Probably coming through. Usually we don't get that. >> It's live. >> But, it is live. So John, we, we've interviewed a lot of customers that have automation in their title. Your title's, Director of product and technology. Obviously you're here 'cause you have an affinity to automation. But talk about your role and how automation fits into it. >> Sure. Well, I'm the director of product and technology and I oversee what we call the communication, collaboration and productivity applications and services for T-Mobile. Reason I'm here is we took over the automation program and automation is falling within to our productivity portfolio. So I'm here to learn about, from these experts and all these leaders within the UiPath and from our vendors as well. >> Okay. Now tell us about iOpex. So kind of an interesting name. Where'd that come from? I think cloud. When I think opex, but, get rid of my cap. Where's the name come from and what do you guys do? >> Actually we thought hard about what to name about 13 years back. You know, I think all of us, the whole team comes from a service background and then I think we believe that you need to have people and as a lot of operational activities were increasing, you know the dependency on people was also increasing. And we thought that there has to be an angle for us to be very unique in the market. So we thought, you know, I would say iOpex is currently at 3.0 and if you look at what 1.0 was, it's all about driving innovation in operation excellence, right? And the medium was technology. And today, if you ask me from operation excellence that is the base, we are actually looking at how do you drive innovation in operating experiences. That's where automation and all these things becomes very native to us. >> So the market just went right, right to you guys you were ahead of the game. And then, wow, now, >> I have to brag that we fortunately named it Opex, which can be interchangeably used for operation excellence or operating experience. >> Got it. >> So, so John, where did, where did it start? What was the catalyst for your automation journey? How did, was it the, was it the, the merger? Take us through that. >> Sure. So I look at our automation journey, like a crawl, walk, run journey for sure. It started with the partnership of UiPath and iOpex. We had an innovation lab. They came, they set up a proof of concept. Proof of concept was successful. I was then asked to build out an automation program for the T-mobile enterprise. Not having any experience within automation as we had discussed before usually you have automation within the title. We leaned heavily on our partners iOpex being main critical partner in that evolution. And so iOpex came in and helped us build that center of excellence and really helped us put that support team together so that we could be successful as we moved forward. Now, when we had both of those in place, we were able to go to the businesses and find opportunities and showcase what automation was all about. The problem is we were so green is that, you know, we'd go and we'd look at an opportunity, but that opportunity we'd deliver and then our pipeline would be empty and we'd have to go look for other opportunities. So we really had to present and get that executive sponsorship of automation for the enterprise. And I'm going to do a few shoutouts here. Giao Duong, John Lowe and our CIO Brian King, were critical in giving us what we needed to be successful. They gave us the expertise, the funds to do what we needed to, to build out this program. We utilized iOpex, UiPath to really get that expertise in place. And today, our pipeline, we have about 300,000 manual hours of labor savings that we'll deploy by the end of the year. That's a huge success. And that's where we're at right now. The run part of it is going to be, I'll wait. >> Wait. No, it's okay. So you went, you went from hunting to fishing in a barrel? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So the, our next is focused on citizen development, building out that citizen development program, where we will be partnering with UiPath and iOpex to get that in place. And once we have that in place I feel like we're going to be ready to run and we'll see that program just kick off. But like I said before, 300,000 hours of savings in the first year of that program. That's incredible. And we're a large company and we'll, I mean we're just starting so it's going to be fun. >> So many questions. So Naga, is the COE where people typically start or is it sometimes a grassroot effort and then the COE comes later? How do you typically recommend approaching it? >> I think the fact that we started very small there was a clear mandate that we have to take a very strategic approach while we are solving a tactical problem to show that automation is the future and you need to solve using automation, right? And we not only looked at it just from a task automation standpoint, we were starting to look at it from a process, entire end to end process automation. And when we started looking at it, though we were tactically automating it, COE naturally fell in place. So, which means you need to evangelize this across multiple departments. So when you have to have, when you have to have evangelize across multiple departments, what is very important is you need to have the pod leaders identified let's say if you have to go to different departments it is somebody from John's team who's very capable of navigating through different departments' problem statements and how when you, when you navigate it you can rightly evangelize what is the benefit. And when it comes to benefit, right? You need to look at it from both the angles of operation excellence and what is it going to do from a growth standpoint of solving a future problem. So somebody internally within T-Mobile we were able to use very nice, you know John's team, you know, the COE naturally fell in place. All of them were at some point in time doing automation. And slowly it was a path that they took to evangelize and we were able to piggyback and scale it bigger. >> So in the world we're in, whether you're talking about cloud services that are created by hyper scale cloud providers or automation platforms from UiPath, between those shiny toys and what we want to accomplish with them in the world of business and everything else there are organizations like iOpex and you and John are working together to figure out which projects need to be done in a strategic, from a strategic viewpoint but you're also addressing them tactically. I'm curious, >> Yeah. >> How does that business model from an iOpex perspective work do you have people embedded at T-Mobile that are working with John and his folks to identify the next things to automate? Is it a, is it, where is the push and where is the pull coming from in terms of, okay now what do we do next? Because look, let's be frank, in the, from a business perspective, iOpex wants to do as much as it can a value for T-mobile because that's what, that's the business they're in. But, so tell me about that push pull between the two of you. Does that make sense? Yeah, So I'll say real fast that, yeah iOpex is actually part of the T-mobile team. They are embedded. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> We work with them daily. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> Right. They had the expertise they're passing along the expertise to our full-time employees. And so it's like we're all one team. So that should answer that one for sure there. >> Absolutely. Let me add one more point to it. See if, you know, I think with respect to T-Mobile I would say it's a little bit of a special case for us. Why I say that is, when we started the whole conversation of we need to drive automation with you there was a natural way to get embedded, you know as part of their team. Normally what happens is a team, a COE team works and say I will do the discovery and you guys can come and do the solution design. That was not the case, right? I think it was such a strategic investment that T-Mobile made on us, right? We were part of the discovery team. So, which means that we were able to take all the best practices that we learned from outside and openness to accept and start looking at it what's in it for us for the larger good that made us to get to what we call it as building a solution factory for T-Mobile. >> Vellante: I got a lot of questions. >> John: Yeah. >> John, you mentioned your CIO and a couple of other constituents. >> Yes. >> What part of the organization were they from? They helped you with funding, >> Yep. >> And maybe sort of gave you a catalyst. How did this all get funded? If I, if you could, Cause a lot of people ask me well how do I fund this thing? Does it fund itself? Do I do, is it an IT driven initiative line of business? >> So those executives were from the IT team. >> Vellante: Okay. For sure. But a lot of our programs start from grassroots ground up and you know a lot of vendors say, hey, you need it from the top down. This was a perfect example of getting it from the top down. We were working it, it was fine, but it wouldn't have taken off if we didn't have, you know, Brian King and John Lowe providing us that executive sponsorship, going to their peers and telling them about the program and giving us the opportunity to showcase what automation can do. >> How do you choose, I got so many questions I'm going to go rapid fire. How do you choose your automation priorities? Is it process driven? Is it data led? What's the right approach? >> I think it's a combination, right? One fundamentally guiding principle that we always look at is let it not be a task automation, right? Task automation solves a particular problem, but maybe you know, if you start looking at it from a bigger, you need to start looking at it from process angle. And when it comes to process, right? There are a lot of things that gets executed in the systems of record, in the form of workflow. And there's a lot of things that gets executed outside the systems of record, which is in people's mind. That's when data comes in, right? So let's say you use process mining tool of UiPath, you will get to know that there is a bottleneck in a particular process because it's cluttered somewhere. But you also have to look at why is this clutter happening, and you need to start collecting data. So a combination of a data science as well as a process science blends together. And that's when you'll start deciding, hey this is repetitive in nature, this is going to scale, this is an optimization problem. And then you build a scorecard and that scorecard naturally drives the, you know decision making process. Hey, it's going to drive operation excellence problem for me or is it going to be a true business benefit of driving growth? >> So I was going to ask you how you visualize it. You visualize it through, I guess, understanding of the organization, anecdotal comments, research digging, peeling the onion, and then you do some kind of scorecard like approach and say, okay these are the high, high opportunity areas. Okay. So combination. Got it. How about change management? Because Dave, you and I were talking about this before, big organizations that I know they have IT, they got an application portfolio. That application portfolio the applications have dependencies on each other. And then they have a process portfolio that is also related. So any change in process ripples through the applications. Any change in application affects other applications and affects processes. So how do you handle change management? >> So we actually have a change management team and we make sure that before we go forward with anything it's communicated what changes would be in place. And this change management team also does communications broadly for any of our applications, not just automation. So they partner close with iOpex, with our development teams on opportunities that are going out. You want to add anything? >> Yeah. So when it comes to change management, right? Well, John is front-ending all the changes relating to apps and stuff like that by having a steering committee, what really is the proactive thing that we end up doing is right when a bot goes live, there is a life support that we provide for the entire bot that's gone live. And the fundamentally core principle for that entire support to work good is you start looking at what's the benefit that the bot is giving more than that when a bot fails. Right? Why is the bot failing? Is it because the systems of records on which the bot is running? Is it that is failing? Or the inputs that is coming to the systems of record the data format, is it changing or the bot logic is failed? And once we set up a constant monitoring about that we were able to throw insights into the change management team saying that the bot failed because of various reasons. And that kind of compliments the whole change management process. And we get earlier notifications saying, hey there's going to be changes. So which means we go proactively look at, hey, okay fair enough, this systems of records, this data is going to change. Can we test this out in staging before you hit the production? So that way the change becomes a smoother process. >> And how quickly can you diagnose that? Is it hours, minutes, days, weeks, months? >> So, >> Vellante: Depends. >> It's a very subjective question. Right. If we know the pattern early then the SWAT team quickly gets into it and figure out how we could stop something, you know, stop the bot from failing. The moment the bot fails, you know, you need to basically look at how the business is going to going to get affected. But we try to do as much as we could. >> So Naga, I'm going to put you on the spot here. >> Please. >> As a partner of UiPath, this question of platform versus product. In order to scale and survive and thrive into the future UiPath needs to be able to demonstrate that it's more than a tool set, but instead a platform. What's your view on that in general? What differentiates a platform from a product? Does it matter to your organization whether UiPath moves in the direction of platform or not? >> I think, it is, it's undoubtedly platform, right? And a platform in my mind will constantly evolve. And once you think about it as a platform you will end up having a lot of plug and place. If you look at the way UiPath is evolving it is evolving as a platform. It used to be attended bot and unattended bot and plugged with Orchestrator. And if you look at it, the problem of solving the up chain and the down chain naturally came in process mining, task capture, made it up chain, a platform that solves the up chain. And then it slowly evolved into, hey I'm actually doing business process automation. Why could I not do test automation with the same skillset? So a platform will try to look at what is that, you know I've got in myself and how can I reuse across the enterprise? I think that is deeply embedded in the UiPath culture. And that's the kind of platform that, you know anybody like a system integrator like us, we do not have to multi-skill people. You just have to skill in one and you can interchange. That I would say is a good approach. >> So John, what's the future look like? What's the organization's appetite for automation? You know, is there an all you could eat kind of enterprise license approach? >> John: Yeah, so we are enterprise license. >> You are? Okay. >> So, and iOpex helped us move to the cloud so we can move quickly. That was definitely a benefit. The future of it, I would say citizen development is going to be key. Like I want citizen development within every business organization. I want them to be able to discover, deploy, you know, and and just use us, the center of excellence as support as needed. The appetite's there. Every group has automation within their goals or KPIs right? So it's there. We just need to be able to get in front of 'em. It's a large company. So I'm, '23 is going to be huge for us. >> Another fantastic story. I love that UiPath brings the customers to theCUBE. So thank you guys for telling your story. Congratulations on all your success. Good luck in the future. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> All right. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson UiPath FORWARD5. The bots are running around Dave. We're going to have to get one of the bots to come up here and show people a lot of fun at FORWARD. We're here in Vegas, right back, right after this short break.

>> Okay. We're back here. theCube and all the action here in Mobile World Congress, cloud city, I'm John ferry, host of the cube. We've got a great remote interviews. Of course, it's a hybrid event here in the cube. And of course, cloud city's bringing all the physical face-to-face and we're going to get the remote interviews. Peter Adderton, founder, chairman, CEO of Mobile X Global. Nicholas Gerrard, founder and CEO of OxyGo. Gentlemen, thank you for coming in remotely onto the cube here in the middle of cloud city. You missed Bon Jovi last night, he was awesome. The little acoustic unplugged and all the action. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right, Peter and Nicholas, if you don't mind, just take a quick 30 seconds to set the table on what you guys do, your business and your focus here at Mobile World Congress. >> So I'll jump in quickly. Being the Australian, I'll go first, but just quick by way of background, I founded a company called Boost Mobile, which is one of the, is now the fourth largest mobile brand in, in America. And I spent a lot of time managing effort in that, in that space and now launching Mobile X, which is kind of the first cloud AI platform that we're going to build for mobile. >> Awesome. Nicholas. >> So I'm a founder of a company called, Ox Fuel where we do is basically a telecommunity service platform for brands to basically incorporate telecom as part of their services and learn from their customers through what we call a telecom business intelligence. So basically making sense of the telecom data to improve their business across retail, financial services or in-demand economy. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for the setup. Peter, I want to ask you first, if you don't mind, the business models in the telecom area is really becoming, not just operate, but build and build new software enabled software defined just cloud-based software. And this has been a change in mindset, not so much a change so much in the actual topologies per se, or the actual investments, but as a change in personnel. What's your take on this whole cloud powering the change in the future of telco? >> Well, I think you've got to look at where the telcos have come from in order to understand where they're going in the future. And where they've come from is basically using other people's technology to try to create a differentiation. And I think that that's the struggle that they're going to have. They talk about wanting to convert themselves from telcos into techcos. I just think it's a leap too far for the carriers to do that. So I think we're going to see, you know, them pushing 5G, which you see they're doing out there right now. Then they start talking about open rand and cloud and, and at the end of the day, all they want to do is basically sell you a plan, give you a phone attached to that and try to make as much money out of you as they possibly can. And they disguise that basically in the whole technology 5G open rand discussion, but they really, I don't think care. And at the end of the day, I don't think the consumers care, their model isn't built around technology. The model is built around selling your data and, and that's their fundamental principle and how they do that. And I've seen them go through from 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. Every G we see come out has a promise of something new and incredible. But what we basically get is a data plan with the minutes. Right? >> Yeah, yeah I totally right on. And I think we're going to get into the whole edge piece of what that's going to open up when you start thinking about what, what the capabilities are and this new stakeholders who are going to have an interest in the trillions of dollars on the table right now, up for grabs. But Nicholas wanted to get to you on this whole digital-first thing, because one of the things we've been saying on theCube and interviewing folks and riffing on is: If digital drives more value and there's new use cases that are going to bring on, that's going to enabled by software. There's now new stakeholders coming and saying, Hey, you know what? I need more than just a pipe. I need more than just the network. I need to actually run healthcare. I need to run education on the edge. These are now industrial and consumer related use cases. I mean, this is software. This is where software and apps shine. So cloud native can enable that. So what's your take on the industry as they start to wake up and say, holy shit, this is going to be pretty massive when you look at what's coming. Not so much what's going to be replatformed, but what's coming. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's where I kind join Peter on this. There's been pretty significant, heavy innovation on the carrier side for, you know, if you think about it 30 years or so of like just reselling plans effectively, which is a virtual slice of the network that built. And all of a sudden they started competing against, you know, the heavyweights on the internet. We had, putting the bar really high in terms of, you know, latency in terms of expectation, in terms of APIs, right? We've we've heard about telecom APIs for 15 years, right? It's- nothing comes close to what you could get if you start building on top of a Stripe or a Google. So I think, it's going to be hard for a lot of those companies. What we do with our show is we try to bridge that gap. Right, we try to build on top of their infrastructure to be able to expose modern APIs, to be able to open up a programmatic interface so that innovators like Peter's are able to actually really take the user experience forward and start, building those specialized businesses across healthcare, financial services, and whatnot. >> Yeah, David Blanca and I were on the, on theCube yesterday talking about how Snowflake, a company that basically sits on top of Amazon built almost nothing on the infrastructure. Built on top of it and was successful. Peter, this is a growth thing. One of the things I want to get your thoughts on is you've had experiences in growing companies. How do you look at the growth coming into this market, Peter, because you know, you got to have new opportunities coming in. It's a growth play too. It's not just take share from someone. It's net new capabilities. >> Yeah. Here's the issue you've got with the wireless industry is that there's only a very few amount of them that actually have that last mile covered. So if you're going to build something on top of it, you're going to have to deal with the carrier, and the carrier as out of like a duopoly slash monopoly, because without their access to their network, you're not going to be able to do these incredible things. So I think we've got a real challenge there where you're going to have to get the carriers to innovate. Now you've got the CEO of Deutsche Telekom coming out yesterday saying that the OTT players aren't paying their fair share. Right, and I sit back and go, well, hang on. You're selling data to customers who basically are using that data to use apps and OTT. And now he's saying, well, they should pay as well. So not only the consumer pay, but now the OTT players should pay. It's a mixed message. So what you're going to have to do, and what we're going to have to do as a, as a growth industry is we're going to have to allow it to grow. And the only way to do that is that the carriers are going to have to have better access, allow more access to their networks, as Nico said, let the APIs has become more available. I just think that that's a leap too far. So I think we're going to be handicapped in our growth based on these carriers. And it's going to take regulators and it's going to take innovation and consumers demanding carriers, do it, otherwise, you know, you're still going to deal with the three carriers in your world. >> Yeah, That's interesting about- I was just talking to Danielle Royce, the DR here at TelcoDR. And she said, I was talking about ORAN and there's more infrastructure than needed. She said, oh, it's more software. I don't disagree with her. I do agree with it. But I also think that the ORAN points to, Nicholas, kind of this idea that there's more surface area to be had on the scale side. So standardizing hardware creates a lower fixed cost, so you can get some cost reduction. And then with standardized software, you get more enablement for hardened openness. I mean, open source is already proven. You can still be secure. And obviously Cloud was once said, could never be secure and most, is probably more secure than anything. What's your take on this whole ORAN commodity standardization mission- efforts? >> I think it's a, I mean, it goes along to the second phase, right? Of what the differentiation in telecom was, you know. Early on, specialized boxes that are very expensive. You know, that you, you, you, you get from a few vendors, then you have the transition over to a software. We lower the price, as you were mentioning. It can run on off the shelf hardware. And then we're in the transition, which is what Danielle is, is evangelizing, right. Transition towards the cloud and specifically the public cloud, because there's no such thing as a private cloud really. And, and so up and running is just another, another piece where you can make the Legos connect better effectively and just have more flexibility. And generally the, the, the game here is to also break the agenda when you- from, from the vendors, right? Because now you have a standard, so you don't necessarily need to buy the entire stack from, from the same vendors. You have a lot more flexibility. You know, you've probably followed the same debate that we've all seen, right. With a push against Huawei, for instance. Th-this is extremely hard for an operator, to start ripping out an entire vendor, because most of the time, they, they own the entire stack. But something like ORAN, now you can start mixing and matching with different vendors, but generally this is also a trend that's going to accelerate the move towards the public cloud. >> That's awesome. Peter, I want to get your thoughts because you're basically building on the cloud. And if you don't mind chime it in to kind of end the segment on this one point. People are trying to really get their minds around what refactoring means. And we've been saying, and talking about, you know, the three phases of, of waking up to the world. Reset your business, or reboot. Replatform to the cloud, and then refactor, which means take advantage of cloud enabled things, whether it's AI and other things. But first get on the platform, understand the economics, and then replatform. So the question, Peter, we'll start with you. What does refactoring actually mean and look like in a successful future execution or playbook? Can you share your thoughts, because this is what people want to get to because that's where the value will come from. That's where the iteration gets you. What's your take on this refactoring? >> Yeah, yeah. So I always, I mean, we're in the consumer business, so I'm always about what is the difference going to make for the consumer? So, whether you're, and when you look at refactoring and you look at what's happening in the space. Is what is the difference that's going to, what are the consumers going to see that's different and are they willing to pay for that? And so we can strip away the technical layers and we all get caught up in the industry with these buzzwords and terms, and we get, and at the end of the day, when it moves to the consumer, the consumer just sits there and says, so what's the value? How much am I paying? And so what we're trying to do at MobileX is, we're trying to use the cloud and we're trying to use kind of innovation into create a better experience for the consumer. One way to do that is to basically help the customer, understand their usage patents. You know, right now today, they don't understand that. Right if I asked you how much you paid for your mobile bill, you will tell me my cell phone bill is $150, but I'm going to ask you the next question How much data do you use? You go, I don't know, right? >> John: unlimited. >> And then I'd say why am I started- well you'd say limited, right. I will go. I'd go, I don't know. So I sit back and go, most customers are like you. You're basically paying for a service that you have no clear, no idea what you're getting. And it's designed by the carriers to scare you into thinking you need it. So I think we've got to get away from the buzzwords that we use as an industry and just dumb that down to what, what does that mean for a consumer? And I think that the cloud is going to allow us to create some very unique ways for consumers to interact with their device and their usage of that device. And I think that that's the holy grail for me. >> Yeah. That's a great point. And it's worth calling out because I think if the cloud can get you a 10X value at, at a reduction in costs compared to the competition, that's one benefit that people will pay for. And the other one is just, Hey, that's really cool. I want I'll, I value that, that's a valuable thing. I'll pay for it. So it's interesting that the cloud scale there, it's just a good mindset. >> Yeah. So it's always, I always like say to people, you know, I've spoken a lot to the Dish guys about what open rand is going to do and I keep saying to them, so what's the value that I'm going to get from a consumer. And they'll say, oh it's flexible pricing plans. They're now starting to talk about, okay, what the end product is of this technology. You look at ECM, right? ECM has been around for a long time. It's only now that we're to see ECM technology, get enabled. The carriers fought that for a long, long time. So there's a monumental shift that needs to take place. And it's in the four or five carriers in our counties. >> Awesome. Nicholas, what's your take on refactoring? Obviously, you know, you've got APIs, you've got all this cool software enabled. How do you get to refactoring and how do you execute through that? >> I mean, it's a little bit of a, what Peter was saying as well, right? There's the, the advantage of that point is to be, you know, all our stuff basically lives in the cloud, right. So it's opportunity to, to get that closer, you know, just having better latency, making sure that, you know, you're not losing your, your photos and your data as you lose your phone and yep. Just bet- better access in general. I, I think ultimately like the, the push to the cloud right now is it's mostly just a cost reduction. The back tick, as far as the carriers are concerned, right. They don't necessarily see how they can build that break. And then from there start interacting with the rest of the OTT world and, and, you know, Netflix is built on Amazon and companies like that, right? Like, so as you're able to get closer as a carrier to that cloud where the data lives, this is also just empowering better digital experience. >> Yeah I think that's where the that's, the proof point will be there, as they say, that's where the rubber will meet the road or proof is in the pudding, whatever expression. Once they get to that cost reduction, if they can wake up to that, whoa we can actually do something better here and make m- or if they don't someone else will. Right. That's the whole point. So, final question as we wrap up, ecosystem changeover. Lot more ecosystem action. I mean, there's a lot of vendors here at Mobile Congress, but real quick, Peter, Nicholas, your take on the future of ecosystem around this new telco. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I look, I mean, it, it, again, it keeps coming back to, to, to where I say that consumers have driven all the ecosystems that have ever existed. And when I say consumers also to IOT as well, right? So it's not just the B to C it's also B to B. So look to the consumer and look to the business to see what pain points you can solve. And that will create the ecosystems. None of us bet on Uber, none of us bet on Airbnb. Otherwise we'd all be a lot richer than we are today. So none of us took that platform- and by the way, we've been in mobile and wireless and any kind of that space smartphone space for a long time. And we will miss those applications. And if you ask a CEO today of a telco, what's the 5G killer application, that's going to send 5G into the next atmosphere, they can't answer the question. They'll talk about drones and robotic surgeries and all things that basically will never have any value to a consumer at the end of the day. So I think we've got to go back to the consumer and that's where my focus is and say, how do we make their lives better? And that will create the ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, they go for the low hanging fruit. Low latency and, and whatnot. But yeah, let's, it's going to be, it's going to be, we'll see what happens. Nicolas your take on ecosystems as they develop. A lot more integrations and not customization. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I think going back to, you know, again like 20- 20 years ago, the network was the product conductivity to the product. Today it's a, it's a building block, right? Something that you integrate that's part of your experience. So the same way we're seeing like conversions between telecom and financial services. Right? You see a lot of telcos trying to be banks. Banks and fintechs trying to be telcos. It's, it's a blending of that, right? So it, at the end of the day, it's like, why, what is the experience? What is the above and beyond the conductivity? Because customers, at this point, it's just not differentiated based on conductivity, kind of become just a busy commodity. So even as you look at what Peter is building, right, this, what is the experience above and beyond just buying a plan that I get out of it, or if you are a media company, you know, how do I pair my content or resolve real problems? Like for instance, we work a lot to the NBA and TikTok. They get into markets where, you know, having a video product at the end and people not being well-connected, that's a problem, right? So it's an opportunity for them to bring the building block into their ecosystem and start offering solutions that are a different shape. >> Awesome. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Both of you, both experienced entrepreneurs and executives riding the wave on the right side of history, I believe. Thanks for coming on theCube, I appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> If you're not riding the wave the right way, you're driftwood. And we're going to toss it back to the studio. Adam and the team, take it from here.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Mobile World Congress is alive, theCUBE will be there and we'll certainly let you know if it's alive and well when we get on the ground. Now, as we approach a delayed mobile world congress, it's really appropriate to reflect in the state of the telecoms industry. Let's face it. Telcos have done of really good job of keeping us all connected during the pandemic, supporting work from home and that whole pivot, accommodating the rapid shift to landline traffic, securing the network and keeping it up and running but it doesn't change the underlying fundamental dilemma that Telco has faced. Telco is a slow growth, no growth industry, with revenue expectations in the low single digits. And at the same time network traffic continues to grow at 20% annually. And last year it grew at 40% to 50%. Despite these challenges, Telcos are still investing in the future. For example, the Telco industry collectively is selling out more than a trillion dollars in the first half of this decade on 5G and fiber infrastructure. And it's estimated that there are now more than 200 5G networks worldwide. But a lot of questions remain, not the least of which is, can and should Telcos go beyond connectivity and fiber. Can the Telcos actually monetize 5G or whatever's next beyond 5G? Or is that going to be left to the ecosystem? Now what about the ecosystem? How is that evolving? And very importantly, what role will the Cloud Hyperscalers play in Telco? Are they infrastructure on which the Telcos can build or are they going to suck the value out of the market as they have done in the enterprise? Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, it's my pleasure to welcome a long time telecoms industry analyst and colleague, and the founding director of Lewis Insight, Mr. Chris Lewis. Chris, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. >> It is really our pleasure. So, we're going to cover a lot of ground today. And first thing, we're going to talk about Mobile World Congress. I've never been, you're an expert at that and what we can expect. And then we're going to review the current state of telecoms infrastructure, where it should go. We're going to dig into transformation. Is it a mandate? Is it aspirational? Can Telcos enter adjacent markets in ways they haven't been able to in the past? And then how about the ecosystem? We're going to talk about that, and then obviously we're going to talk about Cloud as I said, and we'll riff a little bit on the tech landscape. So Chris, let's get into it, Mobile World Congress, it's back on, what's Mobile World Congress typically like? What's your expectation this year for the vibe compared to previous events? >> Well Dave, the issue of Mobile World Congress is always that we go down there for a week into Barcelona. We stress ourselves building a matrix of meetings in 30 minutes slots and we return at the end of it trying to remember what we'd been told all the way through. The great thing is that with the last time we had a live, with around 110,000 people there, you could see anyone and everyone you needed to within the mobile, and increasingly the adjacent industry and ecosystem. So, he gave you that once a year, big download of everything new, obviously because it's the Mobile World Congress, a lot of it around devices, but increasingly over the last few years, we saw many, many stands with cars on them because the connected car became an issue, a lot more software oriented players there, but always the Telcos, always the people providing the network infrastructure. Increasingly in the last few years people provided the software and IT infrastructure, but all of these people contributing to what the network should be in the future, what needs to be connected. But of course the reach of the network has been growing. You mentioned during lockdown about connecting people in their homes, well, of course we've also been extending that connection to connect things whether it's in the home or the different devices, monitoring of doorbells and lights and all that sort of stuff. And in the industry environment, connecting all of the robots and sensors. So, actually the perimeter, the remit of the industry to connect has been expanding, and so is the sort of remit of Mobile World Congress. So, we set an awful lot of different suppliers coming in, trying to attach to this enormous market of roughly $1.5 trillion globally. >> Chris, what's the buzz in the industry in terms of who's going to show up. I know a lot of people have pulled out, I've got the Mobile World Congress app and I can see who's attending. And it looks like quite a few people are going to go but what's your expectation? >> Well, from an analyst point of view, obviously I'm mainly keeping up with my clients and trying to get new clients. I'm looking at it and going most of my clients are not attending in person. Now, of course, we need the DSMA, we need Mobile World Congress for future for the industry interaction. But of course, like many people having adopted and adapted to be online, then they're putting a lot of the keynotes online, a lot of the activities will be online. But of course many of the vendors have also produced their independent content and content to actually deliver to us as analysts. So, I'm not sure who will be there. I like you, but you'll be on the ground. You'll be able to report back and let us know exactly who turned up. But from my point of view, I've had so many pre-briefs already, the difference between this year and previous years, I used to get loads of pre-briefs and then have to go do the briefs as well. So this year I've got the pre-brief so I can sit back, put my feet up and wait for your report to come back as to what's happening on the ground. >> You got it. Okay, let's get into a little bit and talk about Telco infrastructure and the state, where it is today, where it's going, Chris, how would you describe the current state of Telco infrastructure? Where does it need to go? Like, what is the ideal future state look like for Telcos in your view? >> So there's always a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to Telco. I think going forward, the connectivity piece was seen as being table stakes, and then people thought where can we go beyond connectivity? And we'll come back to that later. But actually to the connectivity under the scenario I just described of people, buildings, things, and society, we've got to do a lot more work to make that connectivity extend, to be more reliable, to be more secure. So, the state of the network is that we have been building out infrastructure, which includes fiber to connect households and businesses. It includes that next move to cellular from 4G to 5G. It obviously includes Wi-Fi, wherever we've got that as well. And actually it's been a pretty good state, as you said in your opening comments they've done a pretty good job keeping us all connected during the pandemic, whether we're a fixed centric market like the UK with a lot of mobile on top and like the US, or in many markets in Africa and Asia, where we're very mobile centric. So, the fact is that every country market is different, so we should never make too many assumptions at a very top level, but building out that network, building out the services, focusing on that connectivity and making sure we get that cost of delivery right, because competition is pushing us towards having and not ever increasing prices, because we don't want to pay a lot extra every time. But the big issue for me is how do we bring together the IT and the network parts of this story to make sure that we build that efficiency in, and that brings in many questions that we going to touch upon now around Cloud and Hyperscalers around who plays in the ecosystem. >> Well, as you know, Telco is not my wheelhouse, but hanging around with you, I've learned, you've talked a lot about the infrastructure being fit for purpose. It's easy from an IT perspective. Oh yeah, it's fossilized, it's hardened, and it's not really flexible, but the flip side of that coin is as you're pointing out, it's super reliable. So, the big talk today is, "Okay, we're going to open up the network, open systems, and Open RAN, and open everything and microservices and containers. And so, the question is this, can you mimic that historical reliability in that open platform? >> Well, for me, this is the big trade-off and in my great Telco debate every year, I always try and put people against each other to try and to literally debate the future. And one of the things we looked at was is a more open network against this desire of the Telcos to actually have a smaller supplier roster. And of course, as a major corporation, these are on a national basis, very large companies, not large compared to the Hyperscalers for example, but they're large organizations, and they're trying to slim down their organization, slim down the supplier ecosystem. So actually in some ways, the more open it becomes, the more someone's got to manage and integrate all those pieces together. And that isn't something we want to do necessarily. So, I see a real tension there between giving more and more to the traditional suppliers. The Nokia's, Ericsson's, Huawei's, Amdocs and so on, the Ciscos. And then the people coming in breaking new ground like Mavenir and come in, and the sort of approach that Rakuten and Curve taken in bringing in more open and more malleable pieces of smaller software. So yeah, it's a real challenge. And I think as an industry which is notorious for being slow moving, actually we've begun to move relatively quickly, but not necessarily all the way through the organization. We've got plenty of stuff sitting on major or mainframes still in the back of the organization. But of course, as mobile has come in, we've started to deal much more closely, uninteractively in real time, God forbid, with the customers. So actually, at that front end, we've had to do things a lot more quickly. And that's where we're seeing the quickest adaptation to what you might see in your IT environment as being much more, continuous development, continuous improvement, and that sort of on demand delivery. >> Yeah, and we're going to get to that sort of in the Cloud space, but I want to now touch on Telco transformation which is sort of the main theme of this episode. And there's a lot of discussion on this topic, can Telcos move beyond connectivity and managing fiber? Is this a mandate? Is it a pipe dream that's just aspirational? Can they attack adjacencies to grow beyond the 1% a year? I mean, they haven't been successful historically. What are those adjacencies that might be, an opportunity and how will that ecosystem develop? >> Sure. >> So Chris, can and should Telcos try to move beyond core connectivity? Let's start there. >> I like what you did there by saying pipe dreams. Normally, pipe is a is a negative comment in the telecom world. But pipe dream gives it a real positive feel. So can they move beyond connectivity? Well, first of all, connectivity is growing in terms of the number of things being connected. So, in that sense, the market is growing. What we pay for that connectivity is not necessarily growing. So, therefore the mandate is absolutely to transform the inner workings and reduce the cost of delivery. So, that's the internal perspective. The external perspective is that we've tried in many Telcos around the world to break into those adjacent markets, being around media, being enterprise, being around IOT, and actually for the most part they've failed. And we've seen some very significant recent announcements from AT&T, Verizon, BT, beginning to move away from, owning content and not delivering content, but owning content. And the same as they've struggled often in the enterprise market to really get into that, because it's a well-established channel of delivery bringing all those ecosystem players in. So, actually rather than the old Telco view of we going to move into adjacent markets and control those markets, actually moving into them and enabling fellow ecosystem players to deliver the service is what I think we're beginning to see a lot more of now. And that's the big change, it's actually learning to play with the other people in the ecosystem. I always use a phrase that there's no room for egos in the ecosystem. And I think Telcos went in initially with an ego thinking we're really important, we are on connectivity. But actually now they're beginning to approach the ecosystem things saying, "How can we support partners? How can we support everyone in this ecosystem to deliver the services to consumers, businesses and whomever in this evolving ecosystem?" So, there are opportunities out there, plenty of them, but of course, like any opportunity, you've got to approach it in the right way. You've got to get the right investment in place. You've got to approach it with the right open API so everyone can integrate with your approach, and approach it, do I say with a little bit of humility to say, "Hey, we can bring this to the table, how do we work together? >> Well, it's an enormous market. I think you've shared with me, it's like 1.4 trillion. And I want to stay on these adjacencies for a minute, because one of the obvious things that Telcos will talk about is managed services. And I know we have to be careful of that term in an IT context, that it's different in a, you're talking about managing connectivity, but there's professional services. That's a logical sort of extension of their business and probably a safe adjacency, maybe not even adjacency, but they're not going to get into devices. I mean, they'll resell devices, but they're not going to be, I would presume not go back to trying to make devices, but there's certainly the edge and that's so, it'll define in opaque, but it's huge. If there's 5G, there's the IT component and that's probably a partnership opportunity. And as you pointed out, there's the ecosystem, but I wonder, how do you think about 5G as an adjacency or indoor opportunity? Is it a revenue opportunity for Telcos or is that just something that is really aspirational? >> Oh, absolutely it's a revenue opportunity, but I prefer to think of 5G as being a sort of a metaphor for the whole future of telecom. So, we usually talk, and MWC would normally talk about 5G just as a mobile solution. Of course, what you can get with, you can use this fixed wireless access approach, where the roots that sits in your house or your building. So, it's a potential replacement for some fixed lines. And of course, it's also, gives you the ability to build out, let's say in a manufacturing or a campus environment, a private 5G network. So, many of the early opportunities we're seeing with 5G are actually in that more private network environment addressing those very low latency, and high bandwidth requirements. So yeah, there are plenty of opportunities. Of course, the question here is, is connectivity enough, or especially with your comment around the edge, at the edge we need to manage connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, and of course the applications. So, that's a blend of players. It's not going to be in the hands of one player. So yes, plenty of opportunities but understanding what comes the other way from the customer base, where that's, you and I in our homes or outward as an about, or from a business point of view, an office or a campus environment, that's what should be driving, and not the technology itself. And I think this is the trap that the industry has fallen into many times, is we've got a great new wave of technology coming, how can we possibly deliver it to everybody rather than listening to what the customers really require and delivering it in a way consumable by all those different markets. >> Yeah now, of course all of these topics blend together. We try to keep them separately, but we're going to talk about Cloud, we're going to talk about competition, But one of the areas that we don't have a specific agenda item on is, is data and AI. And of course there's all this data flowing through the network, so presumably it's an opportunity for the Telcos. At the same time, they're not considered AI experts. They do when you talk about Edge, they would appear to have the latency advantage because of the last mile and their proximity, to various end points. But the Cloud is sort of building out as well. How do you think about data and AI as an opportunity for Telco? >> I think the whole data and AI piece for me sits on top of the cake or pie, whatever you want to call it. What we're doing with all this connectivity, what we're doing with all these moving parts and gathering information around it, and building automation into the delivery of the service, and using the analytics, whether you call it ML or AI, it doesn't really matter. But actually using that information to deliver a better service, a better outcome. Now, of course, Telcos have had much of this data for years and years, for decades, but they've never used it. So, I think what's happening is, the Cloud players are beginning to educate many of the Telcos around how valuable this stuff is. And that then brings in that question of how do we partner with people using open APIs to leverage that data. Now, do the Telcos keep hold of all that data? Do they let the Cloud players do all of it? No, it's going to be a combination depending on particular environments, and of course the people owning their devices also have a vested interest in this as well. So, you've always got to look at it end to end and where the data flows are, and where we can analyze it. But I agree that analysis on the device at the Edge, and perhaps less and less going back to the core, which is of course the original sort of mandate of the Cloud. >> Well, we certainly think that most of the Edge is going to be about AI inferencing, and then most of the data is going to stay at the edge. Some will come back for sure. And that is big opportunity for whether you're selling compute or conductivity, or maybe storage as well, but certainly insights at the Edge. >> Everything. >> Yeah. >> Everything, yeah. >> Let's get into the Cloud discussion and talk about the Hyperscalers, the big Hyperscaler elephant in the room. We're going to try to dig into what role the Cloud will play in the transformation of telecoms on Telecom TV at the great Telco debate. You likened the Hyperscalers, Chris, to Dementors from Harry Potter hovering over the industry. So, the question is, are the Cloud players going to suck the value out of the Telcos? Or are they more like Dobby the elf? They're powerful, there's sometimes friendly but they're unpredictable. >> Thank you for extending that analogy. Yes, it got a lot of reaction when I use that, but I think it indicates some of the direction of power shift where, we've got to remember here that Telcos are fundamentally national, and they're restricted by regulation, and the Cloud players are global, perhaps not as global as they'd like be, but some regional restrictions, but the global players, the Hyperscalers, they will use that power and they they will extend their reach, and they are extending their reach. If you think they now command some fantastic global networks, in some ways they've replaced some of the Telco international networks, all the submarine investments that tend to be done primarily for the Hyperscalers. So, they're building that out. So, as soon as you get onto their network, then you suddenly become part of that environment. And that is reducing some of the spend on the longer distances we might have got in the past approaches from the Telcos. Now, does that mean they're going to go all the way down and take over the Telcos? I don't believe so, because it's a fundamentally different business digging fiber in people's streets and delivering to the buildings, and putting antennas up. So, they will be a coexistence. And in fact, what we've already seen with Cloud and the Hyperscalers is that they're working much more close together than people might imagine. Now, you mentioned about data in the previous question, Google probably the best known of the of the AI and ML delivers from the Cloud side, working with many of the Telcos, even in some cases to actually have all the data outsourced into the Google Cloud for analytics purposes. They've got the power, the heavy lifting to do that. And so, we begin to see that, and obviously with shifting of workloads as appropriate within the Telco networking environment, we're seeing that with AWS, and of course with Azure as well. And Azure of course acquired a couple of companies in affirmed and Metro switch, which actually do some of the formal 5G core and the likes there within the connectivity environment. So, it's not clean cuts. And to go back to the analogy, those Dementors are swooping around and looking for opportunities, and we know that they will pick up opportunities, and they will extend their reach as far as they can down to that edge. But of course, the edge is where, as you rightly say, the Telcos have the control, they don't necessarily own the customer. I don't believe anyone owns the customer in this digital environment, because digital allows you to move your allegiance and your custom elsewhere anyway. So, but they do own that access piece, and that's what's important from a national point of view, from an economic point of view. And that's why we've seen some of the geopolitical activity banning Huawei from certain markets, encouraging more innovation through open ecosystem plays. And so, there is a tension there between the local Telco, the local market and the Hyperscaler market, but fundamentally they've got an absolute brilliant way of working together using the best of both worlds to deliver the services that we need as an economy. >> Well, and we've talked about this you and I in the past where the Telcos, portions of the Telco network could move into the Cloud. And there of course the Telcos all run the big data centers, and portions of that IT infrastructure could move into the Cloud. But it's very clear, they're not going to give up the entire family jewels to the Cloud players. Why would they? But there are portions of their IT that they could move into. Particularly, in the front end, they want to build like everybody. They want to build an abstraction layer. They're not going to move their core systems and their backend Oracle databases, they're going to put a brick wall around those, but they wanted abstraction layer, and they want to take advantage of microservices and use that data from those transaction systems. But the web front end stuff makes sense to put into Cloud. So, how do you think about that? >> I think you've hit the nail on the head. So you can't move those big backend systems straight away, gradually over time, you will, but you've got to go for those easy wins. And certainly in the research I've been doing with many of my clients, they're suggested that front end piece, making sure that you can onboard customers more easily, you can get the right mix of services. You can provide the omnichannel interaction from that customer experience that everybody talks about, for which the industry is not very well known at all by the way. So, any improvement on that is going to be good from an MPS point of view. So yeah, leveraging what we might, what we call BSS OSS in the telecom world, and actually putting that into the Cloud, leveraging both the Hyperscalers, but also by the way, many of the traditional players who people think haven't moved Cloud wards, but they are moving Cloud wards and they're embracing microservices and Cloud native. So, what you would have seen if we'd been in person down in Barcelona next week, would be a lot of the vendors who perhaps traditionally seems a bit slow moving, actually have done a lot of work to move their portfolio into the Cloud and into Cloud native environments. And yes, as you say, we can use that front end, we can use the API openness that's developed by people at the TM forum, to actually make sure we don't have to do the backend straight away, do it over time. Because of course the thing that we're not touching upon here, is the revenue stream is a consistent revenue stream. So, just because you don't need to change the backend to keep your revenue stream going, this is on a new, it keeps delivering every month, we keep paying our 50, 40, whatever bucks a month into the Telco pot. That's why it's such a big market, and people aren't going to stop doing that. So, I think the dynamics of the industry, we often spend a lot of time thinking about the inner workings of it and the potential of adjacent markets, whereas actually, we keep paying for this stuff, we keep pushing revenue into the pockets of all the Telcos. So, it's not a bad industry to be in, even if they were just pushed back to be in the access market, it's a great business. We need it more and more. The elasticity of demand is very inelastic, we need it. >> Yeah, it's the mother of old golden geese. We don't have a separate topic on security, and I want to touch on security here, is such an important topic. And it's top of mind obviously for everybody, Telcos, Hyperscalers, the Hyperscalers have this shared responsibility model, you know it well. A lot of times it's really confusing for customers. They don't realize it until there has been a problem. The Telcos are going to be very much tuned into this. How will all this openness, and we're going to talk about technology in a moment, but how will this transformation in your view, in the Cloud, with the shared responsibility model, how will that affect the whole security posture? >> Security is a great subject, and I do not specialize in it. I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would say security for me is a bit like AI and analytics. It's everywhere. It's part of everything. And therefore you cannot think of it as a separate add on issue. So, every aspect, every element, every service you build into your micro services environment has to think about how do you secure that connection, that transaction, how do you secure the customer's data? Obviously, sovereignty plays a role in that as well in terms of where it sits, but at every level of every connection, every hop that we look through, every route to jump, we've got to see that security is built in. And in some ways, it's seen as being a separate part of the industry, but actually, as we collapse parts of the network down, we're talking about bringing optical and rooting together in many environments, security should be talked about in the same breath. So when I talked about Edge, when I talked about connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, I should've said security as well, because I absolutely believe that is fundamental to every chain in the link and let's face it, we've got a lot of links in the chain. >> Yeah, 100%. Okay, let's hit on technologies and competition, we kind of blend those together. What technology should we be paying attention to that are going to accelerate this transformation. We hear a lot about 5G, Open RAN. There's a lot of new tech coming in. What are you watching? Who are the players that we maybe should be paying attention to, some that you really like, that are well positioned? >> We've touched upon it in various of the questions that have proceeded this. So, the sort of Cloudification of the networking environment is obviously really important. The automation of the process we've got to move away from bureaucratic manual processes within these large organizations, because we've got to be more efficient, we've got to be more reliable. So, anything which is related to automation. And then the Open RAN question is really interesting. Once again, you raised this topic of when you go down an Open RAN routes or any open route, it ultimately requires more integration. You've got more moving parts from more suppliers. So, therefore there are potential security issues there, depending on how it's defined, but everybody is entering the Open RAN market. There are some names that you will see regularly next week, being pushed, I'm not going to push them anymore, because some of them just attract the oxygen of attention. But there are plenty out there. The good news is, the key vendors who come from the more traditional side are also absolutely embracing that and accept the openness. But I think the piece which probably excites me more, apart from the whole shift towards Cloud and microservices, is the coming together, the openness between the IT environment and the networking environment. And you see it, for example, in the Open RAN, this thing called the RIC, the RAN Interconnection Controller. We're actually, we're beginning to find people come from the IT side able to control elements within the wireless controller piece. Now that that starts to say to me, we're getting a real handle on it, anybody can manage it. So, more specialization is required, but understanding how the end to end flow works. What we will see of course is announcements about new devices, the big guys like Apple and Samsung do their own thing during the year, and don't interrupt their beat with it with MWC, but you'll see a lot of devices being pushed by many other providers, and you'll see many players trying to break into the different elements of the market. But I think mostly, you'll see the people approaching it from more and more Cloudified angle where things are much more leveraging, that Cloud capability and not relying on the sort of rigid and stodgy infrastructure that we've seen in the past >> Which is kind of interesting because Cloud, a lot of the Clouds are Walled Gardens, at the same time they host a lot of open technologies, and I think as these two worlds collide, IT and the Telco industry, it's going to be interesting to see how the Telco developer ecosystem evolves. And so, that's something that we definitely want to watch. You've got a comment there? >> Yeah, I think the Telco developer they've not traditionally been very big in that area at all, have they? They've had their traditional, if you go back to when you and I were kids, the plain old telephone service was a, they were a one trick pony, and they've moved onto that. In some ways, I'd like them to move on and to have the one trick of plain old broadband that we just get broadband delivered everywhere. So, there are some issues about delivering service to all parts of every country, and obviously the globe, whether we do that through satellite, we might see some interesting satellite stuff coming out during NWC. There's an awful lot of birds flying up there trying to deliver signal back to the ground. Traditionally, that's not been very well received, with the change in generation of satellite might help do that. But we've known traditionally that a lot of developer activity in there, what it does bring to the four though, Dave, is this issue of players like the Ciscos and Junipers, and all these guys of the world who bring a developer community to the table as well. This is where the ecosystem play comes in, because that's where you get the innovation in the application world, working with channels, working with individual applications. And so it's opening up, it's basically building a massive fabric that anybody can tap into, and that's what becomes so exciting. So, the barriers to entry come down, but I think it will see us settling down, a stabilization of relationship between the Telcos and the Hyperscalers, because they need each other as we talked about previously, then the major providers, the Ciscos, Nokias, Ericssons, Huawei's, the way they interact with the Telcos. And then allowing that level of innovation coming in from the smaller players, whether it's on a national or a global basis. So, it's actually a really exciting environment. >> So I want to continue that theme and just talk about Telco in the enterprise. And Chris, on this topic, I want to just touch on some things and bring in some survey data from ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, our partner. And of course the Telcos, they've got lots of data centers. And as we talked about, they're going to be moving certain portions into the Cloud, lots of the front end pieces in particular, but let's look at the momentum of some of the IT players within the ETR dataset, and look at how they compare to some of the Telcos that ETR captures specifically within the Telco industry. So, we filtered this data on the Telco industry. So, this is our X, Y graph that we show you oftentimes on the vertical axis, is net score which measures spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, this data is for shared accounts just in the Telco sector. So we filtered on certain sectors, like within the technology sectors, Cloud, networking, and so it's narrow, it's a narrow slice of the 1500. It respondents, it represents about 133 shared accounts. And a couple of things to jump right out. Within the Telco industry, it's no surprise, but Azure and AWS have massive presence on the horizontal axis, but what's notable as they score very highly in the vertical axis, with elevated spending velocity on their platforms within Telco. Google Cloud doesn't have as much of a presence, but it's elevated as well. Chris was talking about their data posture before, Arista and Verizon, along with VMware are also elevated, as is Aruba, which is HPEs networking division, but they don't have the presence on the horizontal axis. And you got Red Hat OpenStack is actually quite prominent in Telco as we've reported in previous segments. Is no surprise You see Akamai there. Now remember, this survey is weighted toward enterprise IT, so you have to take that into consideration, but look at Cisco, very strong presence, nicely elevated as is Equinox, both higher than many of the others including Dell, but you could see Dell actually has pretty respectable spending in Telco. It's an area that they're starting to focus on more. And then you got that cluster below, your Juniper, AT&T, Oracle, the rest of HPE TELUM and Lumen which is formerly, century link via IBM. Now again, I'm going to caution you. This is an enterprise IT heavy survey, but the big takeaway is the Cloud players have a major presence inside of firms that say they're in the telecommunications industry. And certain IT players like Cisco, VMware and Red Hat appear to be well positioned inside these accounts. So Chris, I'm not sure if any of this commentary resonates with you, but it seems that the Telcos would love to partner up with traditional IT vendors and Cloud players, and maybe find ways to grow their respective businesses. >> I think some of the data points you brought out there are very important. So yes, we've seen a Microsoft Azure and AWS very strong working with Telcos. We've seen Google Cloud platform actually really aggressively pushed into the market certainly the last 12, 24 months. So yeah, they're well positioned, and they all come from a slightly different background. As I said, the Google with this, perhaps more data centric approach in its analytics, tools very useful, AWS with this outpost reaching out, connecting out, and as you'll, with its knowledge of the the Microsoft business market certainly pushing into private networks as well, by the way. So yeah, and Cisco, of course in there does have, and it's a mass scale division, a lot of activity there, some of the people collapsing, some of that rooting an obstacle together, their big push on Silicon. So, what you've got here is a sort of cross representation of many of the different sorts of suppliers who are active in this market. Now Telcos is a big spenders, the telecom market, as we said, a $1.4 trillion market, they spend a lot, they probably have to double bubble spend at the moment to get over the hump of 5G investment, to build out fiber where they need to build out. So, any anything that relates to that is of course a major spending opportunity, a major market opportunity for players. And we know when you need the infrastructure behind it, whether it's in data centers or in their own data centers or in the Cloud to deliver against it. So, what I do like about this as an analyst, a lot of people would focus on one particular piece of the market. So you specialize on handsets, people specialize on home markets and home gateways. So, I tend to sit back and try and look at the big picture, the whole picture. And I think we're beginning to see some very good momentum where people are, where companies are building upon, of course their core business within the telecom industry, extending it out. But the lines of demarcation are blurring between enterprise, Telco, and indeed moving down into small business. And you think about the SD-WAN Market, which came from nowhere to build a much more flexible solution for connecting people over the wide area network, which has been brilliant during the pandemic, because it's allowed us to extend that to home, but be of course, build a campus ready for the future as well. So there are plenty of opportunities out there. I think the big question in my mind is always about from going into the Telco, as I said, whether they wannna reduce the number of suppliers on the roster. So that puts a question mark against some of the open approaches, and then from the Telco to the end customer, because it goes to the Telcos, 30% of their revenue comes from the enterprise market, 60% from the consumer market. How do they leverage the channel? Which includes all the channels, we talked about security, all of the IT stuff that you've already touched upon and the Cloud. It's going to be a very interesting mix and balancing act between different channels to get the services that the customers want. And I think increasingly, customers are more aware of the opportunities open to them to reach back into this ecosystem and say, "Yeah, I want a piece of humans to Telco, but I want it to come to me through my local integrated channel, because I need a bit of their expertise on security." So, fascinating market, and I think not telecom's no longer considered in isolation, but very much as part of that broader digital ecosystem. >> Chris, it's very hard to compress an analysis of a $1.4 trillion business into 30 or 35 minutes, but you're just the guy to help me do it. So, I got to really thank you for participating today and bringing your knowledge. Awesome. >> Do you know, it's my pleasure. I love looking at this market. Obviously I love analogies like Harry Potter, which makes it bring things to life. But at the end of the day, we as people, we want to be connected, we as business, we want to be connected, in society we want to be connected. So, the fundamental of this industry are unbelievably strong. Let's hope that governments don't mess with it too much. And let's hope that we get the right technology comes through, and help support that world of connectivity going forward. >> All right, Chris, well, I'll be texting you from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and many thanks to my colleague, Chris Lewis, he brought some serious knowledge today and thank you. And remember, I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. And these episodes are all available as podcasts. You just got to search for Breaking Analysis podcasts. You can always connect with me on twitter @dvellante or email me at dave.vellante@siliconangle.com. And you can comment on my LinkedIn post, and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

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

>>Yeah. >>Okay. Now we're going to look deeper into the intersection of technology and money and actually a force for good mobile. And the infrastructure around it has made sending money as easy as sending a text. But the capabilities that enable this to happen are quite amazing, especially because as users, we don't see the underlying complexity of the transactions. We just enjoy the benefits. And there's many parts of the world that historically have not been able to enjoy the benefits. And the ecosystems that are developing around these new platforms are truly transformative. And with me to explain, the business impacts of these innovations is all a person who is the head of mobile financial services at Ericsson Ola. Welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Dave, Thank you for having me here in the program and really excited to tell me. Tell us about the product that we have within Ericsson. >>Okay, well, let's get right into it. I mean, your firm has developed the Ericsson wallet platform. What is that? Yes, >>so? So the wallet platform is one of the product, but, I mean, you can say offer here by Ericsson and the platform is built on enabled financial services not for only the bank segment, but also for the unbanked. And we have, you know, the function that we are providing as such Here is, uh, both transfer the service provided payment. You have the cash in the cash out. You have a lot of other feature that we kind of a neighbor through the ecosystem as such. And, uh, I would really like you say, to emphasize on on the use, and they really I'll say, uh, connectivity that we have in this platform here because, uh, looking at you can say the pandemic as such here. Now, we really have made you can say tremendous Shane here through all the functions etcetera feature that we have here. >>Yeah, so, I mean, I'm surrounded by banks in Massachusetts, right? No problem. I'm Boston, right? So But there's a lot of places in the world that that aren't I take for granted some of the capabilities that are there, but so part of this is to enable people who don't have access to those types of services. So maybe you could talk about that and talk about some of the things that you're enabling with the platform, >>right? So So you just think of their You can say unbanked people here, But we have across the emerging market. I think we have one point, you know, seven billion unbanked people here, but we actually can, through wallet platform enabled through getting a bank account, etcetera, and so on here and what we're actually providing you can say in this, uh, this feature is here is that you can pay your electricity bill, for example, Here, you can pay your your bill and you you can go through merchants. You can do the cashed out. You can do multiple thing here, just like I mean to to enable the the question that financial inclusion as well. So I mean I mean from from my point of view, where we're sitting, as I said, we also sitting in Sweden, we have bank account. We have something called swish where we send you can say money back, back and forward between the family, etcetera. So, on this type of transaction, we can and have enabled for all you can say, the user that I come across the the platform here and the kind of growth that we have within this usage here and and we're seeing also. I mean, we leverage here to get with a speed today on a fantastic scale that we actually have here with our our both you can say feature performers going, I will say, Really in in in in a in the direction that we couldn't imagine here you can say a few years back here. So it is fantastic transformation that we undergo here through through the platform of the technology that we have. >>You know, it reminds me of sort of the early days of mobile people talked about being able to connect, you know, remote users in places like Africa or other parts of the world that that haven't been able to enjoy things like a landline. Uh, and so I presume you're seeing a lot of interest in in those types of regions. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Yeah. Yeah, correct. I mean, I mean, we we see all of this region here, but for for example, Uh uh. Now, we we, uh we were not only entering, you can say the the, uh, specifically the African region, but also you can say the Middle East and the the the A C a specific and also actually Latin America. I mean, a lot of this country here are looking into you can say the expansion, how they can evolve. You can say the financial inclusion from what they have today, when they are, and you can say firm telecom provider, they would like to have an asset of different use case here, and we're seeing that transformation. But we have right now from just voice, you can say SMS and five year etcetera so on. This is the platform that we have to sort of enable the transaction for for a mobile financial system. But we would like also to see that the kind of operator or evolving the business with much more feature here. And this is another. You can say I was attraction to attract the user with the mobile transfer system. So we we we see this kind of expanding very heavily in this this kind of market. >>I think this is really transformative. I mean, in terms of people's lives. I mean, first of all, you're talking about the convenience of being able to move money as bits as opposed to paper, but as well I would think supporting entrepreneurship and business is getting started. I mean, there's a whole set of cultural and societal impacts that that you're having. How do you see that >>we we also providing you say I mean the world to such is also supporting, say microloans and need as an entrepreneur is to sort of start you can say any kind of company, but you need to kind of business around here. So we have seen that we have sort of enterprise services across function and the whole asset that we are that we are into today >>talking a little bit >>about >>partnerships and the ecosystems. I know you've got big partnerships with HPD. We're going to get to that. They're kind of a technology operator, but But what about, you know, other partnerships, like, I'm imagining that if I'm gonna pay my my my bill with this, you've got other providers that got to connect into your platform. So So how are those ecosystem partnerships evolving? >>Well, we are kind of the enabler, but we are providing to the operator the partnerships is then going through the operator. It could be any kind of you can say external instrument that we have today and the kind of you can go directly to the bank. You can go directly to any court provider. You have these amongst the court, etcetera and so on. But these are all partners of the and you can stay connected through there. You can say operator assault today. So what we're doing actually, with our platform is to kind of make the enable them to kind of provide the food ecosystem as partnership to to operate as us today. Here, So that that's kind of the baseline that we see how you can say we are sort of supporting of building the full ecosystem around the platform in order to connect here has come to both the like, the card. As I said here, the merchant, the bank, any kind of type of you can say I will say service provider here, but that we can see could enable the ecosystem >>okay. And so I mean, I don't want to geek out here, but it sounds like it's an open system that my developers can plug into through a p i s They're not gonna throw cold water on that. They're going to embrace it. So yeah, this is actually easy for me to integrate with, Is that correct? >>Correct. Correct. And they open API that we're actually providing today. I think that you can say there are five thousands of you can say developer, just you can say connecting to our system. And actually, we're also providing both sandbox and and other application in order to support this developers in order to to kind of create this ecosystem here. So it's a multiple things that we we see through you can say, hear, hear the both the partners partnership the open API or you can say the development that is doing through through the channels. So I mean, it's a fascinating, amazing development that we see up front here right now. >>Now, what's H. P s role in all this? What are they providing? How are you partnering with them? >>So it's very good question, I would say. And we we look back, you can say and we we have evaluated a lot of you say that the provider fruit year here, And, uh, you can just imagine the the kind of, uh, stability that we need to provide when it comes to the financial inclusion system here because what we need to have a very strong uptake of, uh, making sure that we don't both go with the performance and the stability and what we have seen in our lab is that hypocrisy today is we have domestically evolved how you can say our stability assessed on the system. And right now we are leveraging the the dog is with the microservices here, together with HV on the platform that you're providing. So I will say that the transformation we have done in the stability that we have get through the food. You can say HP system is really fantastic at the moment. >>Well, and you know, I'm no security expert, but I talked to a lot of security experts and what I what I do know is they tell me that that you can't just bolt security on. It's got to be designed in from the start. I would imagine that that's part of the HPD partnership. But what about security? Can I fully trust this platform >>now? It's It's very, very valid question. I would say we we have one of the most you can say secure system here were also running multiple external. You can say, uh, system validation there is called The PNDs s certification is a certification, But we we have external auditor, you can say trying to breach the system. Look at the process that we are developing making sure that we have You can say all of you can say the documentation really in shape and seeing that we follow the procedure when we are both developing the code and and also when we're looking into all the a p I s that were actually exposed to to to our end users. So I would say that we haven't had any bridge on our system and we we really working tightly. I'll say both together with I'll say, H b and and of course, the the customer, such and? And every time we do a Lawrence, we also make you can say final security validation on the system here in order to sort of see that we have and and two and because the application that is completely secure, So so that that that that's a very, very important topic. For from our point of view, >>Yeah, because it's the usual. I don't even want to think about that. Like I set up front. It's It's got to be hidden from me, all that complexity. But there's sort of the same question around compliance and privacy. I mean, often security, privacy. There's sort of two sides of the same coin, but compliance privacy You've got to worry about K. Y. C Know your customer? Uh, there's a lot of complexity around that, and and so that's another key piece. >>Mhm Now. Like you said, the K Y C is an important part that we have fully support in our system and we validate. You can say all the uses We we also are running, You can say with our credit scoring companies that the you can say our operator or are partnering with. So this combined, you can say, with both the K Y C and then and the credit scoring. But there were performing that. Let's make us a very you can say unique, stable platform as such. >>Okay, last question is, is what about going forward? What's the road map look like? What can you share? What should we expect going forward in terms of the impact that this will have on society and how the technology will evolve. >>Well, what is he going forward? And that's a very interesting question, because what we what we see right now is how we we we kind of have changed the life for for so many. You can say unbanked people here and we would like to have You can say, uh, any kind of assets that going forward here, any kind of you can see that the digital currency is a bouldering through both government. You can see over top players like Google. You can say, What's up all of these things. Here we want to be the one, but also connecting. You can say this type of platform together and see that we could be the heart of the ecosystem going forward here, independent in what kind of you can say customer we're aiming for. So I would say this This is kind of the role that we will play in the future here, depending on what kind of currency it would be. So it's very interesting future we see. With this, you can say abroad digital currency in the market and the trends that we are now right now, evolving on >>very exciting when we're talking about elevating, you know, potentially billions of people all, uh, thanks very much for sharing this innovation with the audience. And best of luck with this incredible platform. Congratulations. >>Thank you so much, Dave. And once again, thank you for having me here, and I'll talk to you soon again. Thank you. >>Thank you. It's been our pleasure. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Valenti. >>Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Okay.

>>Yeah, yeah, hello again and welcome to our last session of the day before we head to the meat. The experts roundtables how T Mobile is building a data driven organization with thought spot and whip prone. Today we'll hear how T Mobile is leaving Excel hell by enabling all employees with self service analytics so they can get instant answers on curated data. We're lucky to be closing off the day with these two speakers. Evo Benzema, manager of business intelligence services at T Mobile Netherlands, and Sanjeev Chowed Hurry, lead architect AT T Mobile, Netherlands, from Whip Chrome. Thank you both very much for being with us today, for today's session will cover how mobile telco markets have specific dynamics and what it waas that T Mobile was facing. We'll also go over the Fox spot and whip pro solution and how they address T mobile challenges. Lastly, but not least, of course, we'll cover Team Mobil's experience and learnings and takeaways that you can use in your business without further ado Evo, take us away. >>Thank you very much. Well, let's first talk a little bit about T Mobile, Netherlands. We are part off the larger deutsche Telekom Group that ISS operating in Europe and the US We are the second largest mobile phone company in the Netherlands, and we offer the full suite awful services that you expect mobile landline in A in an interactive TV. And of course, Broadbent. Um so this is what the Mobile is appreciation at at the moment, a little bit about myself. I'm already 11 years at T Mobile, which is we part being part of the furniture. In the meantime, I started out at the front line service desk employee, and that's essentially first time I came into a touch with data, and what I found is that I did not have any possibility of myself to track my performance. Eso I build something myself and here I saw that this need was there because really quickly, roughly 2020 off my employer colleagues were using us as well. This was a little bit where my efficient came from that people need to have access to data across the organization. Um, currently, after 11 years running the BR Services Department on, I'm driving this transformation now to create a data driven organization with a heavy customer focus. Our big goal. Our vision is that within two years, 8% of all our employees use data on a day to day basis to make their decisions and to improve their decision. So over, tuition Chief. Now, thank >>you. Uh, something about the proof. So we prize a global I T and business process consulting and delivery company. Uh, we have a comprehensive portfolio of services with presents, but in 61 countries and maybe 1000 plus customers. As we're speaking with Donald, keep customers Region Point of view. We primary look to help our customers in reinventing the business models with digital first approach. That's how we look at our our customers toe move to digitalization as much as possible as early as possible. Talking about myself. Oh, I have little over two decades of experience in the intelligence and tell cope landscape. Calico Industries. I have worked with most of the telcos totally of in us in India and in Europe is well now I have well known cream feed on brownfield implementation off their house on big it up platforms. At present, I'm actively working with seminal data transform initiative mentioned by evil, and we are actively participating in defining the logical and physical footprint for future architectures for criminal. I understand we are also, in addition, taking care off and two and ownership off off projects, deliveries on operations, back to you >>so a little bit over about the general telco market dynamics. It's very saturated market. Everybody has mobile phones already. It's the growth is mostly gone, and what you see is that we have a lot of trouble around customer brand loyalty. People switch around from provider to provider quite easily, and new customers are quite expensive. So our focus is always to make customer loyal and to keep them in the company. And this is where the opportunities are as well. If we increase the retention of customers or reduce what we say turned. This is where the big potential is for around to use of data, and we should not do this by only offering this to the C suite or the directors or the mark managers data. But this needs to be happening toe all employees so that they can use this to really help these customers and and services customers is situated. This that we can create his loyalty and then This is where data comes in as a big opportunity going forward. Yeah. So what are these challenges, though? What we're facing two uses the data. And this is, uh, these air massive over our big. At least let's put it like that is we have a lot of data. We create around four billion new record today in our current platforms. The problem is not everybody can use or access this data. You need quite some technical expertise to add it, or they are pre calculated into mawr aggregated dashboard. So if you have a specific question, uh, somebody on the it side on the buy side should have already prepared something so that you can get this answer. So we have a huge back lock off questions and data answers that currently we cannot answer on. People are limited because they need technical expertise to use this data. These are the challenges we're trying to solve going forward. >>Uh, so the challenge we see in the current landscape is T mobile as a civil mentioned number two telco in Europe and then actually in Netherlands. And then we have a lot of acquisitions coming in tow of the landscape. So overall complexity off technical stack increases year by year and acquisition by acquisition it put this way. So we at this time we're talking about Claudia Irureta in for Matic Uh, aws and many other a complex silo systems. We actually are integrated where we see multiple. In some cases, the data silos are also duplicated. So the challenge here is how do we look into this data? How do we present this data to business and still ensure that Ah, mhm Kelsey of the data is reliable. So in this project, what we looked at is we curated that around 10% off the data of us and made it ready for business to look at too hot spot. And this also basically help us not looking at the A larger part of the data all together in one shot. What's is going to step by step with manageable set of data, obviously manages the time also and get control on cost has. >>So what did we actually do and how we did? Did we do it? And what are we going to do going forward? Why did we chose to spot and what are we measuring to see if we're successful is is very simply, Some stuff I already alluded to is usual adoption. This needs to be a tool that is useable by everybody. Eso This is adoption. The user experience is a major key to to focus on at the beginning. Uh, but lastly, and this is just also cold hard. Fact is, it needs to save time. It needs to be faster. It needs to be smarter than the way we used to do it. So we focused first on setting up the environment with our most used and known data set within the company. The data set that is used already on the daily basis by a large group. We know what it's how it works. We know how it acts on this is what we decided to make available fire talksport this cut down the time around, uh, data modeling a lot because we had this already done so we could go right away into training users to start using this data, and this is already going on very successfully. We have now 40 heavily engaged users. We go went life less than a month ago, and we see very successful feedback on user experience. We had either yesterday, even a beautiful example off loading a new data set and and giving access to user that did not have a training for talk sport or did not know what thoughts, what Waas. And we didn't in our he was actively using this data set by building its own pin boards and asking questions already. And this shows a little bit the speed off delivery we can have with this without, um, much investments on data modeling, because that's part was already done. So our second stage is a little bit more ambitious, and this is making sure that all this information, all our information, is available for frontline uh, employees. So a customer service but also chills employees that they can have data specifically for them that make them their life easier. So this is performance KP ice. But it could also be the beautiful word that everybody always uses customer Terry, 60 fuse. But this is giving the power off, asking questions and getting answers quickly to everybody in the company. That's the big stage two after that, and this is going forward a little bit further in the future and we are not completely there yet, is we also want Thio. Really? After we set up the government's properly give the power to add your own data to our curated data sets that that's when you've talked about. And then with that, we really hope that Oh, our ambition and our plan is to bring this really to more than 800 users on a daily basis to for uses on a daily basis across our company. So this is not for only marketing or only technology or only one segment. This is really an application that we want to set in our into system that works for everybody. And this is our ambition that we will work through in these three, uh, steps. So what did we learn so far? And and Sanjeev, please out here as well, But one I already said, this is no which, which data set you start. This is something. Start with something. You know, start with something that has a wide appeal to more than one use case and make sure that you make this decision. Don't ask somebody else. You know what your company needs? The best you should be in the driver seat off this decision. And this is I would be saying really the big one because this will enable you to kickstart this really quickly going forward. Um, second, wellness and this is why we introduce are also here together is don't do this alone. Do this together with, uh I t do this together with security. Do this together with business to tackle all these little things that you don't think about yourself. Maybe security, governance, network connections and stuff like that. Make sure that you do this as a company and don't try to do this on your own, because there's also again it's removes. Is so much obstacles going forward? Um, lastly, I want to mention is make sure that you measure your success and this is people in the data domain sometimes forget to measure themselves. Way can make sure everybody else, but we forget ourselves. But really try to figure out what makes its successful for you. And we use adoption percentages, usual experience, surveys and and really calculations about time saved. We have some rough calculations that we can calculate changes thio monetary value, and this will save us millions in years. by just automating time that is now used on, uh, now to taken by people on manual work. So, do you have any to adhere? A swell You, Susan, You? >>Yeah. So I'll just pick on what you want to mention about. Partner goes live with I t and other functions. But that is a very keating, because from my point of view, you see if you can see that the data very nice and data quality is also very clear. If we have data preparing at the right level, ready to be consumed, and data quality is taken, care off this feel 30 less challenges. Uh, when the user comes and questioned the gator, those are the things which has traded Quiz it we should be sure about before we expose the data to the Children. When you're confident about your data, you are confident that the user will also get the right numbers they're looking for and the number they have. Their mind matches with what they see on the screen. And that's where you see there. >>Yeah, and that that that again helps that adoption, and that makes it so powerful. So I fully agree. >>Thank you. Eva and Sanjeev. This is the picture perfect example of how a thought spot can get up and running, even in a large, complex organization like T Mobile and Sanjay. Thank you for sharing your experience on how whip rose system integration expertise paved the way for Evo and team to realize value quickly. Alright, everyone's favorite part. Let's get to some questions. Evil will start with you. How have your skill? Data experts reacted to thought spot Is it Onley non technical people that seem to be using the tool or is it broader than that? You may be on. >>Yes, of course, that happens in the digital environment. Now this. This is an interesting question because I was a little bit afraid off the direction off our data experts and are technically skilled people that know how to work in our fight and sequel on all these things. But here I saw a lot of enthusiasm for the tool itself and and from two sides, either to use it themselves because they see it's a very easy way Thio get to data themselves, but also especially that they see this as a benefit, that it frees them up from? Well, let's say mundane questions they get every day. And and this is especially I got pleasantly surprised with their reaction on that. And I think maybe you can also say something. How? That on the i t site that was experienced. >>Well, uh, yeah, from park department of you, As you mentioned, it is changing the way business is looking at. The data, if you ask me, have taken out talkto data rather than looking at it. Uh, it is making the interactivity that that's a keyword. But I see that the gap between the technical and function folks is also diminishing, if I may say so over a period of time, because the technical folks now would be able to work with functional teams on the depth and coverage of the data, rather than making it available and looking at the technical side off it. So now they can have a a fair discussion with the functional teams on. Okay, these are refute. Other things you can look at because I know this data is available can make it usable for you, especially the time it takes for the I t. G. When graduate dashboard, Uh, that time can we utilize toe improve the quality and reliability of the data? That's yeah. See the value coming. So if you ask me to me, I see the technical people moving towards more of a technical functional role. Tools such as >>That's great. I love that saying now we can talk to data instead of just looking at it. Um Alright, Evo, I think that will finish up with one last question for you that I think you probably could speak. Thio. Given your experience, we've seen that some organizations worry about providing access to data for everyone. How do you make sure that everyone gets the same answer? >>Yes. The big data Girlfriends question thesis What I like so much about that the platform is completely online. Everything it happens online and everything is terrible. Which means, uh, in the good old days, people will do something on their laptop. Beirut at a logic to it, they were aggregated and then they put it in a power point and they will share it. But nobody knew how this happened because it all happened offline. With this approach, everything is transparent. I'm a big I love the word transparency in this. Everything is available for everybody. So you will not have a discussion anymore. About how did you get to this number or how did you get to this? So the question off getting two different answers to the same question is removed because everything happens. Transparency, online, transparent, online. And this is what I think, actually, make that question moot. Asl Long as you don't start exporting this to an offline environment to do your own thing, you are completely controlling, complete transparent. And this is why I love to share options, for example and on this is something I would really keep focusing on. Keep it online, keep it visible, keep it traceable. And there, actually, this problem then stops existing. >>Thank you, Evelyn. Cindy, That was awesome. And thank you to >>all of our presenters. I appreciate your time so much. I hope all of you at home enjoyed that as much as I did. I know a lot of you did. I was watching the chat. You know who you are. I don't think that I'm just a little bit in awe and completely inspired by where we are from a technological perspective, even outside of thoughts about it feels like we're finally at a time where we can capitalize on the promise that cloud and big data made to us so long ago. I loved getting to see Anna and James describe how you can maximize the investment both in time and money that you've already made by moving your data into a performance cloud data warehouse. It was cool to see that doubled down on with the session, with AWS seeing a direct query on Red Shift. And even with something that's has so much scale like TV shows and genres combining all of that being able to search right there Evo in Sanjiv Wow. I mean being able to combine all of those different analytics tools being able to free up these analysts who could do much more important and impactful work than just making dashboards and giving self service analytics to so many different employees. That's incredible. And then, of course, from our experts on the panel, I just think it's so fascinating to see how experts that came from industries like finance or consulting, where they saw the imperative that you needed to move to thes third party data sets enriching and organizations data. So thank you to everyone. It was fascinating. I appreciate everybody at home joining us to We're not quite done yet. Though. I'm happy to say that we after this have the product roadmap session and that we are also then going to move into hearing and being able to ask directly our speakers today and meet the expert session. So please join us for that. We'll see you there. Thank you so much again. It was really a pleasure having you.

>>Hi, everyone. My name is my uncle. My uncle Poor I worked with Geo reminds you in India. We call ourselves Geo Platforms. Now on. We've been recently in the news. You've raised a lot off funding from one of the largest, most of the largest tech companies in the world. And I'm here to talk about Geos Cloud Journey, Onda Mantis Partnership. I've titled it the story often, Underdog becoming the largest telecom company in India within four years, which is really special. And we're, of course, held by the cloud. So quick disclaimer. Right. The content shared here is only for informational purposes. Um, it's only for this event. And if you want to share it outside, especially on social media platforms, we need permission from Geo Platforms limited. Okay, quick intro about myself. I am a VP of engineering a geo. I lead the Cloud Services and Platforms team with NGO Andi. I mean the geo since the beginning, since it started, and I've seen our cloud footprint grow from a handful of their models to now eight large application data centers across three regions in India. And we'll talk about how we went here. All right, Let's give you an introduction on Geo, right? Giorgio is on how we became the largest telecom campaign, India within four years from 0 to 400 million subscribers. And I think there are There are a lot of events that defined Geo and that will give you an understanding off. How do you things and what you did to overcome massive problems in India. So the slide that I want to talkto is this one and, uh, I The headline I've given is, It's the Geo is the fastest growing tech company in the world, which is not a new understatement. It's eggs, actually, quite literally true, because very few companies in the world have grown from zero to 400 million subscribers within four years paying subscribers. And I consider Geo Geos growth in three phases, which I have shown on top. The first phase we'll talk about is how geo grew in the smartphone market in India, right? And what we did to, um to really disrupt the telecom space in India in that market. Then we'll talk about the feature phone phase in India and how Geo grew there in the future for market in India. and then we'll talk about what we're doing now, which we call the Geo Platforms phase. Right. So Geo is a default four g lt. Network. Right. So there's no to geo three g networks that Joe has, Um it's a state of the art four g lt voiceover lt Network and because it was designed fresh right without any two D and three G um, legacy technologies, there were also a lot of challenges Lawn geo when we were starting up. One of the main challenges waas that all the smart phones being sold in India NGOs launching right in 2000 and 16. They did not have the voice or lt chip set embedded in the smartphone because the chips it's far costlier to embed in smartphones and India is a very price and central market. So none of the manufacturers were embedding the four g will teach upset in the smartphones. But geos are on Lee a volte in network, right for the all the network. So we faced a massive problem where we said, Look there no smartphones that can support geo. So how will we grow Geo? So in order to solve that problem, we launched our own brand of smartphones called the Life um, smartphones. And those phones were really high value devices. So there were $50 and for $50 you get you You At that time, you got a four g B storage space. A nice big display for inch display. Dual cameras, Andi. Most importantly, they had volte chip sets embedded in them. Right? And that got us our initial customers the initial for the launch customers when we launched. But more importantly, what that enabled other oh, EMS. What that forced the audience to do is that they also had to launch similar smartphones competing smartphones with voltage upset embedded in the same price range. Right. So within a few months, 3 to 4 months, um, all the other way EMS, all the other smartphone manufacturers, the Samsung's the Micromax is Micromax in India, they all had volte smartphones out in the market, right? And I think that was one key step We took off, launching our own brand of smartphone life that helped us to overcome this problem that no smartphone had. We'll teach upsets in India and then in order. So when when we were launching there were about 13 telecom companies in India. It was a very crowded space on demand. In order to gain a foothold in that market, we really made a few decisions. Ah, phew. Key product announcement that really disrupted this entire industry. Right? So, um, Geo is a default for GLT network itself. All I p network Internet protocol in everything. All data. It's an all data network and everything from voice to data to Internet traffic. Everything goes over this. I'll goes over Internet protocol, and the cost to carry voice on our smartphone network is very low, right? The bandwidth voice consumes is very low in the entire Lt band. Right? So what we did Waas In order to gain a foothold in the market, we made voice completely free, right? He said you will not pay anything for boys and across India, we will not charge any roaming charges across India. Right? So we made voice free completely and we offer the lowest data rates in the world. We could do that because we had the largest capacity or to carry data in India off all the other telecom operators. And these data rates were unheard off in the world, right? So when we launched, we offered a $2 per month or $3 per month plan with unlimited data, you could consume 10 gigabytes of data all day if you wanted to, and some of our subscriber day. Right? So that's the first phase off the overgrowth and smartphones and that really disorders. We hit 100 million subscribers in 170 days, which was very, very fast. And then after the smartphone faith, we found that India still has 500 million feature phones. And in order to grow in that market, we launched our own phone, the geo phone, and we made it free. Right? So if you take if you took a geo subscription and you carried you stayed with us for three years, we would make this phone tree for your refund. The initial deposit that you paid for this phone and this phone had also had quite a few innovations tailored for the Indian market. It had all of our digital services for free, which I will talk about soon. And for example, you could plug in. You could use a cable right on RCR HDMI cable plug into the geo phone and you could watch TV on your big screen TV from the geophones. You didn't need a separate cable subscription toe watch TV, right? So that really helped us grow. And Geo Phone is now the largest selling feature phone in India on it. 100 million feature phones in India now. So now now we're in what I call the geo platforms phase. We're growing of a geo fiber fiber to the home fiber toe the office, um, space. And we've also launched our new commerce initiatives over e commerce initiatives and were steadily building platforms that other companies can leverage other companies can use in the Jeon o'clock. Right? So this is how a small startup not a small start, but a start of nonetheless least 400 million subscribers within four years the fastest growing tech company in the world. Next, Geo also helped a systemic change in India, and this is massive. A lot of startups are building on this India stack, as people call it, and I consider this India stack has made up off three things, and the acronym I use is jam. Trinity, right. So, um, in India, systemic change happened recently because the Indian government made bank accounts free for all one billion Indians. There were no service charges to store money in bank accounts. This is called the Jonathan. The J. GenDyn Bank accounts. The J out off the jam, then India is one of the few countries in the world toe have a digital biometric identity, which can be used to verify anyone online, which is huge. So you can simply go online and say, I am my ankle poor on duh. I verify that this is indeed me who's doing this transaction. This is the A in the jam and the last M stands for Mobil's, which which were held by Geo Mobile Internet in a plus. It is also it is. It also stands for something called the U. P I. The United Unified Payments Interface. This was launched by the Indian government, where you can carry digital transactions for free. You can transfer money from one person to the to another, essentially for free for no fee, right so I can transfer one group, even Indian rupee to my friend without paying any charges. That is huge, right? So you have a country now, which, with a with a billion people who are bank accounts, money in the bank, who you can verify online, right and who can pay online without any problems through their mobile connections held by G right. So suddenly our market, our Internet market, exploded from a few million users to now 506 106 100 million mobile Internet users. So that that I think, was a massive such a systemic change that happened in India. There are some really large hail, um, numbers for this India stack, right? In one month. There were 1.6 billion nuclear transactions in the last month, which is phenomenal. So next What is the impact of geo in India before you started, we were 155th in the world in terms off mobile in terms of broadband data consumption. Right. But after geo, India went from one 55th to the first in the world in terms of broadband data, largely consumed on mobile devices were a mobile first country, right? We have a habit off skipping technology generation, so we skip fixed line broadband and basically consuming Internet on our mobile phones. On average, Geo subscribers consumed 12 gigabytes of data per month, which is one of the highest rates in the world. So Geo has a huge role to play in making India the number one country in terms off broad banded consumption and geo responsible for quite a few industry first in the telecom space and in fact, in the India space, I would say so before Geo. To get a SIM card, you had to fill a form off the physical paper form. It used to go toe Ah, local distributor. And that local distributor is to check the farm that you feel incorrectly for your SIM card and then that used to go to the head office and everything took about 48 hours or so, um, to get your SIM card. And sometimes there were problems there also with a hard biometric authentication. We enable something, uh, India enable something called E K Y C Elektronik. Know your customer? We took a fingerprint scan at our point of Sale Reliance Digital stores, and within 15 minutes we could verify within a few minutes. Within a few seconds we could verify that person is indeed my hunk, right, buying the same car, Elektronik Lee on we activated the SIM card in 15 minutes. That was a massive deal for our growth. Initially right toe onboard 100 million customers. Within our and 70 days. We couldn't have done it without be K. I see that was a massive deal for us and that is huge for any company starting a business or start up in India. We also made voice free, no roaming charges and the lowest data rates in the world. Plus, we gave a full suite of cloud services for free toe all geo customers. For example, we give goTV essentially for free. We give GOTV it'll law for free, which people, when we have a launching, told us that no one would see no one would use because the Indians like watching TV in the living rooms, um, with the family on a big screen television. But when we actually launched, they found that GOTV is one off our most used app. It's like 70,000,080 million monthly active users, and now we've basically been changing culture in India where culture is on demand. You can watch TV on the goal and you can pause it and you can resume whenever you have some free time. So really changed culture in India, India on we help people liver, digital life online. Right, So that was massive. So >>I'm now I'd like to talk about our cloud >>journey on board Animal Minorities Partnership. We've been partners that since 2014 since the beginning. So Geo has been using open stack since 2014 when we started with 14 note luster. I'll be one production environment One right? And that was I call it the first wave off our cloud where we're just understanding open stack, understanding the capabilities, understanding what it could do. Now we're in our second wave. Where were about 4000 bare metal servers in our open stack cloud multiple regions, Um, on that around 100,000 CPU cores, right. So it's a which is one of the bigger clouds in the world, I would say on almost all teams, with Ngor leveraging the cloud and soon I think we're going to hit about 10,000 Bama tools in our cloud, which is massive and just to give you a scale off our network, our in French, our data center footprint. Our network introduction is about 30 network data centers that carry just network traffic across there are there across India and we're about eight application data centers across three regions. Data Center is like a five story building filled with servers. So we're talking really significant scale in India. And we had to do this because when we were launching, there are the government regulation and try it. They've gotten regulatory authority of India, mandates that any telecom company they have to store customer data inside India and none of the other cloud providers were big enough to host our clothes. Right. So we we made all this intellectual for ourselves, and we're still growing next. I love to show you how we grown with together with Moran says we started in 2014 with the fuel deployment pipelines, right? And then we went on to the NK deployment. Pipelines are cloud started growing. We started understanding the clouds and we picked up M C p, which has really been a game changer for us in automation, right on DNA. Now we are in the latest release, ofem CPM CPI $2019 to on open stack queens, which on we've just upgraded all of our clouds or the last few months. Couple of months, 2 to 3 months. So we've done about nine production clouds and there are about 50 internal, um, teams consuming cloud. We call as our tenants, right. We have open stack clouds and we have communities clusters running on top of open stack. There are several production grade will close that run on this cloud. The Geo phone, for example, runs on our cloud private cloud Geo Cloud, which is a backup service like Google Drive and collaboration service. It runs out of a cloud. Geo adds G o g S t, which is a tax filing system for small and medium enterprises, our retail post service. There are all these production services running on our private clouds. We're also empaneled with the government off India to provide cloud services to the government to any State Department that needs cloud services. So we were empaneled by Maiti right in their ego initiative. And our clouds are also Easter. 20,000 certified 20,000 Colin one certified for software processes on 27,001 and said 27,017 slash 18 certified for security processes. Our clouds are also P our data centers Alsop a 942 be certified. So significant effort and investment have gone toe These data centers next. So this is where I think we've really valued the partnership with Morantes. Morantes has has trained us on using the concepts of get offs and in fries cold, right, an automated deployments and the tool change that come with the M C P Morantes product. Right? So, um, one of the key things that has happened from a couple of years ago to today is that the deployment time to deploy a new 100 north production cloud has decreased for us from about 55 days to do it in 2015 to now, we're down to about five days to deploy a cloud after the bear metals a racked and stacked. And the network is also the physical network is also configured, right? So after that, our automated pipelines can deploy 100 0 clock in five days flight, which is a massive deal for someone for a company that there's adding bear metals to their infrastructure so fast, right? It helps us utilize our investment, our assets really well. By the time it takes to deploy a cloud control plane for us is about 19 hours. It takes us two hours to deploy a compu track and it takes us three hours to deploy a storage rack. Right? And we really leverage the re class model off M C. P. We've configured re class model to suit almost every type of cloud that we have, right, and we've kept it fairly generous. It can be, um, Taylor to deploy any type of cloud, any type of story, nor any type of compute north. Andi. It just helps us automate our deployments by putting every configuration everything that we have in to get into using infra introduction at school, right plus M. C. P also comes with pipelines that help us run automated tests, automated validation pipelines on our cloud. We also have tempest pipelines running every few hours every three hours. If I recall correctly which run integration test on our clouds to make sure the clouds are running properly right, that that is also automated. The re class model and the pipelines helpers automate day to operations and changes as well. There are very few seventh now, compared toa a few years ago. It very rare. It's actually the exception and that may be because off mainly some user letter as opposed to a cloud problem. We also have contributed auto healing, Prometheus and Manager, and we integrate parameters and manager with our even driven automation framework. Currently, we're using Stack Storm, but you could use anyone or any event driven automation framework out there so that it indicates really well. So it helps us step away from constantly monitoring our cloud control control planes and clothes. So this has been very fruitful for us and it has actually apps killed our engineers also to use these best in class practices like get off like in France cord. So just to give you a flavor on what stacks our internal teams are running on these clouds, Um, we have a multi data center open stack cloud, and on >>top of that, >>teams use automation tools like terra form to create the environments. They also create their own Cuba these clusters and you'll see you'll see in the next slide also that we have our own community that the service platform that we built on top of open stack to give developers development teams NGO um, easy to create an easy to destroy Cuban. It is environment and sometimes leverage the Murano application catalog to deploy using heats templates to deploy their own stacks. Geo is largely a micro services driven, Um um company. So all of our applications are micro services, multiple micro services talking to each other, and the leverage develops. Two sets, like danceable Prometheus, Stack stone from for Otto Healing and driven, not commission. Big Data's tax are already there Kafka, Patches, Park Cassandra and other other tools as well. We're also now using service meshes. Almost everything now uses service mesh, sometimes use link. Erred sometimes are experimenting. This is Theo. So So this is where we are and we have multiple clients with NGO, so our products and services are available on Android IOS, our own Geo phone, Windows Macs, Web, Mobile Web based off them. So any client you can use our services and there's no lock in. It's always often with geo, so our sources have to be really good to compete in the open Internet. And last but not least, I think I love toe talk to you about our container journey. So a couple of years ago, almost every team started experimenting with containers and communities and they were demand for as a platform team. They were demanding community that the service from us a manage service. Right? So we built for us, it was much more comfortable, much more easier toe build on top of open stack with cloud FBI s as opposed to doing this on bare metal. So we built a fully managed community that a service which was, ah, self service portal, where you could click a button and get a community cluster deployed in your own tenant on Do the >>things that we did are quite interesting. We also handle some geo specific use cases. So we have because it was a >>manage service. We deployed the city notes in our own management tenant, right? We didn't give access to the customer to the city. Notes. We deployed the master control plane notes in the tenant's tenant and our customers tenant, but we didn't give them access to the Masters. We didn't give them the ssh key the workers that the our customers had full access to. And because people in Genova learning and experimenting, we gave them full admin rights to communities customers as well. So that way that really helped on board communities with NGO. And now we have, like 15 different teams running multiple communities clusters on top, off our open stack clouds. We even handle the fact that there are non profiting. I people separate non profiting I peoples and separate production 49 p pools NGO. So you could create these clusters in whatever environment that non prod environment with more open access or a prod environment with more limited access. So we had to handle these geo specific cases as well in this communities as a service. So on the whole, I think open stack because of the isolation it provides. I think it made a lot of sense for us to do communities our service on top off open stack. We even did it on bare metal, but that not many people use the Cuban, indeed a service environmental, because it is just so much easier to work with. Cloud FBI STO provision much of machines and covering these clusters. That's it from me. I think I've said a mouthful, and now I love for you toe. I'd love to have your questions. If you want to reach out to me. My email is mine dot capulet r l dot com. I'm also you can also message me on Twitter at my uncouple. So thank you. And it was a pleasure talking to you, Andre. Let let me hear your questions.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome everyone back to the Cube's live coverage. This is day three of Google Cloud Cube coverage here. Google Next 2018 #GoogleNext18. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Jeff Frick. Our next two guests kicking off day three, is Ed Anuff, the director of product management at Google Cloud, part of the Apigee acquisition, really part of the APIs and really a big part of the story here at Google Next, and Chuck Knostman, vice-president of IT at T-mobile customer. Ed, thanks for coming on. Chuck, thanks for coming on. So Apigee, a big part of the story at Google Next is, you know, the role of APIs and services. Huge, and I won't say nuanced. I mean, certainly Istio is new to a lot of people. Kubernetes, superly a very important piece of this new cloud service platform, as well as just running work loads, multicloud, etc. What's the focus, what's going on for you guys at the event. Take a minute to explain the announcements and what you guys did here at the show. >> Sure, so, APIs are how software talks to software. And what we announced this week at the show with Kubernetes and Istio are new ways for people to build software and deploy it, in new distributive fashions. And so that's creating new ways for tying your software together. Microservices, a lot of people are talking about now, are a key part of this. And so, from an Apigee perspective, you know, we're looking at facilitating how to make that communications happen, how to make it secure, how to make it efficient, how to monitor it. So what we announced was that Apigee is making it now possible for you to have all the tools that we've given you for managing your APIs, for, you know, getting your mobile apps to talk to your cloud services and all that, now is also going to apply to these new microservices that you're building. And so we think it's a pretty exciting thing. Lot of our customers have been asking for this, and obviously, uh, Chuck being one of them, and so, you know, that's what it's been all about for us this week. >> Chuck, obviously, APIs, key part of dev ops. You know, it first started with slinging some APIs around, stitching them together. Developers voted with their code, clearly APIs is the way that software's working. Microservices takes us to a whole nother level. Now, operationalizing APIs seems easy, but it's, you've got to start managing things differently. How are you guys taking that API and this new service management piece of it and kind of operationalizing APIs into T-Mobile? >> Yeah, we've been using Apigee for about four years now, and so over the time I think we were have 200 plus internal APIs, so we've over that time we've kind of learned how to operationalize that piece of it. Over the last couple of years we've really been focused on the microservice layers. Writing cloud-native applications, essentially. And that layer, and now with the Apigee hook into Istio, we're going to have a much better way to manage it. And it's really nice to see the platform starting to grow and mature along with us, so that's really great. >> I can only imagine how complicated it is to run real-time, cloud-native and have also legacy, and I think one of the things I'd like to get your thoughts on is, containers have become a nice piece of, not ripping and replacing to bring in the new. You don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. And now with containers, Kubernetes, and microservices and Istio, you have an ability to kind of do both. Talk about how you guys do it, cause this is like a perfect storm, in a good way, for enterprises. >> Well yeah, and it's really good timing for us as well. We're just now starting our Kubernetes journey on premise, if you will. So we're a big cloud-foundry shop. We're starting to put our legacy applications into docker containers and moving them, we'll be moving them onto Kubernetes. And so you can see the whole, the containerization shift as we go, as we go through time. And it's really, for us, like you said, it's fortuitous that at this timing because now with Istio coming in and being able to control all that, that's a great thing for us. >> Ed, talk about, you give a lot of history. To use, as normal APIs, it's lingua franca, it's been around for a while, you've had a lot of experience in that. But a lot of the enterprises that we talk to are like, there's a lot of pressure in IT to do more now with cloud-native. And now with the new services that are out there, it kind of takes the pressure off IT because the pressure of, oh, I got to sunset that app or I don't know when to kill that workload. I know I want to maybe transform it, but I don't want to have to disrupt all this stuff. So talk about the importance of nondisruption, because this seems to be a conversation that's talked a lot in the hallways. >> That's exactly right. So, you know, what you see within enterprises is that there's a need to deliver a whole set of new applications, and a lot of these are connected to digital experiences. Basically everything that you experience on your mobile apps, every new form of engaging with your customer. That's where a lot of the business growth is that's bringing, you know, a lot of the funding for these new initiatives. But, a lot of the core data of the enterprise is locked up within systems that have been operating very efficiently, but siloed for many years. And so that's the part that we see the most, which is, you know, folks within IT come to us and say, "Look, you know, I've been building these legacy systems "for many years now, and I know that if I can just take "the data that's locked up in these and bring these "into these new ways of doing business, "that it's going to have a huge impact on my business." And that's, you know, that's where the question sits. And then the follow up on that is, "Hey, you know, we want to, "we want to make our businesses more like the way, you know, "you guys are doing it in Silicon Valley. "And we, we see what you're doing with containers, "and we see things like Kubernetes, and cloud-native, "and we know that's the right way to build things, "but there has to be a way for us to bring "all of these other assets that we've been building "for the last 30 years along for the ride." And in fact for most of these businesses, our response is, "Hey, it's not just a question "of building along for the ride. "That, that's your core, that's your, that is been "what you built your business on. "So don't even just think about it "as this thing that you somehow have to drag along. "Think about how you actually can amplify it "because it's been the source of your business for so long." >> Yeah, the other I would add to that is that it gives us scale and operation, a much better operational platform to work with. For us, we've grown tremendously, or our growth has been tremendous over the last five years. We've gone from I think 30 million customers to 73 million customers, and frankly, to scale those systems up, containerization is probably the only way we can go with it. And with, from an operational standpoint, having one platform like Kubernetes to have, to operate for all of this stuff just helps us out tremendously. >> We hear that all the time. I think that's the biggest story around containers outside of geeking out on the benefits of it is that it really allows a nice bridge to the future. You don't have to burn the boats, as they say, in Silicon Valley, you know. >> And you can pick your, you can pick on the applications you want to keep around, right. Then you refactor 'em to be cloud-native on the ones you don't. You don't have to go all the way, right, and so you can make it much better that way. >> Chuck, I'm curious to get your take on the changing competitive environment. Cause before, you know, you had these big complex systems and you wanted to keep them running. Now the pressure for more innovation, more applications, quicker applications, to leverage not only your inside stuff but outside stuff, and how some of these technologies are helping you deliver that to your customers or your internal development team. >> Yeah, like I said, scale is one aspect of it. Performance is another, and the ability to move those workloads close to the customer just like Google's trying to do with moving closer to the customer, we do the same thing. Right, and so the hybrid cloud is real for us. We run in almost all the clouds right now, and on premise we treat that as a cloud as well. But being able to do that can only happen when we containerize stuff and utilize similar platforms on all these places. >> Right, and then you'll have this huge transformational shift over the next several years with 5G right, that's coming-- >> Yeah, yeah, and we've been at it for a couple years now. >> For a couple years, so this is going to be another huge wave of change inside your infrastructure. >> Yeah, sounds fantastic. >> What attracted you to Google Cloud? Share, take a minute to explain. What was the interest in Google Cloud. Why Google Cloud for your guys? >> Well we're just getting started with it, but it's really, it's the partnership we've had with Apigee that's helped us kind of understand what's going on with Google Cloud, but then the open-source nature of it as well as the focus on AI and ML. That's why we're really taking a hard look at what's going on with Google Cloud, and the attitude towards enterprises is great as well. >> Culture's a good fit there. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Yeah, it's interesting, a lot of people are attracted by some of the speed. I mean, we've been hearing here at the show, you know, Google obviously has built their business on being fast. >> Yeah, well and having your own network is massive as well, right. >> And now you got the API. And what's the future look like for APIs and Apigee inside Google? Give us a little taste of what you guys are working on, some of the projects you guys are passionate about, and some of the successes you've had or any anecdotal use case studies. >> So definitely, so, you know, APIs carry our customers' most important data. And data's the basis for machine learning and AI, and so you're going to see a lot of product innovation for us about bringing, you know, AI to the point of these data conduits that are what APIs are all about. It's the natural place to couple it with every business process. So that's a big deal for us. I think that, you know, the security aspect, you heard a lot about security in the key notes. Again, you know, APIs are the conduit in many cases for, again, the enterprises most important data. To get outside of the perimeter of the enterprise, it has to be done in a secure way. You know, and then finally, being able to go and leverage the sort of collaborative nature, the stuff you see within open-source, the community around all of this, again, you know, most APIs are about bringing a lot more developers to, you know, build more applications in less time around these APIs and that is, that collaboration component is something that we see a ton of opportunities in terms of leveraging, you know, Google's unique know-how in terms of advancing and pushing this data that are in an API management. So I think you're going to see a lot of that from us. >> Chuck, I'd love to get your thoughts on how you in IT, obviously and IT's transforming, we talk about it all the time, how you keep track of what's good, right. It used to be in the old days the stack was pretty not that complex. And you go to Gartner or magic quadrant, oh they're a leader, I'll kick the tires, they come in, a vendor will come in, but some of the best cloud providers don't even show up on a magic quadrant because it's horizontally scalable. APIs changes the stack a little bit. A new modern middleware is emerging with Istio and new sets of business models and services are emerging. So a lot of people are like trying to be, how do you determine who's good. You know, in IT, because ou want to move the needle, you want to transform, you got a lot a build up. How do you kind of evaluate, is there any new ways, or is it gut instinct or specific things that you look at? >> Really good question. We look, we try to adopt the open-source stuff first. But we, from the company standpoint we also look at the company themselves and who's really vested in what's going on with it. Like, Apigee four years ago was really the only ones that were really only doing APIs, right. And their knowledge and the depth and their road map, that's what we really kind of look for. But to your point, things are changing so rapidly that you kind of have to go with the, watch the open-source community. Where are all the pull requests coming from, or what platforms are they going after? And then track that, and that's where, that's what we try to do. And so when we see Kubernetes and the explosion that's happening on that, the tooling that's coming around that, we know that's going to be good for enterprises going forward. So, we're going to be heavily investing in that platform. >> It's interesting, we always talk about developers, but what's interesting that's coming out of the show that we're observing is, it's always about developers do building apps. But the role of an operator inside IT, used to be an operator would, you know, maybe provision some storage and some servers. Now the role of what an operator, I mean, network op guys, now it's kind of like a more of a holistic view. Your thoughts on this. I know it's super early, but the emergence of these two personas in IT is super critical. >> Yeah, we look at it like it's automation, right. That's where it all comes to play. So if you've got a platform like a Kubernetes where you can have all this automation built around it, and you let the developers just do their thing and focus on the business logic, it's huge. So there is kind of two personalities, and the caring and feeding of that platform is just as important as the guys writing the applications across the top. >> Yeah, it's really a great environment. Final question for you guys. Observations on the show, Google Next. What's your observation, obviously you've got an API perspective, just globally looking down. If you kind of look, zoom out and look at, look down at the show, thoughts and commentary on what's happening here. >> You know, I think the scale of it has been amazing, you know, we became part of Google two years ago. We were here at the show last year, looking at it this year. And, the level of growth, the activity, attendees, the number of announcements, it's just been amazing. It's been very exciting for us to be a part of. >> Cool, Chuck your thoughts? >> Super impressed. This is our first one, really, that we've come to. We were even participating on the stage on the Knative, we wrote some applications to work with Knative. But, it's a, it's a very diverse crowd which is awesome. I think you really need that. Some of the others, I don't see as much. So I think what Google is doing, and again their approaches to enterprise, looking more at solutions, vertical solutions, very impressed with what's going on here. >> It's a really great time. Congratulations on all your success with the APIs. You guys have done the work, and open-source, it's where the, your employees want to work. They want to meet other people, and this is where the co-creation, that's where the assessments of the vendors happen. >> Opensource.T-Mobile.com, that's where we want to be. >> Alright, great. Well, Chuck, Ed, thanks so much. Really appreciate the time. It's the Cube live coverage here in San Francisco covering Google Cloud's conference, Next '18. We'll be right back with more day three coverage. Stay with us, we'll be right back. (light jazzy music plays)

(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> Welcome back to the Cube, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, in Boston. Talking a lot about digital transformation, and love when we get to talk to the users here, at the show. One of the great stories told on the keynote stage this morning was from T-Mobile. So, while Rob wasn't on the stage, he's involved in the activity. This is Rob Hansen, Director of Operations at T-Mobile. Thank you for joining me. >> Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. >> So, Rob, we were talking before and the twitters, there's lots of stuff that goes on, but everybody, there was a great story talking about 17 hundred developers and only 10 operators, underneath, making those work. So, maybe before we get into it, tell us a little bit about your role, your background, what you do at T-mobile. >> Sure, my role is, I lead a team on the operations side. So, we operate the software and when we look over the last 10 years or so, that software's been predominately large monoliths. Look at, use TIBCO as an example. We've been a heavy user of TIBCO BW for many many years and my environment supporting TIBCO BW accounts for about 2,000 physical servers across multiple data centers, and that carries a high operational cost. We're doing all our changes in the middle of the night. Things break, seeming randomly at times, causing customer impact, just a lot of paint and patching. One of my favorite topics is patching. >> (laughs) Oh, boy. Tuesday's your favorite day of the week, right? It's taco Tuesday and patch Tuesday. >> Oh, my god. Yes. Exactly Every quarter I get the list of servers, here's the list of servers that needs to be patched, and it's just a nightmare, right. >> So, Rob, can we talk a little bit about the developer and operator interaction at your company? I interviewed Solomon Hykes last year at DockerCon, and he said, "Believe it or not, "I created Docker mostly for the operators." That's his background in there, >> Oh, yeah. >> But everybody, they're, "This show, "it's developers, developers, developers." So, what's that dynamic inside T-Mobile? >> Historically, before we got into kind of the cloud-native space, it was really an us versus them, right. There's the mentality of, oh, it's an ops problem now. There's a great meme out there. It's one of my favorites, the little girl standing in front of the burning house, and it says, "Worked in dev, it's an ops problem now." (Stu laughs) So, as we've gone through this cloud-native journey, and we've moved into using like Pivotal, within our environment, we've seen that community within our organization come together, and really start working closer and closer together. Right now, we're going through a migration into the TIBCO Container Edition project, or application, and as we've been doing that, we literally have our ops base folks and the development base folks sitting in a room together, day and night, just working together. Historically, developers have a point of view, operators have a different point of view. It's really brought them together into a singular point of view and ownership of the software, and just providing business capabilities. >> Rob, could you give us a little bit of picture, kind of your application portfolio, how much have you been kind of moving onto the platforms, how much do you build new on the platform, those kind of things? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I mentioned earlier, legacy, we were about 2,000 physical servers. Right now, I'm trying to remember the actual application count, but I've taken, or we've taken one of our historical job applications, moved it completely into PCF, running a complete spring boot now. We're doing that with our TIBCO environment. We have a number of other applications that we've spun up, running in spring and whatnot. What we've been able to do is just explode the amount of stuff we're deploying, and just new functionality. We're able to develop it much faster. So, when we look at the developers, more people are coming on board, because you can just get the code out there so much faster, and really in smaller increments. So, a lot of times, when we've developed things and we've delivered functionality for the business, because you're dealing with large monoliths, you have to change, you know, one of the applications I mentioned, you've got 200 services, about 600 operations, bundled into the same ball of code. Now, we've separated that out into a bunch of microservices, so now, we can just implement this one thing, with very little to no impact to the business. I think one of the big fundamental shifts that we've seen, we have historically done the large Saturday night deployments, right. You show up Saturday night at 7:00 p.m. and you hope you get to go home Sunday. We've really shifted that model, so in Q1, in my space, we did 86 and a half percent of our changes in production, during the day, right in the middle of the business day. >> Stu: Is it scary? >> It was at first, in all honesty, because my biggest fear is having to explain things to leadership, you know why did it go wrong, the root cause, and all that kind of stuff. But because we're able to move so fast now, we're able to get the code out there. We're able to see, okay, is this working? Roll it back really quickly, leveraging blue-green. Scale is another thing. Every year, iPhone. iPhone is a scary time I think, for pretty much any wireless operator. And historically, we've had to go out and buy more physical servers. So, you're buying these servers, you're building em. It takes months to build em, stand em up, and you're doing that for a two-day event, a year. You end up carrying the costs of that hardware. Well, this last iPhone in September, you know the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X, because we were predominately running in our cloud-native environment, and our cloud foundry environment, spun up the containers. >> Does that live in a public cloud? >> That lives in a private cloud, On-Prem. >> Stu: Okay. So we just spun up the containers, got through the event, spun em down. >> Okay, you had enough infrastructure capacity, you just didn't need it to be kind of-- >> Yeah. Well, and we're able to target the specific services, right. In our TIBCO landscape, we operate, in the old BW environment we operated about 200 years, comes out to about 14 hundred services. So, when you're scaling up, you're having to do it, more or less, for everything, but running in the Pivotal environment, we're able to just target, okay this, you know, like a get customer info. It's like a basic call when you log into MyT-Mo. You're able to just take that, double it, triple it, whatever you need to do. Maybe this other call over here, you know, we don't have to touch that. So you're just being way more efficient with your resources. >> So, Rob, if you can do these updates all the time, do you still love patching as much as you used to? >> The patching is the devil. I actually, the 10 to 15 people that Chuck was talking about on stage today, those are the guys that actually operate the physical hardware, you know, the Diego cells and whatnot. I meet with them on a weekly basis, and we kind of go through the state of things, and planning, and all that kind of stuff. Almost every time, I end that meeting with, "I just don't want to patch anything, anymore." So, the more we get onto this environment, the easier it is for me As we're trying to do this dev/ops transformation at T-Mobile, we're getting there, and we're doing it. You know, one of the things we ask ourselves is, should a dev/ops team have to care about patching? Why is a developer going to say, "Oh, my OS is a version behind, "I need to take care of that." That's not useful to the business, right? That takes away time that that developer can be creating new things and adding value. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about, you know in a public cloud environment, I don't think about that, you know, what version of ah-jur-ware you're running isn't something that people ask. Private cloud, if it's going to live up to what we want it to, it should have a similar type of dynamic. >> Exactly, and our platform team is amazing. I mean, they take care of that stuff for us. I'm a heavy user. So I think Chuck talked about this a little. He didn't really talk about the volume, but we started on our Pivotal journey a couple years ago. I think first started dabbling 2015, but we really didn't start converting our large monolithic middleware until the beginning of 2017. So, right now, we are doing 250 million transactions a day, on our Pivotal platform, just with two, or, I'm sorry, three of my platforms running in there. >> Last thing I want to ask you, Rob. What key learnings have you had, going through this transformation? What do you say to your peers, that they could do better or look out for or plan, to help them? >> I think the main learning that we've had is just how important it is to partner together, with the hardware people, the developers, and the operations people. Coming together, it's a cultural shift in many respects. Like they say in dev/ops, a lot of people talk about it, they don't realize how hard it is to do, but hardware has to be a part of that. Coming together, luckily, we had a couple stumblings, in the beginning, but we were quickly able to huddle together between kind of these three core groups and really work together and overcome those challenges. I think the second thing that's really important is just to be open and honest with each other. Everybody makes mistakes. I think a lot of times, there's cases of, oh this is platform problem, oh it's a software problem. You know, there's a little finger-pointing here and there, from time to time, but getting through that, being open, honest, communicative with each other, it just makes the world so much easier and better for us. >> Well, Rob, my entire IT career, you know we've wanted everybody to hold hands (Rob laughs) and get in the circle together, bust through those silos, so, you know, making progress though. Thank you so much for sharing the story of T-Mobile. Watch more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit, here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in Palo Alto for SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE's new studio, 4500 square feet in Palo Alto. Just moved in less than a month ago, and we're bringing you all the in-studio coverage of what's going on in Barcelona, Spain at Mobile World Congress. This is day two of two days of coverage. Here in the studio we're bringing people in that's in Silicon Valley into the studio, experts, entrepreneurs, venture capitalist investors, angel investors, and of course, analysts here from our own team, and we have Peter Burris with me here. And we're covering all the action. Of course, we have reporters and analysts and friends on the ground doing call-ins in Barcelona, bringing you all the action, and really, bringing the big story that's not being told, which is AI, IOT, and cloud-ready, cloud-native action is happening. This is the disruptor, the calm before the storm as we were saying earlier yesterday. Peter Burris, great to see you. We were talking yesterday morning on the kickoff, let's take that to the next level. Cloud-native, IOT, really the big story that's not being told at Mobile World Congress this year, mainly because it's just in everyone's face right now, and people are making sense of it. Your thoughts on this as you are looking at the research, looking at the marketplace, this is reality. The IOT is real. >> Oh, it's very much real, John. Let's start with why cloud and mobile are so important together. In many respects, the thing that made the cloud real is mobility because the minute that you don't know where your device is going to connect, where the termination point's going to be, then you don't want to have to control and own that network. And so in many respects, the whole concept of mobility catalyzed the need for the cloud because you didn't want to have to utilize a, you didn't want to have to build your own network to support people as they moved around. So the cloud as a front end, or as a set of capabilities that supports mobility is really crucial to this whole concept, and it's somewhat surprising that it's not more closely tied together at Mobile World Congress. But the most important thing that we could talk about obviously is that IOT is going to have a major impact on all kinds of different factors. It's going to have a major impact on the devices that are manufactured, it's going to have a major impact on what the scale efficiencies that you have in manufacturing, the nature of the sensors, the nature of microprocessors, how much memory gets put on stuff, how much flash memory is going to be manufactured over the next decade. All these things are going to have a significant impact on the concept of mobility and what it means and the networks it provided over the course of the next 10 years. >> Peter, I want to bring up something that you brought up yesterday, and I think this is important, that's why I wanted to do a real drill down on what seems to be a major paradigm shift and inflection point. We've been talking about autonomous vehicles, media entertainment, smart cities, smart homes. Those are all the sexy demos at Mobile World Congress. But the real change, as pointed out by Val Bercovici who just came in as CTO is that the sea change underneath it, and you pointed out yesterday the convergence between enterprise and consumers coming together is that this internet of things and people, IOTP, or IOTNP, 'cause things can be sensors and devices, are changing it, and what's obvious to us and now coming out of Mobile World Congress as it's just starting to be seen by the mainstream press and media and community is that the TelCos aren't used to dealing with rapidly provisioning things. They're used to a subscriber who buys a phone, dials up a service, gets provisioned and connected, and they have a number, and then they try to connect to the base station and get on the internet. That's simple, and those connections we all know fail, but now imagine that multiplied by millions and millions of devices that are going to be turned on and connected. This is a scale problem, this is a network problem, this is a physics problem. >> Well, it's a physics problem-- >> Explain your theory on this. >> Yeah, it's a physics problem at a very, very base level. Just talking about the TelCos for a second. You're absolutely right, John. We're talking about, when we talk about the scale problem in the TelCos, it's not that they don't know what to do with their networks, it's not that they don't know how to connect devices to the networks. They just don't know how to provide it at a service level. It's going to be demanded by the scale of the devices moving into and out of networks as we think about IOT and P, the TelCos have historically thought about, they've thought about the assets that they have in place, the rates that they charge for those assets, the returns they generate, the tariff rules they work with with governments around the globe. They tend to focus on, good or bad, 10, 20-year time horizons. >> And their P is phone, not people. >> That's right, their P is absolutely. Their P is phone, and I can, and you were probably around. I can remember when you could not buy a phone that didn't have, on a particular company's network, you still can't buy a phone on a network today. You buying a mobile phone and it goes, it's associated with-- >> You're buying a carrier. >> That's right, that's exactly right. And that's how TelCos want to work. Now, they're hoping that eventually they're going to find themselves in the position to be able to spin up devices very quickly, but the reality is that's not how provisioning works in the real world. It's one of the reasons why TelCos continue to get their lunches eaten by companies that are building out their own networks and doing a much better job of rapid provisioning. >> You and I were talking last night off-camera about this notion of IOT and P, and of course, we all believe in and we're passionate about it, but you made a comment that was interesting. It was that we're going to look back at this time in history as a moment where before and after kind of, before Christ, after Christ, however you want to look at it. I mean, there's always that AD, BC kind of thing going on where before, I always call it before Steve Jobs and iPhone. Now it's going to a whole other level with the societal changes from little things, like we had a guest on talking about waste disposal efficiency. Traffic light management, healthcare, every single digital service. NTT Docomo's investor was on yesterday. She was talking about investing in services and bringing AI as a service, not network services, lifestyle services. What do you mean by that, that this is going to be something that we're going to look back 50 years from now and say this was the moment? Can you expand your? >> Yeah, absolutely, John, and it's really actually pretty simple. If you take a look at how executives are starting to think, what's happening is for the first time, we're really starting to look at data as an asset. That's a big question, but let me try to break it down and be a little bit more concise about what I mean by that. When we think about IOT and P, we're thinking about the idea that we can distribute enormous, billions of devices that are going to be sources of data. They're going to be going into the analog world, put into the analog world, and they're going to take analog signals and turn them into, and transduce them into digital signals. Once those signals become digital, then they hit big data, they hit AI, they hit machine learning. That's what's catalyzing a lot of the social concerns about, well, what does it mean for machines to be more autonomous, to take more responsibility? What's going to happen with business accountability when business are increasingly relying on machines that quote, "think." When we think about these big societal changes, we're talking about the ability that IOT's providing, IOT and P is providing, that for the first time how we're going to capture enormous net-new data, how we're going to process that enormous net-new data, and then ultimately, what we call systems of enaction, how we're going to enact specific events back in the real world as a consequence of what machines say is the right thing to do. That is a demarcation point. It moves from a machine being regarded as a tool, and almost exclusively as a tool, something that performs work better but having that work be very well described and very well articulated and the concept clear to something that might actually introduce new work or do work differently. Take responsibility for how it performs work. That's a major sea change. And so when we say that it's going to be, we'll look back and say, "It was before this time "and after this time," it's because we are now in the position to economically be able to gather these streams of data, process them in ways that are unprecedented, and then have the results of that processing enact in unpredictable ways, and that's a major change. >> I don't know if we can talk about some of your research that's coming out, I dunno, can we touch on some of the points? This has yet to be released research from the Wikibon team headed up by Peter with SiliconANGLE Media. I want to just point out, 'cause I find this interesting, you say that there's a architectural decision point within IOTP, a new phrase, hashtag IOTP if you're interested in working with us, just hit us up at Twitter. But there's really four points you point, physics, the law, legal, of course, everything's legal. Physics, legal, economical, economics, and then, authority. >> Right. >> What do you mean by those four? Can you just take us through conceptually these are dimensions, they interplay, are they dependencies, are they interdependent, are they all intertwined? What's the rationale behind these architectural forces? >> When people think about information systems historically, they've been relatively well circumscribed. So, I have an employee that I'm going to provide a service to from a network that I control that has latency requirements and aren't that big a problem because at the end of the day a human being doesn't operate at nanosecond kind of levels, and I got a machine that's mine, and I own running an application that I've licensed. That is a very, very tightly bound unit. When we start introducing IOTP and some of these other things, now we're talking about emergent behaviors that might be far away that we don't control, we're working with partners, et cetera, and the basic architectural challenge of thinking about what do we have to do to get a handle on the requirements of the processing, 'cause at the end of the day these things are still computers, and they still have operational characteristics that have to be accommodated. We think that there's going to be four factors that are going to influence how what we call the edge zone expands or compresses based on the work that needs to be conducted. One is physics. You're not going to go faster than the speed of light, and in fact, generally speaking, if you look at the distance that you have to travel, you're going to be outside the automation zone. You're going to be outside the automation zone if light has to travel, at best, you're going to be about a 10th of the speed of light, so if your automation zone, if you want your automation zone to be about 100 miles, then it means that from there and back with the speed of light you're not going to be able to automate anything that takes longer than that, just for example. Physics is one. >> Physics and wireless is a great example of physics. >> Wireless is, yeah. >> And moving packets around. >> None of this stuff works without physics, right. The second one is legal, that the reality is is that while the laws of physics are relatively immutable as far as we know, there are also government regulations that are what they are, and that could include privacy, it can include requirements for disclosing things, and so, those also, borders are going to have an impact on this notion of automation zones, or edge zones as we call them. Economics is another one. It costs money to move data from point A to point B, and the question is how much data's going to move. A lot of people think that everything's going to go up to the cloud, it's going to be processed up there, and then some instruction's going to come down for automation. That's probably not the way it's going to work. Our findings are suggesting-- >> Not only is it the cost of data, I would argue that also the product design criteria will be impacted economically on that decision point. >> Absolutely. But that's based on how much does it cost to move the data around. The operational characteristics of a product or service are fundamentally, a digital product or service, are fundamentally tied to the cost of moving data. We think that 95-plus percent of the data's actually going to stay in the edge. And the last one is authority, and we kind of touched upon this a second ago in that we're now suggesting that machines are going to take actions without human intervention. Not just actions, but they're actually going to change the scope and nature of the actions that are going to be taken. What does that mean? What does it mean for a machine to act on behalf of a brand? Or on behalf of a person? People use a simple explanation, "Does the autonomous car take out the old lady "or the cub scouts if you got a problem? "Or does it do something else?" It's those kinds of things that we don't know the answer to. A lot of the questions of authority and how we distribute authority and how we codify authority and how we track authority is going to have a major impact on what limits to behavior we put on these things. >> There's also the security angle alone is another one, too, just like basic stuff. These are interesting. And you see these architectural forces. Are you calling them forces, factors, variables? >> Just factors simply because the concept of factor, or you can call it constraints, is the idea that your decision has to factor these things, so we're just calling 'em factors right now. >> Alright, so let's step back now, and look at some of the commentary from this week in Mobile World Congress and our interviews here in theCUBE as well as the remotes. Certainly the hallway conversation is the business model of the TelCos. Saar Gillia who was on yesterday brought up a point of, hey, where's the use cases? Show me the use case, and then I'll say yes. And it's this too complicated, he was not seeing the use cases, and he was saying, "I'd prefer more battery life than "more one gigabit wireless right now" given that's his current situation. The balancing of where to get started seems to be the number one theme. What do I do next, what's the first step? Will the bridge collapse that I'm trying to cross to this future? Or I can't see the other side? Is the world flat or round? These are kind of more personal feelings that people have around taking that leap of faith into this new world? How do you advise and package that together and assimilate that? I mean, do you, how should people look at that? >> I think it's a great question, and I wasn't part of the conversation yesterday, but let's look at that for example. Today, if you're using your phone, you effectively have a relatively simple number of sensors in your phone, relatively simple number of transducers, right. You have a chip that turns your analog voice into a digital signal, so there's that in there. You have some neat stuff that presents the screens, so there's that in there. You have a microphone, et cetera, that kind of stuff, but when we start thinking about 5G and what networking could become, as we talked about yesterday, it's not so much the absolute bandwidth speeds, and it certainly is not going to have any impact on latency for the most part. It really is the number of devices that you can support at one time. It allows for greater density of sources. Now, without looking at 5G, we can talk about a phone being able to support not just a few generators, or a few sources of data on that phone, but maybe dozens, so maybe things that, you know, the whole concept of wearables. Again, do I want to get involved in the use case? No, you and I are sitting here being analysts, and that's not our business. But are there going to be use cases for more wearable technology? Well, if you're sick, if you have a chronic disease, just for example, yeah, that's a use case. I could see people actually living much higher quality lives because they can support more sensors as a result of 5G, with greater security. Again, we go to the autonomous car. There's going to be a lot of sensors in an autonomous car. Most of them are going to operate locally, but having said that, it might be nice if we could actually have a very, very fast low-cost network with inside the car itself to handle a lot of that work. I think we've, human beings, developers, have always found new use cases when given more compute, more memory, and more networking. I don't think that's going to change. I think we're going to see more of that. >> Peter, what's your thoughts, if you had to summarize and encapsulate it into a narrative, Mobile World Congress 2017, now looking back at day two kind of coming to a close, seeing what's out there, how do you look at that? How would you tell someone here is the story of Mobile World Congress? Tell that story. >> To me, John, having looked at the stuff come over the transom and you know, a lot of new devices being talked about and generating a little bit of excitement, a lot of new this and a little bit of excitement, I think that the question for me is are we moving into a period where integration's going to matter again? And I think in many respects that's going to be kind of the subtext of what's coming out of Mobile World Congress. Is it good enough to have the best of breed device and this and that, with a software stack that's doing this and that? Or is there going to be more value to the enterprise and ultimately to the consumer by taking more of an end-to-end perspective? Apple from a consumer and an experience standpoint has done that and has, what is it? They're worth $150 billion more than any other company on the planet right now or something crazy like that? Don't quote me on that, but I think that's what somebody told me. >> Trillions of dollars in cash overseas, for sure. >> Yeah, so it's that notion of are we moving back into a world where integration is going to matter because we're going through a period of significant discontinuity. >> Integration is a great point, 'cause I see that, I do see that as a thing, and bring the Apple example. Apple, the way they develop might be different than say, what we see in an open source, for instance. If you look at what Intel's doing, and I look at Intel as a bellwether, and this is from my perspective, because they have such a huge long game in play, they have been the leader in my opinion in the tech industry playing the long game, and they have to because they make chips. And they're looking at the 5G as an ecosystem play, and they're admitting and saying it's not one vendor. They don't say take village, but they're basically saying it takes a village to rise all the tide or float all the boats, if you will. If you look at what Intel's doing, they're essentially saying that it's an integration game through their own moves, which is ecosystem, playing well together. Now, you could fight for best of breed on point solutions, whether it's a Snapdragon Qualcom, or Intel processor on the device. At the end of the day, it's, as we were saying, network function virtualization to make those dynamic networks work seem to be the key. To play in that, if as a society globally, to your four factors, it has to be an integration game. No one company can do those factors. >> You're absolutely right. Here's how I would say it to put a slightly different twist on it. The tech industry has moved from a product orientation to a service orientation, or is moving from a product orientation to a service orientation, from an orientation where we focus on what's the intrinsic value of what we're buying to what's the utility of what we're using. From a "Hey, let's a put a spend a lot of money upfront "and maybe we'll get to some point of time in the future "where it's valuable" to a, "Let's only pay for what we got." It's difficult to imagine the tech industry moving successfully into that service orientation without taking more of an integration approach to it. Certainly that's what Amazon's trying to do or AWS is trying to do, that's what Google is trying to do, that's what all the companies that are trying to move infrastructure into the cloud are trying to do, so I think that this is a general issue. If we're moving to a service orientation, we have to start taking the integration view on things. >> Awesome, great, Peter. You're watching theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE Media, Inc., and SiliconANGLE Media, Inc. comprises of siliconangle.com, led by Rob Hof, that's our publishing journalism, wikibon.com led by Peter Burris and research, and theCUBE, our internet TV led by Jeff Frick, and of course CrowdChat is the data brand and the data science, and we love bringing you this great content. Pete, I'll give you quick plug because I know that you've been doing a ton of work building out the research team at Wikibon and expanding the work behind the firewall, it's a paid subscription. Some premium that we see on siliconangle.com for the most part. A great body of work on the research. I want to congratulate you, but give you an opportunity to share with the folks who are watching what's going on with research and some of the things that you're working on and why they should potentially reach out to Wikibon. >> Yeah, so we're focused on a couple of relatively simple things. We're not a huge team, so we tend to focus less on products, again, the idea of let's take a look at the intrinsic value of products, and we focus more on the impacts. What does it mean to get utility out of things? How do you get utility out of whatever you buy? The other thing we focus on is disruption, and we talked a lot about what are the disrupting factors. IOT, big data, and what we call the systems of enaction, all supported by significant changing infrastructure and new digital business models. So, it's kind of a combination of those five things that we are focusing our time and attention on. Ultimately, we want to be in a position to help our clients make decisions that improve the value of their business by better utilizing data through these digital models, digital business models that require these technology changes to go. >> Great, and it also helped show Mobile World Congress is about cloud-ready. You had a great report on Amazon we posted on siliconangle.com. What was the summary, bottom line that big body of work you did about Amazon that the headline was, "How big can Amazon be?" What was the key findings from your big assembled report on Amazon Web Service? >> The big finding is Amazon's going to get big, but the cloud's also going to get big, and we think that Amazon, the simple finding is, we think Amazon's going to hold share. That may not sound like much, but for the most part, most of the value's going to go into SaaS, most of the value's going to go into the use cases associated with stuff. That's where a lot of the money's going to go. Amazon holding share, given that they're one of the, in many respects, they created this whole thing, is actually a pretty stunning statement. And it all started, John, because when we went and we looked at our semi-annual update to what's going on in the cloud marketplace, the question that kept coming to us was, okay, so we think it's going to go this fast. Well, what's Amazon going to do with that? What's it going to mean to Amazon? How is Amazon's growth going to affect these things? And so, we started with that answer. We built our models and talked to a lot of users, built our scenarios, so we think that Amazon's going to continue to grow very fast, we think it's going to be a $40 billion company, $40 billion-plus company >> John: In revenue. >> In revenue, AWS. >> John: Not Amazon. >> Not Amazon, Amazon's a totally different beast. We'll see what Amazon does. But AWS will be about a $40-plus billion company in four or five years, and still have about eight-plus percent market share in the entire-- >> And Microsoft has changed their game, they're coming right after Amazon. >> Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Google, and when you start talk internationally, Ali Baba, there's going to be a dozen companies that create enormous businesses. >> And there are companies that don't have a cloud that are late to the game and might not have a seat when the music stops in the old musical chair analogy, so certainly we know who they are. >> You know, what's going to happen to the TelCos? Good question. >> The world, we live in very exciting times as the saying goes. Peter Burris, great to have you, great commentary. Love what you're doing, I think the research around IOT and the edge is a fundamental architectural shift. You've got the four forces laid out. Congratulations, looking forward to doing more where there's totally going to be a game-changer. This will impact everything that we live, and it'll make the autonomous vehicles and the drones and the AI and smart cities a reality. Thanks for the commentary. More Mobile World Congress coverage here in Palo Alto, breaking it all down. We've got a couple late night call-ins, so stay with us. Hopefully, folks will be sauced up a bit, and maybe share some of the news and breaking stories from the hallway. More from theCUBE after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Palo Alto, California for SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE special two-day coverage of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. As people starting to get ready to take that nap to go out all night in Barcelona after they've had their tapas and wine we're here in California breaking it all down. Two days of coverage, this is end of day two in Spain. We're in the middle of it here, and breaking down the analysis, covering all the news, commentary, identifying the trends and talking to the folks here in the Bay Area that can add value to the conversation, and our next guest is Bob Stefanski, who's the managing director of eLab, located in Palo Alto, a venture capitalist making investments and really a key player bridging Silicon Valley with Michigan Motor City here bringing the two worlds together as the autonomous vehicles and the automotive industry's under massive disruption and change, and the car companies know about it and they're not afraid of it. Ford's here, GM's here, they're all here, and now we have Bob Stefanski here in theCUBE. Bob, good to see ya, thanks for coming in. >> John, thanks for having me on. It's good to be here. >> I love this story, and I think this is not really well documented, but this is the beginning of what's been happening for a while, kind of as an outpost to Michigan and Motor City, you have some satellite offices in Palo Alto or Silicon Valley. They're close to Stanford, close to Cal, close to a lot of the research, but now it's a change where you're starting to see Ford, GM, all the car companies, BMW, big venture fund as well, all here in Silicon Valley because the software defined blank is everything, so software-defined radios in 5G, big story at Mobile World Congress, software-defined networks, the world is software-driven, so they're here. You're bridging the investments, trying to identify the key trends. >> Bob: You bet. >> To help identify this new game-changing technology that's going to bring a whole new world together, and certainly Intel and others are changing the networks, creating an end-to-end architecture digitally to bring autonomous vehicles, media entertainment, smart cities, the smart home, and we're seeing Alexa, Google's got their device, and you're seeing smart cities. What's the big bridge being built around? I mean, obviously, the cars themselves are changing. What is this bridge between Silicon Valley and Michigan Motor City? Obviously, that's a big part of Uber and whatnot. >> Absolutely, John, you know, I grew up in Michigan, I grew up in the days before there was a single chip, I think, in cars. I worked for General Motors when I was a summer intern in the early '80s in the engineering group there. There was a very distinct automotive culture. I then fast forward 20 years, and I'm in Silicon Valley. I've spent the majority of my career here in Silicon Valley doing Silicon Valley things, so software, enterprise software was where I spent most of my career with TIBCO software. We are now bridging these two things. We're bridging, the automotive industry is, I think we all know, anyone who's paying attention, the car now has a lot of chips in it, and it's about to have a lot more, the car is becoming a data center on wheels. It's becoming another mobile device, a very big mobile device, and the really neat thing is with, we're the only venture fund with offices and partners located in both places. We have fairly deep networks and connections into the whole Michigan ecosystem back there in automotive, and of course, we're out here in Silicon Valley as well. It's been fascinating to see after spending, after having that early childhood experience, young adult experience as I was growing up in the auto industry, and really kind of the heyday of the auto industry, maybe the beginning of the decline in the '70s and early '80s, and then having sort of spent the career working on the latest, greatest, newest technologies as they've come along out here in Silicon Valley. This is a fascinating time to see these two now finally merging together with autonomous vehicles. >> One of the things that we're seeing in Intel, obviously the bellwether, and they always have the long game going and make the big bets, and autonomous vehicles and virtual reality is that showcase, but what I find interesting and I want to get your thoughts on and reaction to is that I shared on my Facebook feed a post by autoblog.com that says, "Race for autonomous cars is over in Silicon Valley." And they were kind of pointing to the obvious things that people are seeing today, which is myopic and narrow in my opinion, but obviously Apple kind of tapped out of building a car, and I think a lot of people thought, "Oh, Apple should build a car. "They built a watch, why not build a car?" Obviously, they forgot about Teslas here, so I'm not sure what they're thinking, but I think they missed the point that it's bigger than the actual car. Could you share some color commentary around the mindset of Detroit? Because we're seeing that certainly Ford's not lookin' the other way, they have their finger on the pulse. Others do as well. What is the general mindset for the folks in both ecosystems and how are they working together right now? >> Sure, that's a great question, John. And you said it right at the outset, look, all the autos are here, and they're here in our backyard in Palo Alto. They've really sort of migrated here over the last five, seven years probably. GM is here, Ford is here in a big way, BMW's here, Mercedes' here. So they all obviously recognize that the car's becoming all about technology, and they need to be, if they're going to be a key part of that in the future, they need to be out here, and they need to be understanding that, on the other hand, making cars is hard. Making cars is not a simple thing, and this is where 70% of auto research in the U.S. is still happening in Michigan in the Detroit area. Michigan has a very high density of automotive engineers, and integration engineers and integrating IT with the autos and so forth. There's a lot of talent there, there's a lot of experience there. I think, you know, frankly probably the biggest and most interesting thing in this bridge is going to be to watch the cultures either integrate or not, and there's a lot of talk about who wins and the autos can't move fast enough, and that may be the case, but we'll find out. I'm not so sure. They know how to compete and there's a lot of smart people. >> There's no way that Detroit's going away. >> Bob: Not at all. >> My view is they're very solid, and I think they got good self-awareness, and I think if you look at the signals, I would say that I'm pretty confident it's just a matter of how they get reconfigured in this new value-creation model around 5G and whatnot. But I want to get your thoughts on another point, which is if you look at what the iPhone did, that created a new class of app developer and that, I would call them, on one hand artisan developers, people who are composing much more design-centric, obviously, and then, you still had the hardcore developers, and that was lower in the stack, but also other harder problems. But when you talk about automotive, there are some serious technology challenges that require, I won't say old-school engineering, but really hardcore engineering. You're talking about wireless, which is a physics issue, you have all kinds of policy challenges, but really hardcore engineering and software development. I'm not discounting what the app guys are doing, but certainly there will be plenty of apps like all that more the finishing touches in, say, cars for instance. What are some of those technologies because that's really where you need to see the classic double-E, computer science, physics gurus, the real PhD kind of guys. What's your thoughts and what trends do you see in that hardcore area? >> Absolutely, you know, I mean, look, we all know that cars are no longer about just axles and engines, and those hard things. But I think when we make this transition to highly automated, to fully autonomous vehicles, the technologies that are driving that, the fundamental technologies and the really hard stuff are around sensors, right. We're constantly developing newer, faster, better, further range, more precise sensors, so we're talking about Lidar, we're talking about of course, Mobileye and what's happening with the camera and vision processing. We're talking about even radar, a 1940s technology that actually is changing very fast. There's a lot of interesting things happening. >> AI's an old technology coming back now and getting rebooted with cloud computing and whatnot. >> Yeah, absolutely, and then, connecting all that to the cloud, right. I think the hardest, and I think we talked about this before, probably still the single hardest piece and the point of this fear on this is artificial intelligence at the end of the day. It's the same stuff that's driving virtual reality, it's the same stuff that's driving a lot of different things right now, but it's also true in self-driving cars. These things, when you make a car, first of all, it's got to be safe. It has got to be safe. The Department of Transportation, the government regulatory interest is in safety. To make a car safe, they have to be tested, tested, tested, tested, what's that about? Well, when autonomous takes over, it's no long John Furrier driving that car, it's the AI driving the car, right? How do you make it AI smart? >> The crash test dummy's inside AI. >> Right, this is fundamental deep learning. This is fundamental deep learning that the guys at Google know as much as anybody in the world and Facebook and all, you know, that we all know about the arms race in artificial intelligence, but that's at the core of what's happening in self-driving vehicles, and most of that talent, the talent is spread out, it's all over the world, but there's a lot of it out here. And they know they need to have those engineers here. >> What's interesting about your background, you mentioned when we started this segment, you have an enterprise software background in Silicon Valley and you've been very successful, it's interesting, we were talking yesterday and we kind of validated this morning on our opening segment around Mobile World Congress, it's a two-show game right now. It's kind of a bipolar show. You got devices, the new phones, the glam and the sizzle, Samsung and so on, so forth, LG. >> Bob: Can't wait. >> And then you got the TelCo show, which is, TelCo's trying to figure things out, but what's interesting is what we noticed is that there's really a trend between enterprise computing concepts, network data center with consumer clash, so there's a direct collision course between the TelCos which serve as consumers, but the infrastructure challenges are all enterprise. >> Bob: Right, right. >> And the number one thing that's key there is integration and ecosystems. So, you kind of have the right background for this, so we want to get your thoughts on ecosystem integration concepts where a lot of boats in the harbor, so rising tide will float all boats, we see that as a trend, but also integrating. You mentioned the testing, so it's not one company's going to do all this. >> It's not one company that's going to do all this, and in fact, it's going to one of the more complex integrations we've ever undertaken because we're going to have to have those automotive engineers, we're going to have to have those, the software developers, we're going to have to have the AI guys, we're going to have to have the sensor guys, and it's all going to the cloud ultimately. And don't forget GPS, you got GPS. You got a lot. >> Connectivity challenges. Mobility. >> Connectivity challenges, and of course, 5G when 5G comes down the line is going to be a critical part of this as well. You're also going to have smart cities, you're going to have infrastructure embedded in the environment, and in particular, the highly dense areas is where it'll happen first. It's not going to, rural America and so forth, they're going to be probably driving their cars without the embedded sensor for a while, but there are a lot of different components to integrate. >> We had a CTO on earlier before, Val Bercovici, he was talking about the cloud native architecture really plays well in this market because it's not so much about the one car, it's about the one cars in relations to thousands of other cars that are self-driving. It's a multi-touch data equation. Alright, Bob, final question I want to get to you is what are you investing in? What are some of the things that you're looking at? Can you share? I know some of the stuff is pretty stealthy on your end, 'cause it's pretty high end, but can you share any, show a little leg on investments you've made? >> You bet, you bet. Yeah, John, we're, some of the, probably the coolest stuff I can't talk about right now, you're right. Hint hint, it's in some of the things I've already talked about. We're certainly in artificial intelligence. We have a portfolio company in that. We're looking at others. In better sensors, some of the sensor areas I talked about, we are in the process of looking at companies. We have investments in the connected space, not autonomous, but connected space, which is also going to be a very big and important part of this. Company called Aperia right up here that is, at the end of the day, they're tire inflation, but it's all about data. They do automated tire inflation, connected, they'll be connecting every fleet in America. And so we're-- >> It's those boring little efficiency areas that really yield a lot of cash. We just talked about a guest about waste optimize, waste disposal industries. >> Absolutely. >> Little things that are luring billion dollar innovations. >> Little things, very big problems, right, and it's where you can marry things like tire inflation on commercial fleets with data, with lots of data that we never had before. And then apply artificial intelligence to that to learn what's happening and map an entire fleet or multiple fleets nationwide, worldwide, collect all that data and start to correlate and understand what. Those are the problems that are, where a lot of value can be added actually with these technologies. >> It's super interesting, and I think you got a great opportunity, congratulations. Great to see the bridge between Silicon Valley and Michigan Motor City, and I think that's anecdotally means automotive, but there's probably other bridges your connecting, too. Bob, thanks for coming in and sharing. Final question for you while we got you, got a little bit more time. What premises would you, are you betting on? I mean, everyone has a premise, and you mentioned before you came on-camera that one of your premises is that automotive won't miss mobility. What other premises are you investing, what thesises are you building around? >> Well, look, for the, are you talking about autonomous vehicles or much--? >> For the bridge fund and how you're looking at the future of autonomous driving in the connected ecosystem, what are the premise, what's on the premise? >> The premise there is that we're in for what I think is going to be the biggest change in the biggest thing to happen in transportation ever, but it's not just transportation, so we're looking at areas that are not autonomous per se, but that are going to be fundamentally impacted, so services. We're talking about things like insurance, we're talking about all the shared services that are going to come out of this. Medicine is going to probably change, and there's some interesting plays there. And so all of this sort of periphery that is going to be disrupted, we're trying to look five years, 10 years ahead and look at how life is going to change, people's individual experiences are going to change, and how new services, in particular shared services, are going to be enabled by autonomy. >> Bob Stefanski here inside theCUBE, breaking down his commentary and direction of his investments bridging Silicon Valley with Michigan Motor City, or really looking at the autonomous future of vehicles and transportation. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more coverage and analysis of Mobile World Congress 2017 after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)