(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back to "theCUBE" stage here in cloud city, TelcoDr, Telco digital revolution. We had a chance to talk to Rob Haberman, CTO of Nokia software. Great interview as part of our hybrid program here, but we're still on the floor onsite. Let's go listen to my great interview with Ron and what he had to say about the power of the cloud. (upbeat digital music) And welcome to "theCUBE's" coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. It's an in-person and hybrid event and we're here in Palo Alto through remote interview as part of the hybrid, getting as much content as possible, is a great guest Ron Haberman, who is the CTO of Nokia Cloud Network Services known as CNS. Ron's an expert. He's going to come in and share with us his vision and his commentary on openness in the cloud, Telco cloud, the changes at the Edge, of so much going on, so much innovation that's changing the game, that's going to impact lives and society. Ron, thank you for coming on "theCUBE" for this Mobile World Congress special segment. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So the transformation in the cloud is so amazing with 5G. You've got cloud native developers, you've got enterprises changing their architectures, and cloud service probably going to the next level. 5G certainly is a great edge, but the strength of the cloud combined with the new modern applications really is going to be the power. And you start to see people starting to think differently around how developers are building apps and how companies are working together. It's not just one company ruling the world anymore, it's a lot of interoperability, interconnections, a lot of API's openness, kind of sounds like a network. It sounds like a network effect. This is a big deal. What's your take on this whole shift as 5G gets enabling a fast edge and cloud native go hand in hand. What's your take? >> I think 5G and the transformation to cloud native, generically speaking, go very nicely hand in hand. It's important to understand that 5G is not just another G, really because it's more intended for consumption by businesses and not just consumer. And what it means is that it would have a vast impact on how development is done, how the deployment is done and the type of features that would be required from the network. So when we went on our path to start developing for cloud native, primarily, for 5G, it went beyond just being cloud ready. And we started looking at how do we expand the operability with the ecosystems? How do we go into topics such as continuous delivery? How do we create collaboration between CSPs and cloud providers, such as we can provide the advancements. Now, there are quite a few subtopics in the transformation. For example, these might be obvious, but without automation there's really no ability to create a cloud native delivery process. If you're on the cloud, you're creating speed and ability to innovate as well as access, but you also are now required to create a better security system in ways to tie things back together. The multi-vendor environment and the path that it would enable to move to as a service model is again, a topic that can really be established as part of this transition to cloud native and has been greatly in focus for us. And finally there is a bit of a balancing act in some of the use cases in how do we use new technologies such as machine learning, in creating new use cases. For Nokia as a supplier of both the network functions, which are now getting distributed into public cloud in the private cloud, and on the Edges, as well as control systems of different types of OSS, BSS, including charging, enablement, IOP, et cetera, et cetera. It's really about how do we bring these things together in a way that creates use cases that the service providers can position, especially in their now quest to go after B2B, in leveraging their network. >> Yeah, and you guys bring huge strength there on the Nokia side. I want to ask you specifically, as CSPs are collaborating with you guys to leverage that strength of cloud native and open, the question comes up is how fast can they get to a modern, agile, open infrastructure and how fast can they enable value? And that's where this whole interoperability thing, or this interplay between cloud native and innovation hub comes together. Can you take us through how you see that? How cloud service providers are approaching cloud native today? Because that's really kind of where the focus is, how do I get the operating value, with the speed and agility of development, and obviously built in all the security and everything else? That seems to be the disruptor and let's face it, it's been a slow world in the telco place. So cloud has been a speed game with value, but it's an operator game too. What's your thoughts? >> That's right. And look, I'll take you maybe just a little bit into the history of this transition because only just a few years ago, most networks were really build purely with what we're now referring to as SPMS, physical network functions, really a equipment that was installed in a certain pop locations and created the network. We started this transition to virtualization in the world of VMS and then cloud ready and now cloud native. And it's been a few years for these things to come together. And maybe the most important thing that we must get right, is that as we dis-aggregate and in a way it complicates the deployment, if you would, by a few factors, we want to give the tools to indeed go fast, because the name of the game in moving to cloud native is to speed up innovation. So what we've been doing and in collaboration now with Google, is on the one hand, we need to make sure that all of the network functions, the operating models work, into this aggregated cloud. They can go all the way from a private data center through the Edge, into the central data center. Then on the Nokia side, we have to bring the capabilities to tie networks together, be able to migrate workloads between the locations. And maybe most importantly, as we release new versions of our software, as we enable new capabilities, we want to put it in the hands of the service providers and in turn the developers right away. So we need to enable true continuous delivery in the sense that is very familiar in the cloud world, but quite new to telco. So we have- >> You know. All right sorry- >> Go ahead. >> I'm sorry to interrupt, continue. >> Maybe just to give a very practical example of a customer that we share in Europe, Telenet we're starting with an on-premise Anthos based type of deployment, but keeping an eye on moving to the Edge and into the broader cloud, really enabling themselves to be in a multi region and with true Northbound open interfaces for new use cases to be implemented. >> Yeah, Ron, I want to get your thoughts on this. Dave Vellante, my cohost and I we're talking just in an earlier segment around how major inflection points have some characteristics. They all have characters in common. Usually it's proprietary to open shifts happen. And one in point we were looking at was like the nineties, the late eighties, early nineties, when you had proprietary networking protocol stacks, and then OSI stack came out. Obviously we know what happened from there TCP/IP created the best biggest wave of innovation in the computer history we've seen. Similar things happened here. And I won't say proprietary per se, but there were 5G and telcos stuff, that's kind of like operator centric legacy. Are you starting to see this openness come back and I'm not going to say a full stack, but new kinds of disruption and 5G is opening up the door because it's not just consumer technology. A lot of people like the CEO of Intel saying this is a business technology, commercial technology, more than consumer because of the characteristics. And you combine that with cloud native and say openness with scale with cloud services, but you mentioned Google, that's a public cloud. And so public cloud is going to be a disruption, 'cause it brings scale. So it reminds me of this inflection point where you have this new shift and you mentioned networks, these networks are connecting. So you've got a public cloud and Google's known for their networks and their cloud is being highly scalable and secure. But they're not the only network in town. You got a 5G and you got Backhaul, you got all kinds of new heterogeneous environments. What's your comment on that? Because this is what people are talking about. Where's the shift going to go? What wave is this? What's this going to look like? Is this a true disruption or is it more of the same? What's your thoughts? >> I think it's a true disruption. One of the biggest parts of 5G that would enable these new use cases is slicing. Now slicing is a big word describing something that most of us in networks know for quite some time, really the ability to create some kind of a piece of the network that is shared between partners for a particular purpose, with a particular SLA that contains bandwidth and licensing or requirements, locations, et cetera, et cetera. Now the ultimate goal is for an enterprise to be able to interface with the public cloud and with their operator and consume resources completely dynamically. Now, you talked about Google and public cloud. And obviously anybody that used GCP knows that at any point in time, you can go into a region, you can reserve what you need, use what you need, create results, and then either keep it move away, open new locations, et cetera, et cetera. One thing is missing, the connectivity over the mobile air interface to your user. And slicing allows us to combine the power of the true cloud with the ability to dynamically and programmatically, create a slice for a particular purpose. And for us, the ultimate goal is that really networks would become programmable and a developer or their user would be able to interface with the system and literally create network in code. Now there's going to be quite a lot of building blocks required to reach that goal, given that today, most of it is static. But it starts with at least being able to orchestrate resources out of the network, tie them into termination point that by themselves are annex, that are cloud native and potentially even running in the true public cloud and then attach them into a use case. Now you also mentioned openness and Nokia had been on this open path for quite some time in creating choice for our customers, but now with Google coming in with GCP for example, the interface that we create with technology such as Apogee enable openness, not just for our customer being the CSP, but also for the developer to come in from the outside and reside within the ecosystem that they chose and still be able to consume and even create services dynamically. And we enable it with products that interface with that on the other side, which we can get in there. >> Yeah, what's interesting. What you're saying is interesting, I would just call it out because I think it's important. We hear this all the time is that with the Edge and the devices, people are managing an end to end workflow from an application standpoint. But that's very difficult when you don't have networks that are being managed as a heterogeneous environment. So that's a key point you made. So the question I have for you is how can operators best manage this wave? Because this is the holy grail you're talking about here. We're talking about end to end visibility into the workflow as a developer, with the shift left security being built in. No one's debating that, everyone knows that. So as an operator, how do I starting today operate and manage through this? 'Cause I got to operate a large network. It's almost like swapping the engine out at 30,000 feet in the airplane. So how should operators think about taking this step? >> So the first thing to do is to really just accept the fact that there is going to be true legacy... And there are plenty of 3G networks today still operating around the world. There's going to be, to what is now starting to look like semi legacy. So VNX that have only been delivered to networks, maybe in the past couple of years and will carry 4G traffic and will stay in production for quite some time and manage this transition between PMS, VMs, running VNX, VMs running containerized workloads, and true cloud native, which may be bare metal. And as we're working with Google on Anthos, it literally enables this transition by creating a position for us to put the workload in each step of the path, as well as in multiple locations around the network. And what Nokia brings into this equation, it's also a unified view for the operator. So if you're an operator that today runs on VMs on prem, you have some workflows defined and you've been running them in a certain way, we want to keep that view as similar as possible with the tooling that you were enabled to use over the past few years, but create extensions that connects us into the containerized workflow and then a true cloudified workflow out of the same environment. And this is actually in part what we've been collaborating both with some CSPs, as well as with Google on enabling. >> Ron Haberman, CTO, Nokia Cloud Network Services Group, thank you so much for that insight, great commentary. Thank you for sharing your perspective on the future of telco, telco cloud, telco Edge, unifying those networks end to end. Great stuff, thank you for coming on "theCube." >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is Cube's coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. We're in person and we're virtual, it's a hybrid event. Thanks for watching. >> John clearly the power of the public cloud in that interview. Great job, by the way, >> It was great to get Nokia and to hear the operator impact, and that's awesome. More to come. So back to the studio, Adam and the team back at the studio.

>> Announcer: From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio and looking forward, we're going to be digging into one of my favorite topics and also the community always loves when we have it. Talking about networking, of course. Happy to welcome you to the program. I have two first time guests. First of all, we have Mike Saur. He is a solutions architect of NetDevOps with CCI. And joining us a long time friend of the program. First time on the program, Omar Saltun, who is a leader, product management for Network Services Orchestrator with Cisco. Omar and Mike, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks, nice to be here. >> Thank you, sir. >> All right. So Mike, if you could just set up for us, CCI, Cisco partner, give us a little bit about the organization, what you specialize in, what you're known for. And tell us a bit about your role there. >> Sure. CCI systems is a trusted partner for typical mid market size service providers. That's primarily the focus and that's a lot of different areas of the business, cable access, CMTS, security, data center and now this next evolution of adding NetDevOps as that next step for trusted advisor. I've been in my role for about a year now at CCI with a strong passion for automation and finding the right fit tools to solve problems for our customers, whether that's a commercial product or a open source tool. So a lot of different problems out there and no one size fits all. So it's my passion to bring those types of solutions to CCIs customers. >> Wonderful. Mike, I'm hearing a lot of the themes that I'm very familiar with. I'm sure our audience is when we talk about Cisco, when we've gone to Cisco live, we've been in the DevNet zone. So having a lot of discussions about that NetDevOps piece, can you talk to us a little bit more, just the partnership with Cisco. I would love to hear how NetDevOps fits in with what you're doing and how that fits with Cisco too. >> Yeah, I've been working with Cisco on and off for the past 18 months to try to think outside the box. As we know, Network Services Orchestrator was primarily targeted at the large providers that have the investment resources, the programming staff, to be able to do that. So over the years, having various discussions with product management, Cisco and CCI have come together to partner to solve two of the big problems in our space for our customers. As far as the math problem of the investment that's needed to bring up Network Service Orchestrator, and then also the programming piece of that. So not a lot of the providers in the mid market space have that expertise. So CCI and Cisco are really pulling that all together with various trusted partners to bring that to life for them in a shorter timeframe, with more sets of controls, to bring them up to speed faster so that they can it with a martial arts type journey of starting small and integrating over different phases of the life cycle of automation. >> Great. Well, Omar, let's pull you into the discussion here. It tends to be in general from a product standpoint, a little bit easier to grow up market. We want to talk a bit about the mid market, so that Network Services Orchestrator, NSO. Help explain how that really can support the mid tier as Mike was saying. >> Sure, so we were a little crazy, we started at the top and starting to work our way down. So we're well established with tier one service providers, large enterprises, we have good markets penetration there. I think for us, it was a lot of growth opportunity down into the mid market, both on commercial and tier two, tier three service providers. I know that the challenge in NSO is awesome, but it's got a steep learning curve. So, these partnerships like the one here is perfect because it allows mid market customers to access the capability. But at the same time, they have someone to hold their hands. They have partners like CCI, that have both the technical expertise, as well as kind of understanding kind of what customer problems are, what operations and problem scaling look like in mid market, not just a tier one where the different markets, different requirements. >> Mike I would love to get your viewpoint as to what's happening inside your customers. So networking in general, obviously there's always new technologies that they need to integrate, but there's also the skill sets. NetDevOps, of course, helping pull people along to work closer with developers, coding more something we have to talk about. So the mid tier customer specifically, what challenges they face with bring us into some of those conversations, if you would. >> Right, so I preach a lot and talk about the vicious cycle of not automating. They don't have time 'cause they're too busy doing the day to day jobs. And I love to get into that vicious cycle and kind of bust that up and help to kind of think differently why they need to operate their networks differently. And they can take a lot of those tools and techniques from the software world and really help leverage them on their networks. There's just a skills gap right now with the mid market type folks. They're overworked, stressed. And with obviously the growth of IOT, more devices means more work. It's just a volume metric problem that certain automation tools can really make a difference in their world. And that's really what my passion is at, reducing human error, helping those businesses provide more uptime for their end customers and just driving a different way to operate networks in more efficiently in accurate way. >> And part of that... >> Please go ahead on that. >> And part of that is just not. You know those are the technical expertise, but there's also the how do you stitch things together? Any automation strategy is going to have more than one tool. And there's the idea of how do we stitch tools together? How do we build processes? How do we help up-skill customers? Those kinds of things. I mean, this is kind of the all the pieces that come together when you kind of mesh the technology and the apart for capabilities together. That's really what drives successful automation projects, and then get some of those problems solving and added value that we're talking about here. >> Yeah. I mean, Omar, when I think about scale and I think about automation, service fighters, you think would be some of the leading edge for some of that? Maybe just refresh our audience a bit as to how you help them along and how much, they used to kind of build a lot of their own toolings and that's challenging if you have to keep doing it itself. So why do they turn to Cisco for some of these solutions? >> I think two things, one, we build tools that survive scale, right? For NSO, we have customers managing hundreds of thousands of nodes at one time. So there's a scale on performance that comes from building SB class tooling. But the second piece is just understanding, you know, the operational environment service providers, have they have demanding requirements in terms of SLA scale, reg compliance, those kinds of things. And that's really what we've brought to the table is not just tools that have the power and the scale, but kind of understanding what the operational environment is for the typical tier one SP and making sure the tools mentioned to that. >> Michael... Please go ahead. >> Yeah, absolutely. And the idea of that businesses are changing fastly and keeping up with that speed of innovation is very difficult. And not to mention to, I mean, as a trusted partner for our customers, maybe the answer's not Cisco every time to be honest, maybe there's a different tool. So if we have a tool like NSO that could drive other vendors equipment, I think that makes customers feel safer, better, not vendor lock in. So the power that NSO brings is second to none, in my opinion. So I'm just all about flexibility and in solving problems for our customers. And to me, Network Services Orchestrator is that product. But like I said, there's a lot of integrations that need to be done and we need to break it down for these customers and get them to realize the value of it faster instead of the large deployments that you've seen in the tier one type of space. >> Yeah, Mike, you bring up a really good point. When I think traditionally about automation, we take a process or maybe we optimize a process and we automate it, but what companies need today is I need to react fast and I need to be able to make changes in the future if that's needed. So not fossilizing something, but being able to move forward. So it sounds like with NSO, some of your other things that you put together, you're helping customers not only do what they need today, but be ready for the future. Do I have that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, it's just another progression of what CCI already is. That trusted advisor, we have the great opportunity that we talk to so many different providers of the same size, same business goals that we bring best in breed. And our talent that we have at CCI is just amazing and that's a passion that we're trying to get out there into the world that, Hey, we have horsepower and we're ready to help. We're about making lives better. So it's exciting. >> Yeah certainly in the mid market, one of the things we see is customers doing less building and more assembly. So in tier one, they have the time and resources to build stuff from scratch, to write services from scratch, those kinds of things. Mid-markets much more of a simply play, taking things off the shelf. No, maybe a little NSO, but it's also paired with a little bit of Ansible, a little bit of Python, and that's how they're going to handle their automation requirements, both, 'cause it's probably faster and probably in the long run, easier to maintain. >> Well, yeah. You bring up a great point, Omar. When I think traditionally that mid market and the channel partner often would be delivering prepackaged solutions. But today's solutions, you still need that a little bit of flexibility, that little bit of programming, they're not going to, throw a team of PhDs on it like some of the largest customers do. But they still need to be able to put things together and make them fit for what they need and ultimately their customers need. >> Yeah, I mean, every automation project it's still a snowflake. You take something or free VPN, right. Everyone does it, but everyone does it differently. There's no better, there's no worse. But if you're going to automate that you kind of start with an 80% solution, but then you need to line it up whether that's customer's infrastructure, their operations, their staff capabilities and those kinds of things. That's kind of getting over the finish line what CCI brings to the table in the mid market, sure. >> Yup. Mike, it's funny. I'm curious. CCI, does it have any relation with CCIE 'cause when we're talking about that skillsets that we need, obviously, you start, you think about Cisco certifications. How do you keep your team up on the latest technologies, making sure that they can be that trusted advisor that your customers need? >> Well, of course it's a combination of different things, classical learning, but I would say one of the big things is our collaboration capabilities. We have experts in many different areas and usually they have a secondary skill set and we collaborate. And a lot of times we make our own internal training that's more specific to our customers. So example, I really try to recommend to customers to move to EVPN technologies, but there's that learning curve that they don't know how to configure them. Next gen ethernet type of technologies for service providers. So by building an EVPN model and NSO, we're empowering them to leverage that sooner, faster with a smart tool like NSO. And that's really, some of the value that we have, we know what most of our customers use. The big guys tend to use layer three VPNs a lot of time. I would say just that a majority of our customers are very L two VPN vase or infrastructure services, and even offering them up to their own customers. So having a somewhat pre-packaged 80% as Omar had mentioned, and nothing's ever really the same all the time, but 80% of it probably is. And then we'll come in and then we can finish off that last 20% to make it come to life for that customer with a little bit of customization. So making it fit for their environment. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the biggest challenges out there for anyone is, okay, when do I have to revisit what I had? Is there a new technology? Is there a new way of doing things? So you just laid out like, you know, one way that customers, okay, this is the way I should be in my size thinking about VPN. Anything else? What, what kind of key things should people be hearing and they're saying up, if I have this problem, providers like CCI can help. >> Right. Just trying to increase the health of their network by having consistency checks. Over the years, networks have config wonder. It's very hard to keep that up even in the mid market networks. So the cleaner that your network is, the more uptime you're going to have, the easier it is for your network engineers and allows you to scale. Like I said, the time to businesses is just going rapidly. And being able to empower other teams like say knock or even sales engineering to build those L2VPNs for the customer. If you can build them faster by not escalating tickets to the core engineering team, you serve the customer faster and you freed up those network engineers to maybe be more proactive about building out the future network. Cause right now they're just stuck in that day to day grind. So config consistency, and like primary, like service builds L2, L3 VPN. Those are very popular. And one thing that I always like to challenge customers with is that a lot of times they're like, well, we can do it ourselves. And maybe some of these guys have a developer teams and typically they're more focused on the public facing website, internal apps. And I challenged like maybe you could... but what's your time worth to you? And the amount of man hours that were put into NSO, jumpstart you faster. And a lot of times I think you're going to gain more value in just getting that product that you can customize. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's a developer platform. So you bring it to life in your environment. >> Absolutely, there's so many things now that companies need to make that decision. Can they shift left? Can they push it to the platform? Are there solutions that just make things easier so that you can focus on really the things that are important to run your business and get the best utilization out of your people and the skillsets. Wonderful. Mike, Omar want to give you both, give us the final word takeaways you want people to have regarding kind of the opportunity that they can take advantage of, especially in the mid tier. Mike maybe we'll start with you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. I am just passionate about getting CCIS name out there. Not only for NetDevOps, but all the other practices that we have at CCI to be that trusted advisor and come talk to us. We have account teams that already, we have systems engineers that are ready. And I feel like one thing leads to another and it snowballs so reach out and I'd love to have a conversation with every single one of them, whether it's a small organization or a large organization, we're here to help. And that's super important to us. >> I think for us, we see automation start, tactically to science project. So ones trying to deal with the pain pointer or dealing with something here frustrated with which is, I think where most folks start. I think that the trick is to work with your peers, talk to your leadership and figure out how you go from science project to strategy and kind of map out the longer journey and be a little thoughtful as you pick tools and figuring out what you want to automate and make sure it has some value to. >> Mike Saur, Omar Sultan, thank you both for joining. Appreciate the update and especially on the CCI and Cisco partnership. >> Thanks too. >> Thank you. Have a great day. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live 2018 Orlando. Getting to the end of two days of three days of wall to wall coverage, happy to welcome to the program Wayne Ogozaly who's a cloud architect with Cisco. From my neck of the woods up in New England. Thanks so much for joining us down here. >> Pleasure to be here. It's getting towards the end of the day which means thundershowers will probably hit for an hour or so. >> Exactly, exactly, it's sunny in the morning and I brought an umbrella, who knew. >> Absolutely, so Wayne you've been with Cisco for a few years Why don't you give us a little bit about your background before we get into it. >> Sure, I started out with Cisco as an engineer. Actually before Cisco, a rocket scientist at Raytheon Company, so I had all sorts of fun before I got hooked on the internet stuff. So I've been a data center architect, spent quite a few years in the media area providing mogul applications, as well as some of the content development side of the media part of Cisco And now I'm into service provider markets which is fantastic >> So before we get into service providers give us your impression of the show this year It'd been a few years since I've come and it's changed quite a bit you know. Big crowd here, we're in the DevNet zone definitely some of the buzz of the show here. What's your impression of the show so far? >> I feel a huge amount of energy. I deal with service providers and we've had so many service providers come by our booth. There's a huge amount of excitement about bringing new managed services to market. DNA Center launch was huge for us. We're showing live demonstrations of that at our booth as well, and I feel like it's almost at a tipping point, where we're going to be talking about software defined networking and NFV. It's been a long time coming but now we're actually kind of crossing the chasm hopefully where we'll be sharing with you some pretty big announcements very soon on large customers deploying those exact services at massive scale. >> Yeah, so we love talking about service providers, we're talking to service providers on theCUBE because when you talk about scale, when you talk about pace of change, when you talk about pressures of financials. Well there's very few places where they all come together for the service providers. Why don't tell us about the product solution set that you're working on and what the news is here. >> Sounds great So I'm part of the Managed Services Accelerator group that has developed a new cloud product. It's been around for a couple years. We've had some major deployments namely at Verizon and Vodafone and a couple other tier ones. A couple huge announcements coming out very shortly. But Managed Services Accelerator allows service providers to deploy many different services across a multi-tenant platform that runs exclusively in the cloud. So we'll talk about what cloud native means what some of the services are. But we're able to bring services to market much more quickly than you were ever able to do in the past. We're able to go from service creation to actual service deployment in literally weeks As some of our major SP's, and those services span a wide range of opportunities, like deploying Meraki or deploying Viptela SD-WAN, or deploying a managed routed service Or even deploying DNA center for a managed SD access. So it's a broad spectrum of services that we can help service providers bring to market very quickly. >> Yeah I love that 'cause if you look at the service providers the applications are so critically important. >> It all starts with the app. If you don't have a compelling app nobody wants to buy it. >> Look the public cloud players are adding new application and new services on practically a daily clip these days. And service providers, many of them partnering with the public cloud but there's still lots of things that they need to do themselves, locally or in certain verticals. So give us some insight, what are some of the things your customers are looking for. How do they keep up with that pace of change and how does this offering help them do that? >> So the cool thing about MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator is it provides a service provider platform for multi tenancy, many different customers in one platform many different services from both Cisco and third party vendors, and those services span both physical devices, traditional ISRs, ASRs, third-party Juniper boxes, whatever, as well as VNFs, virtual network functions. That run in a public cloud like AWS or in your private data center, as a service provider or, in a universal CPE, or a virtual branch or for our Cisco folks, ENCS, Enterprise Network Compute System. It's a virtual branch x86, where we can run service chains down there, we provide a wide range of services that provide the ability to configure and deploy multiple services toward a single customer all from one place. Some of the challenges that our service providers have, is that they have many different service offers but each of those service offers is in its own silo. And every time they want to bring a new service to market, they have to spend many millions of dollars trying to integrate whether they're northbound OSS or BSS system. Or integrate with a new set of vendors. We, from a singe cloud platform allow them a single platform to integrate many different services from one place in a beautiful sort of cloud managed way. >> There's a large portfolio that customers need to sort out. One of the areas we're hearing a lot of discussion about has been the SD-WAN, how does that fit into this whole discussion? >> The SD-WAN service is one of our most popular services. It's being deployed at scale at Vodafone and Verizon. The Viptela acquisition for Cisco Cisco SD-WAN, now that it's named, has been very popular in that it allows customers, enterprises to have a choice of NPLS, internet, or even 4G or soon to be 5G backbone networks that they can run the traffic of their choice across. Enterprises want SD-WAN not just for the ability to choose policies and map applications to certain overlays or tunnels. But they're also using it to lower their cost significantly. So they can, from the cloud, kind of like a Meraki cloud. Manage many different devices with a single click of a button, I can push a new policy down in a software defined way to a hundred different devices and maybe move Netflix that might have been running on an NPLS circuit, to a internet access circuit with the click of a button. That's the power that SD-WAN provides and it provides enterprises that capability natively. Service providers offer it as a managed service, enterprises can log into our MSX platform and be able to control the traffic that they want and steer it with clicks of buttons, not large amounts of configurations. >> Wayne you've mentioned a couple of very large customers that are using this, is this something that is geared for the top 20 large service providers or will it hit hundreds, thousands of services providers around the globe? >> It's really both, it's targeted, and I can say that because architecturally it's a cloud-native platform. It's built with Docker containers, Kubernetes microservice framework, when Google, it's built on a similar architecture of Google. So when Google's rolling out 1,500 services a year, the MSX platform's goal is to get more than 100 services a year rolled out in this platform. So the service creation portion of it allows large service providers, like Verizon or Vodafone or many others to be able to offer those services more efficiently from the cloud and manage them. But the smaller guys, are also able to tap into these services because we offer a kind of a pay as you grow model. We offer a one year of three year term license to purchase the product which is very small And then there's like a little three to five dollar a month management fee for every device you have under management. So there's a very low cost of entry that you're able to tap into this powerful cloud management platform and offer any sort of service that you want for both large service providers as well as small service providers. >> You touched on some of the pricing there. How does that work today, do you look and feel like you know most cloud models today, really more of a Opex and a Capex? >> It's a tremendous opex savings. This is really an opex play when we look at it from a service provider perspective. Service providers are challenged today because they're trying to offer many different services but each service is a unique silo. And they've got to integrate a wide range of different pieces of that silo for every new service. So in a multi-tenant environment I need to have billing, I need to have northbound OSS BSS integration, I need to have a consistent user interface, I need to have notifications, I need to have tenancy, user roles, single sign on. Do I really want to integrate that uniquely for every new service or do I want to have Managed Services Accelerator manage all of that for me and then the service provider can focus more on the service. So it's an opex play to allow them to not only bring new services to market more quickly, but once they're brought to market through both REST APIs and our Network Services Orchestrator configure them very rapidly. >> Wanna step back for a second. When we look at this whole kinda cloud discussion for a while, you know there was discussion of like oh well maybe, how much is really going to go to the public cloud or fighting the public cloud and the service providers were caught being pulled from the old world in the new world. I don't think we've really hit equilibrium yet but service providers really understand and the message that I've heard from Cisco this week and really for the last year or so has been that hybrid multi cloud world is where we live. It's not going to be an answer. We always know everything's an additive in IT and nothing really ever dies. What do you hear from your service provider partners you know, how are they feeling, what do they think about, the changing dynamic of this world? >> Like John Chambers used to say, "We need to deal with the world the way it is "and not the way we'd wish it to be." Service providers realize that it is a multi cloud environment. They need to be able to accommodate different services and different service models based on what their customers are looking for. They also need to be able to achieve operational efficiency when they're rolling out those services to be able to make it commercially viable. So what we're hearing from our service providers is that they want a multi service environment that MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator, provides them where they can manage maybe deploying a device in AWS, to front end and application space for a particular tenant and then connect that device. Whether it be a Meraki virtual managed device or a Viptela vEdge device, to an SD-WAN that's connected to rest of their enterprises And then when they walk out of one of their branch devices and they get on their mobile network we can enable through Cisco, the connection between 5G slicing and a SD-WAN service so that the service that they get on their phone and the policies that are applied on their phone are identical to those that they've worked so hard to deploy actually in their branches, in their headquarters, in their campuses, or in the cloud. It is a multi-cloud environment. Almost every single application domain spans all of those components. MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator, allows you to kind of centrally manage all of those functions from one place. >> Okay, so Wayne MSX, new branding, some new features some new customers, give us a little bit of what we can expect to see through the rest of this year with this solution. >> You're going to see some pretty big announcements of some new service providers doing some new services with MSX. Those new services include the deployment of new SD-WAN networks, very exciting on our virtual branch platform where our ENCS, or X86 based branch will be rolled out at large scale with a couple service providers. Where you can decide what VNFs you want to put on there. What service chains they represent and how you want to monetize them. Been talking about universal CPs for a long time, this is the year it's going to happen at scale using MSX and ENCS, and then you're going to see managed devices cloud connect to AWS and wide range of other services including Meraki and others that build out the portfolio. But bottom line with MSX is, we know our service providers want a diversity of services. It's a service creation platform. We expect service providers to bring their service to the table, we can accommodate it, monetize it, bring it to market very rapidly. And I would expect to hear a wide range of wonderful announcements from Cisco and the MSX team in the next few months. >> Alright well Wayne really appreciate you bringing this service provider angle to us. We're at the end of two days of three days of live coverage covering all the angles from Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando, be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the replays as well as all the shows that we will be at in the future. For Stu Miniman and my co-host John Furrier, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation; Red Hat, an additional ecosystem of support. (upbeat synthesizer music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my cohost John Troyer. This is The CUBE, worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Coming into the show this year, here, at OpenStack, discussion of edge was something that had a little bit of buzz. Last year's show in Austin, the telecommunication all of the NFV solutions were definitely one of the highlights. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Beth Cohen, who is the SDN and NFV Network Product Strategy at Verizon. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, yes. >> All right, so Beth, I mean, we hear cloud in a box, Edge, all those pieces in the keynote, Monday. People are excited, you know, telecommunications. I worked in telecom back in the '90s. I'm excited to see that people are getting involved and looking at this, but before we get into all the tech, just tell us, briefly, about you and your role inside Verizon. >> Sure. So, I actually work at Verizon as a New Product Strategist, so I come up with new products, so I do product management. This is actually my second product for Verizon. The previous one was Secure Cloud Interconnect which is a very successful product. Who would have thought that connecting privately to the cloud would be a good idea? It turns out, everybody thinks that's an excellent idea, but I worked in telecom back, for GTE, back in the 1990s and through BBN, so I've been in this industry for a while and I've always stayed kind of on the cutting edge of things, so I'm very excited to be working on these cutting-edge projects within Verizon. >> All right, so speaking of cutting edge, let's cut to the Edge. >> Beth: Cut to the Edge (laughs). >> And, give our audience a little bit about what the announcement was, >> Sure. >> the actual product itself. >> So, Virtual Network Services, is the product. We originally announced it in July with a universal CP box. That box was not a, what we're calling a white box which I think is the industry term, now. That one was based on the Juniper NFX250 which is, we call, a gray box, so it's using the Juniper NFX software, but the new, new announcement is this is truly a white box. It's an x86 box. It's generic, any x86 will work, and, in fact, the product has, we realized, actually, working with customers that some customers want to have a very small box, very small footprint, low cost, that only supports maybe two, possibly three, NFVs, Virtual Network Functions, all the way up to our largest box, is 36 core. So, we have four core at the bottom, so that's used for the coffee shops or the small retail-type functions where they're only looking for security in routing or security in SDN or SD-WAN or whatever, so very small, compact use all the way up to 36 core which can support, you know, 10 or 12 different functions, so load balancing, routing, security, whatever you want, >> Yeah. >> cloud in a box. >> There's so many pieces of OpenStack and they've been, for years, talking about the complexity. This, really, if I understand it right, I mean, it's OpenStack at the edge in a small box, so how do we kit such a complicated thing in a little box and what kind of functionality does that bring? You know, what will customers get with it? >> So, obviously, it's, we didn't take old everything, >> Right. >> of course, so, you know, it does include Neutron for the networking and it does include Nova in the computes and so it has the core components that you need for OpenStack. And, why did we choose that? Because OpenStack really gave us that consistent platform across both out at the edge and also within the core, so we are building the hosted network services platform which we're using internally, as well, to host our, to support our network services and we're also supporting customers on this same platform. So, that gives us the ability to give a customer experience both out at the edge and within the core. So, of course, everybody wants to know the secret source. How did we cram that in? Containers, so we containerize OpenStack. One of the requirements is it had to be a single core, so it is a single core in the box because, of course, particularly in a small box, you want to leave as much space as possible for services that our customers want because the OpenStack is the infrastructure that supports it all. >> That's great, I mean, so, Beth, that was one of the highlights of the whole show, for me, right. I like when tech blows my mind a little bit and the idea of something that we might have run on a some embedded Linux source or embedded OS before, now, it's actually running a whole cloud platform, in a box, in my office, was amazing. As you're looking at the center of the network versus the edge, is that one, to you and to network ops, is that one big cloud, is that a cloud of clouds? What's kind of the architecture? >> Beth: Cloud of clouds. >> Yeah. >> Is it fog? (co-hosts laughing) >> It's, yeah, you could say it is a fog, because one of the things when you pull a network to the edge like that, Verizon lives, I mean, we live and breathe networks and the networks are WANs, Wide Area Networks, right, they're everywhere, so we live and breathe that every day. So, traditionally, as I mentioned in the keynote, is that cloud has been sort of the data center centric, right, and that changes the equation because, if you think about it, most data center centric clouds, the network ends at, there's some mystery thing that happens and the end, right? It just goes to that network router, you know, NNI, network-to-network net router and it just kind of disappears, right? Well, of course, we know what's on the other side, so what we've done is we've said, okay, we have functionality within that data center, but we've expanded that out to the edge and we understand that you can't just have everything sitting in the cloud and then rely on that edge to just work, so you need to move pieces of it out so it's not reliant on that inside data center. So, there's tools back there, but if that data center connection goes away, that function will still work out at the edge. >> That's great. You talked about both SDN and NFV, a big conversation at OpenStack for the last several years. >> Yeah. >> Can you talk a little bit about maybe the state of SDN and NFV and how you all are looking at that and are we there yet? What do we still, >> (laughs) Are we there yet? >> what places do you still see we need to go? >> So, when I worked with the marketing team, they were like, "Oh, we're going to have to use this NFV term. "We have to use the SDN," and when I talk to customers, inevitably, they're like, "What is the NFV stuff?" They have no idea, so, really, at the end of the day, I see NFV as a telco thing. Absolutely, we need it, but we have to translate what that means to customers because all that back-end stuff, as far as they're concerned, that's magic. That's the magic: that we deliver the services. Those packets just arrive, they do what they're supposed to do. So, I say, okay, network services is really what you're talking about, because they understand, "Oh, yeah, I need that security, I need that firewall, "I need that WAN Optimizer, I need that load balancer." That, they understand. >> Yeah. >> Well, Beth, I, with my telecom background, I think of, there's lots of hardware, there's lots of cabling, there's the challenges that you have with wireless and we're talking a lot about 5G, you're talking about software, though, and it's delivering >> Yeah. >> those services that the customer needs, so, right, is that what they ask for? Is it, I need these pieces and now I can do it via software as opposed to before, I had to, you know, we talked, it's the appliances to the software move? >> Right. >> What are the, your customers asking for and how are they embracing this? >> Well, so our customers are very excited. I can't think of a single customer that I have gone to that have said, "Why would I do that?" They're all saying, "No, this is really exciting," and so what they're doing is they're really rethinking the network because they're used to having stacks of boxes, so the appliance base, you know, that was really pioneered back, of course, Cisco sort of pioneered it back in the '90s but I remember talking to Infoblox back in the, oh, like the early 2000s when they came out with DHCP DNS appliance and I was like, "Wow, that's so cool." So, this is sort of the next generation, so why do you need to have six different boxes that do a single thing? Why don't we just make it a cloud in the box and put all those functions together and service chain them? That gives you a lot more flexibility. You're not stuck with that proprietary hardware and then worrying about, I mean, I can't tell you how many customers want to do this for tech refresh. They have end-of-life equipment that the vendor is saying, "Forget it, (laughs) this is 10-year-old equipment. "We're not supporting it anymore." >> Yeah, but what are the security implications, here, though? We've seen the surface area of where attacks can come from just seems to be growing exponentially. I think, I go to the edge, I've got way more devices, there's more vulnerabilities. Your last product, you said, was security. How does security fit into all of this? What are you hearing from your costumers? How do you partner with other people? >> So, security is absolutely paramount to our customers. As I mentioned in the talk, there was a, we did a survey of our customers. Security was absolutely the top priority, but security's a lot more sophisticated, as you said, than it used to be and the vectors for attack are much more sophisticated and so it's not enough to just have a firewall. That's, your attack is, you know, the sqiushy inside and the hard outside, forget it. That's just (laughs)-- >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get it. >> That's just not there anymore. >> Indeed, the moats are gone. They're in the castle. >> Yeah. >> They're in the castle, right. So, for us, it's very appealing to our customers, that, the idea that they can put the security where they need it, so they can put it out at the edge and some of them so want it at the edge and we give them the choice of setting up a sort of a minimal basic firewall or a full-featured next-gen firewall. We also find customers kind of like the brand names, so we offer Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco, Juniper and others will be coming, so that appeals to them. They tend to be a shop of one or the other. >> John: All on a software basis? >> All on a software basis. >> Giving them the virtual clients discount? >> Right, yeah, all virtual clients is right. And, you know, at the end of the day, our customers don't actually care about the hardware. For them, it's the service. >> I wanted to take it over to OpenStack itself for a little bit. You know, the great conversation here, this week, has been something about modularization, talking about the ecosystem, talking about containers, both the app layer up on top and the packaging layer down below, which is kind of really cool, as well. How are you seeing the OpenStack community engage with the ecosystem be available to different use cases like this? Right, slim it down, take what you need, leave the rest, different, for a while, the conversation was, there were so many projects and, about everything, and do you feel like OpenStack is going where we need it to go, now, in terms of, again, a usable partner and community to work with? >> I do believe that because, so, my product is really a portfolio, if you think about it, so it's a portfolio of services and I view our use of OpenStack in the same way. So, we're really taking that portfolio of OpenStack services and pulling, you know, putting together the package that we need to deliver the services. So, what's out at the edge, that package of OpenStack services at the edge, that's not the same set of services as what's within the core data center. There's some commonality, but we've chosen the ones that are important to us for the edge and chosen the ones that are important to us for the core. So, I think that the OpenStack community is really embracing this notion and we really welcome that, that thing. Now, what I'm finding is that the vendors that we're supporting, you know, that, in the ecosystem, at the application layer, are still struggling with, "Okay, do we containerize? "Do we support, what do, how do we support it?" I can't tell you how many vendors I've gone to and I said, "If you want to be in our portfolio," and obviously most of them do, you know, Verizon's a big company, "you have to be virtualized. "You have to be able to support, run under OpenStack," and they have to get past that, (laughs) that issue. >> Beth, I noticed in some of your social feeds, you've attended some of the Women at OpenStack event. >> Yes. >> I wonder if you have any comment on the events there and diversity in general in the community? >> So, one of the things I love about OpenStack is it's really, really gone out of its way in, within the open source community, in general, to really focus on the value of diversity and it really does track the number of women that, you know, there's a metric that says the percentage of women at every summit and it's going up and the Women of OpenStack community focus on mentoring, and it's not just women, because mentoring's very important, but it really allows, but women are, have sort of special challenges and minorities have special challenges, as well, and we really try to embrace that fact that you do need a leg up if you're not a 50-year-old white guy (laughs). >> All right, Beth Cohen, really appreciate you joining us. Congratulations on the keynote, the product and wish you the best of luck going forward. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back with more coverage here from OpenStack Summit in Boston. For John and myself, thanks for watching The CUBE. (upbeat synthesizer music)