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

(gentle music) >> Hey! Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of WiDS 2023, the eighth Annual Women In Data Science Conference. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are at Stanford University, as you know we are every year, having some wonderful conversations with some very inspiring women and men in data science and technical roles. I'm very pleased to introduce Tracy Zhang, my co-host, who is in the Data Journalism program at Stanford. And Tracy and I are pleased to welcome our next guest, Rhonda Crate, Principal Data Scientist at Boeing. Great to have you on the program, Rhonda. >> Tracy: Welcome. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Were you always interested in data science or STEM from the time you were young? >> No, actually. I was always interested in archeology and anthropology. >> That's right, we were talking about that, anthropology. Interesting. >> We saw the anthropology background, not even a bachelor's degree, but also a master's degree in anthropology. >> So you were committed for a while. >> I was, I was. I actually started college as a fine arts major, but I always wanted to be an archeologist. So at the last minute, 11 credits in, left to switch to anthropology. And then when I did my master's, I focused a little bit more on quantitative research methods and then I got my Stat Degree. >> Interesting. Talk about some of the data science projects that you're working on. When I think of Boeing, I always think of aircraft. But you are doing a lot of really cool things in IT, data analytics. Talk about some of those intriguing data science projects that you're working on. >> Yeah. So when I first started at Boeing, I worked in information technology and data analytics. And Boeing, at the time, had cored up data science in there. And so we worked as a function across the enterprise working on anything from shared services to user experience in IT products, to airplane programs. So, it has a wide range. I worked on environment health and safety projects for a long time as well. So looking at ergonomics and how people actually put parts onto airplanes, along with things like scheduling and production line, part failures, software testing. Yeah, there's a wide spectrum of things. >> But I think that's so fantastic. We've been talking, Tracy, today about just what we often see at WiDS, which is this breadth of diversity in people's background. You talked about anthropology, archeology, you're doing data science. But also all of the different opportunities that you've had at Boeing. To see so many facets of that organization. I always think that breadth of thought diversity can be hugely impactful. >> Yeah. So I will say my anthropology degree has actually worked to my benefit. I'm a huge proponent of integrating liberal arts and sciences together. And it actually helps me. I'm in the Technical Fellowship program at Boeing, so we have different career paths. So you can go into management, you can be a regular employee, or you can go into the Fellowship program. So right now I'm an Associate Technical Fellow. And part of how I got into the Fellowship program was that diversity in my background, what made me different, what made me stand out on projects. Even applying a human aspect to things like ergonomics, as silly as that sounds, but how does a person actually interact in the space along with, here are the actual measurements coming off of whatever system it is that you're working on. So, I think there's a lot of opportunities, especially in safety as well, which is a big initiative for Boeing right now, as you can imagine. >> Tracy: Yeah, definitely. >> I can't go into too specifics. >> No, 'cause we were like, I think a theme for today that kind of we brought up in in all of our talk is how data is about people, how data is about how people understand the world and how these data can make impact on people's lives. So yeah, I think it's great that you brought this up, and I'm very happy that your anthropology background can tap into that and help in your day-to-day data work too. >> Yeah. And currently, right now, I actually switched over to Strategic Workforce Planning. So it's more how we understand our workforce, how we work towards retaining the talent, how do we get the right talent in our space, and making sure overall that we offer a culture and work environment that is great for our employees to come to. >> That culture is so important. You know, I was looking at some anitab.org stats from 2022 and you know, we always talk about the number of women in technical roles. For a long time it's been hovering around that 25% range. The data from anitab.org showed from '22, it's now 27.6%. So, a little increase. But one of the biggest challenges still, and Tracy and I and our other co-host, Hannah, have been talking about this, is attrition. Attrition more than doubled last year. What are some of the things that Boeing is doing on the retention side, because that is so important especially as, you know, there's this pipeline leakage of women leaving technical roles. Tell us about what Boeing's, how they're invested. >> Yeah, sure. We actually have a publicly available Global Diversity Report that anybody can go and look at and see our statistics for our organization. Right now, off the top of my head, I think we're hovering at about 24% in the US for women in our company. It has been a male majority company for many years. We've invested heavily in increasing the number of women in roles. One interesting thing about this year that came out is that even though with the great resignation and those types of things, the attrition level between men and women were actually pretty close to being equal, which is like the first time in our history. Usually it tends on more women leaving. >> Lisa: That's a good sign. >> Right. >> Yes, that's a good sign. >> And we've actually focused on hiring and bringing in more women and diversity in our company. >> Yeah, some of the stats too from anitab.org talked about the increase, and I have to scroll back and find my notes, the increase in 51% more women being hired in 2022 than 2021 for technical roles. So the data, pun intended, is showing us. I mean, the data is there to show the impact that having females in executive leadership positions make from a revenue perspective. >> Tracy: Definitely. >> Companies are more profitable when there's women at the head, or at least in senior leadership roles. But we're seeing some positive trends, especially in terms of representation of women technologists. One of the things though that I found interesting, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, Rhonda, is that the representation of women technologists is growing in all areas, except interns. >> Rhonda: Hmm. >> So I think, we've got to go downstream. You teach, I have to go back to my notes on you, did my due diligence, R programming classes through Boeings Ed Wells program, this is for WSU College of Arts and Sciences, talk about what you teach and how do you think that intern kind of glut could be solved? >> Yeah. So, they're actually two separate programs. So I teach a data analytics course at Washington State University as an Adjunct Professor. And then the Ed Wells program is a SPEEA, which is an Aerospace Union, focused on bringing up more technology and skills to the actual workforce itself. So it's kind of a couple different audiences. One is more seasoned employees, right? The other one is our undergraduates. I teach a Capstone class, so it's a great way to introduce students to what it's actually like to work on an industry project. We partner with Google and Microsoft and Boeing on those. The idea is also that maybe those companies have openings for the students when they're done. Since it's Senior Capstone, there's not a lot of opportunities for internships. But the opportunities to actually get hired increase a little bit. In regards to Boeing, we've actually invested a lot in hiring more women interns. I think the number was 40%, but you'd have to double check. >> Lisa: That's great, that's fantastic. >> Tracy: That's way above average, I think. >> That's a good point. Yeah, it is above average. >> Double check on that. That's all from my memory. >> Is this your first WiDS, or have you been before? >> I did virtually last year. >> Okay. One of the things that I love, I love covering this event every year. theCUBE's been covering it since it's inception in 2015. But it's just the inspiration, the vibe here at Stanford is so positive. WiDS is a movement. It's not an initiative, an organization. There are going to be, I think annually this year, there will be 200 different events. Obviously today we're live on International Women's Day. 60 plus countries, 100,000 plus people involved. So, this is such a positive environment for women and men, because we need everybody, underrepresented minorities, to be able to understand the implication that data has across our lives. If we think about stripping away titles in industries, everybody is a consumer, not everybody, most of mobile devices. And we have this expectation, I was in Barcelona last week at a Mobile World Congress, we have this expectation that we're going to be connected 24/7. I can get whatever I want wherever I am in the world, and that's all data driven. And the average person that isn't involved in data science wouldn't understand that. At the same time, they have expectations that depend on organizations like Boeing being data driven so that they can get that experience that they expect in their consumer lives in any aspect of their lives. And that's one of the things I find so interesting and inspiring about data science. What are some of the things that keep you motivated to continue pursuing this? >> Yeah I will say along those lines, I think it's great to invest in K-12 programs for Data Literacy. I know one of my mentors and directors of the Data Analytics program, Dr. Nairanjana Dasgupta, we're really familiar with each other. So, she runs a WSU program for K-12 Data Literacy. It's also something that we strive for at Boeing, and we have an internal Data Literacy program because, believe it or not, most people are in business. And there's a lot of disconnect between interpreting and understanding data. For me, what kind of drives me to continue data science is that connection between people and data and how we use it to improve our world, which is partly why I work at Boeing too 'cause I feel that they produce products that people need like satellites and airplanes, >> Absolutely. >> and everything. >> Well, it's tangible, it's relatable. We can understand it. Can you do me a quick favor and define data literacy for anyone that might not understand what that means? >> Yeah, so it's just being able to understand elements of data, whether that's a bar chart or even in a sentence, like how to read a statistic and interpret a statistic in a sentence, for example. >> Very cool. >> Yeah. And sounds like Boeing's doing a great job in these programs, and also trying to hire more women. So yeah, I wanted to ask, do you think there's something that Boeing needs to work on? Or where do you see yourself working on say the next five years? >> Yeah, I think as a company, we always think that there's always room for improvement. >> It never, never stops. >> Tracy: Definitely. (laughs) >> I know workforce strategy is an area that they're currently really heavily investing in, along with safety. How do we build safer products for people? How do we help inform the public about things like Covid transmission in airports? For example, we had the Confident Traveler Initiative which was a big push that we had, and we had to be able to inform people about data models around Covid, right? So yeah, I would say our future is more about an investment in our people and in our culture from my perspective >> That's so important. One of the hardest things to change especially for a legacy organization like Boeing, is culture. You know, when I talk with CEO's or CIO's or COO's about what's your company's vision, what's your strategy? Especially those companies that are on that digital journey that have no choice these days. Everybody expects to have a digital experience, whether you're transacting an an Uber ride, you're buying groceries, or you're traveling by air. That culture sounds like Boeing is really focused on that. And that's impressive because that's one of the hardest things to morph and mold, but it's so essential. You know, as we look around the room here at WiDS it's obviously mostly females, but we're talking about women, underrepresented minorities. We're talking about men as well who are mentors and sponsors to us. I'd love to get your advice to your younger self. What would you tell yourself in terms of where you are now to become a leader in the technology field? >> Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an interesting question because I always try to think, live with no regrets to an extent. >> Lisa: I like that. >> But, there's lots of failures along the way. (Tracy laughing) I don't know if I would tell myself anything different because honestly, if I did, I wouldn't be where I am. >> Lisa: Good for you. >> I started out in fine arts, and I didn't end up there. >> That's good. >> Such a good point, yeah. >> We've been talking about that and I find that a lot at events like WiDS, is women have these zigzaggy patterns. I studied biology, I have a master's in molecular biology, I'm in media and marketing. We talked about transportable skills. There's a case I made many years ago when I got into tech about, well in science you learn the art of interpreting esoteric data and creating a story from it. And that's a transportable skill. But I always say, you mentioned failure, I always say failure is not a bad F word. It allows us to kind of zig and zag and learn along the way. And I think that really fosters thought diversity. And in data science, that is one of the things we absolutely need to have is that diversity and thought. You know, we talk about AI models being biased, we need the data and we need the diverse brains to help ensure that the biases are identified, extracted, and removed. Speaking of AI, I've been geeking out with ChatGPT. So, I'm on it yesterday and I ask it, "What's hot in data science?" And I was like, is it going to get that? What's hot? And it did it, it came back with trends. I think if I ask anything, "What's hot?", I should be to Paris Hilton, but I didn't. And so I was geeking out. One of the things I learned recently that I thought was so super cool is the CTO of OpenAI is a woman, Mira Murati, which I didn't know until over the weekend. Because I always think if I had to name top females in tech, who would they be? And I always default to Sheryl Sandberg, Carly Fiorina, Susan Wojcicki running YouTube. Who are some of the people in your history, in your current, that are really inspiring to you? Men, women, indifferent. >> Sure. I think Boeing is one of the companies where you actually do see a lot of women in leadership roles. I think we're one of the top companies with a number of women executives, actually. Susan Doniz, who's our Chief Information Officer, I believe she's actually slotted to speak at a WiDS event come fall. >> Lisa: Cool. >> So that will be exciting. Susan's actually relatively newer to Boeing in some ways. A Boeing time skill is like three years is still kind of new. (laughs) But she's been around for a while and she's done a lot of inspiring things, I think, for women in the organization. She does a lot with Latino communities and things like that as well. For me personally, you know, when I started at Boeing Ahmad Yaghoobi was one of my mentors and my Technical Lead. He came from Iran during a lot of hard times in the 1980s. His brother actually wrote a memoir, (laughs) which is just a fun, interesting fact. >> Tracy: Oh my God! >> Lisa: Wow! >> And so, I kind of gravitate to people that I can learn from that's not in my sphere, that might make me uncomfortable. >> And you probably don't even think about how many people you're influencing along the way. >> No. >> We just keep going and learning from our mentors and probably lose sight of, "I wonder how many people actually admire me?" And I'm sure there are many that admire you, Rhonda, for what you've done, going from anthropology to archeology. You mentioned before we went live you were really interested in photography. Keep going and really gathering all that breadth 'cause it's only making you more inspiring to people like us. >> Exactly. >> We thank you so much for joining us on the program and sharing a little bit about you and what brought you to WiDS. Thank you so much, Rhonda. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Tracy: Thank you so much for being here. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Alright. >> For our guests, and for Tracy Zhang, this is Lisa Martin live at Stanford University covering the eighth Annual Women In Data Science Conference. Stick around. Next guest will be here in just a second. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got a great remote guest coming in. Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow hot startup in AI, computer vision. Really interesting topic in this wave of AI next gen hitting. Joseph, thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, I love the startup tsunami that's happening here in this wave. RoboFlow, you're in the middle of it. Exciting opportunities, you guys are in the cutting edge. I think computer vision's been talked about more as just as much as the large language models and these foundational models are merging. You're in the middle of it. What's it like right now as a startup and growing in this new wave hitting? >> It's kind of funny, it's, you know, I kind of describe it like sometimes you're in a garden of gnomes. It's like we feel like we've got this giant headstart with hundreds of thousands of people building with computer vision, training their own models, but that's a fraction of what it's going to be in six months, 12 months, 24 months. So, as you described it, a wave is a good way to think about it. And the wave is still building before it gets to its full size. So it's a ton of fun. >> Yeah, I think it's one of the most exciting areas in computer science. I wish I was in my twenties again, because I would be all over this. It's the intersection, there's so many disciplines, right? It's not just tech computer science, it's computer science, it's systems, it's software, it's data. There's so much aperture of things going on around your world. So, I mean, you got to be batting all the students away kind of trying to get hired in there, probably. I can only imagine you're hiring regiment. I'll ask that later, but first talk about what the company is that you're doing. How it's positioned, what's the market you're going after, and what's the origination story? How did you guys get here? How did you just say, hey, want to do this? What was the origination story? What do you do and how did you start the company? >> Yeah, yeah. I'll give you the what we do today and then I'll shift into the origin. RoboFlow builds tools for making the world programmable. Like anything that you see should be read write access if you think about it with a programmer's mind or legible. And computer vision is a technology that enables software to be added to these real world objects that we see. And so any sort of interface, any sort of object, any sort of scene, we can interact with it, we can make it more efficient, we can make it more entertaining by adding the ability for the tools that we use and the software that we write to understand those objects. And at RoboFlow, we've empowered a little over a hundred thousand developers, including those in half the Fortune 100 so far in that mission. Whether that's Walmart understanding the retail in their stores, Cardinal Health understanding the ways that they're helping their patients, or even electric vehicle manufacturers ensuring that they're making the right stuff at the right time. As you mentioned, it's early. Like I think maybe computer vision has touched one, maybe 2% of the whole economy and it'll be like everything in a very short period of time. And so we're focused on enabling that transformation. I think it's it, as far as I think about it, I've been fortunate to start companies before, start, sell these sorts of things. This is the last company I ever wanted to start and I think it will be, should we do it right, the world's largest in riding the wave of bringing together the disparate pieces of that technology. >> What was the motivating point of the formation? Was it, you know, you guys were hanging around? Was there some catalyst? What was the moment where it all kind of came together for you? >> You know what's funny is my co-founder, Brad and I, we were making computer vision apps for making board games more fun to play. So in 2017, Apple released AR kit, augmented reality kit for building augmented reality applications. And Brad and I are both sort of like hacker persona types. We feel like we don't really understand the technology until we build something with it and so we decided that we should make an app that if you point your phone at a Sudoku puzzle, it understands the state of the board and then it kind of magically fills in that experience with all the digits in real time, which totally ruins the game of Sudoku to be clear. But it also just creates this like aha moment of like, oh wow, like the ability for our pocket devices to understand and see the world as good or better than we can is possible. And so, you know, we actually did that as I mentioned in 2017, and the app went viral. It was, you know, top of some subreddits, top of Injure, Reddit, the hacker community as well as Product Hunt really liked it. So it actually won Product Hunt AR app of the year, which was the same year that the Tesla model three won the product of the year. So we joked that we share an award with Elon our shared (indistinct) But frankly, so that was 2017. RoboFlow wasn't incorporated as a business until 2019. And so, you know, when we made Magic Sudoku, I was running a different company at the time, Brad was running a different company at the time, and we kind of just put it out there and were excited by how many people liked it. And we assumed that other curious developers would see this inevitable future of, oh wow, you know. This is much more than just a pedestrian point your phone at a board game. This is everything can be seen and understood and rewritten in a different way. Things like, you know, maybe your fridge. Knowing what ingredients you have and suggesting recipes or auto ordering for you, or we were talking about some retail use cases of automated checkout. Like anything can be seen and observed and we presume that that would kick off a Cambrian explosion of applications. It didn't. So you fast forward to 2019, we said, well we might as well be the guys to start to tackle this sort of problem. And because of our success with board games before, we returned to making more board game solving applications. So we made one that solves Boggle, you know, the four by four word game, we made one that solves chess, you point your phone at a chess board and it understands the state of the board and then can make move recommendations. And each additional board game that we added, we realized that the tooling was really immature. The process of collecting images, knowing which images are actually going to be useful for improving model performance, training those models, deploying those models. And if we really wanted to make the world programmable, developers waiting for us to make an app for their thing of interest is a lot less efficient, less impactful than taking our tool chain and releasing that externally. And so, that's what RoboFlow became. RoboFlow became the internal tools that we used to make these game changing applications readily available. And as you know, when you give developers new tools, they create new billion dollar industries, let alone all sorts of fun hobbyist projects along the way. >> I love that story. Curious, inventive, little radical. Let's break the rules, see how we can push the envelope on the board games. That's how companies get started. It's a great story. I got to ask you, okay, what happens next? Now, okay, you realize this new tooling, but this is like how companies get built. Like they solve their own problem that they had 'cause they realized there's one, but then there has to be a market for it. So you actually guys knew that this was coming around the corner. So okay, you got your hacker mentality, you did that thing, you got the award and now you're like, okay, wow. Were you guys conscious of the wave coming? Was it one of those things where you said, look, if we do this, we solve our own problem, this will be big for everybody. Did you have that moment? Was that in 2019 or was that more of like, it kind of was obvious to you guys? >> Absolutely. I mean Brad puts this pretty effectively where he describes how we lived through the initial internet revolution, but we were kind of too young to really recognize and comprehend what was happening at the time. And then mobile happened and we were working on different companies that were not in the mobile space. And computer vision feels like the wave that we've caught. Like, this is a technology and capability that rewrites how we interact with the world, how everyone will interact with the world. And so we feel we've been kind of lucky this time, right place, right time of every enterprise will have the ability to improve their operations with computer vision. And so we've been very cognizant of the fact that computer vision is one of those groundbreaking technologies that every company will have as a part of their products and services and offerings, and we can provide the tooling to accelerate that future. >> Yeah, and the developer angle, by the way, I love that because I think, you know, as we've been saying in theCUBE all the time, developer's the new defacto standard bodies because what they adopt is pure, you know, meritocracy. And they pick the best. If it's sell service and it's good and it's got open source community around it, its all in. And they'll vote. They'll vote with their code and that is clear. Now I got to ask you, as you look at the market, we were just having this conversation on theCUBE in Barcelona at recent Mobile World Congress, now called MWC, around 5G versus wifi. And the debate was specifically computer vision, like facial recognition. We were talking about how the Cleveland Browns were using facial recognition for people coming into the stadium they were using it for ships in international ports. So the question was 5G versus wifi. My question is what infrastructure or what are the areas that need to be in place to make computer vision work? If you have developers building apps, apps got to run on stuff. So how do you sort that out in your mind? What's your reaction to that? >> A lot of the times when we see applications that need to run in real time and on video, they'll actually run at the edge without internet. And so a lot of our users will actually take their models and run it in a fully offline environment. Now to act on that information, you'll often need to have internet signal at some point 'cause you'll need to know how many people were in the stadium or what shipping crates are in my port at this point in time. You'll need to relay that information somewhere else, which will require connectivity. But actually using the model and creating the insights at the edge does not require internet. I mean we have users that deploy models on underwater submarines just as much as in outer space actually. And those are not very friendly environments to internet, let alone 5g. And so what you do is you use an edge device, like an Nvidia Jetson is common, mobile devices are common. Intel has some strong edge devices, the Movidius family of chips for example. And you use that compute that runs completely offline in real time to process those signals. Now again, what you do with those signals may require connectivity and that becomes a question of the problem you're solving of how soon you need to relay that information to another place. >> So, that's an architectural issue on the infrastructure. If you're a tactical edge war fighter for instance, you might want to have highly available and maybe high availability. I mean, these are words that mean something. You got storage, but it's not at the edge in real time. But you can trickle it back and pull it down. That's management. So that's more of a business by business decision or environment, right? >> That's right, that's right. Yeah. So I mean we can talk through some specifics. So for example, the RoboFlow actually powers the broadcaster that does the tennis ball tracking at Wimbledon. That runs completely at the edge in real time in, you know, technically to track the tennis ball and point the camera, you actually don't need internet. Now they do have internet of course to do the broadcasting and relay the signal and feeds and these sorts of things. And so that's a case where you have both edge deployment of running the model and high availability act on that model. We have other instances where customers will run their models on drones and the drone will go and do a flight and it'll say, you know, this many residential homes are in this given area, or this many cargo containers are in this given shipping yard. Or maybe we saw these environmental considerations of soil erosion along this riverbank. The model in that case can run on the drone during flight without internet, but then you only need internet once the drone lands and you're going to act on that information because for example, if you're doing like a study of soil erosion, you don't need to be real time. You just need to be able to process and make use of that information once the drone finishes its flight. >> Well I can imagine a zillion use cases. I heard of a use case interview at a company that does computer vision to help people see if anyone's jumping the fence on their company. Like, they know what a body looks like climbing a fence and they can spot it. Pretty easy use case compared to probably some of the other things, but this is the horizontal use cases, its so many use cases. So how do you guys talk to the marketplace when you say, hey, we have generative AI for commuter vision. You might know language models that's completely different animal because vision's like the world, right? So you got a lot more to do. What's the difference? How do you explain that to customers? What can I build and what's their reaction? >> Because we're such a developer centric company, developers are usually creative and show you the ways that they want to take advantage of new technologies. I mean, we've had people use things for identifying conveyor belt debris, doing gas leak detection, measuring the size of fish, airplane maintenance. We even had someone that like a hobby use case where they did like a specific sushi identifier. I dunno if you know this, but there's a specific type of whitefish that if you grew up in the western hemisphere and you eat it in the eastern hemisphere, you get very sick. And so there was someone that made an app that tells you if you happen to have that fish in the sushi that you're eating. But security camera analysis, transportation flows, plant disease detection, really, you know, smarter cities. We have people that are doing curb management identifying, and a lot of these use cases, the fantastic thing about building tools for developers is they're a creative bunch and they have these ideas that if you and I sat down for 15 minutes and said, let's guess every way computer vision can be used, we would need weeks to list all the example use cases. >> We'd miss everything. >> And we'd miss. And so having the community show us the ways that they're using computer vision is impactful. Now that said, there are of course commercial industries that have discovered the value and been able to be out of the gate. And that's where we have the Fortune 100 customers, like we do. Like the retail customers in the Walmart sector, healthcare providers like Medtronic, or vehicle manufacturers like Rivian who all have very difficult either supply chain, quality assurance, in stock, out of stock, anti-theft protection considerations that require successfully making sense of the real world. >> Let me ask you a question. This is maybe a little bit in the weeds, but it's more developer focused. What are some of the developer profiles that you're seeing right now in terms of low-hanging fruit applications? And can you talk about the academic impact? Because I imagine if I was in school right now, I'd be all over it. Are you seeing Master's thesis' being worked on with some of your stuff? Is the uptake in both areas of younger pre-graduates? And then inside the workforce, What are some of the devs like? Can you share just either what their makeup is, what they work on, give a little insight into the devs you're working with. >> Leading developers that want to be on state-of-the-art technology build with RoboFlow because they know they can use the best in class open source. They know that they can get the most out of their data. They know that they can deploy extremely quickly. That's true among students as you mentioned, just as much as as industries. So we welcome students and I mean, we have research grants that will regularly support for people to publish. I mean we actually have a channel inside our internal slack where every day, more student publications that cite building with RoboFlow pop up. And so, that helps inspire some of the use cases. Now what's interesting is that the use case is relatively, you know, useful or applicable for the business or the student. In other words, if a student does a thesis on how to do, we'll say like shingle damage detection from satellite imagery and they're just doing that as a master's thesis, in fact most insurance businesses would be interested in that sort of application. So, that's kind of how we see uptick and adoption both among researchers who want to be on the cutting edge and publish, both with RoboFlow and making use of open source tools in tandem with the tool that we provide, just as much as industry. And you know, I'm a big believer in the philosophy that kind of like what the hackers are doing nights and weekends, the Fortune 500 are doing in a pretty short order period of time and we're experiencing that transition. Computer vision used to be, you know, kind of like a PhD, multi-year investment endeavor. And now with some of the tooling that we're working on in open source technologies and the compute that's available, these science fiction ideas are possible in an afternoon. And so you have this idea of maybe doing asset management or the aerial observation of your shingles or things like this. You have a few hundred images and you can de-risk whether that's possible for your business today. So there's pretty broad-based adoption among both researchers that want to be on the state of the art, as much as companies that want to reduce the time to value. >> You know, Joseph, you guys and your partner have got a great front row seat, ground floor, presented creation wave here. I'm seeing a pattern emerging from all my conversations on theCUBE with founders that are successful, like yourselves, that there's two kind of real things going on. You got the enterprises grabbing the products and retrofitting into their legacy and rebuilding their business. And then you have startups coming out of the woodwork. Young, seeing greenfield or pick a specific niche or focus and making that the signature lever to move the market. >> That's right. >> So can you share your thoughts on the startup scene, other founders out there and talk about that? And then I have a couple questions for like the enterprises, the old school, the existing legacy. Little slower, but the startups are moving fast. What are some of the things you're seeing as startups are emerging in this field? >> I think you make a great point that independent of RoboFlow, very successful, especially developer focused businesses, kind of have three customer types. You have the startups and maybe like series A, series B startups that you're building a product as fast as you can to keep up with them, and they're really moving just as fast as as you are and pulling the product out at you for things that they need. The second segment that you have might be, call it SMB but not enterprise, who are able to purchase and aren't, you know, as fast of moving, but are stable and getting value and able to get to production. And then the third type is enterprise, and that's where you have typically larger contract value sizes, slower moving in terms of adoption and feedback for your product. And I think what you see is that successful companies balance having those three customer personas because you have the small startups, small fast moving upstarts that are discerning buyers who know the market and elect to build on tooling that is best in class. And so you basically kind of pass the smell test of companies who are quite discerning in their purchases, plus are moving so quick they're pulling their product out of you. Concurrently, you have a product that's enterprise ready to service the scalability, availability, and trust of enterprise buyers. And that's ultimately where a lot of companies will see tremendous commercial success. I mean I remember seeing the Twilio IPO, Uber being like a full 20% of their revenue, right? And so there's this very common pattern where you have the ability to find some of those upstarts that you make bets on, like the next Ubers of the world, the smaller companies that continue to get developed with the product and then the enterprise whom allows you to really fund the commercial success of the business, and validate the size of the opportunity in market that's being creative. >> It's interesting, there's so many things happening there. It's like, in a way it's a new category, but it's not a new category. It becomes a new category because of the capabilities, right? So, it's really interesting, 'cause that's what you're talking about is a category, creating. >> I think developer tools. So people often talk about B to B and B to C businesses. I think developer tools are in some ways a third way. I mean ultimately they're B to B, you're selling to other businesses and that's where your revenue's coming from. However, you look kind of like a B to C company in the ways that you measure product adoption and kind of go to market. In other words, you know, we're often tracking the leading indicators of commercial success in the form of usage, adoption, retention. Really consumer app, traditionally based metrics of how to know you're building the right stuff, and that's what product led growth companies do. And then you ultimately have commercial traction in a B to B way. And I think that that actually kind of looks like a third thing, right? Like you can do these sort of funny zany marketing examples that you might see historically from consumer businesses, but yet you ultimately make your money from the enterprise who has these de-risked high value problems you can solve for them. And I selfishly think that that's the best of both worlds because I don't have to be like Evan Spiegel, guessing the next consumer trend or maybe creating the next consumer trend and catching lightning in a bottle over and over again on the consumer side. But I still get to have fun in our marketing and make sort of fun, like we're launching the world's largest game of rock paper scissors being played with computer vision, right? Like that's sort of like a fun thing you can do, but then you can concurrently have the commercial validation and customers telling you the things that they need to be built for them next to solve commercial pain points for them. So I really do think that you're right by calling this a new category and it really is the best of both worlds. >> It's a great call out, it's a great call out. In fact, I always juggle with the VC. I'm like, it's so easy. Your job is so easy to pick the winners. What are you talking about its so easy? I go, just watch what the developers jump on. And it's not about who started, it could be someone in the dorm room to the boardroom person. You don't know because that B to C, the C, it's B to D you know? You know it's developer 'cause that's a human right? That's a consumer of the tool which influences the business that never was there before. So I think this direct business model evolution, whether it's media going direct or going direct to the developers rather than going to a gatekeeper, this is the reality. >> That's right. >> Well I got to ask you while we got some time left to describe, I want to get into this topic of multi-modality, okay? And can you describe what that means in computer vision? And what's the state of the growth of that portion of this piece? >> Multi modality refers to using multiple traditionally siloed problem types, meaning text, image, video, audio. So you could treat an audio problem as only processing audio signal. That is not multimodal, but you could use the audio signal at the same time as a video feed. Now you're talking about multi modality. In computer vision, multi modality is predominantly happening with images and text. And one of the biggest releases in this space is actually two years old now, was clip, contrastive language image pre-training, which took 400 million image text pairs and basically instead of previously when you do classification, you basically map every single image to a single class, right? Like here's a bunch of images of chairs, here's a bunch of images of dogs. What clip did is used, you can think about it like, the class for an image being the Instagram caption for the image. So it's not one single thing. And by training on understanding the corpora, you basically see which words, which concepts are associated with which pixels. And this opens up the aperture for the types of problems and generalizability of models. So what does this mean? This means that you can get to value more quickly from an existing trained model, or at least validate that what you want to tackle with a computer vision, you can get there more quickly. It also opens up the, I mean. Clip has been the bedrock of some of the generative image techniques that have come to bear, just as much as some of the LLMs. And increasingly we're going to see more and more of multi modality being a theme simply because at its core, you're including more context into what you're trying to understand about the world. I mean, in its most basic sense, you could ask yourself, if I have an image, can I know more about that image with just the pixels? Or if I have the image and the sound of when that image was captured or it had someone describe what they see in that image when the image was captured, which one's going to be able to get you more signal? And so multi modality helps expand the ability for us to understand signal processing. >> Awesome. And can you just real quick, define clip for the folks that don't know what that means? >> Yeah. Clip is a model architecture, it's an acronym for contrastive language image pre-training and like, you know, model architectures that have come before it captures the almost like, models are kind of like brands. So I guess it's a brand of a model where you've done these 400 million image text pairs to match up which visual concepts are associated with which text concepts. And there have been new releases of clip, just at bigger sizes of bigger encoding's, of longer strings of texture, or larger image windows. But it's been a really exciting advancement that OpenAI released in January, 2021. >> All right, well great stuff. We got a couple minutes left. Just I want to get into more of a company-specific question around culture. All startups have, you know, some sort of cultural vibe. You know, Intel has Moore's law doubles every whatever, six months. What's your culture like at RoboFlow? I mean, if you had to describe that culture, obviously love the hacking story, you and your partner with the games going number one on Product Hunt next to Elon and Tesla and then hey, we should start a company two years later. That's kind of like a curious, inventing, building, hard charging, but laid back. That's my take. How would you describe the culture? >> I think that you're right. The culture that we have is one of shipping, making things. So every week each team shares what they did for our customers on a weekly basis. And we have such a strong emphasis on being better week over week that those sorts of things compound. So one big emphasis in our culture is getting things done, shipping, doing things for our customers. The second is we're an incredibly transparent place to work. For example, how we think about giving decisions, where we're progressing against our goals, what problems are biggest and most important for the company is all open information for those that are inside the company to know and progress against. The third thing that I'd use to describe our culture is one that thrives with autonomy. So RoboFlow has a number of individuals who have founded companies before, some of which have sold their businesses for a hundred million plus upon exit. And the way that we've been able to attract talent like that is because the problems that we're tackling are so immense, yet individuals are able to charge at it with the way that they think is best. And this is what pairs well with transparency. If you have a strong sense of what the company's goals are, how we're progressing against it, and you have this ownership mentality of what can I do to change or drive progress against that given outcome, then you create a really healthy pairing of, okay cool, here's where the company's progressing. Here's where things are going really well, here's the places that we most need to improve and work on. And if you're inside that company as someone who has a preponderance to be a self-starter and even a history of building entire functions or companies yourself, then you're going to be a place where you can really thrive. You have the inputs of the things where we need to work on to progress the company's goals. And you have the background of someone that is just necessarily a fast moving and ambitious type of individual. So I think the best way to describe it is a transparent place with autonomy and an emphasis on getting things done. >> Getting shit done as they say. Getting stuff done. Great stuff. Hey, final question. Put a plug out there for the company. What are you going to hire? What's your pipeline look like for people? What jobs are open? I'm sure you got hiring all around. Give a quick plug for the company what you're looking for. >> I appreciate you asking. Basically you're either building the product or helping customers be successful with the product. So in the building product category, we have platform engineering roles, machine learning engineering roles, and we're solving some of the hardest and most impactful problems of bringing such a groundbreaking technology to the masses. And so it's a great place to be where you can kind of be your own user as an engineer. And then if you're enabling people to be successful with the products, I mean you're working in a place where there's already such a strong community around it and you can help shape, foster, cultivate, activate, and drive commercial success in that community. So those are roles that tend themselves to being those that build the product for developer advocacy, those that are account executives that are enabling our customers to realize commercial success, and even hybrid roles like we call it field engineering, where you are a technical resource to drive success within customer accounts. And so all this is listed on roboflow.com/careers. And one thing that I actually kind of want to mention John that's kind of novel about the thing that's working at RoboFlow. So there's been a lot of discussion around remote companies and there's been a lot of discussion around in-person companies and do you need to be in the office? And one thing that we've kind of recognized is you can actually chart a third way. You can create a third way which we call satellite, which basically means people can work from where they most like to work and there's clusters of people, regular onsite's. And at RoboFlow everyone gets, for example, $2,500 a year that they can use to spend on visiting coworkers. And so what's sort of organically happened is team numbers have started to pull together these resources and rent out like, lavish Airbnbs for like a week and then everyone kind of like descends in and works together for a week and makes and creates things. And we call this lighthouses because you know, a lighthouse kind of brings ships into harbor and we have an emphasis on shipping. >> Yeah, quality people that are creative and doers and builders. You give 'em some cash and let the self-governing begin, you know? And like, creativity goes through the roof. It's a great story. I think that sums up the culture right there, Joseph. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for this great conversation. I really appreciate it and it's very inspiring. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, John. >> Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow. Hot company, great culture in the right place in a hot area, computer vision. This is going to explode in value. The edge is exploding. More use cases, more development, and developers are driving the change. Check out RoboFlow. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle 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)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The pandemic has changed the way we think about and predict the future. As we enter the third year of a global pandemic, we see the significant impact that it's had on technology strategy, spending patterns, and company fortunes Much has changed. And while many of these changes were forced reactions to a new abnormal, the trends that we've seen over the past 24 months have become more entrenched, and point to the way that's coming ahead in the technology business. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we welcome our partner and colleague and business friend, Erik Porter Bradley, as we deliver what's becoming an annual tradition for Erik and me, our predictions for Enterprise Technology in 2022 and beyond Erik, welcome. Thanks for taking some time out. >> Thank you, Dave. Luckily we did pretty well last year, so we were able to do this again. So hopefully we can keep that momentum going. >> Yeah, you know, I want to mention that, you know, we get a lot of inbound predictions from companies and PR firms that help shape our thinking. But one of the main objectives that we have is we try to make predictions that can be measured. That's why we use a lot of data. Now not all will necessarily fit that parameter, but if you've seen the grading of our 2021 predictions that Erik and I did, you'll see we do a pretty good job of trying to put forth prognostications that can be declared correct or not, you know, as black and white as possible. Now let's get right into it. Our first prediction, we're going to go run into spending, something that ETR surveys for quarterly. And we've reported extensively on this. We're calling for tech spending to increase somewhere around 8% in 2022, we can see there on the slide, Erik, we predicted spending last year would increase by 4% IDC. Last check was came in at five and a half percent. Gardner was somewhat higher, but in general, you know, not too bad, but looking ahead, we're seeing an acceleration from the ETR September surveys, as you can see in the yellow versus the blue bar in this chart, many of the SMBs that were hard hit by the pandemic are picking up spending again. And the ETR data is showing acceleration above the mean for industries like energy, utilities, retail, and services, and also, notably, in the Forbes largest 225 private companies. These are companies like Mars or Koch industries. They're predicting well above average spending for 2022. So Erik, please weigh in here. >> Yeah, a lot to bring up on this one, I'm going to be quick. So 1200 respondents on this, over a third of which were at the C-suite level. So really good data that we brought in, the usual bucket of, you know, fortune 500, global 2000 make up the meat of that median, but it's 8.3% and rising with momentum as we see. What's really interesting right now is that energy and utilities. This is usually like, you know, an orphan stock dividend type of play. You don't see them at the highest point of tech spending. And the reason why right now is really because this state of tech infrastructure in our energy infrastructure needs help. And it's obvious, remember the Florida municipality break reach last year? When they took over the water systems or they had the ability to? And this is a real issue, you know, there's bad nation state actors out there, and I'm no alarmist, but the energy and utility has to spend this money to keep up. It's really important. And then you also hit on the retail consumer. Obviously what's happened, the work from home shift created a shop from home shift, and the trends that are happening right now in retail. If you don't spend and keep up, you're not going to be around much longer. So I think the really two interesting things here to call out are energy utilities, usually a laggard in IT spend and it's leading, and also retail consumer, a lot of changes happening. >> Yeah. Great stuff. I mean, I recall when we entered the pandemic, really ETR was the first to emphasize the impact that work from home was going to have, so I really put a lot of weight on this data. Okay. Our next prediction is we're going to get into security, it's one of our favorite topics. And that is that the number one priority that needs to be addressed by organizations in 2022 is security and you can see, in this slide, the degree to which security is top of mind, relative to some other pretty important areas like cloud, productivity, data, and automation, and some others. Now people may say, "Oh, this is obvious." But I'm going to add some context here, Erik, and then bring you in. First, organizations, they don't have unlimited budgets. And there are a lot of competing priorities for dollars, especially with the digital transformation mandate. And depending on the size of the company, this data will vary. For example, while security is still number one at the largest public companies, and those are of course of the biggest spenders, it's not nearly as pronounced as it is on average, or in, for example, mid-sized companies and government agencies. And this is because midsized companies or smaller companies, they don't have the resources that larger companies do. Larger companies have done a better job of securing their infrastructure. So these mid-size firms are playing catch up and the data suggests cyber is even a bigger priority there, gaps that they have to fill, you know, going forward. And that's why we think there's going to be more demand for MSSPs, managed security service providers. And we may even see some IPO action there. And then of course, Erik, you and I have talked about events like the SolarWinds Hack, there's more ransomware attacks, other vulnerabilities. Just recently, like Log4j in December. All of this has heightened concerns. Now I want to talk a little bit more about how we measure this, you know, relatively, okay, it's an obvious prediction, but let's stick our necks out a little bit. And so in addition to the rise of managed security services, we're calling for M&A and/or IPOs, we've specified some names here on this chart, and we're also pointing to the digital supply chain as an area of emphasis. Again, Log4j really shone that under a light. And this is going to help the likes of Auth0, which is now Okta, SailPoint, which is called out on this chart, and some others. We're calling some winners in end point security. Erik, you're going to talk about sort of that lifecycle, that transformation that we're seeing, that migration to new endpoint technologies that are going to benefit from this reset refresh cycle. So Erik, weigh in here, let's talk about some of the elements of this prediction and some of the names on that chart. >> Yeah, certainly. I'm going to start right with Log4j top of mind. And the reason why is because we're seeing a real paradigm shift here where things are no longer being attacked at the network layer, they're being attacked at the application layer, and in the application stack itself. And that is a huge shift left. And that's taking in DevSecOps now as a real priority in 2022. That's a real paradigm shift over the last 20 years. That's not where attacks used to come from. And this is going to have a lot of changes. You called out a bunch of names in there that are, they're either going to work. I would add to that list Wiz. I would add Orca Security. Two names in our emerging technology study, in addition to the ones you added that are involved in cloud security and container security. These names are either going to get gobbled up. So the traditional legacy names are going to have to start writing checks and, you know, legacy is not fair, but they're in the data center, right? They're, on-prem, they're not cloud native. So these are the names that money is going to be flowing to. So they're either going to get gobbled up, or we're going to see some IPO's. And on the other thing I want to talk about too, is what you mentioned. We have CrowdStrike on that list, We have SentinalOne on the list. Everyone knows them. Our data was so strong on Tanium that we actually went positive for the first time just today, just this morning, where that was released. The trifecta of these are so important because of what you mentioned, under resourcing. We can't have security just tell us when something happens, it has to automate, and it has to respond. So in this next generation of EDR and XDR, an automated response has to happen because people are under-resourced, salaries are really high, there's a skill shortage out there. Security has to become responsive. It can't just monitor anymore. >> Yeah. Great. And we should call out too. So we named some names, Snyk, Aqua, Arctic Wolf, Lacework, Netskope, Illumio. These are all sort of IPO, or possibly even M&A candidates. All right. Our next prediction goes right to the way we work. Again, something that ETR has been on for awhile. We're calling for a major rethink in remote work for 2022. We had predicted last year that by the end of 2021, there'd be a larger return to the office with the norm being around a third of workers permanently remote. And of course the variants changed that equation and, you know, gave more time for people to think about this idea of hybrid work and that's really come in to focus. So we're predicting that is going to overtake fully remote as the dominant work model with only about a third of the workers back in the office full-time. And Erik, we expect a somewhat lower percentage to be fully remote. It's now sort of dipped under 30%, at around 29%, but it's still significantly higher than the historical average of around 15 to 16%. So still a major change, but this idea of hybrid and getting hybrid right, has really come into focus. Hasn't it? >> Yeah. It's here to stay. There's no doubt about it. We started this in March of 2020, as soon as the virus hit. This is the 10th iteration of the survey. No one, no one ever thought we'd see a number where only 34% of people were going to be in office permanently. That's a permanent number. They're expecting only a third of the workers to ever come back fully in office. And against that, there's 63% that are saying their permanent workforce is going to be either fully remote or hybrid. And this, I can't really explain how big of a paradigm shift this is. Since the start of the industrial revolution, people leave their house and go to work. Now they're saying that's not going to happen. The economic impact here is so broad, on so many different areas And, you know, the reason is like, why not? Right? The productivity increase is real. We're seeing the productivity increase. Enterprises are spending on collaboration tools, productivity tools, We're seeing an increased perception in productivity of their workforce. And the CFOs can cut down an expense item. I just don't see a reason why this would end, you know, I think it's going to continue. And I also want to point out these results, as high as they are, were before the Omicron wave hit us. I can only imagine what these results would have been if we had sent the survey out just two or three weeks later. >> Yeah. That's a great point. Okay. Next prediction, we're going to look at the supply chain, specifically in how it's affecting some of the hardware spending and cloud strategies in the future. So in this chart, ETRS buyers, have you experienced problems procuring hardware as a result of supply chain issues? And, you know, despite the fact that some companies are, you know, I would call out Dell, for example, doing really well in terms of delivering, you can see that in the numbers, it's pretty clear, there's been an impact. And that's not not an across the board, you know, thing where vendors are able to deliver, especially acute in PCs, but also pronounced in networking, also in firewall servers and storage. And what's interesting is how companies are responding and reacting. So first, you know, I'm going to call the laptop and PC demand staying well above pre-COVID norms. It had peaked in 2012. Pre-pandemic it kept dropping and dropping and dropping, in terms of, you know, unit volume, where the market was contracting. And we think can continue to grow this year in double digits in 2022. But what's interesting, Erik, is when you survey customers, is despite the difficulty they're having in procuring network hardware, there's as much of a migration away from existing networks to the cloud. You could probably comment on that. Their networks are more fossilized, but when it comes to firewalls and servers and storage, there's a much higher propensity to move to the cloud. 30% of customers that ETR surveyed will replace security appliances with cloud services and 41% and 34% respectively will move to cloud compute and storage in 2022. So cloud's relentless march on traditional on-prem models continues. Erik, what do you make of this data? Please weigh in on this prediction. >> As if we needed another reason to go to the cloud. Right here, here it is yet again. So this was added to the survey by client demand. They were asking about the procurement difficulties, the supply chain issues, and how it was impacting our community. So this is the first time we ran it. And it really was interesting to see, you know, the move there. And storage particularly I found interesting because it correlated with a huge jump that we saw on one of our vendor names, which was Rubrik, had the highest net score that it's ever had. So clearly we're seeing some correlation with some of these names that are there, you know, really well positioned to take storage, to take data into the cloud. So again, you didn't need another reason to, you know, hasten this digital transformation, but here we are, we have it yet again, and I don't see it slowing down anytime soon. >> You know, that's a really good point. I mean, it's not necessarily bad news for the... I mean, obviously you wish that it had no change, would be great, but things, you know, always going to change. So we'll talk about this a little bit later when we get into the Supercloud conversation, but this is an opportunity for people who embrace the cloud. So we'll come back to that. And I want to hang on cloud a bit and share some recent projections that we've made. The next prediction is the big four cloud players are going to surpass 167 billion, an IaaS and PaaS revenue in 2022. We track this. Observers of this program know that we try to create an apples to apples comparison between AWS, Azure, GCP and Alibaba in IaaS and PaaS. So we're calling for 38% revenue growth in 2022, which is astounding for such a massive market. You know, AWS is probably not going to hit a hundred billion dollar run rate, but they're going to be close this year. And we're going to get there by 2023, you know they're going to surpass that. Azure continues to close the gap. Now they're about two thirds of the size of AWS and Google, we think is going to surpass Alibaba and take the number three spot. Erik, anything you'd like to add here? >> Yeah, first of all, just on a sector level, we saw our sector, new survey net score on cloud jumped another 10%. It was already really high at 48. Went up to 53. This train is not slowing down anytime soon. And we even added an edge compute type of player, like CloudFlare into our cloud bucket this year. And it debuted with a net score of almost 60. So this is really an area that's expanding, not just the big three, but everywhere. We even saw Oracle and IBM jump up. So even they're having success, taking some of their on-prem customers and then selling them to their cloud services. This is a massive opportunity and it's not changing anytime soon, it's going to continue. >> And I think the operative word there is opportunity. So, you know, the next prediction is something that we've been having fun with and that's this Supercloud becomes a thing. Now, the reason I say we've been having fun is we put this concept of Supercloud out and it's become a bit of a controversy. First, you know, what the heck's the Supercloud right? It's sort of a buzz-wordy term, but there really is, we believe, a thing here. We think there needs to be a rethinking or at least an evolution of the term multi-cloud. And what we mean is that in our view, you know, multicloud from a vendor perspective was really cloud compatibility. It wasn't marketed that way, but that's what it was. Either a vendor would containerize its legacy stack, shove it into the cloud, or a company, you know, they'd do the work, they'd build a cloud native service on one of the big clouds and they did do it for AWS, and then Azure, and then Google. But there really wasn't much, if any, leverage across clouds. Now from a buyer perspective, we've always said multicloud was a symptom of multi-vendor, meaning I got different workloads, running in different clouds, or I bought a company and they run on Azure, and I do a lot of work on AWS, but generally it wasn't necessarily a prescribed strategy to build value on top of hyperscale infrastructure. There certainly was somewhat of a, you know, reducing lock-in and hedging the risk. But we're talking about something more here. We're talking about building value on top of the hyperscale gift of hundreds of billions of dollars in CapEx. So in addition, we're not just talking about transforming IT, which is what the last 10 years of cloud have been like. And, you know, doing work in the cloud because it's cheaper or simpler or more agile, all of those things. So that's beginning to change. And this chart shows some of the technology vendors that are leaning toward this Supercloud vision, in our view, building on top of the hyperscalers that are highlighted in red. Now, Jerry Chan at Greylock, they wrote a piece called Castles in the Cloud. It got our thinking going, and he and the team at Greylock, they're building out a database of all the cloud services and all the sub-markets in cloud. And that got us thinking that there's a higher level of abstraction coalescing in the market, where there's tight integration of services across clouds, but the underlying complexity is hidden, and there's an identical experience across clouds, and even, in my dreams, on-prem for some platforms, so what's new or new-ish and evolving are things like location independence, you've got to include the edge on that, metadata services to optimize locality of reference and data source awareness, governance, privacy, you know, application independent and dependent, actually, recovery across clouds. So we're seeing this evolve. And in our view, the two biggest things that are new are the technology is evolving, where you're seeing services truly integrate cross-cloud. And the other big change is digital transformation, where there's this new innovation curve developing, and it's not just about making your IT better. It's about SaaS-ifying and automating your entire company workflows. So Supercloud, it's not just a vendor thing to us. It's the evolution of, you know, the, the Marc Andreessen quote, "Every company will be a SaaS company." Every company will deliver capabilities that can be consumed as cloud services. So Erik, the chart shows spending momentum on the y-axis and net score, or presence in the ETR data center, or market share on the x-axis. We've talked about snowflake as the poster child for this concept where the vision is you're in their cloud and sharing data in that safe place. Maybe you could make some comments, you know, what do you think of this Supercloud concept and this change that we're sensing in the market? >> Well, I think you did a great job describing the concept. So maybe I'll support it a little bit on the vendor level and then kind of give examples of the ones that are doing it. You stole the lead there with Snowflake, right? There is no better example than what we've seen with what Snowflake can do. Cross-portability in the cloud, the ability to be able to be, you know, completely agnostic, but then build those services on top. They're better than anything they could offer. And it's not just there. I mean, you mentioned edge compute, that's a whole nother layer where this is coming in. And CloudFlare, the momentum there is out of control. I mean, this is a company that started off just doing CDN and trying to compete with Okta Mite. And now they're giving you a full soup to nuts with security and actual edge compute layer, but it's a fantastic company. What they're doing, it's another great example of what you're seeing here. I'm going to call out HashiCorp as well. They're more of an infrastructure services, a little bit more of an open-source freemium model, but what they're doing as well is completely cloud agnostic. It's dynamic. It doesn't care if you're in a container, it doesn't matter where you are. They recently IPO'd and they're down 25%, but their data looks so good across both of our emerging technology and TISA survey. It's certainly another name that's playing on this. And another one that we mentioned as well is Rubrik. If you need storage, compute, and in the cloud layer and you need to be agnostic to it, they're another one that's really playing in this space. So I think it's a great concept you're bringing up. I think it's one that's here to stay and there's certainly a lot of vendors that fit into what you're describing. >> Excellent. Thank you. All right, let's shift to data. The next prediction, it might be a little tough to measure. Before I said we're trying to be a little black and white here, but it relates to Data Mesh, which is, the ideas behind that term were created by Zhamak Dehghani of ThoughtWorks. And we see Data Mesh is really gaining momentum in 2022, but it's largely going to be, we think, confined to a more narrow scope. Now, the impetus for change in data architecture in many companies really stems from the fact that their Hadoop infrastructure really didn't solve their data problems and they struggle to get more value out of their data investments. Data Mesh prescribes a shift to a decentralized architecture in domain ownership of data and a shift to data product thinking, beyond data for analytics, but data products and services that can be monetized. Now this a very powerful in our view, but they're difficult for organizations to get their heads around and further decentralization creates the need for a self-service platform and federated data governance that can be automated. And not a lot of standards around this. So it's going to take some time. At our power panel a couple of weeks ago on data management, Tony Baer predicted a backlash on Data Mesh. And I don't think it's going to be so much of a backlash, but rather the adoption will be more limited. Most implementations we think are going to use a starting point of AWS and they'll enable domains to access and control their own data lakes. And while that is a very small slice of the Data Mesh vision, I think it's going to be a starting point. And the last thing I'll say is, this is going to take a decade to evolve, but I think it's the right direction. And whether it's a data lake or a data warehouse or a data hub or an S3 bucket, these are really, the concept is, they'll eventually just become nodes on the data mesh that are discoverable and access is governed. And so the idea is that the stranglehold that the data pipeline and process and hyper-specialized roles that they have on data agility is going to evolve. And decentralized architectures and the democratization of data will eventually become a norm for a lot of different use cases. And Erik, I wonder if you'd add anything to this. >> Yeah. There's a lot to add there. The first thing that jumped out to me was that that mention of the word backlash you said, and you said it's not really a backlash, but what it could be is these are new words trying to solve an old problem. And I do think sometimes the industry will notice that right away and maybe that'll be a little pushback. And the problems are what you already mentioned, right? We're trying to get to an area where we can have more assets in our data site, more deliverable, and more usable and relevant to the business. And you mentioned that as self-service with governance laid on top. And that's really what we're trying to get to. Now, there's a lot of ways you can get there. Data fabric is really the technical aspect and data mesh is really more about the people, the process, and the governance, but the two of those need to meet, in order to make that happen. And as far as tools, you know, there's even cataloging names like Informatica that play in this, right? Istio plays in this, Snowflake plays in this. So there's a lot of different tools that will support it. But I think you're right in calling out AWS, right? They have AWS Lake, they have AWS Glue. They have so much that's trying to drive this. But I think the really important thing to keep here is what you said. It's going to be a decade long journey. And by the way, we're on the shoulders of giants a decade ago that have even gotten us to this point to talk about these new words because this has been an ongoing type of issue, but ultimately, no matter which vendors you use, this is going to come down to your data governance plan and the data literacy in your business. This is really about workflows and people as much as it is tools. So, you know, the new term of data mesh is wonderful, but you still have to have the people and the governance and the processes in place to get there. >> Great, thank you for that, Erik. Some great points. All right, for the next prediction, we're going to shine the spotlight on two of our favorite topics, Snowflake and Databricks, and the prediction here is that, of course, Databricks is going to IPO this year, as expected. Everybody sort of expects that. And while, but the prediction really is, well, while these two companies are facing off already in the market, they're also going to compete with each other for M&A, especially as Databricks, you know, after the IPO, you're going to have, you know, more prominence and a war chest. So first, these companies, they're both looking pretty good, the same XY graph with spending velocity and presence and market share on the horizontal axis. And both Snowflake and Databricks are well above that magic 40% red dotted line, the elevated line, to us. And for context, we've included a few other firms. So you can see kind of what a good position these two companies are really in, especially, I mean, Snowflake, wow, it just keeps moving to the right on this horizontal picture, but maintaining the next net score in the Y axis. Amazing. So, but here's the thing, Databricks is using the term Lakehouse implying that it has the best of data lakes and data warehouses. And Snowflake has the vision of the data cloud and data sharing. And Snowflake, they've nailed analytics, and now they're moving into data science in the domain of Databricks. Databricks, on the other hand, has nailed data science and is moving into the domain of Snowflake, in the data warehouse and analytics space. But to really make this seamless, there has to be a semantic layer between these two worlds and they're either going to build it or buy it or both. And there are other areas like data clean rooms and privacy and data prep and governance and machine learning tooling and AI, all that stuff. So the prediction is they'll not only compete in the market, but they'll step up and in their competition for M&A, especially after the Databricks IPO. We've listed some target names here, like Atscale, you know, Iguazio, Infosum, Habu, Immuta, and I'm sure there are many, many others. Erik, you care to comment? >> Yeah. I remember a year ago when we were talking Snowflake when they first came out and you, and I said, "I'm shocked if they don't use this war chest of money" "and start going after more" "because we know Slootman, we have so much respect for him." "We've seen his playbook." And I'm actually a little bit surprised that here we are, at 12 months later, and he hasn't spent that money yet. So I think this prediction's just spot on. To talk a little bit about the data side, Snowflake is in rarefied air. It's all by itself. It is the number one net score in our entire TISA universe. It is absolutely incredible. There's almost no negative intentions. Global 2000 organizations are increasing their spend on it. We maintain our positive outlook. It's really just, you know, stands alone. Databricks, however, also has one of the highest overall net sentiments in the entire universe, not just its area. And this is the first time we're coming up positive on this name as well. It looks like it's not slowing down. Really interesting comment you made though that we normally hear from our end-user commentary in our panels and our interviews. Databricks is really more used for the data science side. The MLAI is where it's best positioned in our survey. So it might still have some catching up to do to really have that caliber of usability that you know Snowflake is seeing right now. That's snowflake having its own marketplace. There's just a lot more to Snowflake right now than there is Databricks. But I do think you're right. These two massive vendors are sort of heading towards a collision course, and it'll be very interesting to see how they deploy their cash. I think Snowflake, with their incredible management and leadership, probably will make the first move. >> Well, I think you're right on that. And by the way, I'll just add, you know, Databricks has basically said, hey, it's going to be easier for us to come from data lakes into data warehouse. I'm not sure I buy that. I think, again, that semantic layer is a missing ingredient. So it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. And to your point, you know, Snowflake's got the war chest, they got the momentum, they've got the public presence now since November, 2020. And so, you know, they're probably going to start making some aggressive moves. Anyway, next prediction is something, Erik, that you and I have talked about many, many times, and that is observability. I know it's one of your favorite topics. And we see this world screaming for more consolidation it's going all in on cloud native. These legacy stacks, they're fighting to stay relevant, but the direction is pretty clear. And the same XY graph lays out the players in the field, with some of the new entrants that we've also highlighted, like Observe and Honeycomb and ChaosSearch that we've talked about. Erik, we put a big red target around Splunk because everyone wants their gold. So please give us your thoughts. >> Oh man, I feel like I've been saying negative things about Splunk for too long. I've got a bad rap on this name. The Splunk shareholders come after me all the time. Listen, it really comes down to this. They're a fantastic company that was designed to do logging and monitoring and had some great tool sets around what you could do with it. But they were designed for the data center. They were designed for prem. The world we're in now is so dynamic. Everything I hear from our end user community is that all net new workloads will be going to cloud native players. It's that simple. So Splunk has entrenched. It's going to continue doing what it's doing and it does it really, really well. But if you're doing something new, the new workloads are going to be in a dynamic environment and that's going to go to the cloud native players. And in our data, it is extremely clear that that means Datadog and Elastic. They are by far number one and two in net score, increase rates, adoption rates. It's not even close. Even New Relic actually is starting to, you know, entrench itself really well. We saw New Relic's adoption's going up, which is super important because they went to that freemium model, you know, to try to get their little bit of an entrenched customer base and that's working as well. And then you made a great list here, of all the new entrants, but it goes beyond this. There's so many more. In our emerging technology survey, we're seeing Century, Catchpoint, Securonix, Lucid Works. There are so many options in this space. And let's not forget, the biggest data that we're seeing is with Grafana. And Grafana labs as yet to turn on their enterprise. Elastic did it, why can't Grafana labs do it? They have an enterprise stack. So when you look at how crowded this space is, there has to be consolidation. I recently hosted a panel and every single guy on that panel said, "Please give me a consolidation." Because they're the end users trying to actually deploy these and it's getting a little bit confusing. >> Great. Thank you for that. Okay. Last prediction. Erik, might be a little out of your wheelhouse, but you know, you might have some thoughts on it. And that's a hybrid events become the new digital model and a new category in 2022. You got these pure play digital or virtual events. They're going to take a back seat to in-person hybrids. The virtual experience will eventually give way to metaverse experiences and that's going to take some time, but the physical hybrid is going to drive it. And metaverse is ultimately going to define the virtual experience because the virtual experience today is not great. Nobody likes virtual. And hybrid is going to become the business model. Today's pure virtual experience has to evolve, you know, theCUBE first delivered hybrid mid last decade, but nobody really wanted it. We did Mobile World Congress last summer in Barcelona in an amazing hybrid model, which we're showing in some of the pictures here. Alex, if you don't mind bringing that back up. And every physical event that we're we're doing now has a hybrid and virtual component, including the pre-records. You can see in our studios, you see that the green screen. I don't know. Erik, what do you think about, you know, the Zoom fatigue and all this. I know you host regular events with your round tables, but what are your thoughts? >> Well, first of all, I think you and your company here have just done an amazing job on this. So that's really your expertise. I spent 20 years of my career hosting intimate wall street idea dinners. So I'm better at navigating a wine list than I am navigating a conference floor. But I will say that, you know, the trend just goes along with what we saw. If 35% are going to be fully remote. If 70% are going to be hybrid, then our events are going to be as well. I used to host round table dinners on, you know, one or two nights a week. Now those have gone virtual. They're now panels. They're now one-on-one interviews. You know, we do chats. We do submitted questions. We do what we can, but there's no reason that this is going to change anytime soon. I think you're spot on here. >> Yeah. Great. All right. So there you have it, Erik and I, Listen, we always love the feedback. Love to know what you think. Thank you, Erik, for your partnership, your collaboration, and love doing these predictions with you. >> Yeah. I always enjoy them too. And I'm actually happy. Last year you made us do a baker's dozen, so thanks for keeping it to 10 this year. >> (laughs) We've got a lot to say. I know, you know, we cut out. We didn't do much on crypto. We didn't really talk about SaaS. I mean, I got some thoughts there. We didn't really do much on containers and AI. >> You want to keep going? I've got another 10 for you. >> RPA...All right, we'll have you back and then let's do that. All right. All right. Don't forget, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, all you can do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus, they've got a new website out. It's the best data in the industry, and we publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can always reach out on email, David.Vellante@siliconangle.com I'm @DVellante on Twitter. Comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (mellow music)

(upbeat music) >> Everybody welcome back to theCUBE, continuous coverage of AWS 2021. This is the biggest hybrid event of the year, theCUBEs ninth year covering AWS re:Invent. My name is Dave Vellante. Arwa Kaddoura is here CUBE alumni, chief revenue officer now of InfluxData and Brian Mullen, who's the chief marketing officer. Folks good to see you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Dave: All right, great to see you face to face. >> It's great to meet you in person finally. >> So Brian, tell us about InfluxData. People might not be familiar with the company. >> Sure, yes. InfluxData, we're the company behind a pretty well-known project called Influx DB. And we're a platform for handling time series data. And so what time series data is, is really it's any, we think of it as any data that's stamped in time in some way. That could be every second, every two minutes, every five minutes, every nanosecond, whatever it might be. And typically that data comes from, you know, of course, sources and the sources are, you know, they could be things in the physical world like devices and sensors, you know, temperature gauges, batteries. Also things in the virtual world and, you know, software that you're building and running in the cloud, you know, containers, microservices, virtual machines. So all of these, whether in the physical world or the virtual world are kind of generating a lot of time series data and our platforms are designed specifically to handle that. >> Yeah so, lots to unpack here Arwa, I mean, I've kind of followed you since we met on virtually. Kind of followed your career and I know when you choose to come to a company, you start with the customer that's what your that's your... Those are your peeps. >> Arwa: Absolutely. >> So what was it that drew you to InfluxData, the customers were telling you? >> Yeah, I think what I saw happening from a marketplace is a few paradigm shifts, right? And the first paradigm shift is obviously what the cloud is enabling, right? So everything that we used to take for granted, when you know, Andreessen Horowitz said, "software was eating the world", right? And then we moved into apps are eating the world. And now you look at the cloud infrastructure that, you know, folks like AWS have empowered, they've allowed services like ours and databases, and sort of querying capabilities like Influx DB to basically run at a scale that we never would have been able to do. Just sort of with, you know, you host it yourself type of a situation. And then the other thing that it's enabled is again, if you go back to sort of database history, relational, right? Was humongous, totally transformed what we could do in terms of transactional systems. Then you moved into sort of the big data, the Hadoops, the search, right. The elastic. And now what we're seeing is time series is becoming the new paradigm. That's enabling a whole set of new use cases that have never been enabled before, right? So people that are generating these large volumes of data, like Brian talked about and needing a platform that can ingest millions of points per second. And then the ability to query that in real time in order to take that action and in order to power things like ML and things like sort of, you know, autonomous type capabilities now need this type of capability. So that's all to know >> Okay so, it's the real timeness, right? It's the use cases. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about those use cases and--- >> Sure, sure. So, yeah so we have kind of thinking about things as both the kind of virtual world where people are pulling data off of sources that are in infrastructure, software infrastructure. We have a number like PayPal is a customer of ours, and Apple. They pull a time series data from the infrastructure that runs their payments platform. So you can imagine the volume that they're dealing with. Think about how much data you might have in like a regular relational scenario now multiply every that, every piece of data times however, often you're looking at it. Every one second, every 10 minutes, whatever it might be. You're talking about an order of magnitude, larger volume, higher volume of data. And so the tools that people were using were just not really equipped to handle that kind of volume, which is unique to time series. So we have customers like PayPal in kind of the software infrastructure side. We also have quite a bit of activity among customers on the IOT side. So Tesla is a customer they're pulling telematics and battery data off of the vehicle, pulling that back into their cloud platform. Nest is also our customer. So we're pretty used to seeing, you know, connected thermostats in homes. Think of all the data that's coming from those individual units and their, it's all time series data and they're pulling it into their platform using Influx. >> So, that's interesting. So Tesla take that example they will maybe persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. It's a femoral and end up putting some of it back to the cloud, probably a small portion percentage wise but it's a huge amount of data of data, right? >> Brian: Yeah. >> So, if they might want to track some anomalies okay, capture every time animal runs across, you know, and put that back into the cloud. So where do you guys fit in that analysis and what makes you sort of the best platform for time series data base. >> Yeah, it's interesting you say that because it is a femoral and there are really two parts of it. This is one of the reasons that time series is such a challenge to handle with something that's not really designed to handle it. In a moment, in that minute, in the last hour, you have, you really want to see all the data you want all of what's happening and have full context for what's going on and seeing these fluctuations but then maybe a day later, a week later, you may not care about that level of fidelity. And so you down sample it, you have like a, kind of more of a summarized view of what happened in that moment. So being able to kind of toggle between high fidelity and low fidelity, it's a super hard problem to solve. And so our platform Influx DB really allows you to do that. >> So-- >> And that is different from relational databases, which are great at ingesting, but not great at kicking data out. >> Right. >> And I think what you're pointing to is in order to optimize these platforms, you have to ingest and get rid of data as quickly as you can. And that is not something that a traditional database can do. >> So, who do you sell to? Who's your ideal customer profile? I mean, pretty diverse. >> Yeah, It, so it tends to focus on builders, right? And builders is now obviously a much wider audience, right? We used to say developers, right. Highly technical folks that are building applications. And part of what we love about InfluxData is we're not necessarily trying to only make it for the most sophisticated builders, right? We are trying to allow you to build an application with the minimum amount of code and the greatest amount of integrations, right. So we really power you to do more with less and get rid of unnecessary code or, you know, give you that simplicity. Because for us, it's all about speed to market. You want an application, you have an idea of what it is that you're trying to measure or monitor or instrument, right? We give you the tools, we give you the integrations. We allow you to have to work in the IDE that you prefer. We just launched VS Code Integration, for example. And that then allows these technical audiences that are solving really hard problems, right? With today's technologies to really take our product to market very quickly. >> So, I want to follow up on that. So I like the term builder. It's an AWS kind of popularized that term, but there's sort of two vectors of that. There's the hardcore developers, but there's also increasingly domain experts that are building data products and then more generalists. And I think you're saying you serve both of those, but you do integrations that maybe make it easier for the latter. And of course, if the former wants to go crazy they can. Is that a right understanding? >> Yes absolutely. It is about accessibility and meeting developers where they are. For example, you probably still need a solid technical foundation to use a product like ours, but increasingly we're also investing in education, in videos and templates. Again, integrations that make it easier for people to maybe just bring a visualization layer that they themselves don't have to build. So it is about accessibility, but yes obviously with builders they're a technical foundation is pretty important. But, you know, right now we're at almost 500,000 active instances of Influx DB sort of being out there in the wild. So that to me shows, that it's a pretty wide variety of audiences that are using us. >> So, you're obviously part of the AWS ecosystem, help us understand that partnership they announced today of Serverless for Kinesis. Like, what does that mean to you as you compliment that, is that competitive? Maybe you can address that. >> Yeah, so we're a long-time partner of AWS. We've been in the partner network for several years now. And we think about it now in a couple of ways. First it's an important channel, go to market channel for us with our customers. So as you know, like AWS is an ecosystem unto itself and so many developers, many of these builders are building their applications for their own end users in, on AWS, in that ecosystem. And so it's important for us to number one, have an offering that allows them to put Influx on that bill so we're offered in the marketplace. You can sign up for and purchase and pay for Influx DB cloud using or via AWS marketplace. And then as Arwa mentioned, we have a number of integrations with all the kind of adjacent products and services from Amazon that many of our developers are using. And so when we think about kind of quote and quote, going to where the developer, meeting developers where they are that's an important part of it. If you're an AWS focused developer, then we want to give you not only an easy way to pay for and use our product but also an easy way to integrate it into all the other things that you're using. >> And I think it was 2012, it might've even been 11 on theCUBE, Jerry Chen of Greylock. We were asking him, you think AWS is going to move up the stack and develop applications. He said, no I don't think so. I think they're going to enable developers and builders to do that and then they'll compete with the traditional SaaS vendors. And that's proved to be true, at least thus far. You never say never with AWS. But then recently he wrote a piece called "Castles on the Cloud." And the premise was essentially the ISV's will build on top of clouds. And that seems to be what you're doing with Influx DB. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that. We call it super clouds. >> Arwa: That's right. >> you know, leveraging the 100 billion dollars a year that the hyperscalers spend to develop an abstraction layer that solves a particular problem but maybe you could describe what that is from your perspective, Influx DB. >> Yeah, well increasingly we grew up originally as an open source software company. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> People downloaded the download Influx DB ran it locally on a laptop, put up on the server. And, you know, that's our kind of origin as a company, but increasingly what we recognize is our customers, our developers were building on the building in and on the cloud. And so it was really important for us to kind of meet them there. And so we think about, first of all, offering a product that is easily consumed in the cloud and really just allows them to essentially hit an end point. So with Influx DB cloud, they really have, don't have to worry about any of that kind of deployment and operation of a cluster or anything like that. Really, they just from a usage perspective, just pay for three things. The first is data in, how much data are you putting in? Second is query count. How many queries are you making against? And then third is storage. How much data do you have and how long are you storing it? And really, it's a pretty simple proposition for the developer to kind of see and understand what their costs are going to be as they grow their workload. >> So it's a managed service is that right? >> Brian: It is a managed service. >> Okay and how do you guys price? Is it kind of usage based. >> Total usage based, yeah, again data ingestion. We've got the query count and the storage that Brian talked about, but to your point, back to the sort of what the hyperscalers are doing in terms of creating this global infrastructure that can easily be tapped into. We then extend above that, right? We effectively become a platform as a service builder tool. Many of our customers actually use InfluxData to then power their own products, which they then commercialize into a SaaS application. Right, we've got customers that are doing, you know, Kubernetes monitoring or DevOps monitoring solutions, right? That monitor, you know, people's infrastructure or web applications or any of those things. We've got people building us into, you know, Industrial IoT such as PTC's ThingWorx, right? Where they've developed their own platform >> Dave: Very cool. >> Completely backed up by our time series database, right. Rather than them having to build everything, we become that key ingredient. And then of course the fully cloud managed service means that they could go to market that much quicker. Nobody's for procuring servers, nobody is managing, you know, security patches any of that, it's all fully done for you. And it scales up beautifully, which is the key. And to some of our customers, they also want to scale up or down, right. They know when their peak hours are or peak times they need something that can handle that load. >> So looking ahead to next year, so anyway, I'm glad AWS decided to do re:Invent live. (Arwa mumbling) >> You know, that's weird, right? We thought in June, at Mobile World Congress, we were going to, it was going to be the gateway to returning but who knows? It's like two steps forward, one step back. One step forward, two steps back but we're at least moving in the right direction. So what about for you guys InfluxData? Looking ahead for the coming year, Brian, what can we expect? You know, give us a little view of sharp view of (mumbles) >> Well kind of a keeping in the theme of meeting developers where they are, we want to build out more in the Amazon ecosystem. So more integrations, more kind of ease of use for kind of adjacent products. Another is just availability. So we've been, we're now on actually three clouds. In addition to AWS, we're on Azure and Google cloud, but now expanding horizontally and showing up so we can meet our customers that are working in Europe, expanding into Asia-Pacific which we did earlier this year. And so I think we'll continue to expand the platform globally to bring it closer to where our customers are. >> Arwa: Can I. >> All right go ahead, please. >> And I would say also the hybrid capabilities probably will also be important, right? Some of our customers run certain workloads locally and then other workloads in the cloud. That ability to have that seamless experience regardless, I think is another really critical advancement that we're continuing to invest in. So that as far as the customer is concerned, it's just an API endpoint and it doesn't matter where they're deploying. >> So where do they go, can they download a freebie version? Give us the last word. >> They go to influxdata.com. We do have a free account that anyone can sign up for. It's again, fully cloud hosted and managed. It's a great place to get started. Just learn more about our capabilities and if you're here at AWS re:Invent, we'd love to see you as well. >> Check it out. All right, guys thanks for coming on theCUBEs. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to see you. >> All right, thank you. >> Awesome. >> All right, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBEs coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. You're watching the leader in high-tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>mm Welcome to VM World 2021 2 days of virtual discussions on innovation. Multi cloud application modernization, securing your data new ways to work transforming the network expanding to the edge and loads of content to help build your digital business. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube and with me today is Carol Carpenter who's the chief marketing officer of VM. Where carol Great to see you again. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you Dave. It's great to be here. >>Okay, well, so when we last talked last year at VM World, I honestly thought we'd be back face to face this year. Seems like we learn more every day every week. Every month. How did this year's event come together? What were your priorities in shaping the program? >>You know, I'm with you. I really hoped we would be together in person this year and here we are, another year of virtual. We are primarily all virtual again, which has some really big benefits in that we're able to reach new audiences who in the past couldn't afford to fly, could afford to take the days And it's taught us a lot. So we really approached this year as how do we create a VM world experience that is filled with digestible bites. You know, the notion that any of us are going to sit still for 3-2 days, three days and pay attention full time. This is a pretty antiquated notion. You know, we all like to to take little bites and tastes of content here and there and so we really designed the whole program to do just that. And with this go ahead. >>No, please carry on. >>No, I was going to say one of the things we really wanted to do this year with the M world. The reason the theme is imagined that is we wanted to show the world that VM World is not about your parents, BM world that this is a company while we're very proud of our virtualization past, what we offer today really spans the gamut as you pointed out everything from networking to security to application development platforms. So it's a it's just a different different company with different products and solutions for customers. >>And I love the whole concept of digestible called stackable bites and love that. And you've put together a pretty impressive lineup. You got superstar names, you got, you got stars inside of our industry and then you you know the tech people might know but you've got well known celebrities. What are you looking forward to this year and you know especially around customer and partner engagements. >>Yeah and thank you for highlighting all of that. Like I am super excited about all the different luminaries who are speaking. I am most excited about the customers and partners. Every session will have a customer's part of it. Either a customer speaking or a customer story or customer quotes really speaking to the value and with that we have hundreds of customers presenting customers. Like some you might expect like Fedex to new sas based customers like toast who provides restaurant software and they just went public to companies like space ape games who provide online games. So a real boy, I think a real diversity of customers um, in terms of their transformations and how they're leveraging the VM ware solutions. And then our partner ecosystem really excited. This year we added a new level of sponsorship to bring in some of the um, I would say younger customers and younger partners, partners like, you know, Reddit and um, you know, couch face and others who are bringing new solutions to market. >>We have some great names, they're toast. I think the local boston company, we've, we've been following them so excited to to hear what they have to say. Now let's talk a little bit about the virtual world, This is your second virtual VM world. I'm interested in what you're doing differently. I want to talk about learning, but, but what are you looking forward to in in, in in that sense? And how has the event grown? >>Well, the event has definitely grown in terms of the platform. I think the expectations in terms of numbers of attendees were expecting, you know, over 100,000. Um, and even in this zoom fatigued world, we still expect high level of engagement. The biggest changes. We have made one the more stackable content that we've been talking about two. We focused this year on a high level of interactivity, so we have slack channels set up for almost every session. We expect both speakers, customers prospects to really engage. And and then third area that's different is we amped up all of the different activities. We know that people want to interact and network in other ways. So, you know, some of the usual things like the bourbon tasting, the wine tasting, but also yoga classes and opportunities to learn from a magician, Even golf tips for those of us who love golfing, um really trying to mix it up and create a higher level of interactivity. In addition to all of the platforms you expect for hands on, learning, hands on labs, practitioner classes, All that's still there. We just wanted to increase the level of engagement. >>That's super fun, really innovating in that regard. You're right. I mean it's so easy to just to multitask and get lost. But if I know like if I'm really into yoga or I want some golf tip, I'm gonna come back at that time and it'll, you'll re engage me. So I love that, you know, the cube, we have a unique privilege of participating in a very wide spectrum of events as you can imagine. And we were deeply integrated carol into one of the industry's first big hybrid events this year at mobile world Congress this >>summer. We thought >>that was like the light of the end of the tunnel, but of course we've seen a pullback of sorts but we're still doing some physical, we do a lot of virtual, we were doing these hybrid events. We've been involved in events where they, you know, the host and the guests are there with no audience. So I'm curious as to how you see the evolution of conferences in this post isolation era. What's the learnings? What's changed and what does the future look like for events? >>Yeah, I mean I've talked with a lot of my industry peers about this, including the folks over at Mobile World Congress. Um, I don't think the large, the monolithic event with hundreds of thousands of people um, is in the cards for our near future. And so we've been rethinking like what does a physical event look like or a set of physical events look like next year. That would have an online component. We're we've always had an online component. So we certainly are not. We won't be shedding that anytime soon. The ability to reach new audiences. New targets, new user groups, we absolutely will keep that. I think in terms of the physical presence is exactly what you said. It will be hybrid. Um, we are looking at a series, don't quote me on this because we haven't finalized, but we are considering a series of in person, more local, more regional events with smaller groups. People still want that engagement, customers still want a network and talk with each other. Our users want to talk to each other are vima groups are our new groups like our DEvoPS loop group. The deVOPS folks, they all still want a network, so we want to provide that. But in a smaller, safer, more localized setting. And I think that's the future for a lot of companies. It puts a bigger toll and, and makes more work for us as the company who's hosting, meaning you and you too Dave, you'll be hopefully traveling with us two more of these locations, but it creates a little more strain on the team who is posting. >>You know, it's funny as you well know when we first started doing virtual events, like I said, we've always been been virtual, but largely it was okay. Here are the keynotes, you know, come watch. Uh, and now you're like, say you gave great examples of how you're increasing the engagement, getting much more creative and, and, and it was a lot unknown last year, especially like class March. It was like, okay and virtual events are harder in many respects than physical events and so much of the process has changed different roles. And I think we're seeing the same thing now with with hybrid, there's a lot that's unknown and a lot of trial and error, a lot of experimentation and, but I think at the end of the day, you can actually have the best of both worlds. You can get your what you described, I would, I would call it a VIP locally. V. I. P. Event maybe even role based they have the technical folks, it used to have conferences within conferences, you have your C. I. O. Event, you'd have your event and so I see a kind of return to that maybe I could say smaller and and safer and then a a much much larger audience and in the case it's different in terms of you know converting those into loyal customers and so forth. But but I think overall it's a much much bigger pond ocean that we're playing in. >>Absolutely I think of it as we're going to bring the um world too our customers and prospects and partners and you know it's pretty amazing. The other part of this you asked earlier about like speakers and some of the luminaries the fact is getting everyone to travel to one place at one point in time always had its share of logistical challenges and being able to, you know, some of it can be recorded in advance some of it will be in person. Like one thing we did this year is we recorded our ceo Ragu with six other ceos of hyper scholars talking about the future of multi cloud and what it means and the role that VM ware plays in this. That's pretty hard to do. Like to get all six of them together in one place at the same time. You know how everyone's schedules so compacted so that's what virtual gives us an opportunity to do reach, have more interesting speakers, lots of different speakers who potentially couldn't all travel. >>You don't want to miss that, that event or replay. Um, let's talk about your role as chief marketing officer. You're obviously putting your fingerprints on this new ever you new era. You had no choice you could have entered in. Yeah. We always talked about digital now is like if you're not a digital business, you're out of business and you're, you're living it now. But but I'm interested in in your strategy for global marketing, the organization, The brand in the coming decade. Like you say, the next 10 years are going to be like the last 10 years. >>That's right. Well let's talk about the brand. So VM ware, The name itself is so tightly associated to virtualization and VMS, right, Which is an amazing history and the story of success. That was really what we like to talk about is chapter One, We pioneered server virtualization laying the foundation for what today is the cloud. And then chapter two, we went bigger and broader and we virtualize the entire data center and now here we are, we're in chapter three and this is the next phase of our brand and our promise to customers, which is really focused on customer based innovation and helping our customers innovate and multi cloud. We really believe it's the center of gravity for everything we do. It's in our DNA. It's what how we take constraints which is a very multi cloud can be complex. There are challenges of you know are for customers operating in a multi cloud world. How do we take that help them turn it into an asset, How do we help them take that and give them freedom and control? And that's what our brand is about. It's about the ant is that you can help your developers move faster and retain enterprise control. It's that you can have enterprise apps on any cloud and you can have control and cost savings and enterprise management. So that's what the brand is about. That power of aunt and um and um in terms of how our marketing team is evolving a big piece is exactly what you said. You know just digital everything digital first customers want to learn try buy online and as a company you know VM ware we're shifting our business model from on premise license software to more assassin subscription services And you can see that in our earnings and how we've been shifting and it's quite exciting because with assassin subscription based model you know it's all about customers getting full value in helping customers achieve their value and consumption. So for our marketing team we have shifted from okay we want to get you to the sale and one and done to how do we really drive a full life cycle with a customer, how do we help them land and expand and use the products and get value from them and have a meaningful relationship. It's much more um of a full life cycle. So we're really excited. We, we love what we're doing um particularly on the acquisition side, getting helping customers to learn try by more easily in a digital world and then being able to follow them through with some physical, physical engagement, uh events like the um world and really helping them get the most value out of the products. >>VM ware is really quite an amazing company I'm super excited for as one individual has been following this company for a long time to see the next chapter and the thing a couple of things you mentioned innovation and I see so many companies today, they may have a big customer base, they just, it's easy for them. Easy quotes to milk that customer base and put out new products that sort of lifecycle products. Multi cloud is challenging and one of the hallmarks of VM ware is it's always had a leader that deeply understands technology. You've done that again with with Ragu and so engineering and really drives that innovation. So when I think about cloud generally and you know, there was some start stops with VMware's cloud strategy but then you said, you know what the cloud is an opportunity, it's a gift, we're gonna lean in and then you develop some really interesting partnerships like you said, you got all the big cloud companies up up on stage here this year. And so multi cloud is going to require deep engineering in a vision to really bring that uh, together. And I think, you know, VM ware is, he's one of a handful, you know, small handful of companies that can actually pull that off. >>Well, thank you. Dave, we think so for sure. I mean, we have the history and the foundation and the relationships to be able to do that. I think that um what's what's hard sometimes is that, you know, people may or may not know all the different things we do this multi cloud chapter is really a, It's the reality, 75% of our customers are operating living in a multi cloud world. And if you look at some of the data, it looks like 80, are going that way. And so how do we help them simplify? How do we help customers simplify and innovate for the future? It's definitely in our DNA it's how we take constraints and turn them into an asset for our customers. We, we really believe that it shouldn't be so complex and that we want our customers to have flexibility and choice used to be able to pick which application for which cloud and at any point in time change your mind as well when there are new capabilities on those clouds. And for us, you know, you've hit it on the head, we did realize and we did learn that we don't really want to compete with the hyper scale ear's, what they're doing is pretty unique. What we want to do is help customers consume and accelerate their innovation faster. >>Well, I love the messages and and really appreciate carol your time explaining to our cube audience, going to your vision is the CMO. And you know, we look forward to an interesting chapter ahead with hybrid events, hybrid cloud, multi cloud and all the rest. Thanks so much for coming back in the cube. >>Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Dave >>You're very welcome and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content to cubes coverage of VM World 2021. The virtual edition will be right back. >>Mhm

(upbeat music) >> Thanks Adam from the studio. Dave, with the next interview, I had a great chance to sit down with Pete, from Microsoft Azure. Talk about 5G and all the advances in the innovation around Silicon and what's coming around under the hood. Obviously Microsoft big hyperscaler, top three cloud player. Let's hear from Pete my conversation and we'll come right back. (upbeat music) Well, we'll come back to the cubes coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021, we're onsite in-person and virtual. It's a hybrid event this year. It's in-person for the first time, since the winter of 2019 lots been passed, a lot's happened and theCube's got to cover it. Our next guest is Pete Bernard, senior director, Silicon and telecom at Azure edge devices, platform and services at Microsoft. Pete, thanks for coming on theCube for our remote coverage. Thanks for coming on. We'll be there live and as well as with the remote community. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, no, that's great to be here. I'm coming here from sunny Bellevue, Washington. I wish a wish I was going to be in Barcelona this year, but like, as you mentioned, I think the last time I was in Barcelona was 2019. So a lot has happened since then. Right? >> Well, let's get into it. First of all, we'll see you on the interwebs and the community, but let, let's get the content storyline after the number one story at mobile world. Congress is the rise of the modern developer overlay on top of this new infrastructure, 5g, what is the edge, super edge, AI edge, whatever we want to call it. It is an enabler. Okay. And it's also leveraging the assets of, of these telecom infrastructures and certainly the pandemic we've had great success, nothing crashed. It saved us. So what's your, what's your view on this? This is the big story. It's the most important story? What's your take? >> Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, a lot has happened and there's been a lot of advancements in this area and I think, you know, the part of what's happened with the pandemic is companies have really accelerated their strategies in this area. In terms of, you know, we have tons of commercial customers that are trying to solve really difficult problems using AI and edge and, and 5g now. So the demand is tremendous and the technology has really advanced quite a bit. And you know, we're, my team is specifically focused on sort of the intersection of 5g edge and AI, and it's sort of bringing together these kinds of existing credible technology advances and it's unlocking some amazing new scenarios and business models for, for customers and partners. For sure. >> So let's get it under the hood a little bit and talk about some of the technical issues. Obviously 5g is enabling a lot of commercial benefits cloud providers like Microsoft Azure is having great edge capabilities now with, with bringing the cloud to the edge, which opens up the obvious gamers Mehta versus AI, AR VR kind of things, low latency, applications, cars, and all that good stuff, all the data coming in and then new use cases. So it's a data problem. It's a typology challenge. It's a new architecture, unpack that for us. What, where are we in this? So. >> So I mean, as you mentioned, I mean, it was kind of an infinite set of problems to be solved. And one of the things that we found was that there was actually a lot of friction out there. It's almost like so many different partners and typologies and ways to put things together. Quite often, we get with a commercial customer and they're like, look, we just need to solve this particular problem in retail or healthcare energy. And so one of the things that we introduced as part of our kind of Azure portfolio is something called Azure percept, which is an end to end system for edge AI development and deployment that now works over 5g and L PWA as well. And so a lot of what we're trying to do as a platform company is help customers and partners kind of expedite and speed that development and deployment of solutions. Because like I said, there's no shortage of demand, but they're quite complex. And as you mentioned, you could have, you know, on-prem solutions, you could have hybrid solutions that talk to on-prem hardware and then go to the cloud. You can go direct to the cloud. But the question is like, how do you put these things together in a secure way? And it get an ROI quickly out of your edge AI deployments. And that's been kind of an interesting challenge. And I think when I talked to a lot of partners, telco partners, especially Silicon partners, were all struggling with how do we expedite, expedite? Because you know, the sooner we can get people to deploy and solve their problems, obviously, you know, the sooner they're happy, the sooner we all get paid. Right? And so that's one of the things we have to be careful of is with all the new technology, how do we really sort of titrate down to, you know, what does it take to actually get things from a POC to deployment as quickly as possible? >> And one of the big things is happening is not seeing the developer ecosystem is coming hardcore into the telco cloud, whatever you want to call it. And it's interesting, you know, the word operators is used a lot, the carriers, the operators, you don't hear that in it and say, you don't say that's the operator, the operators writes it department. So you have cloud native and this operating cultures coming together, dev ops dev sec ops coming to what is a carrier grade operating model, which is like a steady build solid foundation. That's what they expect. So you kind of have this classic OT it collision. And this has been talked about in the edge. What's different though, because now you've got to move faster. You got to have a lot of it like cloud scale with automation and AI at the same time I need full Bulletproof operations. Yeah. >> And so it's, you know, we're trying to expose a consistent developer fabric, you know, to our community. I mean, Microsoft's got millions of developers around the world using lots of, lots of tool, tool chains, and frameworks. And we want to sort of harness the power of that whole developer community to bring workloads and applications onto the telco network, right. In, in environments that they're familiar with. And we're seeing also sort of, you mentioned sort of colliding worlds in the edge world. There's kind of traditional embedded developers that are building cameras and devices and gateways. And then there's a lot of data science, AI developers as well. And what we're trying to do is sort of help both communities sort of learn these skills so that, you know, you have developers that are enabled to do, you know, AI workloads and scenarios and all of the business logic around those things and develop it in an environment, whether it's cloud-based or edge based that they're familiar with. And, you know, so therefore a lot of the complexities of the teleco network itself get sort of obfuscated or abstracted for them. So the developer doesn't have to become a telco expert, right. To build a 5g based camera system for their retail stores. Right. And so that's, that's exciting when we start to merge some of these communities together. >> Yeah. So what would be your message to the operators this year? I mean, obviously the edge is not something you need to educate people on, but they are trying to figure out how to, you know, swap the engine of the airplane out at 35,000 feet, as I say, they got, they want to innovate and this year what's your message. Yeah. >> I mean, there's kind of two things going on. One is yes. I think we're, we are deeply involved helping telcos Cloudify their network and take advantage of 5g and virtualization. And, you know, we have recent acquisitions as a metal switching affirmed and hold that whole thing. So that's, that's that chunk of work that's ongoing. I think the other thing that's happening is really thinking about telcos. We're seeing as a hunger for solutions. And so telcos thinking of themselves as solution providers, not just connectivity providers and, you know, getting into that mindset of saying, we're going to come in and work with this city or this, you know, big retailer and we're going to help solve the problems for them. And we love working with partners like that, that are actually delivering solutions as opposed to pieces of technology. >> What solutions do you think Pete are showing the most promise for helping the telco industry digitally transformed? >> Well, I think on the NGI space, there's a couple of big verticals. I mean, you know, obviously places like agriculture are huge, you know, where you need a wide deployments. We're seeing a lot of areas in around retail, you know, retail environments when I would have leveraged like low latency 5g. One of the pieces of feedback we heard was a lot of retailers actually want less hardware in their physical store and they want to leverage 5g more to get back to the cloud. And then we're seeing, you know, energy sectors, you know, and mining and other kind of difficult to reach areas where you can leverage ciliary networks. So a lot of these verticals are, you know, turning onto the fact that they could get some of their conductivity and edge AI solutions combined together and do some amazing things. >> Right. You just made me think of a question while I got you. I got to ask this because you know, you've brought up 5g and back haul, you know, and people in the, in this business always know backhaul is always the problem. We all know we've been to a concert or a game where we've got multiple bars on wifi, but nothing's loading. Right. So we all know, right. We've seen that that's back haul. That's a choke point. If 5g is going to give me more back haul to essentially another exchange, how has the core of the internet evolved? Because as I started poking around and research and there's more direct connects now, there's not many exchanges. It used to be, we had my west and my east, those are now gone. I'm like, what's going on in the backbone? Does that simple? Is it better or worse? Is that still a good thing? >> Well, yeah. One of the exciting things around kind of the virtualization of what's going on with networking is that we're able to partner with telcos to sort of extend the Azure footprint to help with some of those congestion points, right? So we can, we can bring heavy edge equipment, pretty darn close to where the action is, and actually have direct connections into teleco networks to help them sort of expand their footprint, you know, even farther out to the edge and they can leverage our hyperscaler to, to do that. So that that's a benefit of one of the architectural improvements of 5G around virtualization. >> That's awesome. And I'm looking forward to following up on that great point. And I think it's, it sells a digital divide problem. That's been going on for over a decade, 15, 20 years, this digital divide. Now you got city revitalizations going on. You have, I mean, just the, just the, the digital revitalization in global communities is everywhere. And I think, I think this is going to be an influx point. That's not yet written about in the press now, but I think it's going to be very clear. So, so with all that, I got to ask you the importance of how you guys see an ecosystem for this transformation, because it used to be the telcos ruled the world, and now it's not going that way. They still have a footprint. I mean, everyone, the rising tide helps everybody, as they say, what's the importance of a strong ecosystem in order to drive this nutrient? >> Well, you know, it's definitely a team sport. It's definitely a team sport. And, and you know, Microsoft's been a big partner company for decades, and I think it's something like $8, a part of revenue for every dollar of revenue from the Microsoft generate. So we're heavily invested in our device, builder partners, our telco partners, the ISV community. And, you know, I think what we're trying to do is work with telcos to sort of bring those communities together, to solve these kinds of problems that customers are having. So yeah, it's definitely a team sport. And like I said, the new entrance with some really innovative software platforms, it's an opportunity for telcos, I think, to sort of reinvent and to kind of rethink about how they want to be more agile and more competitive. Again, this will be businesses. >> Okay, great. And have you on, I got it. I got ask you, we've talked about the most important story, obviously 5g edge in AI. I think you nailed it. You're you're in this cross hairs of probably one of the most exciting areas in the tech industry as distributed computing goes that last mile, so to speak pun intended, what, but what's, in your opinion, the most important story that not many people are talking about that should be talking about, what do you think is something that's being written about, but to talk about, but it's super important that that needs to be true. >> Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, a lot of the marketing and talk about 5g is around phones, people talking about their speed on phones. And I think we're finally getting past the discussion of 5g on phones and talking about 5g for like more MTM communications and more, more kind of connecting really trillions of things together. And then that enabled me to is going to be a big, big deal moving forward. And I think that's, we'll start to see probably more coverage of that moving forward. We're on the inside of the industry. So we kind of know it, but I think on the outside of the industry, when people think 5g, they still think phones. And then hopefully that becomes, there's more of a story around all the other pieces being connected with 5g. >> Yeah. And I got to ask you about two quick things before we go open source, openness, interoperability, and security. What, how would you, what's your opinion on those two pillars? >> So I think security is kind of foundational for what we're we've been doing at Microsoft for a long time, whether it's Azure sphere that we're doing for end to end, you know, edge security or any of our security offerings that we have from services perspective. So we're trying to like with Azure percept, we actually build in like TPM encryption of AI models from edge to cloud, as an example of that. So security really is foundational to all of the stuff that we need to do. It cannot be something that you do later or add on it has to be designed in. And I think from an open source perspective, I mean, whether it's our, you know, stewardship of GitHub or the involvement in open source communities, you know, we're, we're totally excited about all the innovation that's happening there and you know, you got to let people participate. And in fact, one of the cool things that's been happening is the amount of developer reach in areas where maybe there isn't, you know, like we've had our build conferences and other Microsoft events. It enables everyone to participate virtually no matter where they are in the world, even if they can't get a ticket to Redmond Washington, and you can still be part of the developer community and learn online and be part of that. >> I think this whole embed developer market's going to come back in and massive volumes of new people as Silicon becomes important. And of course, I can't leave you without asking the Silicon angle question for our team. Silicon is becoming a competitive advantage for whether it's acceleration, offload and or core things, whether it's instance related or use case related, what's the future of Silicon and the telecom and cloud in general. >> For mine. Yeah. So I mean, the advances happening in the Silicon space are fantastic. Whether it's like process advances down to like five nanometers and below. So you're talking about, you know, much lower power consumption, much higher density, you know, packaging and, you know, AI acceleration built in as well as all these other, you know, containerized security things. So that's being driven by a lot by consumer markets, right? So more powerful PCs and phones. And that's also translating into the cloud and for some of the heavy infrastructure. So the leaps and bounds we're seeing even between now and the last MWC in person in 2019 in Silicon has been amazing. And that's going to unblock, you know, all kinds of workloads that could be done at the edge as well as incredible high-performance stuff to be done in the cloud. That's pretty exciting. >> Peter Love that word unblocked, because I think it's going to unblock them that big, you know, rock in the river. It's holding the water back. I think it's going to unleash creativity, innovation, computer science engineering down from Silicon to the modern application developer. Amazing opportunity. I think the edge is going to be the, an awesome area to innovate on. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Sounds good. Thanks for having me. >> People in our senior director, silica telecom as your edge devices for platform services at Microsoft, a lot going on big cloud player, hyperscaler at the edge. This is the final area. In my opinion, that's called the accident habits going to be great innovation. It's part of the cloud cloud is creating massive change in telecom. We've got to cover here in the queue. Thanks for watching. Okay, Dave, that was a great interview with Pete Bernard, senior director, Silicon telecom, Azure edge devices, platform, and services. Microsoft's got all those long titles in the, in the thing, but Silicon is a key thing. You heard my interview wide ranging conversation, obviously with that kind of pedigree and expertise. He's pretty strong, but he, at the end there a little gym on the Silicon. Yeah. Okay. Because that is going to be a power source. You you've been reporting on this. You've been doing a lot of breaking analysis. Microsoft's a hyperscaler they're they're the second player in cloud, Amazon. Number one, Microsoft number two, Google number three, Microsoft. They didn't really say anything. They have something Amazon has got grab a ton, but big directional signal shift there. >> Well, I think it was interesting. It was a great interview by the way, and the things that struck me pizza, and they're focused on the intersection of 5g edge and AI. So AI is all about data-driven workloads. If you look at AI today, most of the AI in the enterprise is done in the cloud and it's modeling, but the future of AI is going to be inferencing at the edge in real time. That's where the real expenses today. And that's where you need new computing architectures. And you're right. I've written about this one of my last breaking analysis on AWS, a secret weapon, and that secret weapon is a new computing architecture. That's not based on traditional x86 architectures. It's based on their own design, but based on arm, because arm is higher performance, lower cost, better price, performance, and way cheaper. And so I guarantee you based on what you just said that, well, Amazon clearly has set the direction with nitro and graviton and, and, and, you know, gravitate on to Microsoft is I think following that playbook. And it's interesting that Pete has Silicon in his title and telecom and an edge they're going after that because it doesn't require new low powered architectures that are going to blow away anything we've ever seen on x86. >> Yeah. I mean, I think that's a killer point. You and I have been covering the enterprise, the old guard rack and stack the boxes. Amazon was early on that clearly winning low power, high density looks like a consumer, like feel in cloud scale, changes the game on economics. And then he also teased out if you squint, there's a lot of stuff to decode. We're going to unpack that video and write probably six or five blog posts there, but he said, 5g is going to change the direct connect. They're already doing it. Microsoft's putting that to the edge, that right in the same playbook as AWS, right on the almost right on the number, put the edge, make it powerful, direct connects connectivity. >> We've seen this before. The consumer piece is key. The consumer leads, we know this and the consumer apple is leading in things like AI and, and Tesla is leading at the edge. That's where you have to look for the innovation. That's going to trickle into the enterprise. And so in the cloud guys, I kicked the hyperscale. You and Sergeant Joe Hall talked about this at the startup showcase that we did was that the cloud guys, the hyperscalers, and a really strong position for the edge. >> I got to tell you, we are on this go to the siliconangle.com. Obviously that's our website, the cube.net. We are reporting on this. It's very nuanced point. But if you look at the cloud players, you can see the telco digital revolution telco. Dr. Is a digital revolution back to you, Adam, in the studio for more coverage, we'll be back at the desk shortly.

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

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "theCube's" coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. We're here in person and remote. This is a physical and virtual. It's a hybrid event, and "theCube's" got wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCube." We've got a great guest here, Adolfo Hernandez, Vice-President, Global Telco Business Unit for Amazon Web Services, AWS. Adolfo, thank you for coming on remotely for this virtual hybrid Mobile World Congress. >> Thanks for having me, John, exciting. >> You have an impressive background in telecom industry. Over the years the technology industry has been great innovation. We've seen, I mean, how many Gs have been we've gone through, but I remember the days when wifi wasn't even around. So (laughing) You got a complete change in the past couple decades. This year, more than ever with the pandemic coming through this, you're starting to see some clear visibility on the trends, and also, this is the first Mobile World Congress in person since 2019, so a lot has changed. What is your view on the marketplace, and what is your message you're telling the telecom industry from Amazon's and your perspective? What do you see? >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, John. This is a fascinating time to be on the cloud, to be at Mobile World Congress. I remember Mobile World Congress 2020 was the first event that actually got canceled. So that was the beginning of the pandemic. And now, here we are, a year and a bit later, working with the leading telecommunications operators with the leading telecommunication sides based on solution providers and what better place that would be in doing that with AWS in this very transformational time in this space. We are supporting telecom operators around the world, as they reinvent communications in many different ways. This is not just one more G, we are definitely transforming the industry. Like any industry, we see telecom operators having to get simplification on their operations and transforming the IT side of the house. So they've go the internal IT, that needs a big transformation, they also got the network IT, everything related with OSS and BSS, and they need to migrate that to the cloud. And we've got a lot of experience by doing that with telcos around the world, to really help them accelerate that journey to the cloud. And we can help them with data center consolidation, migrations and a number of things. So we've got examples like GiffGaff, which is one of the largest MVNOs, and one of the first ones in Europe to go all in on the AWS cloud and they move all the data and the heart of the business there. So once you're sort of dealing with the network, the IT transformation, then you've got to go and look at how do you reinvent and accelerate the delivery of 5G connectivity? Well, that's very current as we're doing now. And we really want to help them because when they accelerate to the cloud, they get more flexibility, they get more agility, they get more cost effectiveness. And if you think about how traditional telco networks were built, where you have to provision a lot of systems you have to provision a lot on the base stations, and then you needed to provision a lot of systems on the Ram side, and then you needed to put aggregation centers, traffic centers, and then you would have the headquarters, and then you would have all the network functions, going from the radio all the way into the center. All of the systems needed to be provision for peak capacity. They sort of famous Mother's Day moment. As you move to the cloud, you can provision on the different parts of the cloud, you can provision on the AWS Outpost, you can provision on locals phone, you can provision on regions, and you leverage right away the experience that we've got on all of our infrastructure, reducing costs, getting a lot of flexibility and being able to embark, just and consume what you need. And, an example of that, it's been a Telefonica Vivo in Brazil. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago, and they've accelerated their move by deploying a 5G standalone cloud native platform. And that gives them a lot of automation capabilities. It gives them faster CI/CD/CT. So really cool stuff that you couldn't do in the old ways of building networks- >> It's interesting you mentioned CI/CD pipeline and developers. To me that's what comes to my mind when I think of AWS, the enablement of developers, now the enterprise. Now you've got the telco cloud and Amazon is not known for being a 5G player, but you guys are enabling a lot of 5G. Could you address that question? How is Amazon web services enabling 5G? What's your answer to that? >> So first of all, I have to say that 5G is an absolutely great example that this is a lot about moving to the cloud. 5G is cloud native, it's cloud friendly. You can virtualize pretty much every function. You can separate every function from the hardware and the software move everything to the cloud. And that is really lending itself to move to a cloud delivery model. As we were talking about earlier, we are enabling people to go and take the AWS infrastructure like AWS Outpost and bringing all the AWS infrastructure, all the services, all the APIs and all the tools that you have on AWS, virtually to any single location. And that allows you to really deploy themes like thousands of cell sites across a run, you couldn't do that before. On the AWS local zones, you can take everything that compute storage databases and a lot of different services. And those are perfect for large metro areas where you need to do a lot of network traffic aggregation, and this makes them really good to deploy in parts of the network core. Again, that's another re-innovation. And then you can look at then the regions and the regions have everything that you need from a compute storage and services perspective. And that those are really well suited for BSS for OSS to keeping the network running and to do all of that. And you can do that today, leveraging existing infrastructure. You don't have to acquire that, you don't have to provision, that you don't have to provision for the peak capacity and then you don't have to install and manage, and I think that's a serious breakthrough for the industry. >> Okay, so let me just capture that, 'cause I heard a bunch of things that I really like, cloud native 5G. What does cloud native 5G mean for the telco industry specifically? >> Well, I think if I had to put it down to one thing, it's just about making it really easy to roll out. And it's about being able to deploy easily to automate easily, so you can free up investment and you can free up resources and you can free up overhead. You can really start taking advantage of all that flexibility and scalability and automation that you get with the cloud and you apply that to a network, and that is the very first time we're able to do that in wireless. And it's just going to give you a lot of advantages. Look at Dish. We made this announcement with Dish that they are moving with one of the industry first 5G cloud native networks out there. Look at the example I talked about earlier, Telefonica Vivo, we're doing that 5G standalone solution. So you're going to be seeing, this is just the beginning, but this is going to be not the end because there's a lot of interest in getting these benefits. >> I saw the Dave Brown announcement with Dish a while back just recently. So I want to ask you, does Graviton processors play a role on the Dish deal? Do you mind answering that? If you comment on that? >> Yeah, I think you might remember Dave Brown being very proud of everything that Graviton2 processors can do in terms of increase in the price performance, helping telco operators, not only with the price performance factor, but also with the energy equation. So it's just really exciting to have that differentiation and being able to deliver that innovation and that value to telco operators in a cloud native 5G network. >> I got to ask you about some of the open source and cloud scale things coming together. That's a big trend I'm seeing here at Mobile World Congress. Openness, multi-vendor, scaling up quickly, provisioning stuff fast and easy, leveraging existing technologies and of course, developer friendly. So with that, I got to ask you, what's all the big deal about with this Open RAN. Obviously radios are key and wireless. What does Open RAN mean? Can you take us through, what's the importance of this? >> Yeah, Open RAN is an industry wide or mostly industry-wide initiative to look into effectively trying to apply some of these open and sharing models to the RAN. You've got vendors and you've got telco operators participating. But what we do and you know as well John, 'cause you've been working with AWS for a while, you know, that we're very customer focused, and 90% of what we do is what we hear that they are trying to solve because it's the things that matter to them. So what we engage with them, what we engage with somebody like Dish, and they tell us that they are interested in Open RAN, we will go and partner with the right partners who can provide the right solution to deliver on that Open RAN. And you've seen we signed agreements with the likes of Nokia to do research and solutions on cloud RAN. You also saw a couple of weeks ago, we did another collaboration announcement with Mavenir, to deliver not only cloud run, but I said of 5G solutions like IMS, the 4G 5G converge packet, or messaging and others. So we are engaging with the complete ecosystem on our customer's behalf to deliver whatever thereafter, and Open RAN is one of these topics and that we're delivering to operators like Deutsche and others in the market. >> Do you think that this new shift with cloud is going to increase the surface area? 'Cause that to me is the big theme I'm seeing what this new shift, as we look at, even telco cloud and the Edge, it's the classic surface area. And this is well known in the security world, but the there's no perimeter anymore. The surface area for security is everywhere. So things have changed. But telco just seems like the edge is expanding, you got satellite, you got space, you got more 5G, more commercial, so much more surface area. What's the impact going to be to the industry and to applications? >> Well, I think what we're seeing is 5G comes out there because there is a need for more data, more bandwidth obviously increased security, new standards, but there is also about latency, latency reduction. And I think that's really going to change the paradigm as we inject these increased responsiveness, these low latency, closer to the edge, and we bring the applications and we bring the compute and we bring storage as we do with wavelength right through to the edge as we are doing with Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI, SK Telecom and operators around the world. This is going to enable a number of transformational use cases for society, whether they are in virtual reality, whether they are with autonomous driving, whether it's about automating and getting more intelligence into manufacturing processes, there is just so much potential to transform society. And it all comes back with these sort of new 5G and some of the themes that enables moving closer to the edge. So as I said, really interesting times. >> Adolfo Hernandez, Vice President of Global Telco Business Unit with Amazon Web Services. Thanks for the great insight here on "theCube" for our Mobile World Congress coverage. Really, really great insight. Thanks so much. >> Thanks, John, delighted to be here. >> If you don't mind, I'd like to just quickly shift gears to something while I got you here on the industry. Adolfo you're very well known in the industry for someone who knows how to turn things around. You've done that in the past. You've been part of growth companies, you've been part of companies that have refocused. Telco has been a big change over people looking at this new opportunity as a growth opportunity. And people are looking at divesting some non-critical divisions and looking at acquisitions. I mean the private equity's on fire right now, and you're starting to see a lot more formation because there's more visibility into territory to take, there's more opportunities to be had. So there's more potential revenue than there is you can do on the cost cutting side. So everyone I talked to who's been in the industry has got their eyes are really popping out of their head, they're saying there's more opportunities if we can reconfigure our resources to take advantage of cloud. You're an expert in this area. For the folks out there who are in the boardrooms, cranking away thinking through how to organize for the cloud scale, what would be your advice to those teams? >> Well, I mean, there's a lot of insight to be had from the experience that AWS we've gained through the years, of doing this IT. And you definitely have to get a top down vision. Obviously it's really got to start at the C-suite, is moving to the cloud for what it bring. Either faster pace of innovation, the cost reduction, the agility. And that's you've got to be thinking about going to the cloud top down. Then the next thing you've got to go and say, "Okay, what are the parts of my operation "that I can go after with cloud? "Where do I start? "Do I start with the IT applications? "Do I start with some new go-to market initiatives? "Do I start by infusing some machine learning capabilities "into existing operations? "Do I start by building a data links "that I can go and monetize, "or I can go on and use to generate "best at customer service, "or I can go and fundamentally transform my networks?" Now, every telco's going to start in in different place, but I would say is you've got to start looking at that agility, that faster innovation, that better use of resources that cloud brings to telco for the very first time in a time in, in decades. And then if you're going to do that, I would strongly recommend people to talk to the provider that's got the capabilities, the broader set of services, the deepest set of services, and the most relevant experience to do that, 'cause we've been doing that in IT, and we've been working on telcos now for five plus years. And we've got pretty much every relationship. And as you know, John, this is really important. In telco you depend on collaborations on ISBs on software vendors, and every vendor out there, every software company out there will develop certainly on AWS. So we would be delighted to engage with them and help them move forward. >> Yeah, and Andy Jassy the CEO of AWS last year at re:Invent really made that the hallmark of his keynote around get those teams together, the executives top-down be a builder, think like a builder. McKinsey just put out a report, trillion dollar opportunities that no one sees yet that's coming. So a lot of emphasis on revenue, new revenue opportunities that are coming. And certainly this has been something that telcos been looking for for a long time. So great opportunity and thank you for sharing your insight. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay this is "theCube's" coverage of ABS Mobile World Congress, 2021, I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Thanks so much, and we're back here live. Live, I love saying that, at cloud city, at Mobile World Congress. Barcelona at the Fira. It's just been crazy here all week. We've been going wall to wall coverage. Am really excited to have John Savill here, as a principal cloud solutions architect at Microsoft. John, welcome to Barcelona, man. Come on in the cube. >> Oh yeah, thank you for having me. I'm not quite getting that Barcelona vibe here, but seems great. >> Well, you were just tell you look great. You just did an iron man up in Idaho, so awesome. Congratulations on completing that and many more in your future, I'm sure. You have a really interesting background. You know, in addition to your amazing cardiovascular capabilities. As a cloud architect, you've got a long history, 20 plus year history, you know, digging in at Microsoft. In your spare time you write books on architecture and you've got a great YouTube channel, a lot of subscribers. Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so it really started out 25 years ago. I was playing around with windows and technology and I just tried to share information. So I created a website artifact.com and I wrote magazine articles. And then people asked me to write some books and it's really evolved from there. And the most recent thing is actually the YouTube and I really enjoy doing the videos. It's a lot more rapid in terms of creating the content and sharing it, whereas the book takes six months. You'd write the book and then with technology moving as fast as it is, especially the cloud, you write a book on the cloud and then it's published and it's out on date. And so now this ability to create the content and get it to people a few minutes later, it's just phenomenal. So it's my hobby and my passion. And it's the best of both worlds for me. >> I love a CICD of books. Okay, Let's get into it. We've been talking all week about and actually drawing a lot of parallels with the traditional enterprise IT business and what's happening in Telco In one stop I just talking about the shifts in responsibilities for architects and the organizational roles, when you go from, you know, on-prem, everything's inside of a virtual machine, when you go to the cloud, there's a lot more optionality. As you just pointed out, things are a lot faster. What have you seen in your experience what's different? What should we be thinking about? >> Yeah, so exactly, as you said, it on premise really everything is a virtual machine. It's an OS that you have to manage, like the thing about the patching, the security, the policy. And then I have to put things inside this virtual machine, but that's my unit of work. Some coming to the site and look at containers on premises. And then they struggle with managing one even orchestrator. So I'm managing Kuberneters and ITs and there's work there. When you move to the cloud, you have all these other types of service. You think about serverless kind of at an end of a spectrum where, hey, I just have some code. I want to run based on some event, maybe a schedule, maybe a web hook, some trigger, some event happens. And I only pay for when it's doing work. But what I care about is my code or my focus is this is my code. I don't care about any of the other stuff that makes it work. I just can focus on my code, but you still have the options. I can do containers. I can do virtual machines if that's what I want to do. But my responsibility can really laser focus just on the business value. Generally as a company, I don't really care about managing an OS or patching, I want to see what differentiates my business from someone else. And when I moved to the cloud, I can shift my focus to just that business value and let the cloud vendor take care of the responsibility of keeping the things running, enables me to shift and just focus on value, which is key. >> And as a cloud vendor, that allows you to price by consumption in a very transparent way, and as a customer, now I know what I'm paying for and I can align that investment as you were just pointing out with the business value. >> Oh, absolutely. Right, so again, on premises, we have bits of equipment. We have this server, with memory and CPU, and generally we have different usage. We have peaks and we have lows. We have the same bit of hardware I'm paying for all of the time, we have disaster recovery. I'm paying for that all of the time. If I have customers all over the world, well, speed of light is speed of light. I have to wrap boxes all over the world in the cloud. I can have services dynamically scale based on the need, based on the work coming in. I can scale the amount of resource% I have available to meet that. So I'm optimizing my costs to only pay for what I actually need at any given moment. And of course we have regions all over the world. So suddenly now I can be super close to my customers. So its right, it completely changes how the companies can think about spending the money to only spend what they have to spend on what they want to spend it on. >> Yeah so the last decade clearly the aha moment for enterprise tech, just in terms of really understanding those benefits. And we saw it, you know, it actually first hit right around the financial crisis. When you know, all the CFOs said, "hey, shift your CapEx to OPEX immediately. And then we came out of that downturn and people said, "hey, this stuff, this cloud stuff actually is really good. Let's start to really change our business models around it." And, and there's a lot of relevance for Telco here. And you've talked about cloud as a, a flat layer, three network, what do you mean by that? >> Yes, if you think about on premises, you have bits of wire. Now that might be copper wire, it might be fiber, but you have these bits of wire that connects stuff. And I can think about connecting different bits of staff, to different network cards to enable me to separate systems and how they can communicate to each other and segregate. So that's how I've always thought about on premise is that why I separate stuff. A little bits of wire connecting different bits of network card. Well in the cloud, you don't have that. It's all software defined networking. If I think about a construct where I put my resources like a virtual network, it's just an IP of the layer three network there are no bits of wire. I can plug into different places. There are no different physical network cards. So we have to shift our thinking, and it can be very difficult. If I'm used to being an on-prem network admin, I'm used to the idea of the lines and cables and multiple nicks with different bits of copper plugged into them. When I go to the cloud, I have to shift that and think it is this flat layer three network. And when I want to segment things, now it's software defined networking walls, networks security groups, maybe botched appliances that can inspect the traffic. But it's a huge shift in thinking to how we now segregate and control how that networking actually functions. And of course, if you then want to extend that to hybrid connectivity, well, how does that then map to why my on-prem network? And I want to extend that to make it completely seamless into the cloud. >> Yeah, I don't want to come back to that, but I want to ask you about some of the organizational roles. 'Cause you've been at this for a couple of decades. So you've seen, you know, you remember the days of when you know, the expertise in managing a LAN a report was, you know, highly valued. It's not anymore. And so your colleagues, your peers in the industry, the architects that are your customers, they have to reinvent themselves. And that that's really now beginning to happen in Telco. So I wonder if you could talk about your thoughts, how you're thinking about cloud in telecom. >> Yeah, so I think what's happening is you still need skills. What shifts is, what is the type of skills you talked about LANs and managing storage. Well, you don't manage LANs anymore, but in the cloud, there's different types of storage service. There's different performance characteristics. IOPS throughput capacity. So we have to shift how we actually think about those skillings so I still need to architect accordingly. It's only to make sure I have the right characteristics, that it's just a different unit of work. I'm working with different tools now. And I think from a kind of telco perspective, they're really looking now, well, how can we leverage the cloud, Telcos in particular, have a huge pressure around very low latency. They have to be close to their customers. They deliver critical services. You can think about emergency services. They have to have super high availability. That's when you start moving to the cloud, they can now embrace the fact that well cloud has these various constructs like different physical structures within independent power calling communications. They have different regions, so I can be close my customers and kind of replicate between them. Through the Telco, you have to kind of firstly think about, well, okay, I still need to adhere to all of these core requirements. That quality of service, giving my customers a great experience, but now we have these different tools available in how we can actually deliver that. I think also a big shift is from a security perspective. I think especially Telcos love the idea of the network. The network is the be all and end all of security. When you start using the cloud network is still super important, but identity becomes this huge factor as well, because now I don't have this moat around my physical box. That copper wire doesn't have this disconnect. I'm in the cloud as so now we think about, well, how does the identity play into actually securing our resources? Because now we're going to have all these different cloud services that are going to talk to each other. We need to do that in a secure way. So the identity becomes this much bigger part of my architecture networks still super important, but now identity bumps up there as well. And I think that that's a key thing for Telcos is that there's a shift there. >> Yeah, well on speaking of shifts, a big conversation and Theme CubeCon this year was the shift left with security and designing security in. And really when you think about infrastructure as code, the programmable network, and you combine that with the cloud, I mean, Microsoft has gone through the greatest transformation of any tech company in the history of tech. And it did so with a cloud first mentality. And now you see that cloud expanding. It's clearly on prem you're bringing that you're connecting those, but now the edge. 5g networks and the it's very, you know, super exciting, you know, new compute architectures and new programming models. So this you're essentially building this abstraction layer that developers can really take advantage of having consistency across all those physical locations, really hiding the underlying complexity. I wonder if you could comment on that. >> Not, exactly. You're a 100% correct. So right Azure was a cloud service. So we had this cloud and we had services operating in that cloud, app services, data services, machine learning but you still have requirements for on-premises components. You talk about the edge. Well, hey, I may be, I'm using a private wireless network. I have my RAD, I have the core kind of packet switching components. Well, I still want things on premises then I need compute, I need workers running on my edge, close to where the data's being generated IOT sensors. What Azure has is yes, it has the public cloud services. Then it has things like Azure like edge, Azure stack hub, Azure like HCI that let me actually have things on premises in different form factors. But the can now run consistently like Azure services. I can manage them through Azure services, policy, security constructs, identity constructs, and then with things like if I have Kubernetes any kind of Kubernetes CNCF-compliant, I can actually now sync Azure arc, manage it through the cloud and I can deploy SQL manage instance, Postgres hyper-scale, machine learning, app services, serverless functions now running on-prem. So as a developer, as an architect, I create my solution, but now I can run it in the cloud, I can run it on premises. I don't have to make that conscious decision and do things differently. If my requirements change, I can move or do hybrid. So it really is a game changer. The customer gets the choice. I can leverage these technologies. I can write code and architect solutions and then run it where makes the most sense for me. >> Yeah, and we just got a couple of minutes here, just as we saw new applications emerge in the cloud, we're going to see new applications emerge at the edge. The developers will win the edge, I've said it many times. I'll give you the last thoughts, John. >> No, I just think it's a, it's an amazing, exciting time. I mean, you talked about kind of the whole shift left more and more companies are moving into kind of the whole infrastructures code and the dev ops models. And now we see security embedded all the way at the start of our pipeline. But I really just think this is the time now as a customer, as a Telco, you do have this fantastic set of capabilities available to you in the cloud, but you're always going to have, I think that on-premise is component as well. So you don't have to compromise. I don't have to say, well, I'd love to use this service, but wow, I had this anchor or I had this requirement on prem. I can use the same services. You have that complete choice. You can operate in the same way, the same pipelines, the same dev ops, the same security and one where it makes the most sense for you. I mean, it's a fantastic time. >> Well, John, thanks so much for virtually coming into Barcelona. We've got this great hybrid event, good luck in your career and in your Ironman competitions, all the best to you. Thank you. >> Thank you for having me, the pleasure. >> It's been our pleasure. So we're here, live at the, the Fira in Barcelona. We're in Cloud City. I'll tell you, I'll set it up. It's not like jammed packed where you can't move, you know, good thing we're in, still in the COVID, but it's like the post isolation economy here, but we're really excited to be sharing with you. We're going to go back to the studio to Adam Burns right now.

(light music) >> Okay, we're back here in theCube On The Floor. We're at Cloud City thanks to everyone in the studio. We're here and we bring all the action from the floor. Danielle Royston is about to walk on. We got a great remote interview. Also it's a physical event but it's virtual, so it's a hybrid event with people coming in remotely we've got Mark Collins, Senior Vice President of Commercial Product Management ZephyrTel. Mark, thanks for coming on. You're head of the Product Management, you're responsible for product vision. Calling in, or remote-in in from Ireland great to see you, wish you were here. >> Thank you, John, I wish I was there, too. >> We had a great chat yesterday with Michael a CEO of the company. Public Cloud is a big driver what you guys are part of, it's a sea change. For some of the world, it's an obvious shift it's been going on for a long time, in Telco it's new. What's the story give us the vision of the product. >> So, ZephyrTel are actually a provider of multiple products within the Telco space, and one of our visions is very much about bringing those products into a marketplace capability that Telco's can start engaging in and interacting with them much more simply than they would've been with their vendor suppliers in the past. >> What's the difference between Cloud on premises and in the Public Cloud for Telco, what's the psychology right now of Telco? Most people have lifted and shifted and re-platformed with the cloud in the enterprise side, certainly that's been going on for many many years, now you're seeing people re-factor their business in the cloud and get really neat new advantages. Not just cost optimization and benefits with the re-platforming, or lift and shift, but they got new capabilities. Where's the Telco adoption on this spectrum of re-platforming and re-factoring the public cloud? Early, are they toe in the water? Are they jumping in? What's happening? >> I think very very early like, I've worked in the Telco space for the last 20 years, and certainly for the last five, all of the buzz has been about moving to cloud native solutions (applause in the background) But a lot of the Telco vendors that are right there are still very much looking ahead in supplying solutions (dialogue drowned out by thunderous applause) >> Okay, DR just walked in, sorry to interrupt, letting the folks know that we've got the big entourage here in Cloud City, Danielle Royston, is the CEO of TelcoDR and the CEO of Totogi. And we've started to see TelcoDR, DR being digital revolution or Danielle Royston, however you want to look at the DR part of it. But really a game changer in the Telco industry put a real dent in the universe here with Cloud City, Danielle Royston, just a little entourage there and a cheer for her coming back to her home base here, MWC, see where the Cube is, and where the main stage is Mark, sorry to interrupt you there, continue. So, are they there? Are they jumping in? Is there fear? Are they building? Are they just still operating? We just had a little segment discussing like, the difference between being a builder versus an operator like the confluence of war time and peace time. >> I actually think there's a lot of fear, like I think if you look at the way Telco look at clouds, one of the biggest blockers that I think a lot of them face is that they have this perception that their network, and what they provide as a solution to customers is a stable business model. Like there's been very little input as from the outside to force them into replacing some of their outdated core technologies and they have some very very legacy views on how they model TCO in the future cost to their business which, unless they change those attitudes, some of what they can benefit from the public cloud is going to be lost on them. >> You mentioned legacy, one of the things I want to get your thoughts on quickly is that, the notion of it's always been a customized game, I call it the OT world, you know, operating technologies versus IT, information technology. Different mindsets, you know, one's very IP driven write software, open source now, drives that but you have a lot of legacy, and they build custom solutions when the world seems to be spinning towards open and standardized. What's your take? >> Yeah, I see that as a huge challenge when you look at what Telcos want from a software perspective. Like, they want products, but they still have this huge expectation that their specific needs are going to be addressed, right? And the challenge I see there is that when you talk about customization, most of the time that drives a divergence away from what a product is, to a bespoke solution, which creates a huge number of issues for service providers when it comes to how they do upgrades in the future, or for that matter, what they ultimately have to pay the vendors for the professional services to build those customizations. >> Talk about the Telco's consideration for interfaces, how they should handle interfaces and other standards because, it's an EPI economy, we know that, but now as things start to get more interconnected integration is going to be a big thing, especially with the Edge becoming a much more of a competitive and dynamic, and people care about the Edge cause it's consumer, it's education, it's healthcare it's not just some device on a network it's actually, societal impact, social change, real value. >> Yeah, no, I 100% agree, like I mean, you could probably credit Telcos for what been the way of the normal for network in the last 20 years with regards to all the standardization that's happened in bodies like 3GPP, but I guess in the IT world or in the domain of how you actually deliver capabilities to your end customer, or even in the experiences that you develop for your consumers. A lot of that has been bespoke development, software plugged together, built on premise and not necessarily taking advantage of the openings that you see on the RAM and on the network side of things >> Mark, I want to ask you while I have you here I know we've got a couple of minutes left, but I want to get your thoughts on this since it's been since February 2019 since Mobile World Congress had an event so in dog years or internet years, whatever metaphor you want to use, it's been a long time and a lot of time has passed. What's your assessment of where the industry is? >> I think all you have to do is look back at the last year and a half and see the sea change that has happened in a huge amount of industries around how they've reacted to the ability to deliver new capabilities very quickly on the back of what happened to us with COVID. And I think Telco has in a lot of cases, have been at the forefront of providing network experiences for people as they move to working from home, but they haven't necessarily had the same agility or the same ability to make change when it comes to the customer experiences in the products and services that they build on top. And I think they need to take advantage of what everybody else has been able to do with public clouds in the last year. >> Yep, and I think infrastructures code changes everything DevOps, which is a cloud term, is development and operations, they have to work together, now it's DevSecOps, so I think the same thing is going to happen to Telcos and I'm a big fan and bullish on the Telcos business model because if you embrace the change, if you ride that wave, and, right, you're not going to be driftwood and that is all about keeping the change going and keeping it real relative to the value, because Telco saved us during COVID. Right? So the operational aspect of the network didn't crash, we had some bad zoom meetings here and there but for the most part, people lived and they survived. So, got to give props to that, and that's the purpose now it's next level. Edge applications have to come on board faster, we need more software. How does that happen in your mind? >> I think a lot of that has to come from vendors like ourselves who start providing a different way and a different approach for how operators can consume the software that they purchase, right? Like, if they keep working with the same vendors that they have today, they'll spec their requirements they'll write down what they need and they'll ask somebody to build it for them and that'll take a long time. By the time they've actually got it built, it'll probably be the wrong thing, or likely will have moved on if you look at the pace of change that we have seen in the last year with COVID and everything else. And I think a cloud specialist vendor like ourselves can come and provide a huge amount of value to an operator when we're building a solution that many operators can consume within our marketplace products. >> Awesome. Mark, great to have you on, 30 seconds left, put a plug in for ZephyrTel what are you working on, you hiring? You've got 30 seconds, go. >> We're hiring, we're growing, we're presenting a number of different solutions in Mobile World Congress, looking at both customer experience in IOT and a number of different areas where we're heavily involved. Absolutely come seek out the people from ZephyrTel that are there and look at the demos and meet with the guys on the ground they've got a huge amount of information to share. >> Awesome. Mark Collins CEO Vice President of Commercial Product Management, really changing the game, making service providers get the value from the network and making it easy for having meaningful exchange that's positive impact, changing the world, and really making it happen. Of course, let's send it back to the studio, Adam and the team.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back here at theCUBE on this floor in CLOUD CITY, the center of all the action at Mobile World Congress. I'm John Brown your host. Michael current CTO of Virta San is here with me remote because this is a virtual event as well, this is a hybrid event. The first industry hybrid event, Greg would be back in real life on the floor, Michael, you coming in remotely. Thanks for joining us here in the cube in cloud city. >> Thanks for having me and said the beer. >> We were just talking on camera about. He went to Michigan and football, all that good time while we were waiting from Adam to pseudo great stuff, but let's get into what you guys are doing. You've got a great cloud news, we're going to get to, but take a minute to explain what you guys do first. >> So Virtasant helps organizations of any size thrive in the cloud. So we have a unique combination of proprietary technologies, such as our cloud optimization platform that we'll talk about in a minute and a global team of experts that helps companies make the most of the cloud from getting to the cloud and building the cloud to optimizing the cloud all the way to managing the cloud at scale. >> Well, you got a lot of experience dealing with the enterprise, a lot of customer growth over the years, great leader. The cloud dynamic here is the big story at mobile world congress, this year, the change over, I won't say change over per se, but certainly the shift or growth of cloud on top of telco, you guys have some news here at mobile world congress. Let's share the news, what's the big scoop? >> So we have an automated cloud optimization platform that helps companies automatically understand your usage patterns and do spend fully, automatically. And we focus first on AWS is the biggest cloud provider, but starting this week, we wanted announces we're actually going live with our GCP product, which means people who are on the GCP cloud platform can now leverage our platform to constantly understand usage patterns and spend and automatically take action to reduce spend. So we typically see customers save over 50% when they use our platform. So now GCP customers can take advantage of the same capabilities that our AWS customers take advantage of every day. >> Talk about the relationships as you get deeper. And this seems to be the pattern I want to just unpack it. You don't mind a little bit the relationship with Google and this announcement and Amazon you're tightly coupled with them, is it more integration? Talk about what makes these deals different and special for your customers? What's what's, what's about them. What's the big deal? >> Well, I think for us, obviously we think that, you know, the public cloud's the future, right? And obviously cloud city and all the different companies there agree with us, and we think that much like, you know, you don't, you don't generate your own electricity. We don't think you're going to generate you're to you're going to build your own technology infrastructure. For the most part, we think that pretty much all compute will be in the public cloud. And obviously AWS is the market leader in the largest cloud provider in the, but you know, GCP, especially with telecom has some compelling offerings. And we think that, you know, organizations are going to want choice. Many will go multicloud, meaning they'll have 1, 2, 3 of the big providers and move workloads across those. But even those who choose one cloud provider, you know, each cloud provider has their strengths and different companies will choose different providers. And they're all, you know, they've all got strong capabilities and their uniqueness. So we want to make sure that whether, you know, an organization goes across all cloud providers or they choose one that we can support them no matter what the workloads look like, and so for us, you know, developing deep relationships with each of the public cloud providers, but also, you know, expanding our full set of capabilities to support all of them is critically important because we do think that there's going to be, you know, a handful of large public cloud providers and obviously AWS and GCP are among them. >> Yeah, I mean, I talk to people all the time and even, you know, we're an Amazon customer, pretty robust cloud in the bills out of control is what's, what's this charge for it. There's more services to tap into, you know, it's like first one's on me, you know? And then next thing you know, you're, you're consuming a hell of a lot of new services, but there's value there and there's breaths a minute for the cloud, we all love that. But just as a random aside here, I want to get your thoughts real quick, if you don't mind, this idea of a cloud economist has become part of a new role in an organization, certainly SRS is DevOps. Then you starting to get into people who actually can squint through the data and understand the consumption and be more on the economics side, because people are changing how they report their earnings. They're changing how they report their KPIs based upon the usage and costs, and... What, is this real? what's your thoughts on that? I know that's a little random, but I want to get your, get your thoughts on that. >> Well, yeah, it's interesting that that's been a development. What I will say is, you know, the economics of cloud are complicated and they're still changing and still emerging, so I think that's probably more of a reaction to how dynamic the environment is then kind of a long-term trend. I mean, admittedly for us we hope that, you know, a lot of that analysis and the data that's required and will be provided by our platform. So you can think about it as, you know, a digital or AI powered cloud economist. So I don't, I don't know, hopefully our customers can use the platform and get everything they need and they won't need to go out and hire a cloud economist. That sounds expensive. >> Well, I think one of the things that sounds like great opportunities to make that go away, where you don't have to waste a resource to go through the cost side. I want to get your thoughts on this. This comes up all the time, certainly on Twitter, I'm always riffing on it. It comes up on a lot of my interviews and private chats with people about their, their cloud architecture, spend can get out of control pretty quickly. And data is a big part of it. Moving data is always going to be... Especially Amazon and Google, moving data in and out of the cloud is great. Now with the edge, I just talked to Bill Vass at a Amazon web service. He's the VP of engineering. You can literally bring the cloud to the edge and all the clouds are going to be doing this, these edge hubs. So that's going to process data at the edge, but it's also going to open up more services, right? So, you know, it's complicated enough as it is, spend is getting out of control. And it's only seems to be getting out of control even more. How do you talk to customers? I'd want to not be afraid they want to jump in, but they also want to have a hedge. Yeah, what's your, what's your take on your story? >> I think there's a lot of debate right now as to whether or not, you know, moving to the cloud from a cost perspective is cost-effective or more costly. And there's a pretty healthy debate going on at the moment. I think that the reality is, you know, yes, the cloud makes it easier for you to take on new services and bring on new things, and that of course drives spend, but it also unlocks incredible possibilities. What we try to do is help organizations take advantage of those possibilities and kind of the capabilities of the cloud while managing spend, and it's a complex problem, but it's a solvable problem. So for us, we think that, you know the job of the cloud providers is to, you know, continue to innovate and continue to bring more and more capability to bear so that organizations can transform through technology, the job of the teams using that technologies is to really leverage those capabilities, to build and to innovate and to serve their customers. And what we want to do is enable them to do that in a cost-effective manner, and we believe, and we have data to prove that if you do public cloud, right, it's cheaper because you know, those, those organizations, you know, much like, you know, at the turn of the industrial revolution, factories used to have their own power plants because you couldn't effectively reliably and kind of cost-effectively generate power at scale. Obviously no one does that now. And I think with the cloud providers, that's the same thing. I mean, they're investing in proprietary hardware, tons of software, tons of automation. They're highly secure. You know, at the end of the day, they're going to always be able to provide a given capability at a lower cost point. Like, of course they need to make profit. So there's a bit of margin in there, but, you know, at the end of the day, we think that both the flexibility and capability of it combined with their ability to operate at scale gives you a better value proposition, especially if you do it right. And that's what we want to focus on is, you know, the answer is there. You just need the right data and the right intelligence to find it. >> Totally, I totally agree with you. In fact, I had a big debate with Martine Casada at Andreessen Horowitz about cloud repatriation, and he was calling his paradigm. Do you focus on the cost or the revenue? And obviously they have Dropbox, which is a big example of that, and I even interviewed the Zynga guys and they actually went back to Amazon, although they didn't report that, but I'm a big believer that if you can't get the new revenue, then you're in cosmos then, and there are the issues, but again, I don't want to go there right now. I'll talk about that another time, but I want to get your, I want to get the playbook, so first of all, I love what you do, I think it's an opportunity to take that heavy lifting away from customers around understanding cost optimization. A lot of people don't know how to do it. So take us through a playbook. What are some best practices that you guys have seen to help people figure this out? What do you say to somebody, help me, Michael, I'm in a world of hurt, what do I do? What's the playbook? Can you give some examples of day in the life? >> Sure, so I think, I think the first thing is know what you're spending money on which sounds obvious, but you know, there's cloud environments are complicated, especially at scale. There's hundreds of thousands of skews and lots of different usage patterns. And I think the first thing is understand what you're spending money on. Number two is understand what you're getting for that spend. So, you know, what value are you driving with that spend? And then number three is put the information in the hands of the people who can do something about it. And I think that is, is one of the things that we really focus on is, you know, we built our product from an engineering focus first. It was engineers solving the problem of understanding how to keep cloud costs in control. And so our whole principle is give the people, working with the technology, the data to make good decisions and give them the power to act on it. And so, you know, a lot of companies say, "Oh, we're spending more over here. Or maybe we should look at that." But, but what we believe is actually be specific, where are you spending money? Where exactly are you spending too much? And what should you do about that? And give that information to the people who can take action, which are the engineers. And then lastly make it important in the organization because there's a ton of competing priorities. And what we've found is that, you know, where there's leadership support there's results. And so I think if you do those four things, you know, results will follow. Now, obviously, you know, you need to understand specific utilization patterns and know what to do with different kinds of resources and all of that stuff is complicated, but there are certainly solutions out there. Ours included who helped you with that. So if you get the other four things, right, plus you have some help, you can keep it under control and actually not just keep it under control, but operate in an environment that's much cheaper than hosting all this technology yourself and much more flexible. >> That's a great point, I mean, the fact that you mentioned earlier, the engineering piece that is so true people I've talked to, you mean our experiences and it's pretty common. The DevOps team tends to get involved in things like making sure you're buying reserve instances or all kinds of ways to optimize patterns, and that's also an issue, right? I mean, first of all, it makes sense that they're doing it, but also engineering time is being spent on essentially accounting at that point. Demonstrates the shift, I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying that got to be realistic. It's a time sink for the engineering when they're not engineering accounting, or should they, this is a legit question, it's not so much they should or shouldn't, I mean, if you say to someone, "Hey, you're paid to build and write software and you're spending your time solving accounting problems." That's obviously a mismatch. But when you talk about SREs and DevOps, Michael, it's kind of what might not be a bad thing, right? I mean, so how do people react to that? Are they kind of scratching their head on the same way? Or are you guys the solution to that? >> Well, I think that at first they are, but for us, at least it's, you know, we don't want them trying to understand the intricacies of a savings plan or understanding kind of the different options for compute instances. What we want them to do is we give them all the information. So our approach is give them all the information. They need to quickly make a decision, let them make a decision, like push a button and then let the change happen automatically. So if you think about it, you know, the amount of time they spend is, is a minute. That's the goal because then we can use their expertise. So it's not a finance person or an accountant doing research and making decisions that may or may not make technical sense and then looping in a bunch of people and they all talk, and then all that, that kind of whole process it's now here is a data-driven observation and recommendation. You have context to say yes or no, if you push the button and then you say, yes, then, you know, the change happens. If you say, no, the system learns. >> It's building right into the pipeline and they're shifting left to security, it's the same concept. It's really a great thing. I really think you're onto something big.,I love this story. It's kind of one of those things where reality's there. Michael, we've got 30 seconds left. I want to get your thoughts to share what put a plug in for the company, what you guys are doing, what are you looking at higher? You got a 30 second plug, go plug the company, what do you got? >> Well, you know, we think that, you know, for any organization, big or small, trying to make the most of the public cloud and be cloud first, you know, we, we bring a unique set of expertise, automation, and technology capabilities to bear, to help them thrive in the cloud and make the most of it. So, you know, obviously we would love to work with any company that, that wants to be cloud first and fully embrace the public cloud. I think we've got all the tools to help them thrive. >> Yeah, and I think, I think the confluence of business logic technology engineering working together is a home run. It's only going to get more stronger, so congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Adam, back to you in the studio for more action, theCUBE is out, we'll see you later.

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

(bright, upbeat music) >> Thank you, Adam, you're looking great in the studio. Those clouds going behind you in that beautiful blue sky. Okay. We're excited here at the Fira in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 21. Yes, it's on. Yes, it's alive and I'd say it's pretty well. Andriy Zhylenko is here as the CEO of Porta One and Roman Khalenkov is joining us as well He's the Chief Commercial Officer of Porta One. Gents, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> You're very welcome. You guys are local Barcelonans now. That's awesome. You've came in from Russia. You had this great idea for a company. Tell us about Porta One. >> Well, Porta One exists for over 20 years and we focus on helping Telco operators to deliver services more efficiently or create something new by providing an open architecture platform. And we mostly focus on tier two and three operator. So, I think about us as this weapon they can use to fight the Goliath; the large telecom operators because they need flexibility and the ability to get there faster. >> I mean, I love that, right. And we're going to talk about the cloud is a key part of that because you're now giving the smaller operators the capabilities that the big guys have had but actually doing it a way that may be cleaner and more agile, it's cloud based, they can price differently. It's a whole new ball game, right? I mean, what are you seeing when you talk to customers? What's that? What's the initial conversation like? >> Well, people still, to some extent, are afraid of the cloud but we try to give them different options on premises or in the cloud. It's a software after all. >> Dave: What, what are they afraid of with the cloud? >> They're afraid of not having the full control and usually people are afraid of things, which they don't completely understand and I guess having us here helps them to overcome that fear. >> Well, we saw this with the traditional enterprise IT when we used to have financial services executives on the cube. 10 years ago, they go, we will never put our data in the cloud. It's never going to happen. It was financial services, one of the fastest growing and largest customer segments for the cloud. But you're focusing on, you say, the tier two and tier three, I would think they have a greater motivation, right? Because they see the opportunity to disrupt. Right? >> That's true. I see cloud and other technologies such as SDN as this great equalizer because now it doesn't matter that much how much of the fiber optics you have in the ground or how many base towers you have. The true advantage will come from your platform, from the application and the service you can create. And if there's a company, they can create a great service, if it's in the cloud, it can scale to millions of subscribers easily, they just to find that product market fit. >> And Roman, you've got almost 500 customers, I believe. >> Yes. All around the globe. >> Well, that's the interesting thing, you got like 90 customers or more and so, >> 90 countries >> 90 countries, I meant 500 customers in 90 countries. So you've got local laws, you've got local politics, public policy, different across those countries, you know, provenance etc. etc. How do you see - what's the spectrum like are they open to the tier two and tier three disrupting? I mean, I would imagine some countries are trying to protect, you know, their relationships with the big Telcos because it's such critical infrastructure. What's that spectrum look like? Paint a picture of that diversity. >> It all depends on the specific country. In some countries like South Africa, the market is totally liberalized. You want to become a Telco. Here you go. In other countries like China, for example, it's only for a very small group of national carriers. So we basically follow the lead of the customers. If there are an opportunity in the specific countries, they will pop up like mushrooms. If there is no market liberation, what can you do? >> Right. Okay. So now talk more about what you guys sell to these customers. You're talking about the BSS systems and what exactly am I buying from you? And how is that all working? >> We sell the ability to manage your subscribers, create new services, and then provision and deliver those services to a variety of network elements, equipment and through integrations, and through connections to various types of apps. And right now with the cloud move, I see this as an- it's a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. If Telco has existing infrastructure that's our chance to rethink the architecture and approach. Because if they just think we have a cloud, it's some kind of computer where I'm going to run the applications a bit cheaper, they're missing the point. We were born in Soviet Union and one of my treasures is the jokes from Soviet Union times is one of them is a lady writes to the Central Committee of Communist Party and she says, I work at the Moscow Teapot Factory. And I like my job, I like my colleagues, I'm employee of the month, but, what bothers me; I can never buy a teapot in my store. I go there but they never have teapots. Can you do something? And she receives a reply saying, well, we can not change the way how we distribute goods in the whole country but there's an exception that will allow you to take one part of teapot, bring it home, and you can assemble teapot for yourself. And then two months later, there's now a letter from the same lady saying, Dear comrades, I did as you told me and now in my backyard, I have an intercontinental ballistic missile SS20 but I still don't have a teapot. So you cannot replicate what already had to just bring it piece by piece into the cloud and expect it's going to be something different, it's going to be better. >> Dave: We call it the Lunar Landing Module, very complex. Okay! Let's talk about the move from and the journey from on-prem maybe through hybrid but to the cloud, ultimately, and it starts with the customer conversation. First of all, they got to be willing. Right? Okay. But what's that journey look like? What are the phases that we should- how should we think about that? >> Over the last 20 years we've been offering our platform on premises and usually with unlimited license. So, whatever you can squeeze out of your physical machines is all yours. We don't count that. And that was a pretty straightforward model because you own your servers. We give you the license to the product, and it's fully separated. In the cloud it's not possible by default. You will provide both the physical infrastructure and software infrastructure. So, we need to change that model and we need to explain to our customers first of all. The next step; no Telco is the same. So, they provide different set of services. They offer their products to different audiences of the end-users. So it can be hosted PPBX or IP Centrics environments. So, we would then price our platform based on the number of active seats or it can be a mobile operator, a full mobile network operator or virtual mobile operator MVNO, or even enabler MVNE. So in that case, we would price our platform based on number of active sims. Many manual customers prefer to diversify. They want to choose different models, serve different market segments and not only deliver voice, but also data, messaging, value added services. We have a huge customer in Brazil, for example, they don't have a single end-user customer because everything what they do is pure IOT. So how do we price the platform? Because the variety of business models is so huge. We use the idea of billable events. So any call, any message, any data session, subscription, or anything which can produce a rate-able file can counter against the capacity of what the customer uses. So it gives a full transparency for the customer and it's easy to predict the future costs >> And you're able to charge accordingly and transparently because you've written software to do that. >> Roman: Absolutely. >> Its in the cloud, I presume. And so, you're able to show your customers exactly what you're paying for and the seat in that instance is somebody who's creating those services or somebody who's administering those services, or it's a developer? >> It's an extension >> Somebody who's using the service. So the end user. >> Ah, right. Yeah, okay. >> And actually we use our own software to charge our customers for using our software. >> Okay so you eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne as people like to say, right? How about from an engineering standpoint? Going from on-prem to the cloud, how should we think about architecting that? What are some of the roadblocks that we potentially see? >> The biggest roadblock we see in the developing countries is data centers not being available yet. That customer in Brazil, they were like knocking on the doors of the data center >> 9: 00 AM when it just opened, because they've been waiting for so long. We have about 15 customers in South Africa. They still are waiting for proper cloud at the center to be open there. But that's just the question of time. We just have to wait a little bit and this will get improved. And then that's a big thing. that you have your data center, you have your cloud software, and then you have your existing operations. You have your systems. So how do you move there? And I'm a proponent of gradual migration and gradual movement because every Telco, if they were in business for at least a few years, they have accumulated the variety of different systems, legacy, different products, different departments. It's difficult to jump in the cloud in one jump. So let's build a ladder. And with our customers, we use a technology called Dual-Version with RADIUS. It's a gradual migration. You don't move it at once You first with the pilot batch of customers, observe them, then add more customers, add more customers, and you keep going until everybody's on the new version. And it helps tremendously with new technology, or just with different user experience, because maybe some things which were improved in our perspective from some users, they don't like the change or they need some adjustments. So we see a way to the cloud. It's starting the small steps and then get them to the cloud and the process doesn't start there because once you get to version one of Clio cloud software, it's going to be version two and version three and version four. So the first is a general change in the mentality of telco, all this constant gradual improvements. >> You call it radio? Gradual? >> Gradual. >> Okay, so, gradual migration. So when you do a migration and it's gradual what, do you create some kind of abstraction layer so they don't have to freeze everything, right? Or, maybe I do freeze it but I can still operate with the pieces that have moved. >> Exactly. >> So I'm not shutting down my business. >> No, no way. >> That's the problem with migrations, right? I got to, I got to freeze it. And then, so I say, forget it. I don't ever do a migration, but technology allows you to hide that. >> Right. Some freeze may be required because maybe you should not add a new product or change one, which is currently being immigrated. >> Right. >> But to try to minimize the amount of those freezes from a product catalog perspective and the amount of potential inconveniences for the end user while they be integrated. >> Let's talk about the business value. We know that before, we know what it's like, it's a hairball. You described that spaghetti code. It's slow. It's not transparent. It's expensive. What are you seeing in the after state with some of your tier two and tier three customers, in particular, the ones that are disrupting the Telcos, what do you see? Roman. >> It Brings value, first of all. Because the scalability is no longer an issue. Their ability to migrate, ability to update the system to the new releases is also, much more easier in the cloud. So, the industry's changing fast. The consumers are instantly moving from one preferred way of communicating to another. So the Telcos need to change as well, pretty rapidly. So we are trying to give them that set of tools so they are not being dragged behind by the changes. So update faster, scale faster, introduce new products faster, configure new subscription, and get more customers. >> And then that leads to compress time to monetization. >> Roman: Exactly >> Better customer satisfaction. If we talked in this industry about NPS and how it's so negative. Usually people talk about "my NPS is better than Apple's". When they, in this industry, it's like we need to improve the NPS. Unique approach. Okay! Guys, we're almost out of time. Andriy, I'll give you the last word, put a bow on Mobile World Congress 2021 and how poor to seize it. >> Well, I think it's very symbolic, this place we are in right now, it's a space which used to belong to a large telecom software vendor. And now there's a variety of smaller disruptive companies. And I think that's the future. So the days when Telco would shop for a single huge RFP to solve all of their problems, are gone for good. Because now with the cloud, with integration, with API, You, the Telcos, have the power to build what they need, peak the solutions to integrate and create something which will deliver value and allow them to have it (indistinct) >> Fantastic. We are tracking the transformation of Telco and it just coincides with the exit of the post isolation economy. We're really excited to be here in cloud city. Adam, back to you in the studio.