(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, Lisa Martin here with you on theCUBE Live from Mobile World Congress '23 in Barcelona. We're having a great day at the show. We hope you are too. I've got two guests here with me next. We're going to be talking about telco's 5G, all that exciting stuff. Please welcome Jason Inskeep, the AVP 5G, and Private 5G Center of Excellence at AT&T Business. And Doug Lieberman is here as well. Senior Director, Global Solutions Co-Creation Services at Dell Technologies. Guys, it's great to have you on the show, live from the show floor, talk to me about what's going on, how are you? >> Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great show, I'm happy to be back here this year and really looking forward to the conversations that are going on and really continuing these partnerships that Dell has with companies like AT&T to truly drive the realities and the benefits of 5G. >> Absolutely, Doug, talk to me a little bit. You have an interesting title, Director of Global Solutions Co-Creation Services at Dell. Tell me a little bit about your role, what you're responsible for, and then Jason we'll have you do the same. >> Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. So, I have a very interesting role and a very exciting role at Dell because we have a unique organization that I run globally whose job it is, is to work with telcos to co-create services for enterprise and jointly go to market with those. So that basically take the combined power of AT&T and Dell and bring that to enterprise customers and other telcos so that enterprises can realize the value of, and truly leverage and harness the capabilities of 5G for private mobility and Mac and IOT and connected devices. >> Jason, let's bring you into the conversation now. You have an interesting title as well. You're with the 5G Center of Excellence at AT&T. Talk a little bit about your role and that COE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me again as well. The role with my team at AT&T is we're on the cutting edge. We're sitting in between our customers and our product houses that are working with folks at Dell, really helping putting our products together in the space of 5G. A lot of open opportunities here, a lot of things changing really fast. So my teams are off as well as putting this stuff in customers production sites it's also taking and capturing that information, working with my internal partners, both on the technology side, on the product side, and partners like Dell who are coming in helping us enabling those products and services that we can take and scale out through the different opportunities that we're seeing in this space. >> Let's double click on that partner angle, Jason, will stay with you. The 5G revolution, it's here, we are all excited about it. There's so much potential that will come from that. Let's talk about the AT&T/Dell partnership. How are you guys working together to deliver 5G globally? Jason, we'll start with you and then Doug will go to you. >> Yeah, at the core of it, when we started looking at 5G and seeing the changes that were happening, one of the biggest changes is it became software defined. So, the way we could deploy the hardware with the software becomes a whole new conversation. And what we saw coming out of that is it's not going to be a single winner and loser to really execute the way it's necessary for the experiences of tomorrow. It has to be an ecosystem that comes together. Dell creates a great opportunity for us from the hardware perspective to move those services around, to scale those services ultimately to all kinds of site types up to cities right down to small offices. And those different form factors that they bring with the software and the network pieces that we're adding on top of it help to streamline the flows and processes and really gets to that next generation that we see happening, which is this converged architecture. This meeting of network and application, creating a whole new skillset along with products. So we're at the very top we've got Dell/AT&T, at a partner level, it gets at a granular level too. The users and the developers underneath are starting to change as well, so very interesting dichotomy happening right now. >> Right, Doug, what's through Dell's lens? Tell us a little bit about the partnership and how you're working together to deliver 5G and really unlock its potential globally. >> Yeah, thank you, I'd love to bonus off of what Jason was saying, for Dell, what we look at is through the lens of an enterprise. An enterprise needs to execute their business function, their outcome, their mission that they need to operate. And so therefore they have workloads that they need to run. And 5G is an enabler for that technology, and there's lots of other enablers but the key piece is how can they get their business work done better, faster, cheaper, more efficiently, more securely? And the combination of AT&T and Dell truly is a combination that brings in a partnership that brings together a full breadth of those capabilities, with understanding what those enterprise workloads are and how they work and how an enterprise would leverage these capabilities. And then bonus on top of that and merge together with that the capabilities of AT&T. And when you look at 5G, there's a lot of people that talk about 5G being the enterprise G. And a lot of that is because of things that Jason mentioned. As we move to a disaggregated stack where you have software-defined aspects of it, and the ability in the underlying definition of what 5G in the specifications to allow much more customization. It means that enterprises now cannot just take connectivity as it is and use it however it comes but actually work with a telco and work with Dell to customize that connectivity in a way that better meets their requirements. Whether that be with slicing or private mobility or roaming between private and the public network and things like profiles and being able to have different views of how different users and devices connect to that network are all key in truly harnessing the power of that connectivity to have always on, always connected, always integrated systems from the edge, the core, to the cloud. >> Always on, always connected. That's what we all expect these days. Wherever we are in the world, whatever we're trying to do. But to be able to take advantage of all that 5G offers for all of us, telcos have to create infrastructures that can support it, let's double click guys on the infrastructure that Dell and AT&T have put in place to enable this. Jason, I want to get your perspective first and then Doug will go to you. >> Yeah, I mean, it's foundational, the things that we're trying to do and build out here and there's a lot of complexity in it now that we didn't have before because of the flexibility in it. It's one of those things like the good news in software is you can do whatever you want. The bad news in software is you can do whatever you want. Once you have that foundation there though in terms of infrastructure, which for us is really air to glass. Fiber through the spectrum on top. But underneath of that, we have the servers, we have that infrastructure where those fibers come together where that air meets the radios and so forth. And we've got to have that great foundation. So working with Dell and getting those spaces built together preps the area as needed so that there's additional place now for compute and scale at that new converged meet-me point. And that's going to be the opportunity that we're trying to think about really to get that foundation in a way that maximizes capacity and maximizes control for the customers and enterprises in particular. And more importantly, maximizes the time horizon. Because if you're putting in a foundation like this, you're not looking at two to three years. You're trying to skate beyond, skate where the puck is going, look at five, 10 years out, set that foundation. And that's what we're trying to look at with Dell. What can our network do already? Where can we push it? In return, they're going to build their solutions to help maximize that potential. >> From an infrastructure perspective, Doug, I want to understand really where Dell is really shining there but also what are some of the differentiators that Dell brings to this foundational infrastructure that to your point, is built for scale? >> Yeah, so it really all comes down to as we start to see this transition that's been happening for years, but it's accelerating because of always-connected devices and everything connected and the great proliferation of data at the edge. As we move assets from the data center and out to the edge we introduce new challenges that have to be overcome. You have things like security, automation, infrastructure cost, maintenance, day-one operations, day-two operations, all of these things are new complexities which enterprises want to enable their workloads, enable the outcomes that they want to generate. But they need to make sure that they're not taking a step backwards when it comes to things like regulations. In Europe, you've got GDPR, and in the US you've got different security regulations. No one wants to be the next front page headline about their company being attacked and having a ransomware attack. And so as we spread out these assets, what Dell is here to do is to work with AT&T and enable enterprises to effectively build their virtual enterprise around the world where those assets, whether they're at the edge or the core or in the cloud, are all managed with the same profiles and the same security features and the same automation that they have in a core data center. So my ability to deploy an edge cloud so that I can leverage AT&T's network and have end-user devices do things like gaming or connect to video services or get directed retail advertising to you are not basically introducing new vectors for security vulnerabilities into that network. And so Dell has worked really hard and is a leader in the industry in providing automation and lower cost of ownership and security for those solutions. So it's not just about putting a server out there but it's about putting an infrastructure and a cloud that is connected by AT&T's backbone and to a central core of automation management and orchestration capabilities so that I can leverage those assets securely and efficiently. >> That security element that you bring up, Doug, is so incredibly critical. We talk about it at every event, we talk about it every day. We've seen such dramatic changes in the threat landscape in the last couple of years with covid and things like that. So that security element isn't trivial, it's essential for every type of enterprise regardless of where they are. I want to talk a little bit now about best practices. And Doug, go back to you, looking at what AT&T is achieving, the 5G COE, what you're doing with Dell. From your lens and your experiences, what are some of the best practices for telcos deploying secured network and connectivity at the edge? >> Yeah, well, I think the first one is that automation and that orchestration, right? The answer is that you cannot have snowflakes at every single ag point. You need to make sure that those infrastructures are consistent and compliant with the integrations and with the policies that have been set across the network. The second thing is that you want to make sure that the connectivity is monitored and metered and managed so that we know whether, for example that endpoint is there and it's not there, if it goes offline. And ensuring the end-user experience is consistent throughout. And so what we are seeing is that it's really important that we provide an implementation where the enterprise can get a consistent and a predictable outcome for what they're trying to accomplish. What they don't want to do, what enterprises hate and is really bad for them is when they provide an inconsistent or inappropriate results to their users, to their customer base. So if your website goes offline or you're a gaming platform, if people can't get to your game you're going to lose customers, you're going to lose business you're going to have people lose faith in your network. And so our partnership with AT&T and with other telcos is about ensuring that we have all those aspects covered, day zero, day one, and day two, as well as the security aspects. And that back haul is an essential piece of that because as we get more and more devices and more and more edge devices set up, there's more sprawl. And so the complexity goes up substantially, but what really wins is when you can take that complexity and use it to your advantage and be able to manage and deploy those systems as though they were all within your virtual enterprise. >> Using complexity to your advantage. That's an interesting one, Doug, that you're bringing up. Jason, I want to know, what does that mean for you and how is AT&T leveraging complexity to its advantage for its customers all over the globe? >> You know, first thing is if you're thinking about, we're a network company we're not just a 5G company, so we're wireline, we're wireless, we're global in terms of the amount of fiber we have in the ground, the amount of in the US, domestic sailor deployments, our investments in FirstNet, is our first responder network here in the US. So we have a big portfolio inclusive of IOT. That is a global brand as well. That, if you look at it through the outside lens, that's super complex, all over the planet. So when we're talking to our customers now in this new world, which is very much, "Hey, you can do these things on your own." We go back and the bigger, obviously have the products, and the network and the tech but now that customers can take advantage of it and take things that Dell have rolled out, they need that new new age expertise. You also got the Dell expertise of building these platforms from maybe a software level, from an orchestration level, those kind of things. And at the edge that's creating a new type of person and a new type of workflow, a new type of way to respond and work. So that combination of those two is going to be that new skillset. It's in small pockets now, it's growing in how that looks because it's a little combination of both the app developer and the network developer, that's coming together. Our footprint and in terms of what we provide in there is not just 5G, it's 5G, it's fiber, it's all of those pieces together. And that's what's going to super enable that experience that Doug talked about when you're thinking about gaming or transportation, it's not just the network performance, it's the roundtrip, so we're really trying to focus on that and educate our customers in that way with the expertise that we bring over years and years of building these things. >> And if I could just jump in there. I'd like to just emphasize something Jason just said. When we look at workloads at the edge, very rarely are those workloads uniquely just an edge workload, there are components. The example I like to use is video surveillance. If you are a big box store and you have video surveillance inside your store, there is a set of workloads and outcomes you need for immediate response at that edge. You want to know if there's a safety hazard, if there is a theft or those things. Those things need to be processed real time in the store before the thief leaves the store. But then there's a set of connectivity as well where you want to process that data up in the cloud to get long-term analytics and data off of that information. What's my average store density on a Thursday afternoon in November when it's 20 degrees out. Because that would drive how many employees I have, how much inventory I carry, et cetera. And that combination is a factor that drives all the different aspects of AT&T's network. We need the connectivity in the store for the practicability and the spectrum for the cameras that talk to a central server. We need the high-speed backup and throughput in order to provide cyber recovery as well as point-of-sales services so that they can do credit card transactions flawlessly, which is using a lot of wireline services for AT&T. And together with their cloud and their other capabilities, an enterprise needs all those different aspects to work, both the edge, the core and the cloud coming together to form an outcome from one piece of input. So that one piece of input, that video stream is used in multiple different ways and because of that, that network that AT&T brings can support the end-to-end outcome and use cases for that implementation, as an example. >> That end-to-end roundtrip that you guys talked about is essential for every type of enterprise. A lot of great work that Dell and AT&T are doing together to really enable enterprises to really capitalize on all that the new technology that 5G has the potential to deliver. So I got to wrap things up, Jason, with you. From a business-customer perspective, what's next for AT&T? What can those business customers expect? >> Just continued to scaling because you're looking at a space that's evolving rapidly. It's evolving rapidly, there's a lot of opportunity. You look at the private wireless space in particular, it's nascent, but growing rapidly with the customers having their ability to do this on their own. So for us, and really where we're starting to think now is we're seeing the things move from POC, starting to move to production, customers are starting to think about what's next. For us, we're trying to skate ahead of that knowing how we built our own networks, knowing how we engaged in our own partnerships like with Dell and trying to bring that expertise back to the customer, because it isn't cookie cutter anymore. There's a lot of flexibility and each input creates a different output. So it's up to us to at least help them balance that. Define what I like to affectionately call, "Find their Goldilocks." What is that just right for them? >> Great point, Jason, it is no longer a cookie cutter. Cookie cutter isn't going to cut it. Jason, Doug, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We appreciate thank you all of your insights. Sounds like some great work that AT&T and Dell are doing together. Enterprises have a lot to look forward to. Thank you again for your time. >> Thank you very much, >> Thank you. >> Looking forward to seeing you at the show. >> I'm Lisa Martin from theCUBE at Mobile World Congress '23 in Barcelona. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Narrator: "TheCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hello everybody, welcome back to day four of "theCUBE's" coverage of MWC '23. We're here live at the Fira in Barcelona. Wall-to-wall coverage, John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio, banging out all the news. Really, the whole week we've been talking about the disaggregation of the telco network, the new opportunities in telco. We're really excited to have AT&T and Snowflake here. Dave Whittington is the AVP, at the Chief Data Office at AT&T. Roddy Tranum is the Assistant Vice President, for Channel Performance Data and Tools at AT&T. And Phil Kippen, the Global Head Of Industry-Telecom at Snowflake, Snowflake's new telecom business. Snowflake just announced earnings last night. Typical Scarpelli, they beat earnings, very conservative guidance, stocks down today, but we like Snowflake long term, they're on that path to 10 billion. Guys, welcome to "theCUBE." Thanks so much >> Phil: Thank you. >> for coming on. >> Dave and Roddy: Thanks Dave. >> Dave, let's start with you. The data culture inside of telco, We've had this, we've been talking all week about this monolithic system. Super reliable. You guys did a great job during the pandemic. Everything shifting to landlines. We didn't even notice, you guys didn't miss a beat. Saved us. But the data culture's changing inside telco. Explain that. >> Well, absolutely. So, first of all IoT and edge processing is bringing forth new and exciting opportunities all the time. So, we're bridging the world between a lot of the OSS stuff that we can do with edge processing. But bringing that back, and now we're talking about working, and I would say traditionally, we talk data warehouse. Data warehouse and big data are now becoming a single mesh, all right? And the use cases and the way you can use those, especially I'm taking that edge data and bringing it back over, now I'm running AI and ML models on it, and I'm pushing back to the edge, and I'm combining that with my relational data. So that mesh there is making all the difference. We're getting new use cases that we can do with that. And it's just, and the volume of data is immense. >> Now, I love ChatGPT, but I'm hoping your data models are more accurate than ChatGPT. I never know. Sometimes it's really good, sometimes it's really bad. But enterprise, you got to be clean with your AI, don't you? >> Not only you have to be clean, you have to monitor it for bias and be ethical about it. We're really good about that. First of all with AT&T, our brand is Platinum. We take care of that. So, we may not be as cutting-edge risk takers as others, but when we go to market with an AI or an ML or a product, it's solid. >> Well hey, as telcos go, you guys are leaning into the Cloud. So I mean, that's a good starting point. Roddy, explain your role. You got an interesting title, Channel Performance Data and Tools, what's that all about? >> So literally anything with our consumer, retail, concenters' channels, all of our channels, from a data perspective and metrics perspective, what it takes to run reps, agents, all the way to leadership levels, scorecards, how you rank in the business, how you're driving the business, from sales, service, customer experience, all that data infrastructure with our great partners on the CDO side, as well as Snowflake, that comes from my team. >> And that's traditionally been done in a, I don't mean the pejorative, but we're talking about legacy, monolithic, sort of data warehouse technologies. >> Absolutely. >> We have a love-hate relationship with them. It's what we had. It's what we used, right? And now that's evolving. And you guys are leaning into the Cloud. >> Dramatic evolution. And what Snowflake's enabled for us is impeccable. We've talked about having, people have dreamed of one data warehouse for the longest time and everything in one system. Really, this is the only way that becomes a reality. The more you get in Snowflake, we can have golden source data, and instead of duplicating that 50 times across AT&T, it's in one place, we just share it, everybody leverages it, and now it's not duplicated, and the process efficiency is just incredible. >> But it really hinges on that separation of storage and compute. And we talk about the monolithic warehouse, and one of the nightmares I've lived with, is having a monolithic warehouse. And let's just go with some of my primary, traditional customers, sales, marketing and finance. They are leveraging BSS OSS data all the time. For me to coordinate a deployment, I have to make sure that each one of these units can take an outage, if it's going to be a long deployment. With the separation of storage, compute, they own their own compute cluster. So I can move faster for these people. 'Cause if finance, I can implement his code without impacting finance or marketing. This brings in CI/CD to more reality. It brings us faster to market with more features. So if he wants to implement a new comp plan for the field reps, or we're reacting to the marketplace, where one of our competitors has done something, we can do that in days, versus waiting weeks or months. >> And we've reported on this a lot. This is the brilliance of Snowflake's founders, that whole separation >> Yep. >> from compute and data. I like Dave, that you're starting with sort of the business flexibility, 'cause there's a cost element of this too. You can dial down, you can turn off compute, and then of course the whole world said, "Hey, that's a good idea." And a VC started throwing money at Amazon, but Redshift said, "Oh, we can do that too, sort of, can't turn off the compute." But I want to ask you Phil, so, >> Sure. >> it looks from my vantage point, like you're taking your Data Cloud message which was originally separate compute from storage simplification, now data sharing, automated governance, security, ultimately the marketplace. >> Phil: Right. >> Taking that same model, break down the silos into telecom, right? It's that same, >> Mm-hmm. >> sorry to use the term playbook, Frank Slootman tells me he doesn't use playbooks, but he's not a pattern matcher, but he's a situational CEO, he says. But the situation in telco calls for that type of strategy. So explain what you guys are doing in telco. >> I think there's, so, what we're launching, we launched last week, and it really was three components, right? So we had our platform as you mentioned, >> Dave: Mm-hmm. >> and that platform is being utilized by a number of different companies today. We also are adding, for telecom very specifically, we're adding capabilities in marketplace, so that service providers can not only use some of the data and apps that are in marketplace, but as well service providers can go and sell applications or sell data that they had built. And then as well, we're adding our ecosystem, it's telecom-specific. So, we're bringing partners in, technology partners, and consulting and services partners, that are very much focused on telecoms and what they do internally, but also helping them monetize new services. >> Okay, so it's not just sort of generic Snowflake into telco? You have specific value there. >> We're purposing the platform specifically for- >> Are you a telco guy? >> I am. You are, okay. >> Total telco guy absolutely. >> So there you go. You see that Snowflake is actually an interesting organizational structure, 'cause you're going after verticals, which is kind of rare for a company of your sort of inventory, I'll say, >> Absolutely. >> I don't mean that as a negative. (Dave laughs) So Dave, take us through the data journey at AT&T. It's a long history. You don't have to go back to the 1800s, but- (Dave laughs) >> Thank you for pointing out, we're a 149-year-old company. So, Jesse James was one of the original customers, (Dave laughs) and we have no longer got his data. So, I'll go back. I've been 17 years singular AT&T, and I've watched it through the whole journey of, where the monolithics were growing, when the consolidation of small, wireless carriers, and we went through that boom. And then we've gone through mergers and acquisitions. But, Hadoop came out, and it was going to solve all world hunger. And we had all the aspects of, we're going to monetize and do AI and ML, and some of the things we learned with Hadoop was, we had this monolithic warehouse, we had this file-based-structured Hadoop, but we really didn't know how to bring this all together. And we were bringing items over to the relational, and we were taking the relational and bringing it over to the warehouse, and trying to, and it was a struggle. Let's just go there. And I don't think we were the only company to struggle with that, but we learned a lot. And so now as tech is finally emerging, with the cloud, companies like Snowflake, and others that can handle that, where we can create, we were discussing earlier, but it becomes more of a conducive mesh that's interoperable. So now we're able to simplify that environment. And the cloud is a big thing on that. 'Cause you could not do this on-prem with on-prem technologies. It would be just too cost prohibitive, and too heavy of lifting, going back and forth, and managing the data. The simplicity the cloud brings with a smaller set of tools, and I'll say in the data space specifically, really allows us, maybe not a single instance of data for all use cases, but a greatly reduced ecosystem. And when you simplify your ecosystem, you simplify speed to market and data management. >> So I'm going to ask you, I know it's kind of internal organizational plumbing, but it'll inform my next question. So, Dave, you're with the Chief Data Office, and Roddy, you're kind of, you all serve in the business, but you're really serving the, you're closer to those guys, they're banging on your door for- >> Absolutely. I try to keep the 130,000 users who may or may not have issues sometimes with our data and metrics, away from Dave. And he just gets a call from me. >> And he only calls when he has a problem. He's never wished me happy birthday. (Dave and Phil laugh) >> So the reason I asked that is because, you describe Dave, some of the Hadoop days, and again love-hate with that, but we had hyper-specialized roles. We still do. You've got data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, and you've got this sort of this pipeline, and it had to be this sequential pipeline. I know Snowflake and others have come to simplify that. My question to you is, how is that those roles, how are those roles changing? How is data getting closer to the business? Everybody talks about democratizing business. Are you doing that? What's a real use example? >> From our perspective, those roles, a lot of those roles on my team for years, because we're all about efficiency, >> Dave: Mm-hmm. >> we cut across those areas, and always have cut across those areas. So now we're into a space where things have been simplified, data processes and copying, we've gone from 40 data processes down to five steps now. We've gone from five steps to one step. We've gone from days, now take hours, hours to minutes, minutes to seconds. Literally we're seeing that time in and time out with Snowflake. So these resources that have spent all their time on data engineering and moving data around, are now freed up more on what they have skills for and always have, the data analytics area of the business, and driving the business forward, and new metrics and new analysis. That's some of the great operational value that we've seen here. As this simplification happens, it frees up brain power. >> So, you're pumping data from the OSS, the BSS, the OKRs everywhere >> Everywhere. >> into Snowflake? >> Scheduling systems, you name it. If you can think of what drives our retail and centers and online, all that data, scheduling system, chat data, call center data, call detail data, all of that enters into this common infrastructure to manage the business on a day in and day out basis. >> How are the roles and the skill sets changing? 'Cause you're doing a lot less ETL, you're doing a lot less moving of data around. There were guys that were probably really good at that. I used to joke in the, when I was in the storage world, like if your job is bandaging lungs, you need to look for a new job, right? So, and they did and people move on. So, are you able to sort of redeploy those assets, and those people, those human resources? >> These folks are highly skilled. And we were talking about earlier, SQL hasn't gone away. Relational databases are not going away. And that's one thing that's made this migration excellent, they're just transitioning their skills. Experts in legacy systems are now rapidly becoming experts on the Snowflake side. And it has not been that hard a transition. There are certainly nuances, things that don't operate as well in the cloud environment that we have to learn and optimize. But we're making that transition. >> Dave: So just, >> Please. >> within the Chief Data Office we have a couple of missions, and Roddy is a great partner and an example of how it works. We try to bring the data for democratization, so that we have one interface, now hopefully know we just have a logical connection back to these Snowflake instances that we connect. But we're providing that governance and cleansing, and if there's a business rule at the enterprise level, we provide it. But the goal at CDO is to make sure that business units like Roddy or marketing or finance, that they can come to a platform that's reliable, robust, and self-service. I don't want to be in his way. So I feel like I'm providing a sub-level of platform, that he can come to and anybody can come to, and utilize, that they're not having to go back and undo what's in Salesforce, or ServiceNow, or in our billers. So, I'm sort of that layer. And then making sure that that ecosystem is robust enough for him to use. >> And that self-service infrastructure is predominantly through the Azure Cloud, correct? >> Dave: Absolutely. >> And you work on other clouds, but it's predominantly through Azure? >> We're predominantly in Azure, yeah. >> Dave: That's the first-party citizen? >> Yeah. >> Okay, I like to think in terms sometimes of data products, and I know you've mentioned upfront, you're Gold standard or Platinum standard, you're very careful about personal information. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So you're not trying to sell, I'm an AT&T customer, you're not trying to sell my data, and make money off of my data. So the value prop and the business case for Snowflake is it's simpler. You do things faster, you're in the cloud, lower cost, et cetera. But I presume you're also in the business, AT&T, of making offers and creating packages for customers. I look at those as data products, 'cause it's not a, I mean, yeah, there's a physical phone, but there's data products behind it. So- >> It ultimately is, but not everybody always sees it that way. Data reporting often can be an afterthought. And we're making it more on the forefront now. >> Yeah, so I like to think in terms of data products, I mean even if the financial services business, it's a data business. So, if we can think about that sort of metaphor, do you see yourselves as data product builders? Do you have that, do you think about building products in that regard? >> Within the Chief Data Office, we have a data product team, >> Mm-hmm. >> and by the way, I wouldn't be disingenuous if I said, oh, we're very mature in this, but no, it's where we're going, and it's somewhat of a journey, but I've got a peer, and their whole job is to go from, especially as we migrate from cloud, if Roddy or some other group was using tables three, four and five and joining them together, it's like, "Well look, this is an offer for data product, so let's combine these and put it up in the cloud, and here's the offer data set product, or here's the opportunity data product," and it's a journey. We're on the way, but we have dedicated staff and time to do this. >> I think one of the hardest parts about that is the organizational aspects of it. Like who owns the data now, right? It used to be owned by the techies, and increasingly the business lines want to have access, you're providing self-service. So there's a discussion about, "Okay, what is a data product? Who's responsible for that data product? Is it in my P&L or your P&L? Somebody's got to sign up for that number." So, it sounds like those discussions are taking place. >> They are. And, we feel like we're more the, and CDO at least, we feel more, we're like the guardians, and the shepherds, but not the owners. I mean, we have a role in it all, but he owns his metrics. >> Yeah, and even from our perspective, we see ourselves as an enabler of making whatever AT&T wants to make happen in terms of the key products and officers' trade-in offers, trade-in programs, all that requires this data infrastructure, and managing reps and agents, and what they do from a channel performance perspective. We still ourselves see ourselves as key enablers of that. And we've got to be flexible, and respond quickly to the business. >> I always had empathy for the data engineer, and he or she had to service all these different lines of business with no business context. >> Yeah. >> Like the business knows good data from bad data, and then they just pound that poor individual, and they're like, "Okay, I'm doing my best. It's just ones and zeros to me." So, it sounds like that's, you're on that path. >> Yeah absolutely, and I think, we do have refined, getting more and more refined owners of, since Snowflake enables these golden source data, everybody sees me and my organization, channel performance data, go to Roddy's team, we have a great team, and we go to Dave in terms of making it all happen from a data infrastructure perspective. So we, do have a lot more refined, "This is where you go for the golden source, this is where it is, this is who owns it. If you want to launch this product and services, and you want to manage reps with it, that's the place you-" >> It's a strong story. So Chief Data Office doesn't own the data per se, but it's your responsibility to provide the self-service infrastructure, and make sure it's governed properly, and in as automated way as possible. >> Well, yeah, absolutely. And let me tell you more, everybody talks about single version of the truth, one instance of the data, but there's context to that, that we are taking, trying to take advantage of that as we do data products is, what's the use case here? So we may have an entity of Roddy as a prospective customer, and we may have a entity of Roddy as a customer, high-value customer over here, which may have a different set of mix of data and all, but as a data product, we can then create those for those specific use cases. Still point to the same data, but build it in different constructs. One for marketing, one for sales, one for finance. By the way, that's where your data engineers are struggling. >> Yeah, yeah, of course. So how do I serve all these folks, and really have the context-common story in telco, >> Absolutely. >> or are these guys ahead of the curve a little bit? Or where would you put them? >> I think they're definitely moving a lot faster than the industry is generally. I think the enabling technologies, like for instance, having that single copy of data that everybody sees, a single pane of glass, right, that's definitely something that everybody wants to get to. Not many people are there. I think, what AT&T's doing, is most definitely a little bit further ahead than the industry generally. And I think the successes that are coming out of that, and the learning experiences are starting to generate momentum within AT&T. So I think, it's not just about the product, and having a product now that gives you a single copy of data. It's about the experiences, right? And now, how the teams are getting trained, domains like network engineering for instance. They typically haven't been a part of data discussions, because they've got a lot of data, but they're focused on the infrastructure. >> Mm. >> So, by going ahead and deploying this platform, for platform's purpose, right, and the business value, that's one thing, but also to start bringing, getting that experience, and bringing new experience in to help other groups that traditionally hadn't been data-centric, that's also a huge step ahead, right? So you need to enable those groups. >> A big complaint of course we hear at MWC from carriers is, "The over-the-top guys are killing us. They're riding on our networks, et cetera, et cetera. They have all the data, they have all the client relationships." Do you see your client relationships changing as a result of sort of your data culture evolving? >> Yes, I'm not sure I can- >> It's a loaded question, I know. >> Yeah, and then I, so, we want to start embedding as much into our network on the proprietary value that we have, so we can start getting into that OTT play, us as any other carrier, we have distinct advantages of what we can do at the edge, and we just need to start exploiting those. But you know, 'cause whether it's location or whatnot, so we got to eat into that. Historically, the network is where we make our money in, and we stack the services on top of it. It used to be *69. >> Dave: Yeah. >> If anybody remembers that. >> Dave: Yeah, of course. (Dave laughs) >> But you know, it was stacked on top of our network. Then we stack another product on top of it. It'll be in the edge where we start providing distinct values to other partners as we- >> I mean, it's a great business that you're in. I mean, if they're really good at connectivity. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And so, it sounds like it's still to be determined >> Dave: Yeah. >> where you can go with this. You have to be super careful with private and for personal information. >> Dave: Yep. >> Yeah, but the opportunities are enormous. >> There's a lot. >> Yeah, particularly at the edge, looking at, private networks are just an amazing opportunity. Factories and name it, hospital, remote hospitals, remote locations. I mean- >> Dave: Connected cars. >> Connected cars are really interesting, right? I mean, if you start communicating car to car, and actually drive that, (Dave laughs) I mean that's, now we're getting to visit Xen Fault Tolerance people. This is it. >> Dave: That's not, let's hold the traffic. >> Doesn't scare me as much as we actually learn. (all laugh) >> So how's the show been for you guys? >> Dave: Awesome. >> What're your big takeaways from- >> Tremendous experience. I mean, someone who doesn't go outside the United States much, I'm a homebody. The whole experience, the whole trip, city, Mobile World Congress, the technologies that are out here, it's been a blast. >> Anything, top two things you learned, advice you'd give to others, your colleagues out in general? >> In general, we talked a lot about technologies today, and we talked a lot about data, but I'm going to tell you what, the accelerator that you cannot change, is the relationship that we have. So when the tech and the business can work together toward a common goal, and it's a partnership, you get things done. So, I don't know how many CDOs or CIOs or CEOs are out there, but this connection is what accelerates and makes it work. >> And that is our audience Dave. I mean, it's all about that alignment. So guys, I really appreciate you coming in and sharing your story in "theCUBE." Great stuff. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right, thanks everybody. Thank you for watching. I'll be right back with Dave Nicholson. Day four SiliconANGLE's coverage of MWC '23. You're watching "theCUBE." (gentle music)

(gentle pulsating music) >> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (light airy music) >> Good evening from Fira, Barcelona in Spain. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante. We are covering with theCUBE MWC '23. This is day three. Three full days, almost, of coverage we've given you. And don't worry, we've got a great conversation next, and another day tomorrow. We're going to be talking with Singtel and Dell next about 5G network slicing. Sexy stuff. Please welcome Dennis Wong, VP Enterprise 5G and Platform from Singtel. And Douglas Lieberman is back with us. Our alumni, Global Senior Director, GTM and Co-Creation Services, Telecom Systems Business at Dell. Welcome, guys. Great to have you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Dennis, go ahead and start with you. Talk to the audience about Singtel. You've got a unique insight into some of the challenges that 5G brings and the opportunities. What is Singtel seeing there? >> I think from a Singtel perspective, I think 5G technology brings about a new era of opportunities for all the enterprises, you know, from big to small. I think that's one thing that we are aiming to do. How do we put technology together? And that's why I think that 5G brings about a lot more capabilities, a lot more parameters that, you know, for the new technology, new devices, new services that we can explore. I mean, we are giving ourself a new opportunity to try something that's better than Wi-Fi, that is better 4G. So I think that's something very exciting for me. >> What are some of the challenges that you see that are, that you look to partners like Dell to help wipe off the table? >> I think one of the things that Dell has been doing very closely with us, I think in terms of the network technology, in terms of the RAN, in terms of the, you know, kind of virtualization, in terms of marketplace, in terms of ecosystem, they are all over the place. So I think for them, they are not looking at just hardware, they are looking at how to support us as a whole ecosystem to work things together. >> You know, it's interesting because it's maybe an overused term, but everyone talks about 5G being the enterprise G. And really, what's interesting about 5G, and where Dell is really able to add value in working with partners like Singtel, is the disaggregation of 5G and the open side of it, and the ability to take different workloads and customize them because of the fact that the whole packet core and the CU and the DU and that architecture is not locked into a single proprietary architecture, allows for customization and injection of workloads, and allows enterprises to really tune the network to what their workloads need to be. >> So I wonder, Dennis, can you take us through the anatomy of a 5G deployment? How does it work? Do you start with a sort of greenfield, sort of test bed? How do you connect it to your 4G networks? Take us through the process. >> Maybe I will go through from a customer lens. What does the customer think, and what does the customer feels about when we approach them for 5G? I think for most of the customers who are thinking about 5G, they are usually already having some kind of a services that's running on the current technology. Could be 4G, could be Wi-Fi. And one very typical example that I can share with you is that one of the customers, he was saying that, "I'm having Wi-Fi already. Can you prove to me that 5G is better?" So, what we did was that we actually rolled out our, this little proprietary 5G in the box. We call it 5G GENIE. GENIE stands for Generating Instant Experience. You know, very interesting name. We pushed that to the customer place. Within 30 minutes, he set up a 5G connectivity in his area, and he tested his performance of his Wi-Fi with the GENIE on the spot. And immediately, wow, he see that there's a lot of difference in the performance. Now, so the first part, is really about getting the customer to feel that, why 5G is truly better. Let them experience it. Then after which, we went through with them, because of this performance, what does it do to your business? From a productivity perspective, security perspective, safety perspective. And they kind of look at it and say, "Wow." that is where the ROI comes from. Then after which, then is where I think, you know, where Dave says, you know, he comes in whereby then, we will design, if it's a factory, we are to design the coverage in the factory because robots are moving. You want to ensure that every part of them, of their factories have the coverage. So we are to design it, we are to build it, put in all the controls and put in all the devices. And then after which, you know, then all things will go. And of course, from a customer perspective, they will still need to run the application. We need to check that the performance is, you know, up to the mark. So I think in all, the 5G journey is not really just about putting the network and, "Here, customer, let's use it." There's a lot of conviction, there's a lot of testing, there's a lot of what we call trial and error with the customer. Yeah. >> So thank you for that explanation. So that's there, we're going to make a business case, and they're going to see immediate performance improvements. Then, I presume they're going to start building new applications on top. And then maybe that'll negatively affect the performance, but that's okay. It's like we were talking about the other day, there's so much data pumping, you get equivalent performance, but so much more capability. So how are you guys thinking about that ultimate layer, where that value is, the application, the workloads, that are going to be new to these networks? >> Well, let's, you know, we can take a step back and talk about, for example, the use case he just talked about, which was in, you know, autonomous vehicles or robots inside a factory. It's not that it's just more performance. It's reliable performance and consistent performance. Because the difference with a cellular solution, a mobile solution, a 5G solution, than a Wi-Fi, is the guaranteed spectrum and the isolated spectrum and the lack of competition for that space. I mean, I tell people this all the time, and you can see it right now. If you were to open your phone and look at all the Wi-Fi hotspots that exist right here, there is an enormous amount of contention for the exact same spectrum and we're all competing with each other. >> Dave: I can't get into the network. >> Right, and so the more people that walk past us in this cube, the more that there's going to be interference. And so the performance is not guaranteed. And if you have an automated factory, if you have machines that are moving around a factory, if you have robots that need to work together, you can't afford for it to be great one minute, and lousy the next minute. You need consistent high performance. And that's where these 5G networks and private 5G networks are really, really important. 'Cause it's not just about faster. Sometimes it's not all about can I get it there faster? I want it faster, but reliably and consistently, and make sure I get the same experience every time, so that I can then build more intricate and complicated applications. If you have a warehouse that's got autonomous robots, the closer I can have those robots get to each other, means the more packages I can move, or the more welds I can make, or the more machine parts I can get out the door because I don't have to build into the, "Oh my God, I lost Wi-Fi connectivity for 10 seconds," and I got, "And everything stops, until the connectivity comes back and they can resume." >> And anybody would choose consistent, predictable performance over spiky performance. >> Doug: Right. >> And you're saying the technology, you're able to better leverage the spectrum, isolate the spectrum for that specific use case. That is a technology enabler. >> Dennis: Maybe I can also give you another perspective. Together with the 5G technology is where the multi-edge computing comes into place. And that's where I think one of the things that we work very closely with Dell as well. Because that is very important. With that compute at the edge, means that your latency is low. And, like what you said, it's not just low latency, it's consistently low latency. Today, let's say in Singapore, Singapore is a very small city. You can travel from one end of the city to the other end in one and a half hour, and that's it. Singapore is so- >> If there's no traffic. >> And if there's no traffic. (all laugh) Now, so everyone was saying, "Singapore is such a small city, why would you need a edge?" So I explained to them, we did a test from a cloud gaming perspective. As we use 4G over the public cloud, it's true that you can get about 10, 15, 20 milliseconds, you know, on a good day, but it's, on average, it's about 15, 20 milliseconds. However, you will find that there are times, whereby it'll spike to 150, spike to 90, spike to 200. So you can see that it's not just about low latency, it's about consistent low latency. So that's where I think 5G and MEC come as a good pair to make sure that, you know, the performance of our, for those factories or what, you know, kind of Doug has mentioned, the high performance, you know, synchronized services is very important. Beside packing the, you know, the drones, or the robots who go close together, you want it to be synchronized. And you know, if you've seen some of those robots that work together, it's almost synchronized. That is the one thing that, our dreams that we going to make sure that we going to achieve, yeah. >> And then, of course, on top of all that, is security, which is really, really important on all these. I mean the vulnerabilities of Wi-Fi are well known. There is a hundred different tools that you can download for free to test the security of any Wi-Fi network. So there's- >> Dave: I got my VPN and it won't let me on the network. >> Right, exactly. (all laugh) You know, so the benefit of a 5G solution, a 4G solution, is the added layer of security. I'm not saying that it's perfect, you know, there are obviously ways to get around those as well, but every additional layer of security is one less attack factor that you have to worry about every single day. >> So Dennis, you're pro on the 5G adoption journey. You both have talked about the ostensible benefits there and then the capabilities. I want to understand, how is Dell actually helping, under the covers, Singtel, deliver this connectivity and this consistency and the reliability that your customers expect? >> Yeah. I think, you know, having all these services together, I think, other than just what we call the 5G connectivity, it's like what you mentioned about the RAN, the disaggregated kind of services, I think that gives us a lot of opportunity in terms of flexibility, in terms, of course. But I think one of the things that we also work closely together is about new technology. As I've mentioned also that, you know, the marketplace or the partners that Dell brings, that's very, very important for us. And then for me, I think that, if I look at it again from the customer lens again, right? Having the kind of right equipment, which we are working together with Dell, is important, but I think having the right ecosystem that use the equipment, is even more important. I will give you a very simple example. For any organization, for any services that you need to deploy, let's choose a SMB. You'll realize that, if I want to deploy an application in my office, there's a few things you need to consider. Networks, which could be provided by 5G, right? Then you talk about the public cloud. Then you talk about the, what we call the public cloud and you talk about the edge. Now, in order for you to deploy this, you'll realize that every one of them could be orchestrated and synchronized. And then, as well, Doug has mentioned, after you implemented three of them, you've still got to consider security across them. >> Lisa: Yeah, yeah. >> So what happens there for us, what we want to do is that, we actually build a platform that actually sits on top of all this. This platform actually controls the 5G network, the MEC, as well as the, what we call the public all together. And on top, sitting on top of that is all the applications. Why so? Because again, anytime you have an application, you know that you have to make sure that the VMs works, the hypervisor works, you know, connectivity works, the compatibility works. So, when we build this platform, we put all the ecosystem on board and then it makes it like, the customer can have a one stop shop, look at the equipment, look at the, what we call the equipment, look at the networks, look at the, you know, the cloud, the IaaS as well as the application, it works. And so, working together with Dell, we actually come up and look at some solution that's fit for the market. One of the opportunity that we are looking together with this Dell is in Singapore. How do we actually ship a really packaged bundle to SMEs that has a Dell equipment, our 5G network, plus the platform product ecosystem, that can ship to any restaurant around? So that, you know, we are thinking out loud. Like for example, as you move into the restaurant, you know, we always say that, please scan your barcode on the table for the menu. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> You can just go in, and by facial recognition, knowing that you are not a staff. So it's a reverse privacy. And then after that, push, you know, the menu to your phone directly. And so, therefore, it cuts again the stuff of me trying to scan the menu or waiting for it to load. And because with the on-prem equipment from Dell, let's say for example, there's things is pushed to the phone instantly. You know, sometimes we know that, when some of this goes to the public web or public cloud, and by the time it loads the menu, you are just waiting to avoid the load. So you can see that all these become a experience for the SMEs and the restaurant's staff. So I think these are some of these great use cases that we can foresee in the future. >> And I think, you know, something you just said is really a key part, right? As technologists, sometimes we get wrapped around the technology, and we forget about the fact that it's all about the outcome. To the enterprise, they're looking at a workload. They have a very specific thing they want to accomplish. And all this stuff, private 5G, and edge, and cloud, they're all really irrelevant. They're just means to get to what their outcome that they want to be is. And when we look at them atomically, and as independent little units, we end up with sprawl, and honestly, enterprises are telling us more and more and more, "I don't want that. I don't want a science project. I don't want to be responsible for figuring out how all these things are going to play together and have one rack of equipment for my network, and one rack of equipment for my private 5G, and another rack of equipment for my edge cloud and another rack of equipment for the MEC." And you start to get data centers inside of a pizza shop where there's no space to put a data center, right? And so the partnership we have with Singtel, and exactly what Dennis was just talking about, is how do we take all of those and start realizing that with virtualization and containerization and the open architecture that exists with function virtualization in networking today, in private 5G. We're able to utilize a common infrastructure stack, a common platform to be able to give you all those functions to run the 5G, to run your core applications, to run the MEC, to do all those things, so that we're minimizing the footprint, but also minimizing the complexity. And that's really the point. >> So how mature are we today? Where are we? When can we expect deployments? You know, are there any sort of early case examples you can share? >> Yeah, like I said, you know, in Singapore itself, we have already saw a little bit of success. Especially in Singapore, we have 5G SA already. So I think one of the few things that like I mentioned, some of these use cases that we did. So the company that I talked earlier about is a factory. They took the 5G GENIE, went there, and tested against the Wi-Fi, agree with it. They say, "Let's deploy." They have deployed it now, and it's running. So it's using the 5G for safety, you know, and safety inspection and remote assistance, for training, et cetera. We're using the VR goggles. So I think that's really a live use case. The other live use case is that in Singapore, one of the, you know, kind of automotive manufacturing plants is actually using the AGV that's controlled by our 5G, that's moving around in the factory in a very, what we call random manner. In a way that, in the past, whereby you would never conceive the automotive factories that is going to go on conveyor belts. But now, the AGV is moving as in where at in the ad hoc manner, yeah. >> Yeah, I mean we've got solutions. We've implemented with customers for mining, for example. For the autonomous vehicles in a mine where the, you know, after the mine explosion goes off and you got to gather the minerals and the ores, there's a lot of time that you have to wait before humans can go in. But with a 5G solution, we've been able to enable autonomous vehicles to go in there and start the process of collecting that ore without waiting for the humans, substantially improving safety, security, and the output and revenue of those mines. >> Dave: No, no canary necessary. (Dennis laughs) Is that correct that this capability is not really going to cannibalize Wi-Fi, right? It's going to go into use cases, or will it? Are there situations that overlap, where customers have sort of on the edge, no pun intended, tried to use Wi-Fi and then this will cannibalize some piece of the market? >> Look, there's a Venn diagram somewhere, right? (Lisa and Dennis chuckle) And at the end of the day, no one who's being honest is going to say that 5G is going to replace Wi-Fi, right? >> Yeah, yeah, sure. >> There are, and there's a lot of reasons for that. You know, challenges in adding new devices, you know, if you go to a store, and you want to get on their Wi-Fi, you don't want to necessarily add a new SIM to your phone. So there are places where Wi-Fi is still going to remain a very powerful long-term solution that's not going anywhere, especially at the moment because the cost of Wi-Fi, you know, the chips for Wi-Fi are pennies a piece to put in devices. So we're a long way away from 5G being at the same monetary scale as Wi-Fi. But, there are a lot of use cases where Wi-Fi is simply doesn't work. I talked about that mining solution, Wi-Fi doesn't work in a mine. It's got the wrong physics properties, it's got the wrong distance limitations, there's all sorts of problems. And so, what 5G has opened up, is where in the past, people tried to make Wi-Fi work and either gave up and ran wired, or just dealt with constant problems, like all their machines shutting down simultaneously. 5G is enabling them to now have a real solution that works. So it's carving out a niche for itself. In some places it's replacing Wi-Fi without a doubt 'cause it is a better solution. But there are some use cases that are going to remain Wi-Fi for a long time. >> And how flexible and mobile can that solution be? 'Cause we can't use Wi-Fi here. (Dennis chuckles) We have to use a hard line. >> Yep. >> Right? So, could we use 5G, our own private network on theCUBE? Or is it because we're going too many places? It's just just too complicated for us? >> That's where it comes from. >> Stick with fixed lines. >> That's where the next technology of 5G come from. >> Yeah. >> Slicing. >> Talk about that. >> You see that, you know, somebody ask me, "Why would somebody need slicing?" Then I'll ask you, "That if you are in US, or in any country in the world, there's always two way. You can use a highway and you pay toll. Or you use your small roads. Exactly, why do you have a highway, that you have to pay toll?" There is a highway, there's a path, there's a slice. So for operators, we can always say that based on your mission criticality, based on the speed you want, based on the kind of urgency you need, our works give you a slice, and that you have to pay a premium for it. So similarly, would be that 5G is going to be available here, and say that Cube will purchase a slice from Californica. And say that for Cube, this is your 5G, you have a freeway, green way, it's highly possible. >> Believe me, we're paying a premium for hard lines at Mobile World Congress or MWC. (all laugh) >> And to that point, right, you know, and those slicing gives you the opportunity to do profiling and, you know, setting up. When I say profiling, you know, different devices and different customers getting different metrics on how they use that network. So some of them will get a superhighway, some of them will get a medium size highway, somebody- >> Dennis: Somebody getting a secured highway. >> Right, so a more secure highway. So, there's a lot more flexibility with 5G, and that's why I said, you know, there's a lot of use cases, where it will replace Wi-Fi, and it will be very powerful. And that's the places where we're really seeing the adoption really taking off. >> You guys have done a great job explaining 5G, really. Why you're pro 5G, the opportunities of the use cases. Thank you so much for joining us today. >> Dennis: Thank you, Lisa. >> Also talking about what Dell and Singtel are doing together. I imagine the journey probably has just begun, but you've made tremendous amount of progress so far. It's a great use case. Thank you for sharing it with us today. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Lisa. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live at MWC '23 from Barcelona, Spain. Stick around. Dave comes up with a very cool wrap, after this. (light airy music)

>> (Narrator) The CUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding by Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fira Barcelona. It's theCUBE live at MWC23 our third day of coverage of this great, huge event continues. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've got Dell and Dish here, we are going to be talking about what they're doing together. Andy Sheahen joins as global director of Telecom Cloud Core and Next Gen Ops at Dell. And Marc Rouanne, one of our alumni is back, EVP and Chief Network Officer at Dish Wireless. Welcome guys. >> Great to be here. >> (Both) Thank you. >> (Lisa) Great to have you. Mark, talk to us about what's going on at Dish wireless. Give us the update. >> Yeah so we've built a network from scratch in the US, that covered the US, we use a cloud base Cloud native, so from the bottom of the tower all the way to the internet uses cloud distributed cloud, emits it, so there are a lot of things about that. But it's unique, and now it's working, so we're starting to play with it and that's pretty cool. >> What's some of the proof points, proof in the pudding? >> Well, for us, first of all it was to do basic voice and data on a smartphone and for me the success would that you won't see the difference for a smartphone. That's base line. the next step is bringing this to the enterprise for their use case. So we've covered- now we have services for smartphones. We use our brand, Boost brand, and we are distributing that across the US. But as I said, the real good stuff is when you start to making you know the machines and all the data and the applications for the enterprise. >> Andy, how is Dell a facilitator of what Marc just described and the use cases and what their able to deliver? >> We're providing a number of the servers that are being used out in their radio access network. The virtual DU servers, we're also providing some bare metal orchestration capabilities to help automate the process of deploying all these hundreds and thousands of nodes out in the field. Both of these, the servers and the bare metal orchestra product are things that we developed in concert with Dish, working together to understand the way, the best way to automate, based on the tooling their using in other parts of their network, and we've been with you guys since day one, really. >> (Marc) Absolutely, yeah. >> Making each others solutions better the whole way. >> Marc, why Dell? >> So, the way the networks work is you have a cloud, and you have a distributed edge you need someone who understands the diversity of the edge in order to bring the cloud software to the edge, and Dell is the best there, you know, you can, we can ask them to mix and match accelerators, processors memory, it's very diverse distributed edge. We are building twenty thousands sides so you imagine the size and the complexity and Dell was the right partner for that. >> (Andy) Thank you. >> So you mentioned addressing enterprise leads, which is interesting because there's nothing that would prevent you from going after consumer wireless technically, right but it sounds like you have taken a look at the market and said "we're going to go after this segment of the market." >> (Marc) Yeah. >> At least for now. Are there significant differences between what an enterprise expects from a 5G network than, verses a consumer? >> Yeah. >> (Dave) They have higher expectations, maybe, number one I guess is, if my bill is 150 dollars a month I can have certain levels of expectations whereas a large enterprise the may be making a much more significant investment, are their expectations greater? >> (Marc) Yeah. >> Do you have a higher bar to get over? >> So first, I mean first we use our network for consumers, but for us it's an enterprise. That's the consumer segment, an enterprise. So we expose the network like we would to a car manufacturer, or to a distributor of goods of food and beverage. But what you expect when you are an enterprise, you expect, manage your services. You expect to control the goodness of your services, and for this you need to observe what's happening. Are you delivering the right service? What is the feedback from the enterprise users, and that's what we call the observability. We have a data centric network, so our enterprises are saying "Yeah connecting is enough, but show us how it works, and show us how we can learn from the data, improve, improve, and become more competitive." That's the big difference. >> So what you say Marc, are some of the outcomes you achieved working with Dell? TCO, ROI, CapX, OpX, what are some of the outcomes so far, that you've been able to accomplish? >> Yeah, so obviously we don't share our numbers, but we're very competitive. Both on the CapX and the OpX. And the second thing is that we are much faster in terms of innovation, you know one of the things that Telecorp would not do, was to tap into the IT industry. So we access to the silicon and we have access to the software and at a scale that none of the Telecorp could ever do and for us it's like "wow" and it's a very powerful industry and we've been driving the consist- it's a bit technical but all the silicone, the accelerators, the processors, the GPU, the TPUs and it's like wow. It's really a transformation. >> Andy, is there anything anagallis that you've dealt with in the past to the situation where you have this true core edge, environment where you have to instrument the devices that you provide to give that level of observation or observability, whatever the new word is, that we've invented for that. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean has there, is there anything- >> Yeah absolutely. >> Is this unprecedented? >> No, no not at all. I mean Dell's been really working at the edge since before the edge was called the edge right, we've been selling, our hardware and infrastructure out to retail shops, branch office locations, you know just smaller form factors outside of data centers for a very long time and so that's sort of the consistency from what we've been doing for 30 years to now the difference is the volume, the different number of permutations as Marc was saying. The different type of accelerator cards, the different SKUS of different server types, the sheer volume of nodes that you have in a nationwide wireless network. So the volumes are much different, the amount of data is much different, but the process is really the same. It's about having the infrastructure in the right place at the right time and being able to understand if it's working well or if it's not and it's not just about a red light or a green light but healthy and unhealthy conditions and predicting when the red lights going to come on. And we've been doing that for a while it's just a different scale, and a different level of complexity when you're trying to piece together all these different components from different vendors. >> So we talk a lot about ecosystem, and sometimes because of the desire to talk about the outcomes and what the end users, customers, really care about sometimes we will stop at the layer where say a Dell lives, and we'll see that as the sum total of the component when really, when you talk about a server that Dish is using that in and of itself is an ecosystem >> Yep, yeah >> (Dave) or there's an ecosystem behind it you just mentioned it, the kinds of components and the choices that you make when you optimize these devices determine how much value Dish, >> (Andy) Absolutely. >> Can get out of that. How deep are you on that hardware? I'm a knuckle dragging hardware guy. >> Deep, very deep, I mean just the number of permutations that were working through with Dish and other operators as well, different accelerator cards that we talked about, different techniques for timing obviously there's different SKUs with the silicon itself, different chip sets, different chips from different providers, all those things have to come together, and we build the basic foundation and then we also started working with our cloud partners Red Hat, Wind River, all these guys, VM Ware, of course and that's the next layer up, so you've got all the different hardware components, you've got the extraction layer, with your virtualization layer and or ubernetise layer and all of that stuff together has to be managed compatibility matrices that get very deep and very big, very quickly and that's really the foundational challenge we think of open ran is thinking all these different pieces are going to fit together and not just work today but work everyday as everything gets updated much more frequently than in the legacy world. >> So you care about those things, so we don't have to. >> That's right. >> That's the beauty of it. >> Yes. >> Well thank you. (laughter) >> You're welcome. >> I want to understand, you know some of the things that we've been talking about, every company is a data company, regardless of whether it's telco, it's a retailer, if it's my bank, it's my grocery store and they have to be able to use data as quickly as possible to make decisions. One of the things they've been talking here is the monetization of data, the monetization of the network. How do you, how does Dell help, like a Dish be able to achieve the monetization of their data. >> Well as Marc was saying before the enterprise use cases are what we are all kind of betting on for 5G, right? And enterprises expect to have access to data and to telemetry to do whatever use cases they want to execute in their particular industry, so you know, if it's a health care provider, if it's a factory, an agricultural provider that's leveraging this network, they need to get the data from the network, from the devices, they need to correlate it, in order to do things like automatically turn on a watering system at a certain time, right, they need to know the weather around make sure it's not too windy and you're going to waste a lot of water. All that has data, it's going to leverage data from the network, it's going to leverage data from devices, it's going to leverage data from applications and that's data that can be monetized. When you have all that data and it's all correlated there's value, inherit to it and you can even go onto a forward looking state where you can intelligently move workloads around, based on the data. Based on the clarity of the traffic of the network, where is the right place to put it, and even based on current pricing for things like on demand insists from cloud providers. So having all that data correlated allows any enterprise to make an intelligent decision about how to move a workload around a network and get the most efficient placing of that workload. >> Marc, Andy mentions things like data and networks and moving data across the networks. You have on your business card, Chief Network Officer, what potentially either keeps you up at night in terror or gets you very excited about the future of your network? What's out there in the frontier and what are those key obstacles that have to be overcome that you work with? >> Yeah, I think we have the network, we have the baseline, but we don't yet have the consumption that is easy by the enterprise, you know an enterprise likes to say "I have 4K camera, I connect it to my software." Click, click, right? And that's where we need to be so we're talking about it APIs that are so simple that they become a click and we engineers we have a tendency to want to explain but we should not, it should become a click. You know, and the phone revolution with the apps became those clicks, we have to do the same for the enterprise, for video, for surveillance, for analytics, it has to be clicks. >> While balancing flexibility, and agility of course because you know the folks who were fans of CLIs come in light interfaces, who hate gooeys it's because they feel they have the ability to go down to another level, so obviously that's a balancing act. >> But that's our job. >> Yeah. >> Our job is to hide the complexity, but of course there is complexity. It's like in the cloud, an emprise scaler, they manage complex things but it's successful if they hide it. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> It's the same. You know we have to be emprise scaler of connectivity but hide it. >> Yeah. >> So that people connect everything, right? >> Well it's Andy's servers, we're all magicians hiding it all. >> Yeah. >> It really is. >> It's like don't worry about it, just know, >> Let us do it. >> Sit down, we will serve you the meal. Don't worry how it's cooked. >> That's right, the enterprises want the outcome. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> They don't want to deal with that bottom layer. But it is tremendously complex and we want to take that on and make it better for the industry. >> That's critical. Marc I'd love to go back to you and just I know that you've been in telco for such a long time and here we are day three of MWC the name changed this year, from Mobile World Congress, reflecting mobilism isn't the only thing, obviously it was the catalyst, but what some of the things that you've heard at the event, maybe seen at the event that give you the confidence that the right players are here to help move Dish wireless forward, for example. >> You know this is the first, I've been here for decades it's the first time, and I'm a Chief Network Officer, first time we don't talk about the network. >> (Andy) Yeah. >> Isn't that surprising? People don't tell me about speed, or latency, they talk about consumption. Apps, you know videos surveillance, or analytics or it's, so I love that, because now we're starting to talk about how we can consume and monetize but that's the first time. We use to talk about gigabytes and this and that, none of that not once. >> What does that signify to you, in terms of the evolution? >> Well you know, we've seen that the demand for the healthcare, for the smart cities, has been here for a decade, proof of concepts for a decade but the consumption has been behind and for me this is the oldest team is waking up to we are going to make it easy, so that the consumption can take off. The demand is there, we have to serve it. And the fact that people are starting to say we hide the complexity that's our problem, but don't even mention it, I love it. >> Yep. Drop the mic. >> (Andy and Marc) Yeah, yeah. >> Andy last question for you, some of the things we know Dell has a big and verging presents in telco, we've had a chance to see the booth, see the cool things you guys are featuring there, Dave did a great tour of it, talk about some of the things you've heard and maybe even from customers at this event that demonstrate to you that Dell is going in the right direction with it's telco strategy. >> Yeah, I mean personally for me this has been an unbelievable event for Dell we've had tons and tons of customer meetings of course and the feedback we're getting is that the things we're bring to market whether it's infrablocks, or purposeful servers that are designed for the telecom network are what our customers need and have always wanted. We get a lot of wows, right? >> (Lisa) That's nice. >> "Wow we didn't know Dell was doing this, we had no idea." And the other part of it is that not everybody was sure that we were going to move as fast as we have so the speed in which we've been able to bring some of these things to market and part of that was working with Dish, you know a pioneer, to make sure we were building the right things and I think a lot of the customers that we talked to really appreciate the fact that we're doing it with the industry, >> (Lisa) Yeah. >> You know, not at the industry and that comes across in the way they are responding and what their talking to us about now. >> And that came across in the interview that you just did. Thank you both for joining Dave and me. >> Thank you >> Talking about what Dell and Dish are doing together the proof is in the pudding, and you did a great job at explaining that, thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guest and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from MWC 23 day three. We will be back with our next guest, so don't go anywhere. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, everyone. It's theCUBE live at MWC '23, day three of four days of CUBE coverage. It's like a cannon of CUBE content coming right at you. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We've got Dell and VMware here. Going to be talking about the ecosystem partnerships and what they're doing to further organizations in the telco industry. Please welcome Jared Woodrey, Director of Partner Engineering Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, OTEL. Odded Solomon is here as well, Director of Product Management, VMware Service Provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome to theCUBE. So Jared, first question for you. Talk about OTEL. I know there's a big announcement this week, but give the audience context and understanding of what OTEL is and how it works. >> Sure. So the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab is physically located at Round Rock, Texas, it's the heart and soul of it. But this week we also just announced opening up the Cork, Ireland extension of OTEL. The reason for our existence is to to try and make it as easy as possible for both partners and customers to come together and to re-aggregate this disaggregated ecosystem. So that comes with a number of automation tools and basically just giving a known good testing environment so that tests that happen in our lab are as close to real world as they possibly can be and make it as transparent and open as possible for both partners like VMware as well as customers. >> Odded, talk about what you're doing with Dell and OTEL and give us a customer example of maybe one that you're working with or even even mentioning it by a high level descriptor if you have to. >> Yeah. So we provide a telco cloud platform, which is essentially a vertical in VMware. The telco cloud platform is serving network function vendors, such as Ericsson, Nokia, Mavenir, and so on. What we do with Dell as part of this partnership is essentially complementing the platform with some additional functionality that is not coming out of the box. We used to have a data protection in the past, but this is no longer our main business focus. So we do provide APIs that we can expose and work together with Dell PPDM solution so customer can benefit from this and leverage the partnership and have overall solution that is not coming out of the box from VMware. >> I'm curious, from a VMware perspective. VMware is associated often with the V in VMware, virtualization, and we've seen a transition over time between sort of flavors of virtualization and what is the mix currently today in the telecom space between environments that are leveraging what we would think of as more traditional virtualization with full blown Linux, Windows operating systems in a VM versus the world of containerized microservices? What does that mix look like today? Where do you see it going? >> Yeah, so the VMware telco cloud platform exists for about eight years. And the V started around that time. You might heard about open stack in addition to VMware. So this has definitely helped the network equipment providers with virtualizing their network functions. Those are typically VNF, virtualized network functions, inside the VMs. Essentially we have 4G applications, so core applications, EPC, we have IMS. Those are typically, I would say maybe 80 or 90% of the ecosystem right now. 5G is associated with cloud native network functions. So 5G is getting started now, getting deployed. There is an exponential growth on the core side. Now, when we expand towards the edge of the network we see more potential growth. This is 5G ran, we see the vRAN, we see the open RAN, we see early POCs, we see field trials that are starting. We obviously has production customer now. You just spoke to one. So this is really starting, cloud native is really starting I would say about 10 to 20% of the network functions these days are cloud native. >> Jared, question for you. You mentioned data protection, a huge topic there obviously from a security perspective. Data protection used to be the responsibility of the CSPs. You guys are changing that. Can you talk a little bit about how you're doing that and what Dell's play there is? >> Yeah, so PowerProtect Data Management is a product, but it's produced by Dell. So what this does is it enables data protection over virtual cloud as well as the physical infrastructure of specifically in this case of a telecoms ecosystem. So what this does is enables an ability to rapidly redeploy and back up existing configurations all the way up to the TCP and TCA that pulls the basis of our work here with VMware. >> So you've offloaded that responsibility from the CSPs. You freed them from that. >> So the work that we did, honestly was to make sure that we have a very clear and concise and accurate procedures for how to conduct this as well. And to put this through a realistic and real world as if it was in a telecoms own production network, what did that would actually look like, and what it would take to bring it back up as well. So our responsibility is to make sure that when we when we provide these products to the customers that not only do they work exactly as their intended to, but there is also documentation to help support them and to enable them to have their exact specifications met by as well. >> Got it. So talk about a little bit about OTEL expansion into Cork. What you guys are doing together to enable CSPs here in EMEA? >> Yeah, so the reason why we opened up a facility in Cork Island was to give, for an EMEA audience, for an EMEA CSPs and ability to look and feel and touch some of the products that we're working on. It also just facilitates and ease especially for European-based partners to have a chance to very easily come to a lab environment. The difference though, honestly, is the between Round Rock, Texas and Cork Island is that it's virtually an extension of the same thing. Like the physical locations can make it easier to provide access and obviously to showcase the products that we've developed with partners. But the reality is that it's more than just the physical location. It's more about the ability and ease by which customers and partners can access the labs. >> So we should be expecting a lot of Tito's vodka to be consumed in Cork at some point. Might change the national beverage. >> We do need to have some international exchange. >> Yeah, no, that's good to know. Odded, on the VMware side of things. There's a large group of folks who have VMware skillsets. >> Odded: Correct. >> The telecom industry is moving into this world of the kind of agility that those folks are familiar with. How do people come out of the traditional VMware virtualization world and move into that world of cloud native applications and serve the telecom space? What would your recommendation be? If you were speaking at a VMUG, a VMware Users Group meeting with all of your telecom background, what would you share with them that's critical to understand about how telecom is different, or how telecom's spot in its evolution might be different than the traditional IT space? >> So we're talking about the people with the knowledge and the background of. >> Yeah, I'm a V expert, let's say. And I'm looking into the future and I hear that there are 80,000 people in Barcelona at this event, and I hear that Dell is building optimized infrastructure specifically for telecom, and that VMware is involved. And I'm an expert in VMware and I want to be involved. What do I need to do? I know it's a little bit outside of the box question, but especially against the backdrop of economic headwinds globally, there are a lot of people facing transitions. What are your thoughts there? >> So, first of all, we understand the telco requirements, we understand the telco needs, and we make sure that what we learn from the customers, what we learn from the partners is being built into the VMware products. And simplicity is number one thing that is important for us. We want the customer experience, we want the user experience to be the same as they know even though we are transitioning into cloud native networks that require more frequent upgrades and they have more complexity to be honest. And what we do in our vertical inside VMware we are focusing on automation, telco cloud automation, telco cloud service assurance. Think of it as a wrapper around the SDDC stack that we have from VMware that really simplifies the operations for the telcos because it's really a challenge about skillset. You need to be a DevOps, SRE in order to operate these networks. And things are becoming really complex. We simplify it for them with the same VMware experience. We have a very good ability to do that. We sell products in VMware. Unlike our competition that is mostly selling professional services and support, we try to focus more on the products and delivering the value. Of course, we have services offering because telcos requires some customizations, but we do focus on automation simplicity throughout our staff. >> So just follow up. So in other words the investment in education in this VMware ecosystem absolutely can be extended and applied into the telecom world. I think it's an important thing. >> I was going to add to that. Our engagement in OTEL was also something that we created a solutions brief whether we released from Mobile World Congress this week. But in conjunction with that, we also have a white paper coming out that has a much more expansive explanation and documentation of what it was that we accomplished in the work that we've done together. And that's not something that is going to be a one-off thing. This is something that will stay evergreen that we'll continue to expand both the testing scope as well as the documentation for what this solution looks like and how it can be used as well as documentation on for the V experts for how they can then leverage and realize the the potential for what we're creating together. >> Jared, does Dell look at OTEL as having the potential to facilitate the continued evolution of the actual telco industry? And if so, how? >> Well, I mean, it would be a horrible answer if I were to say no to that. >> Right. >> I think, I honestly believe that one of the most difficult things about this idea of having desired ecosystem is not just trying to put it back together, but then also how to give yourself choice. So each time that you build one of those solution sets like that exists as an island out of all the other possibilities that comes with it. And OTEL seeks to not just be able to facilitate building that first solution set. Like that's what solutions engineering can do. And that's generally done relatively protected and internally. The Open Telecom Ecosystem seeks to build that then to also provide the ability to very easily change specific components of that whether that's a hardware component, a NIC, whether a security pass just came out or a change in either TCP or TCA or we talked a little bit about for this specific engagement that it was done on TCP 2.5. >> Odded: Correct. >> Obviously there's already a 2.7 and 3.0 is coming out. It's not like we're going to sit around and write our coattails of what 2.7 has happened. So this isn't intended to be a one and done thing. So when we talk about trying to make that easier and simpler and de-risk all of the risk that comes from trying to put all these things together, it's not just the the one single solution that you built in the lab. It's what's the next one? And how do I optimize this? And I have specific requirements as a CSP, how can I take something you built that doesn't quite match it, but how do I make that adjustment? So that's what we see to do and make it as easy and as painless as possible. >> What's the engagement model with CSPs? Is it led by Dell only, VMware partner? How does that work? >> Yeah, I can take that. So that depends on the customer, but typically customers they want to choose the cloud vendor. So they come to VMware, we want VMware. Typically, they come from the IT side. They said, "Oh, we want to manage the network side of the house the same way as we manage the IT. We don't want to have special skill sets, special teams." So they move from the IT to the network side and they want VMware there. And then obviously they have an RSP process and they have hardware choices. They can go with Dell, they can go with others. We leverage vSphere, other compatibility. So we can be flexible with the customer choice. And then depending on which customer, how large they are, they select the network equipment provider that the runs on top. We position our platform as multi-vendor. So many of them choose multiple network functions providers. So we work with Dell. So assuming that the customer is choosing Dell. We work very closely with them, offering the best solution for the customer. We work with them sometimes to even design the boxes to make sure that it fits their use cases and to make sure that it works properly. So we have a partnership validation certification end-to-end from the applications all the way down to the hardware. >> It's a fascinating place in history to be right now with 5G. Something that a lot of consumers sort of assume. It's like, "Oh, hey, yeah, we're already there. What's the 6G thing going to look like?" Well, wait a minute, we're just at the beginning stages. And so you talk about disaggregation, re-aggregation, or reintegration, the importance of that. Folks like Dell have experience in that space. Folks at VMware have a lot of experience in the virtualization space, but I heard that VMware is being acquired by Broadcom, if it all goes through, of course. You don't need to comment on it. But you mentioned something, SDDC, software-defined data center. That stack is sometimes misunderstood by the public at large and maybe the folks in the EU, I will editorialize for a moment here. It is eliminating capture in a way by larger hyperscale cloud providers. It absolutely introduces more competition into the market space. So it's interesting to hear Broadcom acknowledging that this is part of the future of VMware, no matter what else happens. These capabilities that spill into the telecom space are something that they say they're going to embrace and extend. I think that's important for anyone who's evaluating this if they're concern. Well, wait a minute. Yeah, when I reintegrate, do I want VMware as part of this mix? Is that an unknown? It's pretty clear that that's something that is part of the future of VMware moving forward. That's my personal opinion based on analysis. But you brought up SDDC, so I wanted to mention that. Again, I'm not going to ask you to get into trouble on that at all. What should we be, from a broad perspective, are there any services, outcomes that are going to come out of all of this work? The agility that's being built by you folks and folks in the open world. Are there any specific things that you personally are excited about? Or when we think about consumer devices, getting data, what are the other kinds of things that this facilitates? Anything cool, either one of you. >> So specific use cases? >> Yeah, anything. It's got to be cool though. If it's not cool we're going to ask you to leave. >> All right. I'll take that challenge. (laughs) I think one of the things that is interesting for something like OTEL as an exist, as being an Open Telecom Ecosystem, there are going to be some CSPs that it's very difficult for them to have this optionality existing for themselves. Especially when you start talking about tailoring it for specific CSPs and their needs. One of the things that becomes much more available to some of the smaller CSPs is the ability to leverage OTEL and basically act as one of their pre-production labs. So this would be something that would be very specific to a customer and we would obviously make sure that it's completely isolated but the intention there would be that it would open up the ability for what would normally take a much longer time period for them to receive some of the benefits of some of the changes that are happening within the industry. But they would have immediate benefit by leveraging specifically looking OTEL to provide them some of their solutions. And I know that you were also looking for specific use cases out of it, but like that's a huge deal for a lot of CSPs around the world that don't have the ability to lay out all the different permutations that they are most interested in and start to put each one of those through a test cycle. A specific use cases for what this looks like is honestly the most exciting that I've seen for right now is on the private 5G networks. Specifically within mining industry, we have a, sorry for the audience, but we have a demo at our booth that starts to lay out exactly how it was deployed and kind of the AB of what this looked like before the world of private 5G for this mining company and what it looks like afterwards. And the ability for both safety, as well as operational costs, as well as their ability to obviously do their job better is night and day. It completely opened up a very analog system and opened up to a very digitalized system. And I would be remiss, I didn't also mention OpenBrew, which is also an example in our booth. >> We saw it last night in action. >> We saw it. >> I hope you did. So OpenBrew is small brewery in Northeast America and we basically took a very manual process of checking temperature and pressure on multiple different tanks along the entire brewing process and digitized everything for them. All of that was enabled by a private 5G deployment that's built on Dell hardware. >> You asked for cool. I think we got it. >> Yeah, it's cool. >> Jared: I think beer. >> Cool brew, yes. >> Root beer, I think is trump card there. >> At least for folks from North America, we like our brew cool. >> Exactly. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what Dell, OTEL, and VMware are doing together, what you're enabling CSPs to do and achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You watching theCUBE live from MWC '23. Day three of our coverage continues right after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (intro music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE's" day three coverage of MWC23. Lisa Martin here in Spain, Barcelona, Spain with Dave Nicholson. We're going to have a really interesting conversation next. We're going to really dig into MWC, it's history, where it's going, some of the controversy here. Please welcome our guests. We have Jim Harris, International Best Selling Author of "Blindsided." And Carolina Milanese is here, President and Principle Analyst of creative strategies. Welcome to "theCUBE" guys. Thank you. >> Thanks. So great to be here. >> So this is day three. 80,000 people or so. You guys have a a lot of history up at this event. Caroline, I want to start with you. Talk a little bit about that. This obviously the biggest one in, in quite a few years. People are ready to be back, but there's been some, a lot of news here, but some controversy going on. Give us the history, and your perspective on some of the news that's coming out from this week's event. >> It feels like a very different show. I don't know if I would say growing up show, because we are still talking about networks and mobility, but there's so much more now around what the networks actually empower, versus the network themselves. And a little bit of maybe that's where some of the controversy is coming from, carriers still trying to find their identity, right, of, of what their role is in all there is to do with a connected world. I go back a long way. I go back to when Mobile World Congress was called, was actually called GSM, and it was in Khan. So, you know, we went from France to Spain. But just looking at the last full Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona, in pre-pandemic to now, very different show. We went from a show that was very much focused on mobility and smartphones, to a show that was all about cars. You know, we had cars everywhere, 'cause we were talking about smart cities and connected cars, to now a show this year that is very much focused on B2B. And so a lot of companies that are here to either work with the carriers, or also talk about sustainability for instance, or enable what is the next future evolution of computing with XR and VR. >> So Jim, talk to us a little bit about your background. You, I was doing a little sleuthing on you. You're really focusing on disruptive innovation. We talk about disruption a lot in different industries. We're seeing a lot of disruption in telco. We're seeing a lot of frenemies going on. Give us your thoughts about what you're seeing at this year's event. >> Well, there's some really exciting things. I listened to the keynote from Orange's CEO, and she was complaining that 55% of the traffic on her network is from five companies. And then the CEO of Deutsche Telecom got up, and he was complaining that 60% of the traffic on his network is from six entities. So do you think they coordinated pre, pre-show? But really what they're saying is, these OTT, you know, Netflix and YouTube, they should be paying us for access. Now, this is killer funny. The front page today of the show, "Daily," the CO-CEO of Netflix says, "Hey, we make less profit than the telcos, "so you should be paying us, "not the other way around." You know, we spend half of the money we make just on developing content. So, this is really interesting. The orange CEO said, "We're not challenging net neutrality. "We don't want more taxes." But boom. So this is disruptive. Huge pressure. 67% of all mobile traffic is video, right? So it's a big hog bandwidth wise. So how are they going to do this? Now, I look at it, and the business model for the, the telcos, is really selling sim cards and smartphones. But for every dollar of revenue there, there's five plus dollars in apps, and consulting and everything else. So really, but look at how they're structured. They can't, you know, take somebody who talks to the public and sells sim cards, and turn 'em in, turn 'em in to an app developer. So how are they going to square this circle? So I see some, they're being disrupted because they're sticking to what they've historically done. >> But it's interesting because at the end of the day, the conversation that we are having right now is the conversation that we had 10 years ago, where carriers don't want to just be a dumb pipe, right? And that's what they are now returning to. They tried to be media as well, but that didn't work out for most carriers, right? It is a little bit better in the US. We've seen, you know, some success there. But, but here has been more difficult. And I think that's the, the concern, that even for the next, you know, evolution, that's the, their role. >> So how do they, how do they balance this dumb pipe idea, with the fact that if you make the toll high enough, being a dumb pipe is actually a pretty good job. You know, sit back, collect check, go to the beach, right? So where, where, where, where does this end up? >> Well, I think what's going to happen is, if you see five to 15 X the revenue on top of a pipe, you know, the hyperscalers are going to start going after the business. The consulting companies like PWC, McKinsey, the app developers, they're... So how do you engage those communities as a telco to get more revenue? I think this is a question that they really need to look at. But we tend to stick within our existing business model. I'll just give you one stat that blows me away. Uber is worth more than every taxi cab company in North America added together. And so the taxi industry owns billions in assets in cars and limousines. Uber doesn't own a single vehicle. So having a widely distributed app, is a huge multiplier on valuation. And I look to a company like Safari in Kenya, which developed M-Pesa, which Pesa means mo, it's mobile money in Swahili. And 25% of the country's GDP is facilitated by M-Pesa. And that's not even on smartphones. They're feature phones, Nokia phones. I call them dumb phones, but Nokia would call them "feature phones." >> Yeah. >> So think about that. Like 25, now transactions are very small, and the cut is tiny. But when you're facilitating 25% of a country's GDP, >> Yeah. >> Tiny, over billions of transactions is huge. But that's not the way telcos have historically thought or worked. And so M-Pesa and Safari shows the way forward. What do you think on that? >> I, I think that the experience, and what they can layer on top from a services perspective, especially in the private sector, is also important. I don't, I never believe that a carrier, given how they operate, is the best media company in the world, right? It is a very different world. But I do think that there's opportunity, first of all, to, to actually tell their story in a different way. If you're thinking about everything that a network actually empowers, there's a, there's a lot there. There's a lot that is good for us as, as society. There's a lot that is good for business. What can they do to start talking about differently about their services, and then layer on top of what they offer? A better way to actually bring together private and public network. It's not all about cellular, wifi and cellular coming together. We're talking a lot about satellite here as well. So, there's definitely more there about quality of service. Is, is there though, almost a biological inevitability that prevents companies from being able to navigate that divide? >> Hmm. >> Look at, look at when, when, when we went from high definition 720P, very exciting, 1080P, 4K. Everybody ran out and got a 4K TV. Well where was the, where was the best 4K content coming from? It wasn't, it wasn't the networks, it wasn't your cable operator, it was YouTube. It was YouTube. If you had suggested that 10 years before, that that would happen, people would think that you were crazy. Is it possible for folks who are now leading their companies, getting up on stage, and daring to say, "This content's coming over, "and I want to charge you more "for using my pipes." It's like, "Really? Is that your vision? "That's the vision that you want to share with us here?" I hear the sound of dead people walking- (laughing) when I hear comments like that. And so, you know, my students at Wharton in the CTO program, who are constantly looking at this concept of disruption, would hear that and go, "Ooh, gee, did the board hear what that person said?" I, you know, am I being too critical of people who could crush me like a bug? (laughing) >> I mean, it's better that they ask the people with money than not consumers to pay, right? 'Cause we've been through a phase where the carriers were actually asking for more money depending on critical things. Like for instance, if you're doing business email, then were going to charge you more than if you were a consumer. Or if you were watching video, they would charge you more for that. Then they understood that a consumer would walk away and go somewhere else. So they stopped doing that. But to your point, I think, and, and very much to what you focus from a disruption perspective, look at what Chat GTP and what Microsoft has been doing. Not much talk about this here at the show, which is interesting, but the idea that now as a consumer, I can ask new Bing to get me the 10 best restaurants in Barcelona, and I no longer go to Yelp, or all the other businesses where I was going to before, to get their recommendation, what happens to them? You're, you're moving away, and you're taking eyeballs away from those websites. And, and I think that, that you know, your point is exactly right. That it's, it's about how, from a revenue perspective, you are spending a lot of money to facilitate somebody else, and what's in it for you? >> Yeah. And to be clear, consumers pay for everything. >> Always. Always. (laughs) >> Taxpayers and consumers always pay for everything. So there is no, "Well, we're going to make them pay, so you don't have to pay." >> And if you are not paying, you are the product. Exactly. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Carolina, talk a little bit about what you're seeing at the event from some of the infrastructure players, the hyperscalers, obviously a lot of enterprise focus here at this event. What are some of the things that you're seeing? Are you impressed with, with their focus in telco, their focus to partner, build an ecosystem? What are you seeing? >> I'm seeing also talk about sustainability, and enabling telco to be more sustainable. You know, there, there's a couple of things that are a little bit different from the US where I live, which is that telcos in Europe, have put money into sustainability through bonds. And so they use the money that they then get from the bonds that they create, to, to supply or to fuel their innovation in sustainability. And so there's a dollar amount on sustainability. There's also an opportunity obviously from a growth perspective. And there's a risk mitigation, right? Especially in Europe, more and more you're going to be evaluated based on how sustainable you are. So there are a lot of companies here, if you're thinking about the Ciscos of the world. Dell, IBM all talking about sustainability and how to help carriers measure, and then obviously be more sustainable with their consumption and, and power. >> Going to be interesting to see where that goes over the years, as we talk to, every company we talk to at whatever show, has an ESG sustainability initiative, and only, well, many of them only want to work with other companies who have the same types of initiative. So a lot of, great that there's focus on sustainability, but hopefully we'll see more action down the road. Wanted to ask you about your book, "Blind," the name is interesting, "Blindsided." >> Well, I just want to tag on to this. >> Sure. >> One of the most exciting things for me is fast charging technology. And Shalmie, cell phone, or a smartphone maker from China, just announced yesterday, a smartphone that charges from 0 to 100% in five minutes. Now this is using GAN FEST technology. And the leader in the market is a company called Navitas. And this has profound implications. You know, it starts with the smartphone, right? But then it moves to the laptops. And then it'll move to EV's. So, as we electrify the $10 trillion a year transportation industry, there's a huge opportunity. People want charging faster. There's also a sustainability story that, to Carolina's point, that it uses less electricity. So, if we electrify the grid in order to support transportation, like the Tesla Semi's coming out, there are huge demands over a period. We need energy efficiency technologies, like this GAN FEST technology. So to me, this is humongous. And it, we only see it here in the show, in Shalmie, saying, "Five minutes." And everybody, the consumers go, "Oh, that's cool." But let's look at the bigger story, which is electrifying transportation globally. And this is going to be big. >> Yeah. And, and to, and to double click on that a little bit, to be clear, when we talk about fast charging today, typically it's taking the battery from a, not a zero state of charge, but a relatively low state of charge to 80%. >> Yep. >> Then it tapers off dramatically. And that translates into less range in an EV, less usable time on any other device, and there's that whole linkage between the power in, and the battery's ability to be charged, and how much is usable. And from a sustainability perspective, we are going to have an avalanche of batteries going into secondary use cases over time. >> They don't get tossed into landfills contrary to what people might think. >> Yep. >> In fact, they are used in a variety of ways after their primary lifespan. But that, that is, that in and of itself is a revolutionary thing. I'm interested in each of your thoughts on the China factor. Glaringly absent here, from my perspective, as sort of an Apple fanboy, where are they? Why aren't they talking about their... They must, they must feel like, "Well we just don't need to." >> We don't need to. We just don't need to. >> Absolutely. >> And then you walk around and you see these, these company names that are often anglicized, and you don't necessarily immediately associate them with China, but it's like, "Wait a minute, "that looks better than what I have, "and I'm not allowed to have access to that thing." What happens in the future there geopolitically? >> It's a pretty big question for- >> Its is. >> For a short little tech show. (Caroline laughs) But what happens as we move forward? When is the entire world going to be able to leverage in a secure way, some of the stuff that's coming out of, if they're not the largest economy in the world yet, they shortly will be. >> What's the story there? >> Well, it's interesting that you mentioned First Apple that has never had a presence at Mobile World Congress. And fun enough, I'm part of the GSMA judges for the GLOMO Awards, and last night I gave out Best Mobile Phone for last year, and it was to the iPhone4 Team Pro. and best disruptive technology, which was for the satellite function feature on, on the new iPhone. So, Apple might not be here, but they are. >> Okay. >> And, and so that's the first thing. And they are as far as being top of mind to every competitor in the smartphone market still. So a lot of the things that, even from a design perspective that you see on some of the Chinese brands, really remind you of, of Apple. What is interesting for me, is how there wouldn't be, with the exception of Samsung and Motorola, there's no one else here that is non-Chinese from a smartphone point of view. So that's in itself, is something that changed dramatically over the years, especially for somebody like me that still remember Nokia being the number one in the market. >> Huh. >> So. >> Guys, we could continue this conversation. We are unfortunately out of time. But thank you so much for joining Dave and me, talking about your perspectives on the event, the industry, the disruptive forces. It's going to be really interesting to see where it goes. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's the consumers that just want to make sure I can connect wherever I am 24 by seven, and it just needs to work. Thank you so much for your insights. >> Thank you. >> Lisa, it's been great. Dave, great. It's a pleasure. >> Our pleasure. For our guests, and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching, "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage coming to you day three of our coverage of MWC 23. Stick around. Our next guest joins us momentarily. (outro music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona. We're here at the Fira Live, theCUBE's ongoing coverage of day two of MWC 23. Back in 2021 was my first Mobile World Congress. And you know what? It was actually quite an experience because there was nobody there. I talked to my friend, who's now my co-host, Chris Lewis about what to expect. He said, Dave, I don't think a lot of people are going to be there, but Danielle Royston is here and she's the CEO of Totoge. And that year when Erickson tapped out of its space she took out 60,000 square feet and built out Cloud City. If it weren't for Cloud City, there would've been no Mobile World Congress in June and July of 2021. DR is back. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> It's great to see you. >> Chris. Awesome to see you. >> Yeah, Chris. Yep. >> Good to be back. Yep. >> You guys remember the narrative back then. There was this lady running around this crazy lady that I met at at Google Cloud next saying >> Yeah. Yeah. >> the cloud's going to take over Telco. And everybody's like, well, this lady's nuts. The cloud's been leaning in, you know? >> Yeah. >> So what do you think, I mean, what's changed since since you first caused all those ripples? >> I mean, I have to say that I think that I caused a lot of change in the industry. I was talking to leaders over at AWS yesterday and they were like, we've never seen someone push like you have and change so much in a short period of time. And Telco moves slow. It's known for that. And they're like, you are pushing buttons and you're getting people to change and thank you and keep going. And so it's been great. It's awesome. >> Yeah. I mean, it was interesting, Chris, we heard on the keynotes we had Microsoft, Satya came in, Thomas Curian came in. There was no AWS. And now I asked CMO of GSMA about that. She goes, hey, we got a great relationship with it, AWS. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But why do you think they weren't here? >> Well, they, I mean, they are here. >> Mean, not here. Why do you think they weren't profiled? >> They weren't on the keynote stage. >> But, you know, at AWS, a lot of the times they want to be the main thing. They want to be the main part of the show. They don't like sharing the limelight. I think they just didn't want be on the stage with the Google CLoud guys and the these other guys, what they're doing they're building out, they're doing so much stuff. As Danielle said, with Telcos change in the ecosystem which is what's happening with cloud. Cloud's making the Telcos think about what the next move is, how they fit in with the way other people do business. Right? So Telcos never used to have to listen to anybody. They only listened to themselves and they dictated the way things were done. They're very successful and made a lot of money but they're now having to open up they're having to leverage the cloud they're having to leverage the services that (indistinct words) and people out provide and they're changing the way they work. >> So, okay in 2021, we talked a lot about the cloud as a potential disruptor, and your whole premise was, look you got to lean into the cloud, or you're screwed. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But the flip side of that is, if they lean into the cloud too much, they might be screwed. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> So what's that equilibrium? Have they been able to find it? Are you working with just the disruptors or how's that? >> No I think they're finding it right. So my talk at MWC 21 was all about the cloud is a double-edged sword, right? There's two sides to it, and you definitely need to proceed through it with caution, but also I don't know that you have a choice, right? I mean, the multicloud, you know is there another industry that spends more on CapEx than Telco? >> No. >> Right. The hyperscalers are doing it right. They spend, you know, easily approaching over a $100 billion in CapEx that rivals this industry. And so when you have a player like that an industry driving, you know and investing so much Telco, you're always complaining how everyone's riding your coattails. This is the opportunity to write someone else's coattails. So jump on, right? I think you don't have a choice especially if other Telco competitors are using hyperscalers and you don't, they're going to be left behind. >> So you advise these companies all the time, but >> I mean, the issue is they're all they're all using all the hyperscalers, right? So they're the multi, the multiple relationships. And as Danielle said, the multi-layer of relationship they're using the hyperscalers to change their own internal operational environments to become more IT-centric to move to that software centric Telco. And they're also then with the hyperscalers going to market in different ways sometimes with them, sometimes competing with them. What what it means from an analyst point of view is you're suddenly changing the dynamic of a market where we used to have nicely well defined markets previously. Now they're, everyone's in it together, you know, it's great. And, and it's making people change the way they think about services. What I, what I really hope it changes more than anything else is the way the customers at the end of the, at the end of the supply, the value chain think this is what we can get hold of this stuff. Now we can go into the network through the cloud and we can get those APIs. We can draw on the mechanisms we need to to run our personal lives, to run our business lives. And frankly, society as a whole. It's really exciting. >> Then your premise is basically you were saying they should ride on the top over the top of the cloud vendor. >> Yeah. Right? >> No. Okay. But don't they lose the, all the data if they do that? >> I don't know. I mean, I think the hyperscalers are not going to take their data, right? I mean, that would be a really really bad business move if Google Cloud and Azure and and AWS start to take over that, that data. >> But they can't take it. >> They can't. >> From regulate, from sovereignty and regulation. >> They can't because of regulation, but also just like business, right? If they started taking their data and like no enterprises would use them. So I think, I think the data is safe. I think you, obviously every country is different. You got to understand the different rules and regulations for data privacy and, and how you keep it. But I think as we look at the long term, right and we always talk about 10 and 20 years there's going to be a hyperscaler region in every country right? And there will be a way for every Telco to use it. I think their data will be safe. And I think it just, you're going to be able to stand on on the shoulders of someone else for once and use the building blocks of software that these guys provide to make better experiences for subscribers. >> You guys got to explain this to me because when I say data I'm not talking about, you know, personal information. I'm talking about all the telemetry, you know, all the all the, you know the plumbing. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Data, which is- >> It will increasingly be shared because you need to share it in order to deliver the services in the streamline efficient way that needs to be deliver. >> Did I hear the CEO of Ericsson Wright where basically he said, we're going to charge developers for access to that data through APIs. >> What the Ericsson have done, obviously with the Vage acquisition is they want to get into APIs. So the idea is you're exposing features, quality policy on demand type features for example, or even pulling we still use that a lot of SMS, right? So pulling those out using those APIs. So it will be charged in some way. Whether- >> Man: Like Twitter's charging me for APIs, now I API calls, you >> Know what it is? I think it's Twilio. >> Man: Oh, okay. >> Right. >> Man: No, no, that's sure. >> There's no reason why telcos couldn't provide a Twilio like service itself. >> It's a horizontal play though right? >> Danielle: Correct because developers need to be charged by the API. >> But doesn't there need to be an industry standard to do that as- >> Well. I think that's what they just announced. >> Industry standard. >> Danielle: I think they just announced that. Yeah. Right now I haven't looked at that API set, right? >> There's like eight of them. >> There's eight of them. Twilio has, it's a start you got to start somewhere Dave. (crosstalk) >> And there's all, the TM forum is all the other standard >> Right? Eight is better than zero- >> Right? >> Haven't got plenty. >> I mean for an industry that didn't really understand APIs as a feature, as a product as a service, right? For Mats Granryd, the deputy general of GSMA to stand on the keynote stage and say we partnered and we're unveiling, right. Pay by the use APIs. I was for it. I was like, that is insane. >> I liked his keynote actually, because I thought he was going to talk about how many attendees and how much economic benefiting >> Danielle: We're super diverse. >> He said, I would usually talk about that and you know greening in the network by what you did talk about a little bit. But, but that's, that surprised me. >> Yeah. >> But I've seen in the enterprise this is not my space as, you know, you guys don't live this but I've seen Oracle try to get developers. IBM had to pay $35 billion trying to get for Red Hat to get developers, right? EMC used to have a thing called EMC code, failed. >> I mean they got to do something, right? So 4G they didn't really make the business case the ROI on the investment in the network. Here we are with 5G, same discussion is having where's the use case? How are we going to monetize and make the ROI on this massive investment? And now they're starting to talk about 6G. Same fricking problem is going to happen again. And so I think they need to start experimenting with new ideas. I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if this new a API network gateway theme that Mats talked about yesterday will work. But they need to start unbundling that unlimited plan. They need to start charging people who are using the network more, more money. Those who are using it less, less. They need to figure this out. This is a crisis for them. >> Yeah our own CEO, I mean she basically said, Hey, I'm for net neutrality, but I want to be able to charge the people that are using it more and more >> To make a return on, on a capital. >> I mean it costs billions of dollars to build these networks, right? And they're valuable. We use them and we talked about this in Cloud City 21, right? The ability to start building better metaverses. And I know that's a buzzword and everyone hates it, but it's true. Like we're working from home. We need- there's got to be a better experience in Zoom in 2D, right? And you need a great network for that metaverse to be awesome. >> You do. But Danielle, you don't need cellular for doing that, do you? So the fixed network is as important. >> Sure. >> And we're at mobile worlds. But actually what we beginning to hear and Crystal Bren did say this exactly, it's about the comp the access is sort of irrelevant. Fixed is better because it's more the cost the return on investment is better from fiber. Mobile we're going to change every so many years because we're a new generation. But we need to get the mechanism in place to deliver that. I actually don't agree that we should everyone should pay differently for what they use. It's a universal service. We need it as individuals. We need to make it sustainable for every user. Let's just not go for the biggest user. It's not, it's not the way to build it. It won't work if you do that you'll crash the system if you do that. And, and the other thing which I disagree on it's not about standing on the shoulders and benefiting from what- It's about cooperating across all levels. The hyperscalers want to work with the telcos as much as the telcos want to work with the hyperscalers. There's a lot of synergy there. There's a lot of ways they can work together. It's not one or the other. >> But I think you're saying let the cloud guys do the heavy lifting and I'm - >> Yeah. >> Not at all. >> And so you don't think so because I feel like the telcos are really good at pipes. They've always been good at pipes. They're engineers. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Are they hanging on to the to the connectivity or should they let that go and well and go toward the developer. >> I mean AWS had two announcements on the 21st a week before MWC. And one was that telco network builder. This is literally being able to deploy a network capability at AWS with keystrokes. >> As a managed service. >> Danielle: Correct. >> Yeah. >> And so I don't know how the telco world I felt the shock waves, right? I was like, whoa, that seems really big. Because they're taking something that previously was like bread and butter. This is what differentiates each telco and now they've standardized it and made it super easy so anyone can do it. Now do I think the five nines of super crazy hardcore network criteria will be built on AWS this way? Probably not, but no >> It's not, it's not end twin. So you can't, no. >> Right. But private networks could be built with this pretty easily, right? And so telcos that don't have as much funding, right. Smaller, more experiments. I think it's going to change the way we think about building networks in telcos >> And those smaller telcos I think are going to be more developer friendly. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> They're going to have business models that invite those developers in. And that's, it's the disruption's going to come from the ISVs and the workloads that are on top of that. >> Well certainly what Dish is trying to do, right? Dish is trying to build a- they launched it reinvent a developer experience. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Right. Built around their network and you know, again I don't know, they were not part of this group that designed these eight APIs but I'm sure they're looking with great intent on what does this mean for them. They'll probably adopt them because they want people to consume the network as APIs. That's their whole thing that Mark Roanne is trying to do. >> Okay, and then they're doing open ran. But is it- they're not really cons- They're not as concerned as Rakuten with the reliability and is that the right play? >> In this discussion? Open RAN is not an issue. It really is irrelevant. It's relevant for the longer term future of the industry by dis aggregating and being able to share, especially ran sharing, for example, in the short term in rural environments. But we'll see some of that happening and it will change, but it will also influence the way the other, the existing ran providers build their services and offer their value. Look you got to remember in the relationship between the equipment providers and the telcos are very dramatically. Whether it's Ericson, NOKIA, Samsung, Huawei, whoever. So those relations really, and the managed services element to that depends on what skills people have in-house within the telco and what service they're trying to deliver. So there's never one size fits all in this industry. >> You're very balanced in your analysis and I appreciate that. >> I try to be. >> But I am not. (chuckles) >> So when Dr went off, this is my question. When Dr went off a couple years ago on the cloud's going to take over the world, you were skeptical. You gave a approach. Have you? >> I still am. >> Have you moderated your thoughts on that or- >> I believe the telecom industry is is a very strong industry. It's my industry of course I love it. But the relationship it is developing much different relationships with the ecosystem players around it. You mentioned developers, you mentioned the cloud players the equipment guys are changing there's so many moving parts to build the telco of the future that every country needs a very strong telco environment to be able to support the site as a whole. People individuals so- >> Well I think two years ago we were talking about should they or shouldn't they, and now it's an inevitability. >> I don't think we were Danielle. >> All using the hyperscalers. >> We were always going to need to transform the telcos from the conservative environments in which they developed. And they've had control of everything in order to reduce if they get no extra revenue at all, reducing the cost they've got to go on a cloud migration path to do that. >> Amenable. >> Has it been harder than you thought? >> It's been easier than I thought. >> You think it's gone faster than >> It's gone way faster than I thought. I mean pushing on this flywheel I thought for sure it would take five to 10 years it is moving. I mean the maths comp thing the AWS announcements last week they're putting in hyperscalers in Saudi Arabia which is probably one of the most sort of data private places in the world. It's happening really fast. >> What Azure's doing? >> I feel like I can't even go to sleep. Because I got to keep up with it. It's crazy. >> Guys. >> This is awesome. >> So awesome having you back on. >> Yeah. >> Chris, thanks for co-hosting. Appreciate you stay here. >> Yep. >> Danielle, amazing. We'll see you. >> See you soon. >> A lot of action here. We're going to come out >> Great. >> Check out your venue. >> Yeah the Togi buses that are outside. >> The big buses. You got a great setup there. We're going to see you on Wednesday. Thanks again. >> Awesome. Thanks. >> All right. Keep it right there. We'll be back to wrap up day two from MWC 23 on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Spain, everybody. We're here at the Fira in MWC23. Is just an amazing day. This place is packed. They said 80,000 people. I think it might even be a few more walk-ins. I'm Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin is here, David Nicholson. But right now we have the Analyst Hot Takes with three friends of theCUBE. Chris Lewis is back again with me in the co-host seat. Zeus Kerravala, analyst extraordinaire. Great to see you, Z. and Sarbjeet SJ Johal. Good to see you again, theCUBE contributor. And that's my new name for him. He says that is his nickname. Guys, thanks for coming back on. We got the all male panel, sorry, but it is what it is. So Z, is this the first time you've been on it at MWC. Take aways from the show, Hot Takes. What are you seeing? Same wine, new bottle? >> In a lot of ways, yeah. I mean, I was talking to somebody this earlier that if you had come from like MWC five years ago to this year, a lot of the themes are the same. Telco transformation, cloud. I mean, 5G is a little new. Sustainability is certainly a newer theme here. But I think it highlights just the difficulty I think the telcos have in making this transformation. And I think, in some ways, I've been unfair to them in some degree 'cause I've picked on them in the past for not moving fast enough. These are, you know, I think these kind of big transformations almost take like a perfect storm of things that come together to happen, right? And so, in the past, we had technologies that maybe might have lowered opex, but they're hard to deploy. They're vertically integrated. We didn't have the software stacks. But it appears today that between the cloudification of, you know, going to cloud native, the software stacks, the APIs, the ecosystems, I think we're actually in a position to see this industry finally move forward. >> Yeah, and Chris, I mean, you have served this industry for a long time. And you know, when you, when you do that, you get briefed as an analyst, you actually realize, wow, there's a lot of really smart people here, and they're actually, they have challenges, they're working through it. So Zeus was saying he's been tough on the industry. You know, what do you think about how the telcos have evolved in the last five years? >> I think they've changed enormously. I think the problem we have is we're always looking for the great change, the big step change, and there is no big step change in a way. What telcos deliver to us as individuals, businesses, society, the connectivity piece, that's changed. We get better and better and more reliable connectivity. We're shunting a load more capacity through. What I think has really changed is their attitude to their suppliers, their attitude to their partners, and their attitude to the ecosystem in which they play. Understanding that connectivity is not the end game. Connectivity is part of the emerging end game where it will include storage, compute, connect, and analytics and everything else. So I think the realization that they are not playing their own game anymore, it's a much more open game. And some things they will continue to do, some things they'll stop doing. We've seen them withdraw from moving into adjacent markets as much as we used to see. So a lot of them in the past went off to try and do movies, media, and a lot went way way into business IT stuff. They've mainly pulled back from that, and they're focusing on, and let's face it, it's not just a 5G show. The fixed environment is unbelievably important. We saw that during the pandemic. Having that fixed broadband connection using wifi, combining with cellular. We love it. But the problem as an industry is that the users often don't even know the connectivity's there. They only know when it doesn't work, right? >> If it's not media and it's not business services, what is it? >> Well, in my view, it will be enabling third parties to deliver the services that will include media, that will include business services. So embedding the connectivity all the way into the application that gets delivered or embedding it so the quality mechanism deliver the gaming much more accurately or, I'm not a gamer, so I can't comment on that. But no, the video quality if you want to have a high quality video will come through better. >> And those cohorts will pay for that value? >> Somebody will pay somewhere along the line. >> Seems fuzzy to me. >> Me too. >> I do think it's use case dependent. Like you look at all the work Verizon did at the Super Bowl this year, that's a perfect case where they could have upsold. >> Explain that. I'm not familiar with it. >> So Verizon provided all the 5G in the Super Bowl. They provided a lot of, they provided private connectivity for the coaches to talk to the sidelines. And that's a mission critical application, right? In the NFL, if one side can't talk, the other side gets shut down. You can't communicate with the quarterback or the coaches. There's a lot of risk at that. So, but you know, there's a case there, though, I think where they could have even made that fan facing. Right? And if you're paying 2000 bucks to go to a game, would you pay 50 bucks more to have a higher tier of bandwidth so you can post things on social? People that go there, they want people to know they were there. >> Every football game you go to, you can't use your cell. >> Analyst: Yeah, I know, right? >> All right, let's talk about developers because we saw the eight APIs come out. I think ISVs are going to be a big part of this. But it's like Dee Arthur said. Hey, eight's better than zero, I guess. Okay, so, but so the innovation is going to come from ISVs and developers, but what are your hot takes from this show and now day two, we're a day and a half in, almost two days in. >> Yeah, yeah. There's a thing that we have talked, I mentioned many times is skills gravity, right? Skills have gravity, and also, to outcompete, you have to also educate. That's another theme actually of my talks is, or my research is that to puts your technology out there to the practitioners, you have to educate them. And that's the only way to democratize your technology. What telcos have been doing is they have been stuck to the proprietary software and proprietary hardware for too long, from Nokia's of the world and other vendors like that. So now with the open sourcing of some of the components and a few others, right? And they're open source space and antenna, you know? Antennas are becoming software now. So with the invent of these things, which is open source, it helps us democratize that to the other sort of skirts of the practitioners, if you will. And that will bring in more applications first into the IOT space, and then maybe into the core sort of California, if you will. >> So what does a telco developer look like? I mean, all the blockchain developers and crypto developers are moving into generative AI, right? So maybe those worlds come together. >> You'd like to think though that the developers would understand everything's network centric today. So you'd like to think they'd understand that how the network responds, you know, you'd take a simple app like Zoom or something. If it notices the bandwidth changes, it should knock down the resolution. If it goes up it, then you can add different features and things and you can make apps a lot smarter that way. >> Well, G2 was saying today that they did a deal with Mercedes, you know this probably better than I do, where they're going to embed WebEx in the car. And if you're driving, it'll shut off the camera. >> Of course. >> I'm like, okay. >> I'll give you a better example though. >> But that's my point. Like, isn't there more that we can do? >> You noticed down on the SKT stand the little helicopter. That's a vertical lift helicopter. So it's an electric vertical lift helicopter. Just think of that for a second. And then think of the connectivity to control that, to securely control that. And then I was recently at an event with Zeus actually where we saw an air traffic control system where there was no people manning the tower. It was managed by someone remotely with all the cameras around them. So managing all of those different elements, we call it IOT, but actually it's way more than what we thought of as IOT. All those components connecting, communicating securely and safely. 'Cause I don't want that helicopter to come down on my head, do you? (men laugh) >> Especially if you're in there. (men laugh) >> Okay, so you mentioned sustainability. Everybody's talking about power. I don't know if you guys have a lot of experience around TCO, but I'm trying to get to, well, is this just because energy costs are so high, and then when the energy becomes cheap again, nobody's going to pay any attention to it? Or is this the real deal? >> So one of the issues around the, if we want to experience all that connectivity locally or that helicopter wants to have that connectivity, we have to ultimately build denser, more reliable networks. So there's a CapEx, we're going to put more base stations in place. We need more fiber in the ground to support them. Therefore, the energy consumption will go up. So we need to be more efficient in the use of energy. Simple as that. >> How much of the operating expense is energy? Like what percent of it? Is it 10%? Is it 20%? Is it, does anybody know? >> It depends who you ask and it depends on the- >> I can't get an answer to that. I mean, in the enterprise- >> Analyst: The data centers? >> Yeah, the data centers. >> We have the numbers. I think 10 to 15%. >> It's 10 to 12%, something like that. Is it much higher? >> I've got feeling it's 30%. >> Okay, so if it's 30%, that's pretty good. >> I do think we have to get better at understanding how to measure too. You know, like I was talking with John Davidson at Sysco about this that every rev of silicon they come out with uses more power, but it's a lot more dense. So at the surface, you go, well, that's using a lot more power. But you can consolidate 10 switches down to two switches. >> Well, Intel was on early and talking about how they can intelligently control the cores. >> But it's based off workload, right? That's the thing. So what are you running over it? You know, and so, I don't think our industry measures that very well. I think we look at things kind of boxed by box versus look at total consumption. >> Well, somebody else in theCUBE was saying they go full throttle. That the networks just say just full throttle everything. And that obviously has to change from the power consumption standpoint. >> Obviously sustainability and sensory or sensors from IOT side, they go hand in hand. Just simple examples like, you know, lights in the restrooms, like in public areas. Somebody goes in there and just only then turns. The same concept is being applied to servers and compute and storage and every aspects and to networks as well. >> Cell tower. >> Yeah. >> Cut 'em off, right? >> Like the serverless telco? (crosstalk) >> Cell towers. >> Well, no, I'm saying, right, but like serverless, you're not paying for the compute when you're not using it, you know? >> It is serverless from the economics point of view. Yes, it's like that, you know? It goes to the lowest level almost like sleep on our laptops, sleep level when you need more power, more compute. >> I mean, some of that stuff's been in networking equipment for a long time, it just never really got turned on. >> I want to ask you about private networks. You wrote a piece, Athenet was acquired by HPE right after Dell announced a relationship with Athenet, which was kind of, that was kind of funny. And so a good move, good judo move by by HP. I asked Dell about it, and they said, look, we're open. They said the right things. We'll see, but I think it's up to HP. >> Well, and the network inside Dell is. >> Yeah, okay, so. Okay, cool. So, but you said something in that article you wrote on Silicon Angle that a lot of people feel like P5G is going to basically replace wireless or cannibalize wireless. You said you didn't agree with that. Explain why? >> Analyst: Wifi. >> Wifi, sorry, I said wireless. >> No, that's, I mean that's ridiculous. Pat Gelsinger said that in his last VMware, which I thought was completely irresponsible. >> That it was going to cannibalize? >> Cannibalize wifi globally is what he said, right? Now he had Verizon on stage with him, so. >> Analyst: Wifi's too inexpensive and flexible. >> Wifi's cheap- >> Analyst: It's going to embed really well. Embedded in that. >> It's reached near ubiquity. It's unlicensed. So a lot of businesses don't want to manage their own spectrum, right? And it's great for this, right? >> Analyst: It does the job. >> For casual connectivity. >> Not today. >> Well, it does for the most part. Right now- >> For the most part. But never at these events. >> If it's engineered correctly, it will. Right? Where you need private 5G is when reliability is an absolute must. So, Chris, you and I visited the Port of Rotterdam, right? So they're putting 5G, private 5G there, but there's metal containers everywhere, right? And that's going to disrupt it. And so there are certain use cases where it makes sense. >> I've been in your basement, and you got some pretty intense equipment in there. You have private 5G in there. >> But for carpeted offices, it does not make sense to bring private. The economics don't make any sense. And you know, it runs hot. >> So where's it going to be used? Give us some examples of where we should be looking for. >> The early ones are obviously in mining, and you say in ports, in airports. It broadens cities because you've got so many moving parts in there, and always think about it, very expensive moving parts. The cranes in the port are normally expensive piece of kits. You're moving that, all that logistics around. So managing that over a distance where the wifi won't work over the distance. And in mining, we're going to see enormous expensive trucks moving around trying to- >> I think a great new use case though, so the Cleveland Browns actually the first NFL team to use it for facial recognition to enter the stadium. So instead of having to even pull your phone out, it says, hey Dave Vellante. You've got four tickets, can we check you all in? And you just walk through. You could apply that to airports. You could do put that in a hotel. You could walk up and check in. >> Analyst: Retail. >> Yeah, retail. And so I think video, realtime video analytics, I think it's a perfect use case for that. >> But you don't need 5G to do that. You could do that through another mechanism, couldn't you? >> You could do wire depending on how mobile you want to do it. Like in a stadium, you're pulling those things in and out all the time. You're moving 'em around and things, so. >> Yeah, but you're coming in at a static point. >> I'll take the contrary view here. >> See, we can't even agree on that. (men laugh) >> Yeah, I love it. Let's go. >> I believe the reliability of connection is very important, right? And the moving parts. What are the moving parts in wifi? We have the NIC card, you know, the wifi card in these suckers, right? In a machine, you know? They're bigger in size, and the radios for 5G are smaller in size. So neutralization is important part of the whole sort of progress to future, right? >> I think 5G costs as well. Yes, cost as well. But cost, we know that it goes down with time, right? We're already talking about 60, and the 5G stuff will be good. >> Actually, sorry, so one of the big boom areas at the moment is 4G LTE because the component price has come down so much, so it is affordable, you can afford to bring it all together. People don't, because we're still on 5G, if 5G standalone everywhere, you're not going to get a consistent service. So those components are unbelievably important. The skillsets of the people doing integration to bring them all together, unbelievably important. And the business case within the business. So I was talking to one of the heads of one of the big retail outlets in the UK, and I said, when are you going to do 5G in the stores? He said, well, why would I tear out all the wifi? I've got perfectly functioning wifi. >> Yeah, that's true. It's already there. But I think the technology which disappears in front of you, that's the best technology. Like you don't worry about it. You don't think it's there. Wifi, we think we think about that like it's there. >> And I do think wifi 5G switching's got to get easier too. Like for most users, you don't know which is better. You don't even know how to test it. And to your point, it does need to be invisible where the user doesn't need to think about it, right? >> Invisible. See, we came back to invisible. We talked about that yesterday. Telecom should be invisible. >> And it should be, you know? You don't want to be thinking about telecom, but at the same time, telecoms want to be more visible. They want to be visible like Netflix, don't they? I still don't see the path. It's fuzzy to me the path of how they're not going to repeat what happened with the over the top providers if they're invisible. >> Well, if you think about what telcos delivers to consumers, to businesses, then extending that connectivity into your home to help you support secure and extend your connection into Zeus's basement, whatever it is. Obviously that's- >> His awesome setup down there. >> And then in the business environment, there's a big change going on from the old NPLS networks, the old rigid structures of networks to SD1 where the control point is moved outside, which can be under control of the telco, could be under the control of a third party integrator. So there's a lot changing. I think we obsess about the relative role of the telco. The demand is phenomenal for connectivity. So address that, fulfill that. And if they do that, then they'll start to build trust in other areas. >> But don't you think they're going to address that and fulfill that? I mean, they're good at it. That's their wheelhouse. >> And it's a 1.6 trillion market, right? So it's not to be sniffed at. That's fixed on mobile together, obviously. But no, it's a big market. And do we keep changing? As long as the service is good, we don't move away from it. >> So back to the APIs, the eight APIs, right? >> I mean- >> Eight APIs is a joke actually almost. I think they released it too early. The release release on the main stage, you know? Like, what? What is this, right? But of course they will grow into hundreds and thousands of APIs. But they have to spend a lot of time and effort in that sort of context. >> I'd actually like to see the GSMA work with like AWS and Microsoft and VMware and software companies and create some standardization across their APIs. >> Yeah. >> I spoke to them yes- >> We're trying to reinvent them. >> Is that not what they're doing? >> No, they said we are not in the business of a defining standards. And they used a different term, not standard. I mean, seriously. I was like, are you kidding me? >> Let's face it, there aren't just eight APIs out there. There's so many of them. The TM forum's been defining when it's open data architecture. You know, the telcos themselves are defining them. The standards we talked about too earlier with Danielle. There's a lot of APIs out there, but the consistency of APIs, so we can bring them together, to bring all the different services together that will support us in our different lives is really important. I think telcos will do it, it's in their interest to do it. >> All right, guys, we got to wrap. Let's go around the horn here, starting with Chris, Zeus, and then Sarbjeet, just bring us home. Number one hot take from Mobile World Congress MWC23 day two. >> My favorite hot take is the willingness of all the participants who have been traditional telco players who looked inwardly at the industry looking outside for help for partnerships, and to build an ecosystem, a more open ecosystem, which will address our requirements. >> Zeus? >> Yeah, I was going to talk about ecosystem. I think for the first time ever, when I've met with the telcos here, I think they're actually, I don't think they know how to get there yet, but they're at least aware of the fact that they need to understand how to build a big ecosystem around them. So if you think back like 50 years ago, IBM and compute was the center of everything in your company, and then the ecosystem surrounded it. I think today with digital transformation being network centric, the telcos actually have the opportunity to be that center of excellence, and then build an ecosystem around them. I think the SIs are actually in a really interesting place to help them do that 'cause they understand everything top to bottom that I, you know, pre pandemic, I'm not sure the telcos were really understand. I think they understand it today, I'm just not sure they know how to get there. . >> Sarbjeet? >> I've seen the lot of RN demos and testing companies and I'm amazed by it. Everything is turning into software, almost everything. The parts which are not turned into software. I mean every, they will soon. But everybody says that we need the hardware to run something, right? But that hardware, in my view, is getting miniaturized, and it's becoming smaller and smaller. The antennas are becoming smaller. The equipment is getting smaller. That means the cost on the physicality of the assets is going down. But the cost on the software side will go up for telcos in future. And telco is a messy business. Not everybody can do it. So only few will survive, I believe. So that's what- >> Software defined telco. So I'm on a mission. I'm looking for the monetization path. And what I haven't seen yet is, you know, you want to follow the money, follow the data, I say. So next two days, I'm going to be looking for that data play, that potential, the way in which this industry is going to break down the data silos I think there's potential goldmine there, but I haven't figured out yet. >> That's a subject for another day. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on. You guys are extraordinary partners of theCUBE friends, and great analysts and congratulations and thank you for all you do. Really appreciate it. >> Analyst: Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right, this is a wrap on day two MWC 23. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. Where Rob Hope and team are just covering all the news. John Furrier is in the Palo Alto studio. We're rocking all that news, taking all that news and putting it on video. Go to theCUBE.net, you'll see everything on demand. Thanks for watching. This is a wrap on day two. We'll see you tomorrow. (soft music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright music) >> Hey everyone! Welcome back. Good evening from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. As you well know, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. Day two of our coverage of MWC 23. Dave, we've been talking about sexy stuff all day. It's about to get, we're bringing sexy back. >> It's about to get hot. >> It's about to get hot. We've had two guests with us, two senior consultants from the product planning, networking and emerging server solutions group at Dell, Heather Raheel and James Bryan. Welcome guys. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Really appreciate it. >> Lisa: Dude, you're bringing sexy back. >> I know. We are. We are. We wanted to bring it, yes. >> This is like XR8000 >> We've been talking about this all day. It's here... >> Yes. Yes. Talk to us about why this is so innovative. >> So, actually we wanted to bring this, getting a lot of attention here on site. Matter of fact, we even have a lot of our competition taking pictures of it. And why is it so innovative? So one of the things that we've done here is we've taken a lot of insights and feedback from our customers that are looking at 5G deployments and looking at how do they, basically, bring commercial off the shelf to a very proprietary industry. So what we've done is we've built a very flexible and scalable form factor in the XR8000. And so this is actually a product that we've purposely built for the telecommunications space. Specifically can be deployed for serving a virtual DU or DUC at a cell site for distributed ram. Or it can be put in a local data center, but outside a main data center to support centralized ram. We'll get into it, which is where the really excitement gets is it's sled-based in its design. And so because of that, it enables us to provide both functionality for telecommunications. Could be network, could be enterprise edge as well as being designed to be configured to whatever that workload is, and be cost-optimized for whatever that work. >> Ah, you're killing us! Let's see. Show, show it to us. >> Actually this is where I have to hand it off to my colleague Heather. But what I really want to show you here is the flexibility that we have and the scalability. So, right here what I'm going to show you first is a one U sled. So I'll set that out here, and I'll let Heather tell us all about it. >> Yeah. So XR8000. Let's talk about flexibility first. So the chassis is a two U chassis with a hot swap shared power supply on the right. Within it there are two form factors for the sleds. What James brought out here, this is the one U form factor. Each sled features one node or one CPU first sled. So we're calling the one U the highest, highest density sled right? Cause you can have up to four one node one U sleds in the chassis. The other form factor is a two U sled, on the right here. And that's just really building on top of the one U sled that adds two PCIe sleds on top. So this is really our general purpose sled. You could have up to two of these sleds within the chassis. So what's really cool about the flexibility is you can plug and play with these. So you could have two one Us, two two Us, or mix and match of each of those. >> Talk about the catalyst to build this for telco and some of the emerging trends that, that you guys have seen and said this needs to be purpose-built for the telco. There's so much challenge and complexity there, they need this. >> Want me to take this? So actually that, that's a great question by the way. It turns out that the market's growing. It's nascent right now. Different telecommunication providers have different needs. Their workloads are different. So they're looking for a form factor like this that, when we say flexible, they need to be able to configure it for theirs. They don't all configure the same way. And so they're looking for something that they can configure to their needs, but they also don't want to pay for things that they don't need. And so that's what led to the creation of, of this device the way we've created it. >> How is it specific for edge use cases, though? We think of the edge: it's emerging, it's burgeoning. What makes this so (pause) specific to edge use cases? >> Yeah, let's talk about some of the the ruggedized features of the product. So first of all, it is short depth. So only 430 millimeters. And this is designed for extreme temperatures, really for any environment. So the normal temperatures of operating are negative five to 55, but we've also developed an enhanced heat sink to get us even beyond that. >> Dave: That's Celsius? >> Celsius. Thank you. >> Lisa: Right. So this will get us all the way down to negative 20 boot in operating all the way up to 65 C. So this is one of the most extreme temperature edge offerings we've seen on the market so far. >> And so this is all outside the data center, so not your typical data center server. So not only are we getting those capabilities, but half the size when you look at a typical data center server. >> So these can go into a place where there's a rack, maybe, but definitely not, not doesn't have to be raised for... >> Could be a cell side cabinet. >> Yeah. Okay. >> Heather: Yeah. And we also have AC and DC power options that can be changed over time as well. >> So what can you pack into that one one U sled in terms of CPU cores and memory, just as an example? >> Yeah, great. So, each of the sleds will support the fourth generation of Intel Sapphire Rapids up to 32 corp. They'll also be supporting their new vRAN boost SKUs. And the benefit of those is it has an integrated FEC accelerator within the CPU. Traditionally, to get FEC acceleration, you would need a PCIe card that would take up one of the slots here. Now with it integrated, you're freeing up a PCIe slot, and there's also a power savings involved with that as well. >> So talk about the involvement of, of the telco customer here and then design, I know Dell is very tight with its customers. I imagine there was a lot of communications and collaboration with customers to, to deliver this. >> Interesting question. So it turns out that early on, we had had some initial insight, but it was actually through deep engagement with our customers that we actually redesigned the form factor to what you see here today. So we actually spent significant amount of time with various telecommunication customers from around the world, and they had a very strong influence in this form factor. Even to the point, like Lisa mentioned, we ended up redesigning it. >> Do, do you have a sense for how many of these, or in what kinds of configurations would you deploy in like the typical BBU? So if we're thinking about radio access network literally tran- tower transmitter receiver... somewhere down there (pause) in a cabinet, you have one of these, you have multiple units. I know, I know the answer is "it depends". >> You are right. >> But if, but if someone tells you, well you know, we have 20, 20 cellular sites, and we need (pause) we're we're moving to an open model, and we need the horsepower to do what we want to do. I'm trying to, I'm trying to gauge like what, one of these, what does that, what does that mean? Or is it more like four of these? >> So that, so we'll go >> It depends? >> Yeah it depends, you're absolutely right. However, we can go right there. So if you look in the two U >> Yeah. >> we have three PCIe slots, you know, as Heather mentioned. And so let's say you have a typical cell site, right? We could be able to support a cell site that could have it could have three radios in the configuration here, it could have a, multiply by three, right? It could have up to 18 radios, and we could actually support that. We could support multiple form factors or multiple deployments at a particular cell site. It really then to your point, it does depend, and that's one of the reasons that we've designed it the way we have. For example, if a customer says their initial deployment, they only need one compute node because maybe they're only going to have, you know, two or three carriers. So then, there, you've got maybe six or eight or nine radios. Well then, you put in a single node, but then they may want to scale over time. Well then, you actually have a chassis. They just come in, and they put in a new chassis. The other beauty of that is, is that maybe they wait, but then they want to do new technology. They don't even have to buy a whole new server. They can update to >> Heather: Yeah. the newest technology, same chassis put that in, connect to the radios, and keep going. >> But in this chassis, is it fair to say that most people will be shocked by how much traffic can go through something like this? In the sense that, if a tower is servicing 'n' number of conversations and data streams, going through something like this? I mean somehow blow, it blows my mind to think of thousands of people accessing something and having them all wrapped through something like this. >> It, it'll depend on what they're doing with that data. So you've probably talked a lot about a type of radios, right? Are we going to be massive MIMO or what type of radio? Is it going to be a mix of 4G or 5G? So it'll really depend on that type of radio, and then where this is located. Is it in a dense urban environment, or is it in a rural type of environment at that cell site shelter, but out in a suburban area. So will depend, but then, that's the beauty of this is then, (pause) I get the right CPU, I get the right number of adding cards to connect to the right radios. I purchase whatever, what I need. I may scale to that. I may be (pause) in a growing part of the city, like where we're from or where I'm from or in San Diego where Heather's from where she's in a new suburban, and they put out a new tower and the community grows rapidly. Well then, we may, they may put out one and then you may add another one and I can connect to more radios, more carriers. So it really just comes down to the type and what you're trying to put through that. It could edit a stadium where I may have a lot of people. I may have like, video streaming, and other things. Not only could I be a network connectivity, but I could do other functions like me, multi-axis axon point that you've heard about, talked about here. So I could have a GPU processing information on one side. I could do network on the other side. >> I do, I do. >> Go for it >> Yeah, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't want to, don't want to hog all of the time. What about expansion beyond the chassis? Is there a scenario where you might load this chassis up with four of those nodes, but then because you need some type of external connectivity, you go to another chassis that has maybe some of these sleds? Or are these self-contained and independent of one another? >> They are all independent. >> Okay. >> So, and then we've done that for a reason. So one of the things that was clear from the customers, again and again and again, was cost, right? Total cost of ownership. So not only, how much does this cost when I buy it from you to what is it going to take to power and run it. And so basically we've designed that with that in mind. So we've separated the compute and isolated the compute from the chassis, from the power. So (pause) I can only deal with this. And the other thing is is it's, it's a sophisticated piece of equipment that people that would go out and service it are not used to. So they can just come out, pull it out without even bringing the system down. If they've got multiple nodes, pull it. They don't have to pull out a whole chassis or whole server. Put one in, connect it back up while the system is still running. If a power supply goes out, they can come and pull it out. We've got one, it's designed with a power infrastructure that if I lose one power supply, I'm not losing the whole system. So it's really that serviceability, total cost of ownership at the edge, which led us to do this as a configurable chassis. >> I was just going to ask you about TCO reduction but another thing that I'm curious about is: there seems to be like a sustainability angle here. Is that something that you guys talk with customers about in terms of reducing footprint and being able to pack more in with less reducing TCO, reducing storage, power consumption, that sort of thing? >> Go ahead. >> You want me to take that one as well? So yes, so it comes at me, varies by the customer, but it does come up and matter of fact one- in that vein, similar to this from a chassis perspective is, I don't, especially now with the technology changing so fast and and customers still trying to figure out well is this how we're really going to deploy it? You basically can configure, and so maybe that doesn't work. They reconfigure it, or, as I mentioned earlier, I purchased a single sled today, and I purchased a chassis. Well then the next generation comes. I don't have to purchase a new chassis. I don't have to purchase a new power supply. So we're trying to address those sustainability issues as we go, you know, again, back to the whole TCO. So they, they're kind of related to some extent. >> Right. Right, right. Definitely. We hear a lot from customers in every industry about ESG, and it's, and it's an important initiative. So Dell being able to, to help facilitate that for customers, I'm sure is part of what gives you that competitive advantage, but you talked about, James, that and, and we talked about it in an earlier segment that competitors are coming by, sniffing around your booth. What's going on? Talk about, from both of your lenses, the (pause) competitive advantage that you think this gives Dell in telco. Heather, we'll start with you. >> Heather: Yeah, I think the first one which we've really been hitting home with is the flexibility for scalability, right? This is really designed for any workload, from AI and inferencing on like a factory floor all the way to the cell site. I don't know another server that could say that. All in one box, right? And the second thing is, really, all of the TCO savings that will happen, you know, immediately at the point of sale and also throughout the life cycle of this product that is designed to have an extremely long lifetime compared to a traditional server. >> Yeah, I'll get a little geeky with you on that one. Heather mentioned that we'll be able to take this, eventually, to 65 C operating conditions. So we've even designed some of the thermal solutions enabling us to go there. We'll also help us become more power efficient. So, again, back to the flexibility even on how we cool it so it enables us to do that. >> So do, do you expect, you just mentioned maybe if I, if I heard you correctly, the idea that this might have a longer (pause) user-usable life than the average kind of refresh cycle we see in general IT. What? I mean, how often are they replacing equipment now in, kind of, legacy network environments? >> I believe the traditional life cycle of a of a server is, what? Three? Three to five years? Three to five years traditionally. And with the sled based design, like James said, we'll be designing new sleds, you know, every year two years that can just be plugged in, and swapped out. So the chassis is really designed to live much longer than, than just three to five years. >> James: We're having customers ask anywhere from seven to when it dies. So (pause) substantial increase in the life cycle as we move out because as you can, as you probably know, well, right? The further I get out on the edge, it, the more costly it is. >> Lisa: Yep. >> And, I don't want to change it if I don't have to. And so something has to justify me changing it. And so we're trying to build to support that both that longevity, but then with that longevity, things change. I mean, seven years is a long time in technology. >> Lisa: Yes it is. >> So we need to be there for those customers that are ready for that change, or something changed, and they want to still be able to, to adopt that without having to change a lot of their infrastructure. >> So customers are going to want to get their hands on this, obviously. We know, we, we can tell by your excitement. Is this GA now? Where is it GA, and where can folks go to learn more? >> Yeah, so we are here at Mobile World Congress in our booth. We've got a few featured here, and other booths throughout the venue. But if you're not here at Mobile World Congress, this will be launched live on the market at the end of May for Dell. >> Awesome. And what geographies? >> Worldwide. >> Worldwide. Get your hands on the XR8000. Worldwide in just a couple months. Guys, thank you >> James: Thank you very much. >> for the show and tell, talking to us about really why you're designing this for the telco edge, the importance there, what it's going to enable operators to achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights and your show and tell. >> Thanks! >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, Spain in Mobile MWC 23. Be back with our sho- day two wrap with Dave Valente and some guests in just a minute. (bright music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) (logo background tingles) >> Hey everyone, it's so good to see you, welcome back to theCube's day two coverage of MWC 23. We are live in Barcelona, Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson, Dave we have had no signage of people dropping out, this conference is absolutely jam packed. There's so much interest in the industry, you've had a lot of interviews this morning, before we introduce our guests and have a great conversation about the industry and challenges and how they're being solved, what are some of the things that stuck out to you in conversations today? >> Well, I think the interesting, kind of umbrella conversation, that seems to be overlapping you know, overlying everything is this question about Open RAN and open standards in radio access network technology and where the operators of networks and the providers of technology come together to chart a better path forward. A lot of discussion of private 5G networks, it's very interesting, I think I've said this a few times, from a consumer's perspective, we feel like 5G has been with us for a long time- >> We do. >> But it's very clear that this, that we're really at the beginning of stages of this and I'm super excited for our guests that we have here because we're going to be able to talk to an actual operator- >> Yes. >> And hear what they have to say, we've heard a lot of people talking about the cool stuff they build, but we're going to get to hear from someone who actually works with this stuff, so- >> Who actually built it, absolutely. Please welcome our two guests, we have Ihab Tarazi CTO and SVP at Dell Technologies, and Juan Carlos Garcia SVP Technology Innovation and Ecosystems at Telephonica, it's great to have you guys on the program. >> So, thank you very much. >> So the buzz around this conference is incredible, 80,000 plus people, 2000 exhibitors, it's standing room only. Lot of opportunity in the industry, a lot of challenges though, Juan Carlos we'd love to get your perspective on, what are some of the industry challenges that Telephonica has faced that your peers are probably facing as well? >> Well we have two kinds of challenges, one is a business challenge, I would say that we may find in other industries, like profitability and growth and I will talk about it. And the second challenge is our technology challenge, we need the network to be ready to embrace a new wave of technologies and applications that are, you know, very demanding in terms of network characteristics and features. On the efficiency and profitability and growth, the solution comes as a challenge from changing the way networks are built and operated, from the traditional way to make them become software platforms. And this is not just at the knowledge challenge, it's also changing the mindset of network operators from a network and service provider to a digital service provider, okay? And this means several things, your network needs to become software-based so that you can manage it digitally and on top of it, you need to be able to deliver detail services digitally, okay? So there are three aspects, making your network so (indistinct) and cloud and cloud waste and then be able to sell in a different way to our customers. >> So some pretty significant challenges, but to your point, Juan Carlos, you share some of those challenges with other industries so there's some commonality there. I wanted to bring Ihab into the conversation, from Dell's perspective, we're seeing, you know, the explosion of data. Every company has to be a data company, we expect to have access to data in real time, if it's a new app, whatever it is. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing from your seat at Dell? >> Yeah, I think Juan Carlos explained that really well, what all the operators are talking about here between new applications, think metaverse, think video streaming, going all the way to the edge, think all the automation of factories and everything that's happening. It's not only requiring a whole new model for delivery and for building networks, but it's throwing out enormous amount of data and the data needs to be acted on to get the value of it. So the challenge is how do I collect the data? How do I catalog it? How do I make it usable? And then how do I make it persistent? So you know, it's high performance data storage and then after that, how do I move it to where I want to and be able to use it. And for many applications that has to happen in milliseconds for the value to come out. So now we've seen this before with enterprise but now I would say this digital transformation is happening at very large scale for all the telcos and starting to deal with very familiar themes we've seen before. >> So Juan Carlos, Telephonica, you hear from partners, vendors that they've done this before, don't worry, you're in good hands. >> Juan Carlos: Yeah, yeah. >> But as a practical matter, when you look at the challenges that you have and you think about the things you'll do to address them as you move forward, what are the immediate short term priorities? >> Okay. >> Versus the longer term priorities? What's realistic? You have a network to operate- >> Yeah. >> You're not just building something out of nothing, so you have to keep the lights on. >> Yeah. >> And you have to innovate, we call that by the way, in the CTO trade, ambidextrous, management using both hands, so what's your order of priorities? >> Well, the first thing, new technologies you are getting into the network need to come with a detail shape, so being cloud native, working by software. On the legacies that you need to keep alive, you need to go for a program to switch (indistinct) off progressively, okay? In fact, in Spain we are going to switch up the copper network in two years, so in 2024, Telephonica will celebrate 100 years and the celebration will be switching up the copper network and we'll have on the fixed access only fiber, okay. So more than likely, the network is necessary, all this digitalization may happen only on the new technologies because the new technologies are cloud-based, cloud native, become already ready for this digitalization process. And not only that, so you need also to build new things, we need an abstraction layer on top of the physical infrastructure to be able to manage the network by software, okay. This is something that happened in the computing world, okay, where the servers, you know, were covered with a cloud stack layer and we are doing the same thing in the network. We are trained to abstract the network services and capabilities and be able to offer them digitally to our customers. And this is a process that we are ongoing with many initiatives in the market, so one was the CAMARA community that was opened in Linux Foundation and the other one was the announcement we made yesterday of the open gateway initiative here at Mobile World Congress where all telecom operators have agreed to launch in this year a set of service APIs that are common worldwide, okay. This is a similar thing to what we did with 2G 35 years ago, to agree on a standard way of delivering a service and in this case is digital services based on APIs. >> What's the net result of? What are the benefits of having those open standards? Is it a benefit that myself as a consumer would enjoy? It seems, I mean, I've been, I'm old enough to remember, you know, a time before cellular telephones and I remember a time when it was very, very difficult to travel from North America to Europe with a cell phone. Now I land and my provider says, "Hey, welcome-" >> Juan Carlos: Yes. >> "Welcome, we're going to charge you a little extra money." And I say, "Hallelujah, awesome." So is part of that interoperability a benefit to consumers or, how, what? >> Yeah, you touch the right point. So in the same way you travel anywhere and you want to still make a call and send an SMS and connect to the internet, you will like your applications in your smartphone to work being them edge applications, okay, and these applications, each application will have to work to be executed very close to where you are, in a way that if you travel abroad the visitor network is serving you, okay. So this means that we are somehow extending the current interconnection and roaming agreements between operators to be able also to deliver edge applications wherever you are, in whatever network, with whatever technology. >> We have that expectation on the consumer side, that it's just going to work no matter where we are, we want apps to be updated, whether I'm banking or I'm shopping for groceries, I want to make sure that they know who I am, the data's got to be there, it's got to be real time, it's got to be right, it's got to serve me personally, but it just has to work. You guys talked about some of the big challenges, but also the opportunities in terms of the future of networking, the data turning companies in the data companies. Walk us through the future of networking from Telephonica's lens, you talked about some of the big initiatives that you have by 2024. >> Yes. >> But if you had a crystal ball and you could look in there and go it looks like this for operators, what would you say? And I'd love to get your feedback too. >> Yeah, I liked how Juan Carlos talked about how the future is, I think I want to add one thing to it, to say, a lot of times the user is no longer a consumer, it's an automated thing, you know, AI think robots, so a lot of times, more and more the usage is happening by some autonomous thing and it needs to always connect. And more and more these things are extending to places where even cellular coverage doesn't exist today, so you have edge compute show up. So, and when you think about it, the things we have to solve as a community here and this is all the discussions is, number one, how you make it a fully open standard model, so everything plugs and play, more and more, there's so many pieces coming, software, hardware, from different components and the integration of all of that is probably one of the biggest challenges people want solved. You know, how it's no longer one box, you buy from one person and put it away, now you have a complex combination of hardware and software. Also the operational model is very important and that is one of the areas we're focused on at Dell, is that while the operational model works inside the data centers for certain application, for telcos, it looks different when you're out at the cell tower and you're going to have these extended temperature changes. And sometimes this may not be inside a cabinet, maybe outside and the person servicing it is not an IT technician. This is somebody that needs to know exactly how to plug it, to be able to place equipment quickly and add capacity, those are just two of the areas, the cloud, making it work like a cloud, where it's intuitive, automated and you can easily add capacity, you can, you know, get a lot of monitoring, a lot of metrics, those are some of the things that we're all solving in this community. >> Let's talk about exactly how you're achieving this, Telephonica and Dell have been working together for a couple of years, you said before we went live. Talk about, you're doing this, you talked about the challenges, the opportunities how are you solving them and why with Dell? >> Okay, well you need to go with the right partners, not to this kind of process of transforming your network into a digital platform. There are big challenges on creating the cloud infrastructure that you need to support the complex, functionality and network requires. And I think you need to have with you, companies that know about the processors, that know about the hardware, the server, that know about how to make an abstraction of that hardware layer so that you can manage that digitally and this is not something any company can do, so you need companies that are very specialized. Telecom operators are changing the way to work, we work in the past with traditionally, with network equipment vendors, now we need to start working with technology providers, hardware (indistinct) providers with cloud providers with an ecosystem that is probably wider than what we had in the past. >> Yes. >> So I come from a background, I call myself a "knuckle dragging hardware engineer" sort of guy, so I'm almost fascinated by the physical part of this. You have a network, part of that network includes towers that have transmitters, receivers, at the base of those towers and like you mentioned, they're not all necessarily in urban areas or easy to access. There's equipment there, let's say that, that tower has been there for 5 years, 10 years, in the traditional world of IT, we have this this concept of the "refresh cycle" >> Juan Carlos: Yeah. >> Where a server may have a useful life of 36 months before it's consuming more power than it should based on the technology. How do you move from, kind of a legacy more proprietary, all-inclusive stack to an open system? I mean, is this a, "Okay, we're planning for an outage for the tower and you're wheeling out old equipment and wheeling in new equipment?" >> Juan Carlos: Yeah. >> I mean that's not, that's what we say as a non-trivial exercise, it's something that isn't, it's not something that's just easy to do, but is that what progress looks like? Sort of, methodically one site at a time? >> Yeah, well, I mean, you have touched an important point. In the technology renewal cycles, we were taking an appliance and replacing that by another one. Now with the current technology, you have the couple, the hardware from the software and the hardware, you need to replace it only when you run out of processing capacity to do what you want, okay? So then we'll be there 2, 3, 4, 5 years, whatever, when you need additional capacity, you replace it, but on the software side you can make the replacement every hour, every week. And this is something that the new technologies are bringing, a flexibility for the telecom operator to introduce a new feature without having to be physically there in the place, okay, by software remotely and this is the kind of software network we want to build. >> Lisa Martin: You know- >> Yeah, I want to add to that if I can- >> Please. >> Yeah. >> I think this is one of the biggest benefits of the open model. If the stack is all integrated as one appliance, when a new technology, we all know how quickly selecon technology comes out and now we have GPU's coming out for AI more increasingly, in an appliance model it may take you two years to take advantage of some new selecon that just came out. In this new open model, as Juan Carlos was saying, you just swap out, you know, you have time to market CPUs launched, it can be put out there at the cell tower and it could double capacity instantly and we're going to need that in that world, that easily going to be AI enabled- >> Lisa Martin: Right. >> So- >> So my last question to you, we only got a minute left or so, is given everything that we've talked about, the challenges, the opportunities, what you're doing together, how would you Juan Carlos summarize how the business is benefiting from the Dell partnership and the technologies that you're enabling with this new future network? >> Well, as I said before, we will need to be able to cover all the characteristics and performance of our network. We will need the right kind of processing capacity, the right kind of hardware solutions. We know that the functionality of the network is a very demanding one, we need hardware acceleration, we need a synchronization, we need time-sensitive solutions and all these can only done by hardware, so you need a good hardware partner, that ensures that you have the processing capacity you need to be able then to run your software, you know, with the confidence that it will work and with the performance that you need. >> That confidence is key. Well it sounds like what Telephonica and Dell have achieved together has been quite successful. Congratulations on the first couple of years, sounds like it's really helping Telephonica's business move in the strategic direction that it wants. We appreciate you joining us on the program today, describing all this, thank you both so much for your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, this was fun. >> A pleasure. >> Good, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live day two from Barcelona, MWC 23. Don't go anywhere, Dave and I will be right back with our next guests. (cheerful bouncy music)

>> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (pleasant music) >> We're back. This is Dave Vellante for our live coverage of MWC '23 SiliconANGLE's wall to wall, four-day coverage. We're here with Greg Manganello, who's from Fuijitsu. He's the global head of network services business unit at the company. And Ryan McMeniman is the director of product management for the open telecom ecosystem. We've been talking about that all week, how this ecosystem has opened up. Ryan's with Dell Technologies. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Greg, thanks for coming on. Let's hear Fuijitsu's story. We haven't heard much at this event from Fuijitsu. I'm sure you got a big presence, but welcome to theCUBE. Tell us your angle. >> Thanks very much. So Fuijitsu, we're big O-RAN advocates, open radio access network advocates. We're one of the leading founders of that open standard. We're also members of the Open RAN Policy Coalition. I'm a board member there. We're kind of all in on OpenRAN. The reason is it gives operators choices and much more vendor diversity and therefore a lot of innovation when they build out their 5G networks. >> And so as an entry point for Dell as well, I mean obviously you guys make a lot of hay with servers and storage and other sort of hardware, but O-RAN is just this disruptive change to this industry, but it's also compute intensive. So from Dell's perspective, what are the challenges of getting customers to the carriers to adopt O-RAN? How do you de-risk it for them? >> Right, I mean O-RAN really needs to be seen as a choice, right? And that choice comes with building out an ecosystem of partners, right? Working with people like Fuijitsu and others helps us build systems that the carriers can rely upon. Otherwise, it looks like another science experiment, a sandbox, and it's really anything but that. >> So what specifically are you guys doing together? Are you doing integrations, reference architectures engineered systems, all of the above? >> Yeah, so I think it's a little bit of all of the above. So we've announced our cooperation, so the engineering teams are linked, and that we're combining our both sweet spots together from Fuijitsu's virtual CU/DU, and our OpenRAN radios, and Dell's platforms and integration capabilities. And together we're offering a pre-integrated bundle to operators to reduce that risk and kind of help overcome some of the startup obstacles by shrinking the integration cost. >> So you've got Greenfield customers, that's pretty straightforward, white sheet of paper, go, go disrupt. And then there's traditional carriers, got 4G and 5G networks, and sort of hybrid if you will, and this integration there. Where do you see the action now? I presume it's Greenfield today, but isn't it inevitable that the traditional carriers have to go open? >> It is, a couple of different ways that they need to go and they want to go might be power consumption, it might be the cloudification of their network. They're going to have different reasons for doing it. And I think we have to make sure that when we work on collaborations like we do with Fuijitsu, we have to look at all of those vectors. What is it that somebody maybe here in Europe is dealing with high gas prices, high energy prices, in the U.S. or wherever it's expansion. They're going to be different justifications for it. >> Yeah, so power must be an increasing component of the operating expense, with energy costs up, and it's a power hungry environment. So how does OpenRAN solve that problem? >> So that's a great question. So by working together we can really optimize the configurations. So on the Fuijitsu side, our radios are multi-band and highly compact and super energy efficient so that the TCO for the carrier is much, much lower. And then we've also announced on the rApp side power savings, energy savings applications, which are really sophisticated AI enabled apps that can switch off the radio based upon traffic prediction models and we can save the operator 30% on their energy bill. That's a big number. >> And that intelligence that lives in the, does it live in the RIC, is it in the brain? >> In the app right above the RIC, absolutely. >> Okay, so it's a purpose-built app to deal with that. >> It's multi-vendor app, it can sit on anybody's O-RAN system. And one of the beauties of O-RAN is there is that open architecture, so that even if Dell and Fuijitsu only sell part of the, or none of the system, an app can be selected from any vendor including Fuijitsu. So that's one of the benefits of whoever's got the best idea, the best cost performance, the best energy performance, customers can really be enabled to make the choice and continue to make choices, not just way back at RFP time, but throughout their life cycle they can keep making choices. And so that's really meaning that, hey, if we miss the buying cycle then we're closed out for 5 or 10 years. No, it's constantly being reevaluated, and that's really exciting, the whole ecosystem. But what we really want to do is make sure we partner together with key partners, Dell and Fuijitsu, such that the customer, when they do select us they see a bundle, not just every person for themselves. It de-risks it. And we get a lot of that integration headache out of the way before we launch it. >> I think that's what's different. We've been talking about how we've kind of seen this move before, in the nineties we saw the move from the mainframe vertical stack to the horizontal stack. We talked about that, but there are real differences because back then you had, I don't know, five components of the stack and there was no integration, and even converged infrastructure was kind of bolts that brought that together. And then over time it's become engineered systems. When you talk to customers, Ryan, is the conversation today mostly TCO? Is it how to get the reliability and quality of service of traditional stacks? Where's the conversation today? >> Yeah, it's the flip side of choice, which is how do you make sure you have that reliability and that security to ensure that the full stack isn't just integrated, but it lives through that whole life cycle management. What are, if you're bringing in another piece, an rApp or an xApp, how do you actually make sure that it works together as a group? Because if you don't have that kind of assurance how can you actually guarantee that O-RAN in and of itself is going to perform better than a traditional RAN system? So overcoming that barrier requires partnerships and integration activity. That is an investment on the parts of our companies, but also the operators need to look back at us and say, yeah, that work has been done, and I trust as trusted advisors for the operators that that's been done. And then we can go validate it. >> Help our audience understand it. At what point in time do you feel that from a TCO perspective there'll be parity, or in my opinion it doesn't even have to be equal. It has to be close enough. And I don't know what that close enough is because the other benefits of openness, the innovation, so there's that piece of it as the cost piece and then there is the reliability. And I would say the same thing. It's got to be, well, maybe good enough is not good enough in this world, but maybe it is for some use cases. So really my question is around adoption and what are those factors that are going to affect adoption and when can we expect them to be? >> It's a good question, Dave, and what I would say is that the closed RAN vendors are making incremental improvements. And if you think in a snapshot there might be one answer, but if you think in kind of a flow model, a river over time, our O-RAN like-minded people are on a monster innovation curve. I mean the slope of the curve is huge. So in the OpenRAN policy coalition, 60 like-minded companies working together going north, and we're saying that let's bring all the innovation together, so you can say TCO, reliability, but we're bringing the innovation curve of software and integration curve from silicon and integration from system vendors all together to really out-innovate everybody else by working together. So that's the-- >> I like that curve analogy, Greg 'cause okay, you got the ogive or S curve, and you're saying that O-RAN is entering or maybe even before the steep part of the S curve, so you're going to go hyperbolic, whereas the traditional vendors are maybe trying to squeeze a little bit more out of the lemon. >> 1, 2%, and we're making 30% or more quantum leaps at a time every innovation. So what we tell customers is you can measure right now, but if you just do the time-based competition model, as an organization, as a group of us, we're going to be ahead. >> Is it a Moore's law innovation curve or is it actually faster because you've got the combinatorial factors of silicon, certain telco technologies, other integration software. Is it actually steeper than maybe historical Moore's law? >> I think it's steeper. I don't know Ryan's opinion, but I think it's steeper because Moore's law, well-known in silicon, and it's reaching five nanometers and more and more innovations. But now we're talking about AI software and machine learning as well as the system and device vendors. So when all that's combined, what is that? So that's why I think we're at an O-RAN conference today. I'm not sure we're at MWC. >> Well, it's true. It's funny they changed the name from Mobile World Congress and that was never really meant to be a consumer show, but these things change that, right? And so I think it's appropriate MWC because we're seeing really deep enterprise technology now enter, so that's your sweet spot, isn't it? >> It really is. But I think in some ways it's the path to that price performance parity, which we saw in IT a long time ago, making its way into telecom is there, but it doesn't work unless everybody is on board. And that involves players like this and even smaller companies and innovative startups, which we really haven't seen in this space for some time. And we've been having them at the Dell booth all week long. And there's really interesting stuff like Greg said, AI, ML, optimization and efficiency, which is exciting. And that's where O-RAN can also benefit the Industry. >> And as I say, there are other differences to your advantage. You've got engineered systems or you've been through that in enterprise IT, kind of learned how to do that. But you've also got the cloud, public cloud for experimentation, so you can fail cheaply, and you got AI, right, which is, really didn't have AI in the nineties. You had it, but nobody used it. And now you're like, everybody's using ChatGPT. >> Right, but now what's exciting, and the other thing that Ryan and we are working on together is linking our labs together because it's not about the first time system integration and connecting the hoses together, and okay, there it worked, but it's about the ongoing life cycle management of all the updates and upgrades. And by using Dell's OTEL Lab and Fuijitsu's MITC lab and linking them together, now we really have a way of giving operators confidence that as we bring out the new innovations it's battle tested by two organizations. And so two logos coming together and saying, we've looked at it from our different angles and then this is battle tested. There's a lot of value there. >> I think the labs are key. >> But it's interesting, the point there is by tying labs together, there's an acknowledged skills gap as we move into this O-RAN world that operators are looking to us and probably Fuijitsu saying, help our team understand how to thrive in this new environment because we're going from closed systems to open systems where they actually again, have more choice and more ability to be flexible. >> Yeah, if you could take away that plumbing, even though they're good plumbers. All right guys, we got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you much. >> It's great to have you. >> Appreciate it, Dave. >> Okay, keep it right there. Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin, and Dave Nicholson will be back from the Fira in Barcelona on theCUBE. Keep it right there. (pleasant music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies: creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE's Coverage day two of MWC 23. Check out SiliconANGLE.com for all the news, John Furrier in our Palo Alto studio, breaking that down. But we're here live Dave Vellante, Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We're really excited. We're going to talk qubits. Vanessa Diaz is here. She's CEO of LuxQuanta And Antonio Acin is a professor of ICFO. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. We're going to talk quantum. Really excited about that. >> Vanessa: Thank you guys. >> What does quantum have to do with the network? Tell us. >> Right, so we are actually leaving the second quantum revolution. So the first one actually happened quite a few years ago. It enabled very much the communications that we have today. So in this second quantum revolution, if in the first one we learn about some very basic properties of quantum physics now our scientific community is able to actually work with the systems and ask them to do things. So quantum technologies mean right now, three main pillars, no areas of exploration. The first one is quantum computing. Everybody knows about that. Antonio knows a lot about that too so he can explain further. And it's about computers that now can do wonder. So the ability of of these computers to compute is amazing. So they'll be able to do amazing things. The other pillar is quantum communications but in fact it's slightly older than quantum computer, nobody knows that. And we are the ones that are coming to actually counteract the superpowers of quantum computers. And last but not least quantum sensing, that's the the application of again, quantum physics to measure things that were impossible to measure in with such level of quality, of precision than before. So that's very much where we are right now. >> Okay, so I think I missed the first wave of quantum computing Because, okay, but my, our understanding is ones and zeros, they can be both and the qubits aren't that stable, et cetera. But where are we today, Antonio in terms of actually being able to apply quantum computing? I'm inferring from what Vanessa said that we've actually already applied it but has it been more educational or is there actual work going on with quantum? >> Well, at the moment, I mean, typical question is like whether we have a quantum computer or not. I think we do have some quantum computers, some machines that are able to deal with these quantum bits. But of course, this first generation of quantum computers, they have noise, they're imperfect, they don't have many qubits. So we have to understand what we can do with these quantum computers today. Okay, this is science, but also technology working together to solve relevant problems. So at this moment is not clear what we can do with present quantum computers but we also know what we can do with a perfect quantum computer without noise with many quantum bits, with many qubits. And for instance, then we can solve problems that are out of reach for our classical computers. So the typical example is the problem of factorization that is very connected to what Vanessa does in her company. So we have identified problems that can be solved more efficiently with a quantum computer, with a very good quantum computer. People are working to have this very good quantum computer. At the moment, we have some imperfect quantum computers, we have to understand what we can do with these imperfect machines. >> Okay. So for the first wave was, okay, we have it working for a little while so we see the potential. Okay, and we have enough evidence almost like a little experiment. And now it's apply it to actually do some real work. >> Yeah, so now there is interest by companies so because they see a potential there. So they are investing and they're working together with scientists. We have to identify use cases, problems of relevance for all of us. And then once you identify a problem where a quantum computer can help you, try to solve it with existing machines and see if you can get an advantage. So now the community is really obsessed with getting a quantum advantage. So we really hope that we will get a quantum advantage. This, we know we will get it. We eventually have a very good quantum computer. But we want to have it now. And we're working on that. We have some results, there were I would say a bit academic situation in which a quantum advantage was proven. But to be honest with you on a really practical problem, this has not happened yet. But I believe the day that this happens and I mean it will be really a game changing. >> So you mentioned the word efficiency and you talked about the quantum advantage. Is the quantum advantage a qualitative advantage in that it is fundamentally different? Or is it simply a question of greater efficiency, so therefore a quantitative advantage? The example in the world we're used to, think about a card system where you're writing information on a card and putting it into a filing cabinet and then you want to retrieve it. Well, the information's all there, you can retrieve it. Computer system accelerates that process. It's not doing something that is fundamentally different unless you accept that the speed with which these things can be done gives it a separate quality. So how would you characterize that quantum versus non quantum? Is it just so much horse power changes the game or is it fundamentally different? >> Okay, so from a fundamental perspective, quantum physics is qualitatively different from classical physics. I mean, this year the Nobel Prize was given to three experimentalists who made experiments that proved that quantum physics is qualitatively different from classical physics. This is established, I mean, there have been experiments proving that. Now when we discuss about quantum computation, it's more a quantitative difference. So we have problems that you can solve, in principle you can solve with the classical computers but maybe the amount of time you need to solve them is we are talking about centuries and not with your laptop even with a classic super computer, these machines that are huge, where you have a building full of computers there are some problems for which computers take centuries to solve them. So you can say that it's quantitative, but in practice you may even say that it's impossible in practice and it will remain impossible. And now these problems become feasible with a quantum computer. So it's quantitative but almost qualitative I would say. >> Before we get into the problems, 'cause I want to understand some of those examples, but Vanessa, so your role at LuxQuanta is you're applying quantum in the communication sector for security purposes, correct? >> Vanessa: Correct. >> Because everybody talks about how quantum's going to ruin our lives in terms of taking all our passwords and figuring everything out. But can quantum help us defend against quantum and is that what you do? >> That's what we do. So one of the things that Antonio's explaining so our quantum computer will be able to solve in a reasonable amount of time something that today is impossible to solve unless you leave a laptop or super computer working for years. So one of those things is cryptography. So at the end, when use send a message and you want to preserve its confidentiality what you do is you destroy it but following certain rules which means they're using some kind of key and therefore you can send it through a public network which is the case for every communication that we have, we go through the internet and then the receiver is going to be able to reassemble it because they have that private key and nobody else has. So that private key is actually made of computational problems or mathematical problems that are very, very hard. We're talking about 40 years time for a super computer today to be able to hack it. However, we do not have the guarantee that there is already very smart mind that already have potentially the capacity also of a quantum computer even with enough, no millions, but maybe just a few qubits, it's enough to actually hack this cryptography. And there is also the fear that somebody could actually waiting for quantum computing to finally reach out this amazing capacity we harvesting now which means capturing all this confidential information storage in it. So when we are ready to have the power to unlock it and hack it and see what's behind. So we are talking about information as delicate as governmental, citizens information related to health for example, you name it. So what we do is we build a key to encrypt the information but it's not relying on a mathematical problem it's relying on the laws of quantum physics. So I'm going to have a channel that I'm going to pump photons there, light particles of light. And that quantum channel, because of the laws of physics is going to allow to detect somebody trying to sneak in and seeing the key that I'm establishing. If that happens, I will not create a key if it's clean and nobody was there, I'll give you a super key that nobody today or in the future, regardless of their computational power, will be able to hack. >> So it's like super zero trust. >> Super zero trust. >> Okay so but quantum can solve really challenging mathematical problems. If you had a quantum computer could you be a Bitcoin billionaire? >> Not that I know. I think people are, okay, now you move me a bit of my comfort zone. Because I know people have working on that. I don't think there is a lot of progress at least not that I am aware of. Okay, but I mean, in principle you have to understand that our society is based on information and computation. Computers are a key element in our society. And if you have a machine that computes better but much better than our existing machines, this gives you an advantage for many things. I mean, progress is locked by many computational problems we cannot solve. We can want to have better materials better medicines, better drugs. I mean this, you have to solve hard computational problems. If you have machine that gives you machine learning, big data. I mean, if you have a machine that gives you an advantage there, this may be a really real change. I'm not saying that we know how to do these things with a quantum computer. But if we understand how this machine that has been proven more powerful in some context can be adapted to some other context. I mean having a much better computer machine is an advantage. >> When? When are we going to have, you said we don't really have it today, we want it today. Are we five years away, 10 years away? Who's working on this? >> There are already quantum computers are there. It's just that the capacity that they have of right now is the order of a few hundred qubits. So people are, there are already companies harvesting, they're actually the companies that make these computers they're already putting them. People can access to them through the cloud and they can actually run certain algorithms that have been tailor made or translated to the language of a quantum computer to see how that performs there. So some people are already working with them. There is billions of investment across the world being put on different flavors of technologies that can reach to that quantum supremacy that we are talking about. The question though that you're asking is Q day it sounds like doomsday, you know, Q day. So depending on who you talk to, they will give you a different estimation. So some people say, well, 2030 for example but perhaps we could even think that it could be a more aggressive date, maybe 2027. So it is yet to be the final, let's say not that hard deadline but I think that the risk, that it can actually bring is big enough for us to pay attention to this and start preparing for it. So the end times of cryptography that's what quantum is doing is we have a system here that can actually prevent all your communications from being hacked. So if you think also about Q day and you go all the way back. So whatever tools you need to protect yourself from it, you need to deploy them, you need to see how they fit in your organization, evaluate the benefits, learn about it. So that, how close in time does that bring us? Because I believe that the time to start thinking about this is now. >> And it's likely it'll be some type of hybrid that will get us there, hybrid between existing applications. 'Cause you have to rewrite or write new applications and that's going to take some time. But it sounds like you feel like this decade we will see Q day. What probability would you give that? Is it better than 50/50? By 2030 we'll see Q day. >> But I'm optimistic by nature. So yes, I think it's much higher than 50. >> Like how much higher? >> 80, I would say yes. I'm pretty confident. I mean, but what I want to say also usually when I think there is a message here so you have your laptop, okay, in the past I had a Spectrum This is very small computer, it was more or less the same size but this machine is much more powerful. Why? Because we put information on smaller scales. So we always put information in smaller and smaller scale. This is why here you have for the same size, you have much more information because you put on smaller scales. So if you go small and small and small, you'll find the quantum word. So this is unavoidable. So our information devices are going to meet the quantum world and they're going to exploit it. I'm fully convinced about this, maybe not for the quantum computer we're imagining now but they will find it and they will use quantum effects. And also for cryptography, for me, this is unavoidable. >> And you brought the point there are several companies working on that. I mean, I can get quantum computers on in the cloud and Amazon and other suppliers. IBM of course is. >> The underlying technology, there are competing versions of how you actually create these qubits. pins of electrons and all sorts of different things. Does it need to be super cooled or not? >> Vanessa: There we go. >> At a fundamental stage we'd be getting ground. But what is, what does ChatGPT look like when it can leverage the quantum realm? >> Well, okay. >> I Mean are we all out of jobs at that point? Should we all just be planning for? >> No. >> Not you. >> I think all of us real estate in Portugal, should we all be looking? >> No, actually, I mean in machine learning there are some hopes about quantum competition because usually you have to deal with lots of data. And we know that in quantum physics you have a concept that is called superposition. So we, there are some hopes not in concrete yet but we have some hopes that these superpositions may allow you to explore this big data in a more efficient way. One has to if this can be confirmed. But one of the hopes creating this lots of qubits in this superpositions that you will have better artificial intelligence machines but, okay, this is quite science fiction what I'm saying now. >> At this point and when you say superposition, that's in contrast to the ones and zeros that we're used to. So when someone says it could be a one or zero or a one and a zero, that's referencing the concept of superposition. And so if this is great for encryption, doesn't that necessarily mean that bad actors can leverage it in a way that is now unhackable? >> I mean our technologies, again it's impossible to hack because it is the laws of physics what are allowing me to detect an intruder. So that's the beauty of it. It's not something that you're going to have to replace in the future because there will be a triple quantum computer, it is not going to affect us in any way but definitely the more capacity, computational capacity that we see out there in quantum computers in particular but in any other technologies in general, I mean, when we were coming to talk to you guys, Antonio and I, he was the one saying we do not know whether somebody has reached some relevant computational power already with the technologies that we have. And they've been able to hack already current cryptography and then they're not telling us. So it's a bit of, the message is a little bit like a paranoid message, but if you think about security that the amount of millions that means for a private institution know when there is a data breach, we see it every day. And also the amount of information that is relevant for the wellbeing of a country. Can you really put a reasonable amount of paranoid to that? Because I believe that it's worth exploring whatever tool is going to prevent you from putting any of those piece of information at risk. >> Super interesting topic guys. I know you're got to run. Thanks for stopping by theCUBE, it was great to have you on. >> Thank you guys. >> All right, so this is the SiliconANGLE theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress, MWC now 23. We're live at the Fira Check out silicon SiliconANGLE.com and theCUBE.net for all the videos. Be right back, right after this short break. (relaxing music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's first day of coverage of MWC 23 from Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. I'm literally in between two Daves. We've had a great first day of coverage of the event. There's been lots of conversations, Dave, on disaggregation, on the change of mobility. I want to be able to get your perspectives from both of you on what you saw on the show floor, what you saw and heard from our guests today. So we'll start with you, Dave V. What were some of the things that were our takeaways from day one for you? >> Well, the big takeaway is the event itself. On day one, you get a feel for what this show is like. Now that we're back, face-to-face kind of pretty much full face-to-face. A lot of excitement here. 2000 plus exhibitors, I mean, planes, trains, automobiles, VR, AI, servers, software, I mean everything. I mean, everybody is here. So it's a really comprehensive show. It's not just about mobile. That's why they changed the name from Mobile World Congress. I think the other thing is from the keynotes this morning, I mean, you heard, there's a lot of, you know, action around the telcos and the transformation, but in a lot of ways they're sort of protecting their existing past from the future. And so they have to be careful about how fast they move. But at the same time if they don't move fast, they're going to get disrupted. We heard some complaints, essentially, you know, veiled complaints that the over the top guys aren't paying their fair share and Telco should be able to charge them more. We heard the chairman of Ericsson talk about how we can't let the OTTs do that again. We're going to charge directly for access through APIs to our network, to our data. We heard from Chris Lewis. Yeah. They've only got, or maybe it was San Ji Choha, how they've only got eight APIs. So, you know the developers are the ones who are going to actually build out the innovation at the edge. The telcos are going to provide the connectivity and the infrastructure companies like Dell as well. But it's really to me all about the developers. And that's where the action's going to be. And it's going to be interesting to see how the developers respond to, you know, the gun to the head. If you want access, you're going to have to pay for it. Now maybe there's so much money to be made that they'll go for it, but I feel like there's maybe a different model. And I think some of the emerging telcos are going to say, you know what, here developers, here's a platform, have at it. We're not going to charge you for all the data until you succeed. Then we're going to figure out a monetization model. >> Right. A lot of opportunity for the developer. That skillset is certainly one that's in demand here. And certainly the transformation of the telecom industry is, there's a lot of conundrums that I was hearing going on today, kind of chicken and egg scenarios. But Dave, you had a chance to walk around the show floor. We were here interviewing all day. What were some of the things that you saw that really stuck out to you? >> I think I was struck by how much attention was being paid to private 5G networks. You sort of read between the lines and it appears as though people kind of accept that the big incumbent telecom players are going to be slower to move. And this idea of things like open RAN where you're leveraging open protocols in a stack to deliver more agility and more value. So it sort of goes back to the generalized IT discussion of moving to cloud for agility. It appears as though a lot of players realize that the wild wild west, the real opportunity, is in the private sphere. So it's really interesting to see how that works, how 5G implemented into an environment with wifi how that actually works. It's really interesting. >> So it's, obviously when you talk to companies like Dell, I haven't hit HPE yet. I'm going to go over there and check out their booth. They got an analyst thing going on but it's really early days for them. I mean, they started in this business by taking an X86 box, putting a name on it, you know, that sounded like it was edged, throwing it over, you know, the wall. That's sort of how they all started in this business. And now they're, you know, but they knew they had to form partnerships. They had to build purpose-built systems. Now with 16 G out, you're seeing that. And so it's still really early days, talking about O RAN, open RAN, the open RAN alliance. You know, it's just, I mean, not even, the game hasn't even barely started yet but we heard from Dish today. They're trying to roll out a massive 5G network. Rakuten is really focused on sort of open RAN that's more reliable, you know, or as reliable as the existing networks but not as nearly as huge a scale as Dish. So it's going to take a decade for this to evolve. >> Which is surprising to the average consumer to hear that. Because as far as we know 5G has been around for a long time. We've been talking about 5G, implementing 5G, you sort of assume it's ubiquitous but the reality is it is just the beginning. >> Yeah. And you know, it's got a fake 5G too, right? I mean you see it on your phone and you're like, what's the difference here? And it's, you know, just, >> Dave N.: What does it really mean? >> Right. And so I think your point about private is interesting, the conversation Dave that we had earlier, I had throughout, hey I don't think it's a replacement for wifi. And you said, "well, why not?" I guess it comes down to economics. I mean if you can get the private network priced close enough then you're right. Why wouldn't it replace wifi? Now you got wifi six coming in. So that's a, you know, and WiFi's flexible, it's cheap, it's good for homes, good for offices, but these private networks are going to be like kickass, right? They're going to be designed to run whatever, warehouses and robots, and energy drilling facilities. And so, you know the economics I don't think are there today but maybe they can be at volume. >> Maybe at some point you sort of think of today's science experiment becoming the enterprise-grade solution in the future. I had a chance to have some conversations with folks around the show. And I think, and what I was surprised by was I was reminded, frankly, I wasn't surprised. I was reminded that when we start talking about 5G, we're talking about spectrum that is managed by government entities. Of course all broadcast, all spectrum, is managed in one way or another. But in particular, you can't simply put a SIM in every device now because there are a lot of regulatory hurdles that have to take place. So typically what these things look like today is 5G backhaul to the network, communication from that box to wifi. That's a huge improvement already. So yeah, my question about whether, you know, why not put a SIM in everything? Maybe eventually, but I think, but there are other things that I was not aware of that are standing in the way. >> Your point about spectrum's an interesting one though because private networks, you're going to be able to leverage that spectrum in different ways, and tune it essentially, use different parts of the spectrum, make it programmable so that you can apply it to that specific use case, right? So it's going to be a lot more flexible, you know, because I presume the needs spectrum needs of a hospital are going to be different than, you know, an agribusiness are going to be different than a drilling, you know, unit, offshore drilling unit. And so the ability to have the flexibility to use the spectrum in different ways and apply it to that use case, I think is going to be powerful. But I suspect it's going to be expensive initially. I think the other thing we talked about is public policy and regulation, and it's San Ji Choha brought up the point, is telcos have been highly regulated. They don't just do something and ask for permission, you know, they have to work within the confines of that regulated environment. And there's a lot of these greenfield companies and private networks that don't necessarily have to follow those rules. So that's a potential disruptive force. So at the same time, the telcos are spending what'd we hear, a billion, a trillion and a half over the next seven years? Building out 5G networks. So they got to figure out, you know how to get a payback on that. They'll get it I think on connectivity, 'cause they have a monopoly but they want more. They're greedy. They see the over, they see the Netflixes of the world and the Googles and the Amazons mopping up services and they want a piece of that action but they've never really been good at it. >> Well, I've got a question for both of you. I mean, what do you think the odds are that by the time the Shangri La of fully deployed 5G happens that we have so much data going through it that effectively it feels exactly the same as 3G? What are the odds? >> That's a good point. Well, the thing that gets me about 5G is there's so much of it on, if I go to the consumer side when we're all consumers in our daily lives so much of it's marketing hype. And, you know all the messaging about that, when it's really early innings yet they're talking about 6G. What does actual fully deployed 5G look like? What is that going to enable a hospital to achieve or an oil refinery out in the middle of the ocean? That's something that interests me is what's next for that? Are we going to hear that at this event? >> I mean, walking around, you see a fair amount of discussion of, you know, the internet of things. Edge devices, the increase in connectivity. And again, what I was surprised by was that there's very little talk about a sim card in every one of those devices at this point. It's like, no, no, no, we got wifi to handle all that but aggregating it back into a central network that's leveraging 5G. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. >> I think you, the odds of your, to go back to your question, I think the odds are even money, that by the time it's all built out there's going to be so much data and so much new capability it's going to work similarly at similar speeds as we see in the networks today. You're just going to be able to do so many more things. You know, and your video's going to look better, the graphics are going to look better. But I think over the course of history, this is what's happening. I mean, even when you go back to dial up, if you were in an AOL chat room in 1996, it was, you know, yeah it took a while. You're like, (screeches) (Lisa laughs) the modem and everything else, but once you were in there- >> Once you're there, 2400 baud. >> It was basically real time. And so you could talk to your friends and, you know, little chat room but that's all you could do. You know, if you wanted to watch a video, forget it, right? And then, you know, early days of streaming video, stop, start, stop, start, you know, look at Amazon Prime when it first started, Prime Video was not that great. It's sort of catching up to Netflix. But, so I think your point, that question is really prescient because more data, more capability, more apps means same speed. >> Well, you know, you've used the phrase over the top. And so just just so we're clear so we're talking about the same thing. Typically we're talking about, you've got, you have network providers. Outside of that, you know, Netflix, internet connection, I don't need Comcast, right? Perfect example. Well, what about the over the top that's coming from direct satellite communications with devices. There are times when I don't have a signal on my, happens to be an Apple iPhone, when I get a little SOS satellite logo because I can communicate under very limited circumstances now directly to the satellite for very limited text messaging purposes. Here at the show, I think it might be a Motorola device. It's a dongle that allows any mobile device to leverage direct satellite communication. Again, for texting back to the 2,400 baud modem, you know, days, 1200 even, 300 even, go back far enough. What's that going to look like? Is that too far in the future to think that eventually it's all going to be over the top? It's all going to be handset to satellite and we don't need these RANs anymore. It's all going to be satellite networks. >> Dave V.: I think you're going to see- >> Little too science fiction-y? (laughs) >> No, I, no, I think it's a good question and I think you're going to see fragments. I think you're going to see fragmentation of private networks. I think you're going to see fragmentation of satellites. I think you're going to see legacy incumbents kind of hanging on, you know, the cable companies. I think that's coming. I think by 2030 it'll, the picture will be much more clear. The question is, and I think it's come down to the innovation on top, which platform is going to be the most developer friendly? Right, and you know, I've not heard anything from the big carriers that they're going to be developer friendly. I've heard "we have proprietary data that we're going to charge access for and developers are going to have to pay for that." But I haven't heard them saying "Developers, developers, developers!" You know, Steve Bomber running around, like bend over backwards for developers, they're asking the developers to bend over. And so if a network can, let's say the satellite network is more developer friendly, you know, you're going to see more innovation there potentially. You know, or if a dish network says, "You know what? We're going after developers, we're going after innovation. We're not going to gouge them for all this network data. Rather we're going to make the platform open or maybe we're going to do an app store-like model where we take a piece of the action after they succeed." You know, take it out of the backend, like a Silicon Valley VC as opposed to an East Coast VC. They're not going to get you in the front end. (Lisa laughs) >> Well, you can see the sort of disruptive forces at play between open RAN and the legacy, call it proprietary stack, right? But what is the, you know, if that's sort of a horizontal disruptive model, what's the vertically disruptive model? Is it private networks coming in? Is it a private 5G network that comes in that says, "We're starting from the ground up, everything is containerized. We're going to go find people at KubeCon who are, who understand how to orchestrate with Kubernetes and use containers in microservices, and we're going to have this little 5G network that's going to deliver capabilities that you can't get from the big boys." Is there a way to monetize that? Is there a way for them to be disrupted, be disruptive, or are these private 5G networks that everybody's talking about just relegated to industrial use cases where you're just squeezing better economics out of wireless communication amongst all your devices in your factory? >> That's an interesting question. I mean, there are a lot of those smart factory industrial use cases. I mean, it's basically industry 4.0 use cases. But yeah, I don't count the cloud guys out. You know, everybody says, "oh, the narrative is, well, the latency of the cloud." Well, not if the cloud is at the edge. If you take a local zone and put storage, compute, and data right next to each other and the cloud model with the cloud APIs, and then you got an asynchronous, you know, connection back. I think that's a reasonable model. I think the cloud guys figured out developers, right? Pretty well. Certainly Microsoft and, and Amazon and Google, they know developers. I don't see any reason why they can't bring their model to the edge. So, and that's really disruptive to the legacy telco guys, you know? So they have to be careful. >> One step closer to my dream of eliminating the word "cloud" from IT lexicon. (Lisa laughs) I contend that it has always been IT, and it will always be IT. And this whole idea of cloud, what is cloud? If AWS, for example, is delivering hardware to the edge where it needs to be, is that cloud? Do we go back to the idea that cloud is an operational model and not a question of physical location? I hope we get to that point. >> Well, what's Apex and GreenLake? Apex is, you know, Dell's as a service. GreenLake is- >> HPE. >> HPE's as a service. That's outposts. >> Dave N.: Right. >> Yeah. >> That's their outpost. >> Yeah. >> Well AWS's position used to be, you know, to use them as a proxy for hyperscale cloud. We'll just, we'll grow in a very straight trajectory forever on the back of net new stuff. Forget about the old stuff. As James T. Kirk said of the Klingons, "let them die." (Lisa laughs) As far as the cloud providers were concerned just, yeah, let, let that old stuff go away. Well then they found out, there came a point in time where they realized there's a lot of friction and stickiness associated with that. So they had to deal with the reality of hybridity, if that's the word, the hybrid nature of things. So what are they doing? They're pushing stuff out to the edge, so... >> With the same operating model. >> With the same operating model. >> Similar. I mean, it's limited, right? >> So you see- >> You can't run a lot of database on outpost, you can run RES- >> You see this clash of Titans where some may have written off traditional IT infrastructure vendors, might have been written off as part of the past. Whereas hyperscale cloud providers represent the future. It seems here at this show they're coming head to head and competing evenly. >> And this is where I think a company like Dell or HPE or Cisco has some advantages in that they're not going to compete with the telcos, but the hyperscalers will. >> Lisa: Right. >> Right. You know, and they're already, Google's, how much undersea cable does Google own? A lot. Probably more than anybody. >> Well, we heard from Google and Microsoft this morning in the keynote. It'd be interesting to see if we hear from AWS and then over the next couple of days. But guys, clearly there is, this is a great wrap of day one. And the crazy thing is this is only day one. We've got three more days of coverage, more news, more information to break down and unpack on theCUBE. Look forward to doing that with you guys over the next three days. Thank you for sharing what you saw on the show floor, what you heard from our guests today as we had about 10 interviews. Appreciate your insights and your perspectives and can't wait for tomorrow. >> Right on. >> All right. For Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's day one wrap from MWC 23. We'll see you tomorrow. (relaxing music)

(bright gentle music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright gentle music) >> Hey, everyone. Good to see you. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE's coverage, day one of MWC 23 from Barcelona, and we're having a great day so far. The theme of this conference, Dave, is velocity. I feel like we've been shot out of a cannon of CUBE content already on day one. We've been talking with... Today's ecosystem day. We've been talking about the ecosystem, the importance of open ecosystem, and why. And we're going to be unpacking that a little bit more next. >> You know, Lisa, what used to be Mobile World Congress and is now MWC, it was never really intended to be sort of a consumer show, but with the ascendancy of smartphones. It kind of... They sucked all the air out of the room. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> But really, we're seeing the enterprise come really into focus now as the telco stack disaggregates, and enterprise is complicated. >> Enterprise is complicated, telecom is complicated. We have a guest here to unpack that with us. Chris Falloon joins us the Senior Managing Director of telecom practice at Dell. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks very much for having me. >> So you've been in the telecom industry for a long time. Talk about some of the things that you've witnessed over the last couple of decades and really help us understand the complexity that is telecom. >> Yeah. Well, nothing, nothing more complex. Look, I got... I was privileged to start my career in telco 20 years ago in Canada working with other telecoms globally. And so I got a good picture of how they operate, what's important to them. But I was... It's come full circle for me. I got into IT and come all the way back now to helping telcos figure out how to operate. And so it's been a great journey. >> What are some of the- >> Dave: You kno- >> Oh sorry, Dave. >> Dave: Please, go ahead. >> I was just going to say unpack some of the complexity that we see now. Obviously, we think telecom, we... And you talked about the consumerization... We have this expectation that we can get anything on our mobile devices 24/7 from any part of the world, but there's a lot of complexity in the industry as it's evolving. What are some of the complexities and how is Dell helping address that? >> Look, I think the transformation from traditional monolithic architectures to cloud-based architectures is maybe the most... The single largest complex transformation any industry's done in the last 20 years. And it's not just a technology transformation, it's critically an operational transformation. And so I think that's really at the heart of it is we've seen a real shift this year. From conversations last year were around how this stuff gets turned on, "Can it work?", "Does it work?", to a conversation around "How does it work?", "How do I operationalize it?", "What are the implications to my teams?". And so we've got teams struggling with knowledge and competency gaps. We've got people figuring out how to get this stuff working at scale. >> Yeah, so I mean, you think about Telcos, you know, a lot of engineers, but a lot of the stuff is done kind of, I call it, in the basement. >> Yeah. >> Kind of hidden, right? And they make it work, right? And that transformation that you're talking about toward this more agile, open ecosystem, moving fast, cloud-native, new services coming in, new monetization models. That does require a different operating model. How similar, given your background in both, you know, IT and Telco, how similar is it to the transformation that occurred in IT in terms of the operation- Operating model, which some companies are still going through? >> Look, I think we're privileged actually to be able to do this 10 years after IT went through it. And there's a lot of patterns that are definitely the same. There's no question there's differences. The applications are far different, the timing and and issues in the RAN are far different, and the distributed size of these deployments is different. But the learnings around how to deploy cloud-native technology, how to organize around these platforms, and back to the operationalization, how to deploy them and operate them at scale, it took IT a decade to figure that out. And hopefully, with the learnings that we've got from that we can rush through it here in a few years or less. >> One of the other big differences, of course, is public policy and regulation, right? You don't really have that so much in the IT world. >> Chris: Right. >> Sometimes you have no regulation. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> You know, Google, Facebook, do whatever you want and we'll figure it out 20 years later. How much of a factor is that in terms of the complexity and are the new Greenfield players... Are they bound by similar sort of restrictions or can they move faster? What's the dynamic there? >> Look, there's no question that Greenfield is faster than Brownfield. Doesn't matter whether that's telco or IT. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, sure. >> I think the... I think we're at a place in history where we're watching some of the early movers testing some of these theories. But I would tell you just... Again, just in the last few days leading up to this event talking with our customers and our partners, it's clear that even the first movers are struggling with the operational complexity of these platforms. And as a... You know, I think Dell's position in IT for the last decade as a platform systems integrator is very much going to continue to play out in the... In... We're being asked to play that role here as we try to bring some of the cloud-native operating competencies to the to the table. >> Hmm. >> And where are you having customer conversations these days? Is it at... Is it at the IT level? Is it higher sense tel... Networking is essential for any business in any organization to be able to deliver what the end user is demanding. >> Of course. Look, I... We've seen a real shift as I mentioned from the technology proof points to the operational proof points. How do we... How do we make sure that not only the business case is valid, but that we can maintain these new changes in these new operating models at scale at the right operating cost? And those are very healthy conversations because the success of this transformation to cloud architecture and edge computing and everything else is predicated on the idea that we can get cloud running at scale in the network. But I think the... It's very much use case driven and we're going to see... We're finally seeing some edge use cases that are driving consumption of those edge use cases, for sure. >> You know, I said earlier, I was in the keynotes and it took 45 minutes to get to the topic of security. >> Hmm. >> It was I think the third or fourth, or even fifth speaker. Finally, 45 minutes in, mention security. And I think that's because security's kind of a given in this world. It's a hardened environment. >> Chris: Yep. >> But that security model changes as well. The cloud brings a shared responsibility model. If it's multicloud, which it is, then it's shared responsibility across multiple clouds. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You know, you've got now developers who are being asked to be responsible for security. So that's another part of the complexity. We're kind of unpacking complexity here, aren't we? >> Chris: That's right. >> Just throwing more things in the cake. >> Look, I... Security is... It's an indication of this shift from what to how, very much includes security. And I think we're seeing security come to the forefront. Dell has a... We, you know, our philosophy is intrinsic security at all levels of the deployment. Everything from the infrastructure all the way through to the delivery and the management. >> Chris: And through the supply chain. >> And through supply chain. All the way through to the delivery of our technology integrated with other people's technology to ensure that the security's intrinsic in those deployments. And those integrations, as we're getting more and more involved in zero-touch deployments and helping carriers stand up these cloud platforms at scale, one of the ways to make sure that it's done repeatably and securely is to integrate those things at the factory or have your, you know, have your infrastructure partner take accountability for doing some of that pre-Day Zero. >> Well, the lab announcement that you guys have is... I've wrote about this. That pretty key, I think, because if you can certify in the lab... That's only other big differences. We talk a lot about the similarities between, you know, enterprise tech of the nineties and the disaggregation of the enterprise stack. But you didn't have so-called converged infrastructure back then. And even when you had converged infrastructure, it was like a skew that was bolted on. Now, you've got engineered systems. You're starting with engineered systems, but you've got to have a lab, so that the ecosystem and you've got self-certification. Those, I think, are key investments that... If you're thinking why Dell... A comp... You need a company like Dell who's got the resources to make those investments and actually kind of force that through. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Dave: Yeah. >> That's right. I think we're... You know, the value of the la... Again, the learnings from these last 10 years of integration is just... That understanding what the major blockers are should provide us with an accelerated roadmap for solving some of these problems as we encounter them over the next year or two in telecoms, no question. >> There's always regional differences in telecom, right? In the United States, you know, years ago, decades ago, sort of, you know, blew apart the telco industry. I would argue, many would I think as well, that that actually made the US less competitive. You got... Certainly have, you know, national interests around the world, across the European continent, certainly in APAC as well. How do you see that of, of... What are you hearing from those different regions? How do you see that affecting the adoption of some of the new technologies that you guys are promoting? >> Yeah, look, there's leaders... There's leaders and laggards in every market, I would say. I think we've been at this now, trying to stand up some of these cloud infrastructures and cloud RAN projects and virtual RAN projects. We've been at that now long enough to know that there's not so much regional patterns as there are patterns of companies that believe deeply that these architectures are going to lead to the right type of innovation and allow them to, you know, to build new markets and new sources of revenue. And those that are deeply committed to that structure are the ones willing to lean in and sort of blaze a path, right? So I would say that pattern is definitely emerged. I don't... We don't see... The larger the organization, certainly the larger the carrier, the deeper their resources on engineering and their ability to pivot and train those resources to become cloud-capable. That's a factor. We see a lot of conversations. Dell's got a very large Day 2 managed services business on the IT side. And, and as we pivot those Day 2 managed services, practices into managing cloud platforms and edge cloud platforms, I think it's the companies that don't have the depth or the skill or the experience are the ones that are that are asking us for the help there, for sure. >> How much has Dell been able to leverage? I mean, in the telecom systems business, I see, you know, a lot of new faces at Dell, a lot of folks like yourself that have telco experience. How about the services business? Were you able to sort of realign your existing folks or is it similar, you had to bring in people from the industry? >> It's both actually. So the... In services, it's critical because they... The org... The industry desperately needs systems integration across the board. And I think if we can convince the industry to treat telco clouds as a horizontal platform, then the idea of a platform integrator is a, you know, is definitely... It's valued. And in fact, it's required, I think, for the success of these projects. The services team at Dell is comprised of the folks who obviously run the pieces of the services business that are really no different in their construct. Building telco clouds is not that different from building IT clouds, so the elements are the same. Those teams are... Those teams persist. But definitely, the apps are different, and the support is different, and the requirements for uptime and availability are different. And so we've brought in services specialists to sort of... Just to create the glue between the customers and our existing sales depth. >> Do you have a favorite customer story that really articulates the value of what Dell is able to deliver in telecom with the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah. Look, it's not that well-known, but you know, the Day Zero Zero-Touch deployment factory integration capabilities that Dell has, we've been deploying that in IT for years. And, you know, we're... We've got a couple of projects globally now where we're not only designing and testing the stack in our labs and with our partners, but we're loading that stack in a known good architecture into third party and Dell hardware in a factory integration setting and shipping it to site with really nothing left to do but connect power and connectivity. And so from an engineering standpoint, the complexity of deploying cloud into thousands of data centers, we have examples of that that are being shipped continent by continent and and being deployed in a... In days and weeks as opposed to months. And so I think the... Taking some of the pain out of deployment and taking some of the... Building some repeatability into those deployments is a very big deal. Those are... Those are great, great projects. The next stage of that, of course, is helping them get to a place where the operations of those platforms is just as easy as the deployment. >> What's going to be different? Go to head... Look ahead to 2030. Let's go backwards from there. What's the world going to be like? What do people need to know in terms of what's coming? >> That's a great question. If... I think if I... If I could see that far ahead, I wouldn't probably be sitting here. (Chris and Lisa laughs) >> Dave: Yeah, but you have wisdom. >> Yeah. >> You know, the experience. >> If we play back... If we play back what's happened in the data centers, you know, in the IT data centers and you mentioned the, you know, the disaggregated systems shift that happened a decade ago. You know, those... Once the applications rearchitected to cloud-native architectures and could take advantage of the platform changes... Once the resiliency is built into the application instead of into the platforms, these things become more and more touchless. And I think the real double digit payback on this shift to cloud-native, we haven't begun to talk about it yet because we haven't... We're not anywhere close to the level of automation that can be achieved once we get to true cloud-native and microservices-based application architecture. That's a big shift and it's going to take a while. It took companies like SAP and others almost a decade to get that done. I think it'll happen faster here, but it's going to take us some time. >> Some of the things that you've heard... This is only day one of the conference, but anything that you've heard today or that you're looking forward to hearing in terms of how telecom is evolving and kind of playing catch-up? >> Yeah, look, I... We really believe this is the year that the edge use cases come alive. I think we're... We're... We've been... Almost every conversation I've been in, we've been asked, you know, sort of where's the... "Where are these use cases that are driving actual deployments and revenue?" and that sort of... And I think carriers are very much interested in trying to figure out customer edge, very much trying to figure out their own edge. Dell, of course, has both of those edges in mind. We've got a very large enterprise edge business unit, as well as our telco BU. And so, that's... I think this is the year we really start to figure out where those... We're seeing good deployments now in production at scale, and I think this is the year that starts to really take shape. >> Well, and it seems like... Just in hearing some of the carriers talk, they want to avoid what happened with the over-the-top vendors, okay. And they want to monetize the data that they have about the network. Looks like they want to charge for API access. >> Chris: Yep. >> 'Kay, developers are going to love that, right? Especially at the volumes that we're seeing here. But I feel like there's a, you know, potential blind spot of disruption coming, you know, like the over-the-top vendors, you know, that created all this innovation. I could see developers... Whether it's at the edge or new services, that customers really want to buy, they really value. Different than, "Hey, I own this data and you need it. I'm going to charge ya for it." versus "Hey, I'm going to create something that's really compelling." You know, an analog would be Netflix or other services that you get with maybe it's private wireless that can do some things. And, you know, that to me is the interesting opportunity here that I feel like is a blind spot for traditional telcos. 'Cause they've kind of got that mindset of, "Okay, you know, we're going to monetize. Let's do it." But they don't have that creativity mindset yet, you know? >> This industry has been given an opportunity to monetize almost every major transformation in technology, and many of them have slipped through our fingers, right? And this one is different because it's inextricably tied to the network. And I think the, you know... If... You mentioned mobile phones earlier I mean, I think what we saw in innovation in mobile was that we had no idea what was going to happen at the edge of that edge until someone created it. And so you have to have those in operating environments have to show up before the developers will spend the time to test them out and figure out what works. And so I... We haven't begun to believe, even understand I don't think, what's coming once we figure out a way to get ultra low latency, reliable connectivity at the edge. >> And I think developers have that open canvas and they're going to paint- >> That's right. >> What that edge looks like. And that's what... I mean, I kind of get concerned about... You know, to me the way to deal with developers, you give 'em a platform. Say, "Go create." >> Chris: That's right. >> As opposed to "Okay, pay to get access.", which you're going to have to, but I mean, there's other third parties that are going to fund that. I get it. >> Chris: Yeah. >> But there's a big open field that is going to get plowed here. >> Yes. >> And it's going to throw off some, you know, serious benefits to consumers. >> Yeah, and that's what we all want. We have that expectation that- >> Chris: Absolutely. >> It's going to... There's going to be a... With them... It's going to be, "What's in it for me?", right? >> "What's in it for me?" Yeah, that's right. >> Absolutely. >> Chris: That's right. >> Chris, I was going to say thank you so much. You want to add one more thing? >> Chris: No, I'm good. Thank you. >> I was just going to thank you so much for stopping by and talking to us about Dell's presence in telecom, how you're helping customers manage the complexity and the opportunities that really are there. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks so much, I really appreciate it. >> Dave: Thank you. >> Lisa: All right, our pleasure. >> Thanks, guys. >> For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live in Barcelona at MWC 23. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (bright gentle music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome to the Fira in Barcelona, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23, day one of that coverage. We have four days of wall-to-wall action going on, the place is going crazy. I'm here with Dave Nicholson, Lisa Martin is also in the house. Today's ecosystem day, and we're really excited to have Manish Singh who's the CTO of the Telecom Systems Business unit at Dell Technologies. He's joined by Doug Wolf who's the head of strategy for the Telecom Systems Business unit at Dell. Gents, welcome. What a show. I mean really the first major MWC or used to be Mobile World Congress since you guys have launched your telecom business, you kind of did that sort of in the Covid transition, but really exciting, obviously a huge, huge venue to match the huge market. So Manish, how did you guys get into this? What did you see? What was the overall thinking to get Dell into this business? >> Manish: Yeah, well, I mean just to start with you know, if you look at the telecom ecosystem today, the service providers in particular, they are looking for network transformation, driving more disaggregation into their network so that they can get better utilization of the infrastructure, but then also get more agility, more cloud native characteristics onto their, for their networks in particular. And then further on, it's important for them to really start to accelerate the pace of innovation on the networks itself, to start more supply chain diversity, that's one of the challenges that they've been having. And so there've been all these market forces that have been really getting these service providers to really start to transform the way they have built the infrastructure in the past, which was legacy monolithic architectures to more cloud native disaggregated. And from a Dell perspective, you know, that really gives us the permission to play, to really, given all the expertise on the work we have done in the IT with all the IT transformations to leverage all that expertise and bring that to the service providers and really help them in accelerating their network transformation. So that's where the journey started. We've been obviously ever since then working on expanding the product portfolio on our compute platforms to bring Teleco great compute platforms with more capabilities than we can talk about that. But then working with partners and building the ecosystem to again create this disaggregated and open ecosystem that will be more cloud native and really meet the objective that the service providers are after. >> Dave Vellante: Great, thank you. So, Doug the strategy obviously is to attack this market, as Manish said, from an open standpoint, that's sort of new territory. It's like a little bit like the wild, wild west. So maybe you could double click on what Manish was saying from a, from a strategy standpoint, yes, the Telecos need to be more flexible, they need to be more open, but they also need this reliability piece. So talk about that from a strategy standpoint of what you guys saw. >> Doug: Yeah, absolutely. As Manish mentioned, you know, Dell getting into open systems isn't something new. You know, Dell has been kind of playing in that world for years and years, but the opportunity in Telecom that came was opening of the RAN, the core network, the edge, all of these with 5G really created a wide opening for us. So we started developing products and solutions, you know, built our first Telecom grade servers for open RAN over the last year, we'll talk about those at the show. But you know, as, as Manish mentioned, an open ecosystem is new to Telecom. I've been in the Telecom business along with Manish for, you know, 25 plus years and this is a new thing that they're embarking on. So started with virtualization about five, six years ago, and now moving to cloud native architectures on the core, suddenly there's this need to have multiple parties partner really well, share specifications, and put that together for an operator to consume. And I think that's just the start of really where all the challenges are and the opportunities that we see. >> Where are we in this transition cycle? When the average consumer hears 5G, feels like it's been around for a long time because it was hyped beforehand. >> Doug: Yeah. >> If you're talking about moving to an open infrastructure model from a proprietary closed model, when is the opportunity for Dell to become part of that? Is it, are there specific sites that have already transitioned to 5G, therefore they've either made the decision to be open or not? Or are there places where the 5G transition has taken place, and they might then make a transition to open brand with 5G? Where, where are we in that cycle? What does the opportunity look like? >> I'll kind of take it from the typology of the operator, and I'm sure Manish will build on this, but if I look back on the core, started to get virtualized you know, back around 2015-16 with some of the lead operators like AT&T et cetera. So Dell has been partnering with those operators for some years. So it really, it's happening on the core, but it's moving with 5G to more of a cloud-like architecture, number one. And number two, they're going beyond just virtualizing the network. You know, they previously had used OpenStack and most of them are migrating to more of a cloud native architecture that Manish mentioned. And that is a bit different in terms of there's more software vendors in that ecosystem because the software is disaggregated also. So Dell's been playing in the core for a number of years, but we brought out new solutions we've announced at the show for the core. And the parts that are really starting that transition of maybe where the core was back in 2015 is on the RAN and on the edge in particular. >> Because NFV kind of predated the ascendancy of cloud. >> Exactly, yeah. >> Right, so it really didn't have the impact that people had hoped. And there's some, when you look back, 'cause it's not same wine, new bottle as the open systems movement, there are a lot of similarities but you know, you mentioned cloud, and cloud native, you really didn't have, back in the nineties, true engineered systems. You didn't really have AI that, you know, to speak of at the sort of volume of the data that we have. So Manish, from a CTO's perspective, how are you attacking some of those differences in bringing that to market? >> Manish: Yeah, I mean, I think you touched on some very important points there. So first of all, the duck's point, a lot of this transformation started in the core, right? And as the technology evolution progress, the opportunities opened up. It has now come into the edge and the radio access network as well, in particular with open RAN. And so when we talk about the disaggregation of the infrastructure from the software itself and an open ecosystem, this now starts to create the opportunity to accelerate innovation. And I really want to pick up on the point that you'd said on AI, for example. AI and machine learning bring a whole new set of capabilities and opportunities for these service providers to drive better optimization, better performance, better sustainability and energy efficiency on their infrastructure, on and on and on. But to really tap into these technologies, they really need to open that up to third parties implementation solutions that are coming up. And again, the end objective remains to accelerate that innovation. Now that said, all these things need to be brought together, right? And delivered and deployed in the network without any degradation in the KPIs and actually improving the performance on different vectors, right? So this is what the current state of play is. And with this aggregation I'm definitely a believer that all these new technologies, including AI, machine learning, and there's a whole area, host area of problems that can be solved and attacked and are actually getting attacked by applying AI and machine learning onto these networks. >> Open obviously is good. Nobody's ever going to, you know, argue that open is a bad thing. It's like democracy is a good thing, right? At least amongst us. And so, but, the RAN, the open RAN, has to be as reliable and performant, right, as these, closed networks. Or maybe not, maybe it doesn't have to be identical. Just has to be close enough in order for that tipping point to occur. Is that a fair summarization? What are you guys hearing from carriers in terms of their willingness to sort of put their toe in the water and, and what could we expect in terms of the maturity model of, of open RAN and adoption? >> Right, so I mean I think on, on performance that, that's a tough one. I think the operators will demand performance and you've seen experiments, you've really seen more of the Greenfield operators kind of launch. >> Okay. >> Doug: Open RAN or vRAN type solutions. >> So they're going to disrupt. >> Doug: Yeah, they're going to disrupt. >> Yeah. >> Doug: And there's flexibility in an open RAN architecture also for 5G that they, that they're interested in and I think the Brownfield operators are too, but let's say maybe the Greenfield jump first in terms of doing that from a mass deployment perspective. But I still think that it's going to be critical to meet very similar SLAs and end user performance. And, you know, I think that's where, you know, maturity of that model is what's required. I think Brownfield operators are conservative in terms of, you know, going with something they know, but the opportunities and the benefits of that architecture and building new flexible, potentially cost advantaged over time solutions, that's what the, where the real interest is going forward. >> And new services that you can introduce much more quickly. You know, the interesting thing about Dell to me, you don't compete with the carriers, the public cloud vendors though, the carriers are concerned about them sort of doing an end run on them. So you provide a potential partnership for the carriers that's non-threatening, right? 'Cause you're, you're an arms dealer, you're selling hardware and software, right? But, but how do you see that? Because we heard in the keynote today, one of the Teleco, I think it was the chairman of Telefonica said, you know, cloud guys can't do this alone. You know, they need, you know, this massive, you know, build out. And so, what do you think about that in terms of your relationship with the carriers not being threatening? I mean versus say potentially the cloud guys, who are also your partners, I understand, it's a really interesting dynamic, isn't it? >> Manish: Yeah, I mean I think, you know, I mean, the way I look at it, the carriers actually need someone like Dell who really come in who can bring in the right capabilities, the right infrastructure, but also bring in the ecosystem together and deliver a performance solution that they can deploy and that they can trust, number one. Number two, to your point on cloud, I mean, from a Dell perspective, you know, we announced our Dell Telecom Multicloud Foundation and as part of that last year in September, we announced what we call is the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks. The first one we announced with Wind River, and this is, think of it as the, you know, hardware and the cashier all pre-integrated with lot of automation around it, factory integrated, you know, delivered to customers in an integrated model with all the licenses, everything. And so it starts to solve the day zero, day one, day two integration deployment and then lifecycle management for them. So to broaden the discussion, our view is it's a multicloud world, the future is multicloud where you can have different clouds which can be optimized for different workloads. So for example, while our work with Wind River initially was very focused on virtualization of the radio access network, we just announced our infrastructure block with Red Hat, which is very much targeted and optimized for core network and edge, right? So, you know, there are different workflows which will require different capabilities also. And so, you know, again, we are bringing those things to these service providers to again, bring those cloud characteristics and cloud native architecture for their network. >> And It's going to be hybrid, to your point. >> David N.: And you, just hit on something, you said cloud characteristics. >> Yeah. >> If you look at this through the lens of kind of the general world of IT, sometimes when people hear the word cloud, they immediately leap to the idea that it's a hyperscale cloud provider. In this scenario we're talking about radio towers that have intelligence living on them and physically at the base. And so the cloud characteristics that you're delivering might be living physically in these remote locations all over the place, is that correct? >> Yeah, I mean that, that's true. That will definitely happen over time. But I think, I think we've seen the hyperscalers enter, you know, public cloud providers, enter at the edge and they're dabbling maybe with private, but I think the public RAN is another further challenge. I think that maybe a little bit down the road for them. So I think that is a different characteristic that you're talking about managing the macro RAN environment. >> Manish: If I may just add one more perspective of this cloud, and I mean, again, the hyperscale cloud, right? I mean that world's been great when you can centralize a lot of compute capability and you can then start to, you know, do workload aggregation and use the infrastructure more efficient. When it comes to Telecom, it is inherently it distributed architecture where you have access, you talked about radio access, your port, and it is inherently distributed because it has to provide the coverage and capacity. And so, you know, it does require different kind of capabilities when you're going out and about, and this is where I was talking about things like, you know, we just talked, we just have been working on our bare metal orchestration, right? This is what we are bringing is a capability where you can actually have distributed infrastructure, you can deploy, you can actually manage, do lifecycle management, in a distributed multicloud form. So it does require, you know, different set of capabilities that need to be enabled. >> Some, when talking about cloud, would argue that it's always been information technology, it always will be information technology, and especially as what we might refer to as public cloud or hyperscale cloud providers, are delivering things essentially on premises. It's like, well, is that cloud? Because it feels like some of those players are going to be delivering physical infrastructure outside of their own data centers in order to address this. It seems the nature, the nature of the beast is that some of these things need to be distributed. So it seems perfectly situated for Dell. That's why you guys are both at Dell now and not working for other Telecom places, right? >> Exactly. Exactly, yes. >> It's definitely an exciting space. It's transformed, the networks are under transformation and I do think that Dell's very well positioned to, to really help the customers, the service providers in accelerating their transformation journey with an open ecosystem. >> Dave V.: You've got the brand, and the breadth, and the resources to actually attract an ecosystem. But I wonder if you could sort of take us through your strategy of ecosystem, the challenges that you've seen in developing that ecosystem and what the vision is that ultimately, what's the outcome going to be of that open ecosystem? >> Yeah, I can start. So maybe just to give you the big picture, right? I mean the big picture, is disaggregation with performance, right, TCO models to the service providers, right? And it starts at the infrastructure layer, builds on bringing these cloud capabilities, the cast layer, right? Bringing the right accelerators. All of this requires to pull the ecosystem. So give you an example on the infrastructure in a Teleco grade servers like XR8000 with Sapphire, the new intel processors that we've just announced, and an extended array of servers. These are Teleco grade, short depth, et cetera. You know, the Teleco great characteristic. Working with the partners like Marvel for bringing in the accelerators in there, that's important to again, drive the performance and optimize for the TCO. Working then with partners like Wind River, Red Hat, et cetera, to bring in the cast capabilities so you can start to see how this ecosystem starts to build up. And then very recently we announced our private 5G solution with AirSpan and Expeto on the core site. So bringing those workloads together. Similarly, we have an open RAN solution we announce with Fujitsu. So it's, it's open, it's disaggregated, but bringing all these together. And one of the last things I would say is, you know, to make all this happen and make all of these, we've also been putting together our OTEL, our open Telecom ecosystem lab, which is very much geared, really gives this open ecosystem a playground where they can come in and do all that heavy lifting, which is anyways required, to do the integration, optimization, and board. So put all these capabilities in place, but the end goal, the end vision again, is that cloud native disaggregated infrastructure that starts to innovate at the speed of software and scales at the speed of cloud. >> And this is different than the nineties. You didn't have something like OTEL back then, you know, you didn't have the developer ecosystem that you have today because on top of everything that you just said, Manish, are new workloads and new applications that are going to be developed. Doug, anything you'd add to what Manish said? >> Doug: Yeah, I mean, as Manish said, I think adding to the infrastructure layers, which are, you know, critical for us to, to help integrate, right? Because we kind of took a vertical Teleco stack and we've disaggregated it, and it's gotten a little bit more complex. So our Solutions Dell Technology infrastructure block, and our lab infrastructure with OTEL, helps put those pieces together. But without the software players in this, you know, that's what we really do, I think in OTEL. And that's just starting to grow. So integrating with those software providers with that integration is something that the operators need. So we fill a gap there in terms of either providing engineered solutions so they can readily build on or actually bringing in that software provider. And I think that's what you're going to see more from us going forward is just extending that ecosystem even further. More software players effectively. >> In thinking about O-RAN, are they, is it possible to have the low latency, the high performance, the reliability capabilities that carriers are used to and the flexibility? Or can you sort of prioritize one over the other from a go to market and rollout standpoint and optimize one, maybe get a foothold in the market? How do you see that balance? >> Manish: Oh the answer is absolutely yes you can have both We are on that journey, we are on that journey. This is where all these things I was talking about in terms of the right kind of accelerators, right kind of capabilities on the infrastructure, obviously retargeting the software, there are certain changes, et cetera that need to be done on the software itself to make it more cloud native. And then building all the surrounding capabilities around the CICD pipeline and all where it's not just day zero or day one that you're doing the cloud-like lifecycle management of this infrastructure. But the answer to your point, yes, absolutely. It's possible, the technology is there, and the ecosystem is coming together, and that's the direction. Now, are there challenges? Absolutely there are challenges, but directionally that's the direction the industry is moving to. >> Dave V.: I guess my question, Manish, is do they have to go in lockstep? Because I would argue that the public cloud when it first came out wasn't nearly as functional as what I could get from my own data center in terms of recovery, you know, backup and recovery is a perfect example and it took, you know, a decade plus to get there. But it was the flexibility, and the openness, and the developer affinity, the programmability, that attracted people. Do you see O-RAN following a similar path? Or does it, my question is does it have to have that carrier class reliability today? >> David N.: Everything on day one, does it have to have everything on day one? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, like again, the Greenfield operators I think we're, we're willing do a little bit more experimentation. I think the operators, Brownfield operators that have existing, you know, deployments, they're going to want to be closer. But I think there's room for innovation here. And clearly, you know, Manish came from, from Meta and we're, we've been very involved with TIP, we're very involved with the O-RAN alliance, and as Manish mentioned, with all those accelerators that we're working with on our infrastructure, that is a space that we're trying to help move the ball forward. So I think you're seeing deployments from mainstream operators, but it's maybe not in, you know, downtown New York deployment, they're more rural deployments. I think that's getting at, you know, kind of your question is there's maybe a little bit more flexibility there, they get to experiment with the technology and the flexibility and then I think it will start to evolve >> Dave V.: And that's where the disruption's going to come from, I think. >> David N.: Well, where was the first place you could get reliable 4K streaming of video content? It wasn't ABC, CBS, NBC. It was YouTube. >> Right. >> So is it possible that when you say Greenfield, are a lot of those going to be what we refer to as private 5G networks where someone may set up a private 5G network that has more functions and capabilities than the public network? >> That's exactly where I was going is that, you know, that that's why you're seeing us getting very active in 5G solutions that Manish mentioned with, you know, Expeto and AirSpan. There's more of those that we haven't publicly announced. So I think you'll be seeing more announcements from us, but that is really, you know, a new opportunity. And there's spectrum there also, right? I mean, there's public and private spectrum. We plan to work directly with the operators and do it in their spectrum when needed. But we also have solutions that will do it, you know, on non-public spectrum. >> So let's close out, oh go ahead. You you have something to add there? >> I'm just going to add one more point to Doug's point, right? Is if you look on the private 5G and the end customer, it's the enterprise, right? And they're, they're not a service provider. They're not a carrier. They're more used to deploying, you know, enterprise infrastructure, maintaining, managing that. So, you know, private 5G, especially with this open ecosystem and with all the open run capabilities, it naturally tends to, you know, blend itself very well to meet those requirements that the enterprise would have. >> And people should not think of private 5G as a sort of a replacement for wifi, right? It's to to deal with those, you know, intense situations that can afford the additional cost, but absolutely require the reliability and the performance and, you know, never go down type of scenario. Is that right? >> Doug: And low latencies usually, the primary characteristics, you know, for things like Industry 4.0 manufacturing requirements, those are tough SLAs. They're just, they're different than the operator SLAs for coverage and, you know, cell performance. They're now, you know, Five9 type characteristics, but on a manufacturing floor. >> That's why we don't use wifi on theCUBE to broadcast, we need a hard line. >> Yeah, but why wouldn't it replace wifi over time? I mean, you know, I still have a home phone number that's hardwired to align, but it goes to a voicemail. We don't even have handset anymore for it, yeah. >> I think, well, unless the cost can come down, but I think that wifi is flexible, it's cheap. It's, it's kind of perfect for that. >> Manish: And it's good technology. >> Dave V.: And it works great. >> David N.: For now, for now. >> Dave V.: But you wouldn't want it in those situations, and you're arguing that maybe. >> I'm saying eventually, what, put a sim in a device, I don't know, you know, but why not? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, and Dell offers, you know, from our laptop, you know, our client side, we do offer wifi, we do offer 4G and 5G solutions. And I think those, you know, it's a volume and scale issue, I think for the cost structure you're talking about. >> Manish: Come to our booth and see the connected laptop. >> Dave V.: Well let's, let's close on that. Why don't you guys talk a little bit about what you're going on at the show, I did go by the booth, you got a whole big lineup of servers. You got some, you know, cool devices going on. So give us the rundown and you know, let's end with the takeaways here. >> The simple rundown, a broad range of new powered servers, broad range addressing core, edge, RAN, optimized for those with all the different kind of acceleration capabilities. You can see that, you can see infrastructure blocks. These are with Wind River, with Red Hat. You can see OTEL, the open telecom ecosystem lab where all that playground, the integration, the real work, the real sausage makings happening. And then you will see some interesting solutions in terms of co-creation that we are doing, right? So you, you will see all of that and not to forget the connected laptops. >> Dave V.: Yeah, yeah, cool. >> Doug: Yeah and, we mentioned it before, but just to add on, I think, you know, for private 5G, you know, we've announced a few offers here at the show with partners. So with Expeto and AirSpan in particular, and I think, you know, I just want to emphasize the partnerships that we're doing. You know, we're doing some, you know, fundamental integration on infrastructure, bare metal and different options for the operators to get engineered systems. But building on that ecosystem is really, the move to cloud native is where Dell is trying to get in front of. And we're offering solutions and a much larger ecosystem to go after it. >> Dave V.: Great. Manish and Doug, thanks for coming on the program. It was great to have you, awesome discussion. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We're seeing the disaggregation of the Teleco network into open ecosystems with integration from companies like Dell and others. Keep it right there for theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back. (upbeat tech music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While never really meant to be a consumer tech event, the rapid ascendancy of smartphones sucked much of the air out of Mobile World Congress over the years, now MWC. And while the device manufacturers continue to have a major presence at the show, the maturity of intelligent devices, longer life cycles, and the disaggregation of the network stack, have put enterprise technologies front and center in the telco business. Semiconductor manufacturers, network equipment players, infrastructure companies, cloud vendors, software providers, and a spate of startups are eyeing the trillion dollar plus communications industry as one of the next big things to watch this decade. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we bring you part two of our ongoing coverage of MWC '23, with some new data on enterprise players specifically in large telco environments, a brief glimpse at some of the pre-announcement news and corresponding themes ahead of MWC, and some of the key announcement areas we'll be watching at the show on theCUBE. Now, last week we shared some ETR data that showed how traditional enterprise tech players were performing, specifically within the telecoms vertical. Here's a new look at that data from ETR, which isolates the same companies, but cuts the data for what ETR calls large telco. The N in this cut is 196, down from 288 last week when we included all company sizes in the dataset. Now remember the two dimensions here, on the y-axis is net score, or spending momentum, and on the x-axis is pervasiveness in the data set. The table insert in the upper left informs how the dots and companies are plotted, and that red dotted line, the horizontal line at 40%, that indicates a highly elevated net score. Now while the data are not dramatically different in terms of relative positioning, there are a couple of changes at the margin. So just going down the list and focusing on net score. Azure is comparable, but slightly lower in this sector in the large telco than it was overall. Google Cloud comes in at number two, and basically swapped places with AWS, which drops slightly in the large telco relative to overall telco. Snowflake is also slightly down by one percentage point, but maintains its position. Remember Snowflake, overall, its net score is much, much higher when measuring across all verticals. Snowflake comes down in telco, and relative to overall, a little bit down in large telco, but it's making some moves to attack this market that we'll talk about in a moment. Next are Red Hat OpenStack and Databricks. About the same in large tech telco as they were an overall telco. Then there's Dell next that has a big presence at MWC and is getting serious about driving 16G adoption, and new servers, and edge servers, and other partnerships. Cisco and Red Hat OpenShift basically swapped spots when moving from all telco to large telco, as Cisco drops and Red Hat bumps up a bit. And VMware dropped about four percentage points in large telco. Accenture moved up dramatically, about nine percentage points in big telco, large telco relative to all telco. HPE dropped a couple of percentage points. Oracle stayed about the same. And IBM surprisingly dropped by about five points. So look, I understand not a ton of change in terms of spending momentum in the large sector versus telco overall, but some deltas. The bottom line for enterprise players is one, they're just getting started in this new disruption journey that they're on as the stack disaggregates. Two, all these players have experience in delivering horizontal solutions, but now working with partners and identifying big problems to be solved, and three, many of these companies are generally not the fastest moving firms relative to smaller disruptive disruptors. Now, cloud has been an exception in fairness. But the good news for the legacy infrastructure and IT companies is that the telco transformation and the 5G buildout is going to take years. So it's moving at a pace that is very favorable to many of these companies. Okay, so looking at just some of the pre-announcement highlights that have hit the wire this week, I want to give you a glimpse of the diversity of innovation that is occurring in the telecommunication space. You got semiconductor manufacturers, device makers, network equipment players, carriers, cloud vendors, enterprise tech companies, software companies, startups. Now we've included, you'll see in this list, we've included OpeRAN, that logo, because there's so much buzz around the topic and we're going to come back to that. But suffice it to say, there's no way we can cover all the announcements from the 2000 plus exhibitors at the show. So we're going to cherry pick here and make a few call outs. Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced an acquisition of an Italian private cellular network company called AthoNet. Zeus Kerravala wrote about it on SiliconANGLE if you want more details. Now interestingly, HPE has a partnership with Solana, which also does private 5G. But according to Zeus, Solona is more of an out-of-the-box solution, whereas AthoNet is designed for the core and requires more integration. And as you'll see in a moment, there's going to be a lot of talk at the show about private network. There's going to be a lot of news there from other competitors, and we're going to be watching that closely. And while many are concerned about the P5G, private 5G, encroaching on wifi, Kerravala doesn't see it that way. Rather, he feels that these private networks are really designed for more industrial, and you know mission critical environments, like factories, and warehouses that are run by robots, et cetera. 'Cause these can justify the increased expense of private networks. Whereas wifi remains a very low cost and flexible option for, you know, whatever offices and homes. Now, over to Dell. Dell announced its intent to go hard after opening up the telco network with the announcement that in the second half of this year it's going to begin shipping its infrastructure blocks for Red Hat. Remember it's like kind of the converged infrastructure for telco with a more open ecosystem and sort of more flexible, you know, more mature engineered system. Dell has also announced a range of PowerEdge servers for a variety of use cases. A big wide line bringing forth its 16G portfolio and aiming squarely at the telco space. Dell also announced, here we go, a private wireless offering with airspan, and Expedo, and a solution with AthoNet, the company HPE announced it was purchasing. So I guess Dell and HPE are now partnering up in the private wireless space, and yes, hell is freezing over folks. We'll see where that relationship goes in the mid- to long-term. Dell also announced new lab and certification capabilities, which we said last week was going to be critical for the further adoption of open ecosystem technology. So props to Dell for, you know, putting real emphasis and investment in that. AWS also made a number of announcements in this space including private wireless solutions and associated managed services. AWS named Deutsche Telekom, Orange, T-Mobile, Telefonica, and some others as partners. And AWS announced the stepped up partnership, specifically with T-Mobile, to bring AWS services to T-Mobile's network portfolio. Snowflake, back to Snowflake, announced its telecom data cloud. Remember we showed the data earlier, it's Snowflake not as strong in the telco sector, but they're continuing to move toward this go-to market alignment within key industries, realigning their go-to market by vertical. It also announced that AT&T, and a number of other partners, are collaborating to break down data silos specifically in telco. Look, essentially, this is Snowflake taking its core value prop to the telco vertical and forming key partnerships that resonate in the space. So think simplification, breaking down silos, data sharing, eventually data monetization. Samsung previewed its future capability to allow smartphones to access satellite services, something Apple has previously done. AMD, Intel, Marvell, Qualcomm, are all in the act, all the semiconductor players. Qualcomm for example, announced along with Telefonica, and Erickson, a 5G millimeter network that will be showcased in Spain at the event this coming week using Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset platform, based on none other than Arm technology. Of course, Arm we said is going to dominate the edge, and is is clearly doing so. It's got the volume advantage over, you know, traditional Intel, you know, X86 architectures. And it's no surprise that Microsoft is touting its open AI relationship. You're going to hear a lot of AI talk at this conference as is AI is now, you know, is the now topic. All right, we could go on and on and on. There's just so much going on at Mobile World Congress or MWC, that we just wanted to give you a glimpse of some of the highlights that we've been watching. Which brings us to the key topics and issues that we'll be exploring at MWC next week. We touched on some of this last week. A big topic of conversation will of course be, you know, 5G. Is it ever going to become real? Is it, is anybody ever going to make money at 5G? There's so much excitement around and anticipation around 5G. It has not lived up to the hype, but that's because the rollout, as we've previous reported, is going to take years. And part of that rollout is going to rely on the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, as we reported last week and in previous Breaking Analysis episodes. OpenRAN is a big component of that evolution. You know, as our RAN intelligent controllers, RICs, which essentially the brain of OpenRAN, if you will. Now as we build out 5G networks at massive scale and accommodate unprecedented volumes of data and apply compute-hungry AI to all this data, the issue of energy efficiency is going to be front and center. It has to be. Not only is it a, you know, hot political issue, the reality is that improving power efficiency is compulsory or the whole vision of telco's future is going to come crashing down. So chip manufacturers, equipment makers, cloud providers, everybody is going to be doubling down and clicking on this topic. Let's talk about AI. AI as we said, it is the hot topic right now, but it is happening not only in consumer, with things like ChatGPT. And think about the theme of this Breaking Analysis in the enterprise, AI in the enterprise cannot be ChatGPT. It cannot be error prone the way ChatGPT is. It has to be clean, reliable, governed, accurate. It's got to be ethical. It's got to be trusted. Okay, we're going to have Zeus Kerravala on the show next week and definitely want to get his take on private networks and how they're going to impact wifi. You know, will private networks cannibalize wifi? If not, why not? He wrote about this again on SiliconANGLE if you want more details, and we're going to unpack that on theCUBE this week. And finally, as always we'll be following the data flows to understand where and how telcos, cloud players, startups, software companies, disruptors, legacy companies, end customers, how are they going to make money from new data opportunities? 'Cause we often say in theCUBE, don't ever bet against data. All right, that's a wrap for today. Remember theCUBE is going to be on location at MWC 2023 next week. We got a great set. We're in the walkway in between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, stand CS-60. Look for us, we got a full schedule. If you got a great story or you have news, stop by. We're going to try to get you on the program. I'll be there with Lisa Martin, co-hosting, David Nicholson as well, and the entire CUBE crew, so don't forget to come by and see us. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, and Ken Schiffman, as well, in our Boston studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE.com. He does some great editing. Thank you. All right, remember all these episodes they are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. I publish each week on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. All the video content is available on demand at theCUBE.net, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Mobile World Congress '23, MWC '23, or next time on Breaking Analysis. (bright music)