(electronic music) >> Hello, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE News and host of theCUBE, and welcome to our news update for MWC in Barcelona, the premier event for cloud and to the telecommunication industry. News today, VMware in the news has lots of announcements, where it's expanding its line of products for communication service providers with Open RAND portfolio VMware's unveiled service management orchestration framework for simplifying and automating radio access networks and their applications. RANDs have traditionally been proprietary because of their need for low latency and speed and the Overran Alliance is championed open standard that would expand the number of players in the RAND ecosystem. According to Sanjay Oppai, senior vice president and general manager of the service provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware, VMware is the forefront of getting deployed in telcos both in the RAND as well as the core and VMware hopes they can extend their leadership from the enterprise data center and SD WAN and be the defacto standard in the RAND. VMware is also announcing a technical preview that'll allow communications service providers to run disaggregated and virtualized RAND functions directly on bare metal servers using VMware Tanzu. Project Hui is the initiative aimed at telecom providers that need flexibility in how they deploy edge devices. The VMware Telco cloud platform is also being improved to deliver carrier grade intelligent networking and lateral security features such as distributed firewall and intrusion detection and prevention, along with support for energy efficient use cases for 4G and 5G core load balancing. For enterprise customers, VMware is delivering new and enhanced remote worker device connectivity and intelligent wireless capabilities to its SD WAN and Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE Products, is also expanding its collaboration with Intel aimed at delivering new edge applications based on 5G connectivity that will support SD WAN use cases involving mobile and internet of things devices. Again, VMware spinning their portfolio in the news. Again, VMware is not stopping. Of course, theCUBE's, all the coverage of VMware Explorer will be coming up this year in 2023. Don't miss that. But at mwc, Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, the entire Cube team are there for four days of live coverage. Of course, all the news and reporting is on SiliconANGLE.com. For all the action, go there. And of course theCUBE.net is where the broadcast is in Barcelona. This is theCUBE News. Thanks for watching.

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Lisa Martin: Good afternoon everyone. theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC23. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of four days of CUBE content. I know, it's amazing. We're going to have a great conversation next with DISH and Dell, talking about the value of automation and telecom for 5G. Please welcome Song Toh, Senior Director of Product Management Infrastructure Automation at Dell. And Sidd Chenumolu, VP of Technology Development at DISH. Guys, great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure. >> So let's go ahead and start with you. We know that DISH is developing its own open cloud native 5G network from the ground up. Talk to us about before you were working with Dell, what the situation was like and why you brought Dell in to help drive the innovation. >> Ah, that's a good question. So, three years ago we started the journey, and one thing that was very clear to us is that we want to work with the partners who are going to be the leaders in this space. And it was very clear we are going to be in the cloud side- we are going to be in hybrid cloud, we are going to have our own data centers. Everything that we built is going to replicate a cloud model. 'Cause it was very, like we said, what is 5G? Fundamentally, if you think about 5G, right? Everyone says people talk about speeds. Okay, get it. But it's also about vertical industries. It's about customization of a network, application driven network. That's the way I call it, because if you walk around the floor right now, everyone's talking about monetization of 5G, everyone keeps doing enterprise. So you put two and two together, what do you get? That means you have to work with the leaders who have been serving enterprises forever, who know the enterprises' pain, they know all the problem statements. So we said, "okay, let's see who's out there and who can help us." And then obviously, Dell comes to the picture. So we had a good conversation, there was an alignment in where Dell wanted to go long-term, so we saw synergies. So we had a vision, we needed their help. They wanted to get into this space too. So there was an agreement, let's do it together. And it's been a good partnership since then. >> What were some of the challenges that you had at that time? Going, "we've got some challenges here, some risks, we want to move DISH forward and automate." Talk about some of those challenges that helped you understand, "Yeah, Dell's the right partner for this." >> Oh, first is when we started this, right? I'll be honest, I don't think we anticipated the complexity. We didn't know what we didn't know. So initially it was learning from Dell, who was more like teaching us, "this is what you're going to see, this is how it's going to look like". And then we started bringing the telco aspects on top of it. So it was not like, "I'm going to build a 5G". We said, "no, Dell, tell me what does the data center look like? Tell me the day-to-day challenges. How do you bring a server in? How the rack looks like, what are the connectivity?" So, learning, then you bring the telco as an application, it was not like a telco first. It was like a software first, infrastructure second, now you bring in the telco part of it. So, I mean, challenges I would say, right? Everything was new, pretty much across the board for us. It was not just one thing. We were doing Open RAN, which was a brand new cloud native, was completely new. 5G standalone was new. No one had done that before, and (mumbles) was hybrid cloud. So I think we were on a stool sitting on the, with the four legs, all were wobbly. (laughs) We made it. So, automation was definitely the key. We knew we had to go at a scale, because we are in FCC deployment, we are meeting like- we will be at covering 230 million pops by June of this year. So, aggressive timelines- >> Dave Nicholson: Wait, say that again. How many, so say that ag- how many? >> 230 million. >> And, pops being points of presence? >> No, sorry, population. U. S.- >> Oh, population. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Okay, okay. >> Okay. I'm sorry, I'm- >> So, very aggressive buildout for us. >> Wow. >> And automation has to be the key for it, because we just cannot- first is, we cannot scale a company. We are a startup. This wireless is a startup. That's how we started with a handful of people. We obviously hired a lot of people since then, but we said, "we will never be at the scale of the existing CSPs today." We can't. Time is not on our side, and we don't want to be at that scale anyway, 'cause we want to be nimble, move fast. So what do you need? Automation. Automation at every layer. And it's a journey. Never stops. >> No, it doesn't stop. >> Oh yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, she's- >> Go ahead and get a question in. I don't want to hog. >> So when most people hear DISH, they think of streaming content, they think of alternative to cable provider. >> Sidd: Yeah. >> In that space. But just clarify for us all of the things that DISH is involved with today, and what DISH aspires to be involved with as we move forward. >> Good question. We want to be in the connectivity space. We want to connect everything. That's our goal, our mission statement. We started with the satellite, since then we moved on to the IPTV Sling, which is a leader. So we are not afraid to take risks, right? So what we own- we own satellites, we know content delivery very well. I think we are done there for many years. We agreed to that. Now we said, "now we understand wireless". What we want to do is, we want to deliver the data to the customers, and whether it could be videos, it could be audio data, like voice, anything, or it could be a machine. We just want to be in the connectivity space of connecting everything, and based on- you look around, right? It's all about connectivity. Everything requires connectivity. It's all about data monetization, and we want to be there in every aspect of it. >> Connectivity is almost the lifeblood these days of everything that we do, right? >> Sidd: Yep. >> Song: Indeed. >> And of every industry. Song, talk a little bit about the DISH Wireless use case. How some of their challenges in telco really maybe helped even Dell accelerate its presence in telco. >> Absolutely, right. I think one thing that Sidd mentioned, right, 230 million populations, but what does that translate to in terms of infrastructure deployment? 'Cause he said it's a startup. They started from not a whole lot in terms of coverage. So, in terms of 5G deployment, whether it's virtualized or open RAN, there needs to be distributed infrastructure that covers the entire United States, right? A certain percentage of the population is still a huge amount of coverage. So deploy tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of servers around the country, get them set up, get 'em configured, and maintain and monitor and meter all of that. We help DISH to essentially roll that out, get it going, and then they deploy their RAN workload on top. I mean, that's a very significant undertaking. We were very proud to be able to offer our Bare Metal Orchestrator to facilitate that, but ultimately their success is their success. We are there to help, right? We are partnered, and we- happy to definitely be able to say we got to a point that we are happy, you know, in claims of success there. >> Well, that's why we selected Dell. >> Thank you. (chuckles) >> Let's unpack a little bit of some of the successes, some of the outcomes that you've achieved so far, working with Dell. >> Let me give an example. Today we have an ability to upgrade, update, even swap a RAN vendor overnight. Entire market, unheard of overnight. Give me hours, I'll do the entire thing for you from scratch. We can instantiate entire data center racks remotely in a matter of minutes. Cannot do that without automation, and with the help- >> Lisa Martin: Couldn't do it before. >> We have curated an extraordinary, what you call orchestration mechanism of finely tuned data sets and pipelines. It's like a machine. It keeps spinning. It's very good. And again, not something that happened overnight. Took us several months to get there with a lot of our partners, and Dell was there. >> Song: Right. >> I'd be curious to get your perspectives, each of you, on some of the buzz that was going on around the show where the telecom, "plumbing providers"- >> Sidd: Yep. >> have complained about the content streaming through, and maybe they need to charge more for access, and Netflix hit back and said, "well, hold on a minute. You wouldn't have anything to deliver to your customers if it weren't for the content we are producing. Maybe we need licensing fees from you." >> Song: (chuckles) >> What is your view on that, in terms of this whole over the top conversation? DISH seems sort of, kind of in a hybrid position there. >> Well, it's a very complex question. I think everyone is struggling with it, so I'm not sure if I have the right answer for it. We are definitely unique because we own the content too. We want to offer- we probably may offer our own content over the wireless service. There is a pros and cons. I mean, purely from a, as a M&O service provider, it's a lot of effort and cost for us to deliver huge amount of bandwidth. But again, the networks are being built to handle huge capacity. So if you don't have video, what do we do? That's also a realistic question. I think there is a mechanism where the cost and the value both have to be shared. So that it's a win-win for everyone. It's not lopsided to one. And said, "you carry most of the cost", and I'm transparent, it doesn't work that way long term. And especially given the 5G side, with all the slicing capabilities and ability to offer QoS, better quality of experience, I think there's a value to be created here. >> If you look at the infrastructure necessary to drive all of these things- >> Right. >> We've seen, just go back to our own consumer experience with the internet. We've gone from text to images to video. >> Song: Right. >> To high definition video. >> Sidd: Yeah. >> To, is 8K video absurd? Do we really need to be able to handle that? What are the things that need to be supported as we move forward? Is it that we scale out into this world of billions and billions of things that are connected? Or are there these much bigger, fatter pipelines for things like 8K video or it a combination of the two? What is Dell thinking of when it thinks of the infrastructure that it builds and how you customize that- >> Song: Right. >> to address those things? What's on the horizon? >> Dave, I think that's a very good question, right? Certainly communication service providers like DISH has built out the capacity to handle the customers that they want to serve. But there's another aspect of this I think I'd like to add on top of the question you posed, it's not about say, 10, say a thousand streams of 8K. I would need to be able to handle that. I think the present challenge right now is really, say there's a sports stadium that you need to activate so that, not about everyone filming that sports game, it's about, "Hey, I got to tell my, whoever- I got a 10 seconds video clip that I got to share with my friends." It's also not about copyright. It's more about- >> Dave Nicholson: (laughs) >> can you as a provider- >> The NFL is listening. >> Exactly. Can you as a provider handle that service? Because otherwise your customers say, "oh, I got into the sports stadium, every time I could not even text my daughter." >> Dave Nicholson: Yeah. >> So, how do you then scale up the infrastructure as needed, the bandwidth as needed, and scale back down when it's not? Maybe, because the infrastructure can potentially be repurposed for a different workload too. That requires automation, right? From bottom to top, all the way, infrastructure - all the way up to the workload. And that's I think a question that people are starting to ask. I'm not sure. I mean, still you guys have thought about that too as a- >> I mean, instant gratification is the new thing, right? Everyone wants instant response, everyone feedback, everything. So connectivity is given. I do think there is a space for both billions of devices and the 8K and probably 16K in the future. It's going to happen in the technology walls. That's why I like, say, the 5G, and especially the way we architect our own network. We call it network of networks. I'm not designing a network that is only for one monolithic application or one stack only. We are actually programmable network, because I know network A is for 8K. Network B is for IOT, network C is for regular, network D is for something else. And the list can keeps on growing. I don't think we can stifle innovation at any level and said, "well you can't do this because we are not ready." World is going to move too fast. Technology is too fast for all of us. >> But do you have to prioritize? >> If there is a business for- it's all top-down driven, not much of a technology driven. If there's a business, someone said there's a value to be made, it's prioritized. >> What's your - Sidd, we'll stick with you, your observations. This is day three of MWC 23. Lot of talk here on disaggregation. A lot of talk about open RAN, a lot of talk about private 5G wireless networks, but also some controversy. You brought up the Netflix controversy. >> Dave: Yep. >> What are some of the messages that you've heard so far from this event - and then, Song, we'll ask you the same question - that excite you about the direction that the industry's going and where DISH Wireless stands within it? >> Yeah. I mean, I didn't have a chance to walk the floor, but for wherever I have been in the last two and a half days, one thing that stood out is people are no longer talking about gigabits capacity anymore. They're talking about monetization of the network. Everyone is talking APIs now. >> Lisa Martin: Yeah. >> That's the buzzword. If I said monetization, API- I got a beautiful network not tell me how to make money off it and how do I work with each other? It's no longer about "I want to own it all." What can I do to partner with A, partner with B? How can we all grow together? I think that's the theme that I see this year compared to the previous years, where it was always about like, "hey, build the best 5G network with the high speeds, big radios." I don't even see radios, by the way. >> Lisa Martin: (chuckles) >> Interesting. Yeah. So the actual, it's almost fascinating when you toil in obscurity to build these critical components and then people ignore you. So I feel for the radio people. >> Song: (laughs) Being a long-term infrastructure guy, what have you been seeing here that's interesting? >> Well, a few things that I feel quite excited about from the conversation I've had. One is, on the private mobility side, Lisa, as you said, I'm seeing certainly customers, partners, and even in the booth talking about what the use cases are, right? Rather than, "Hey, here's a cool technology." But actually, people talking about use cases now. And, with the communication service providers and the operators, I'm hearing - of course, I mean, Sidd's doesn't have that problem because it's building whole new, >> (chuckles) >> but there are other providers that are saying, "Hey, we acknowledge that we need to transform and we are on the way too", rather than saying, "can I not do it and still, you know, live with the modern world." So I feel that we always need to be ready to change, because the world, the market, and all other factors will cause us to either change or really to change. And I think we are changing. Open system is becoming more of a expected, you know, future. It's just how do we get there, right? What do we need to learn as we get there? And we're happy to provide the support as a partner, the automation technology, and even the solutions to enable that, from Dell's perspective. >> So DISH in particular? DISH Wireless. >> Yep. >> Despite the fact that everyone's heard of DISH. >> Song: Yeah. >> DISH has been around for a long time. Where you sit within DISH Wireless, you described it as a startup. You don't feel encumbered by a lot of the legacy things that maybe some other providers do. Is that a fair statement or are you having to navigate that? We call it ambidextrous management >> (laughs) >> in the CTO world, where it's like, got to keep the lights on, got to keep the existing revenue flowing, also got to innovate. How do you blend the two? Is that a challenge? >> Well, probably not a challenge for me. I'm on the wireless technology and architecture side, so I get to do the cool stuff. >> Dave Nicholson: Okay. >> Don't have to worry about day to day operations, some complexity or revenue. Someone else is managing that complex part. They let me play with my toys. >> Well played, well played. >> Guys, it's been great having you on the program talking about what DISH Wireless is doing with Dell. Thanks to Dell. We're going to be watching this space to see how you continue to innovate. Thank you so much for joining us on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Our pleasure. >> For our guests and for Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from MWC 23. Stick around. Our next guest joins Dave and me in just a minute. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

(intro music) >> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (gentle music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. As you well know, we are live at MWC23 in Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our coverage, as you know, 'cause you've been watching the first two days. A lot of conversations about ecosystem, a lot about disruption in the telco industry. We're going to be talking about Open RAN. You've heard some of those great conversations, the complexities, the opportunities. Two guests join Dave and me. Abdullah Abuzaid, Technical Product Manager at Dell, and Gil Hellmann, VP Telecom Solutions Engineering and Architecture at Wind River. Welcome to the program guys. >> Thank you. >> Nice to be here. >> Let's talk a little bit about Dell and Wind River. We'll each ask you both the same question, and talk to us about how you're working together to really address the complexities that organizations are having when they're considering moving from a closed environment to an open environment. >> Definitely. Thank you for hosting us. By end of the day, the relationship between Dell and Wind River is not a new. We've been collaborating in the open ecosystem for long a time enough. And that's one of the, our partnership is a result of this collaboration where we've been trying to make more efficient operation in the ecosystem. The open environment ecosystem, it has the plus and a concern. The plus of simplicity, choice of multiple vendors, and then the concern of complexity managing these vendors. Especially if we look at examples for the Open RAN ecosystem, dealing with multiple vendors, trying to align them. It bring a lot of operational complexity and TCO challenges for our customers, from this outcome where we build our partnership with Wind River in order to help our customer to simplify, or run deployment, operation, and lifecycle management and sustain it. >> And who are the customers, by the way? >> Mainly the CSP customers who are targeting Open RAN and Virtual RAN deployments. That digital transformation moving towards unified cloud environment, or a seamless cloud experience from Core to RAN, these are the customers we are working with them. >> You'll give us your perspective, your thoughts on the partnership, and the capabilities that you're enabling, the CSPs with that. >> Sure. It's actually started last year here in Barcelona, when we set together, and started to look at the, you know, the industry, the adoption of Open RAN, and the challenges. And Open RAN brings a lot of possibilities and benefit, but it does bring a lot of challenges of reintegrating what you desegregate. In the past, you purchase everything from one vendor, they provide the whole solution. Now you open it, you have different layers. So if you're looking at Open RAN, you have, I like to look at it as three major layers, the management, application, and the infrastructure. And we're starting to look what are the challenges. And the challenges of integration, of complexity, knowledge that operator has with cloud infrastructure. And this is where we basically, Dell and Winder River set together and say, "How can we ease this? "How we can make it simpler?" And we decided to partner and bring a joint infrastructure solution to market, that's not only integrated at a lab at the factory level, but it basically comes with complete lifecycle management from the day zero deployment, through the day two operation, everything done through location, through Dell supported, working out of the box. So basically taking this whole infrastructure layer integration pain out, de-risking everything, and then continuing from there to work with the ecosystem vendor to reintegrate, validate the application, on top of this infrastructure. >> So what is the, what is the Wind River secret sauce in this, in this mix, for folks who aren't familiar with what Wind River does? >> Yes, absolutely. So Wind River, for many, many don't know, we're in business since 1981. So over 40 years. We specialize high performance, high reliability infrastructure. We touch every aspect of your day and your life. From the airplane that you fly, the cars, the medical equipment. And if we go into the telco, most of the telco equipment that it's not virtualized, not throughout the fight today, using our operating system. So from all the leading equipment manufacturers and even the smaller one. And as the world started to go into desegregation in cloud, Wind River started to look at this and say, "Okay, everything is evolving. Instead of a device that included the application, the hardware, everything fused together, it's now being decomposed. So instead of providing the operating environment to develop and deploy the application to the device manufacturer, now we're providing it basically to build the cloud. So to oversimplify, I call it a cloud OS, okay. It's a lot more than OS, it's an operating environment. But we took basically our experience, the same experience that, you know, we used in all those years with the telco equipment manufacturer, and brought it into the cloud. So we're basically providing solution to build an on-premises scalable cloud from the core all the way to the far edge, that doesn't compromise reliability, doesn't compromise performance, and address all the telco needs. >> So I, Abdullah, maybe you can a answer this. >> Yeah. >> What is the, what does the go-to-market motion look like, considering that you have two separate companies that can address customers directly, separately. What does that, what does that look like if you're approaching a possible customer who is, who's knocking on the door? >> How does that work? >> Exactly. And this effort is a Dell turnkey sales service offering, or solution offering to our customers. Where Dell, in collaboration with Wind River, we proactively validate, integrate, and productize the solution as engineered system, knock door on our customer who are trying to transform to Open RAN or open ecosystem. We can help you to go through that seamless experience, by pre-validating with whatever workload you want to introduce, enable zero touch provisioning, and during the day one deployment, and ensure we have sustainable lifecycle management throughout the lifecycle of the product in, in operate, in operational network, as well as having a unified single call of support from Dell side. >> Okay. So I was just going to ask you about support. So I'm a CSP, I have the solution, I go to Dell for support. >> Exactly. >> Okay. So start with Dell, and level one, level two. And if there are complex issues related to the cloud core itself, then Wind River will be on our back supporting us. >> Talk a little bit about a cust, a CSP example that is, is using the technology, and some of the outcomes that they're able to achieve. I'd love to get both of your perspectives on that. >> Vodafone is a great example. We're here in Barcelona. Vodafone is the first ora network in Europe, and it's using our joint solution. >> What are some of the, the outcomes that it's helping them to achieve? >> Faster time to market. As you see, they already started to deploy the ORAN in commercial network, and very successful in the trials that they did last year. We're also not stopping there. We're evolving, working with them together to improve like stuff around energy efficiency. So continue to optimize. So the outcome, it's just simplifying it, and you know, ready to go. Using experience that we have, Wind River is powering the first basically virtualized RAN 5G network in the world. This is with Verizon. We're at the very large scale. We started this deployment in late '20 and '19, the first site. And then through 2020 to 2022, we basically rolled in large scale. We have a lot of experience learning from it, which what we brought into the table when we partnered with Dell. A lot of experience from how you deploy at scale. Many sites from a central location, updates, upgrade. So the whole day two operation, and this is coming to bearing the solution that basically Vodafone is deploying now, and which allowed them... If I, if I look at my engagement with Verizon, started years before we started. And it took quite some time until we got stuff running. And if you look at the Vodafone time schedule, was significantly compressed compared to the Verizon first deployment. And I can tell you that there are other service providers that were announced here by KDI, for example. It's another one moving even faster. So it's accelerating the whole movement to Ora. >> We've heard a lot of acceleration talk this week. I'd love to get your perspective, Abdullah, talking about, you know, you, you just mentioned two huge names in Telco, Vodafone and Verizon. >> Yep. >> Talk a little bit about Dell's commitment to helping telecommunications companies really advance, accelerate innovation so that all of us on the other end have this thing that just works wherever we are 24 by 7. >> Not exactly. And this, we go back to the challenges in Open ecosystem. Managing multiple vendors at the same time, is a challenge for our customers. And that's why we are trying to simplify their life cycle by have, by being a trusted partner, working with our customer through all the journey. We started with Dish in their 5G deployment. Also with Vodafone. We're finding the right partners working with them proactively before getting into, in front of the customer to, we've done our homework, we are ready to simplify the process for you to go for it. If you look at the RAN in particular, we are talking with the 5g. We have ran the simplification, but they still have on the other side, limited resources and skillset can support it. So, bringing a pro, ahead of time engineer system, with a zero touch of provisioning enablement, and sustainable life cycle management, it lead to the faster time to market deployment, TCO savings, improved margins for our customers, and faster business revenue for their end users. >> Solid outcomes. >> And, and what you just just described, justifies the pain associated with disaggregating and reintegrating, which is the way that Gill referenced it, which I think is great because you're not, you're not, you're not re-aggregating, (laughs) you're reintegrating, and you're creating something that's better. >> Exactly. >> Moving forward. Otherwise, why would you do it? >> Exactly. And if you look at it, the player in the ecosystem, you have the vendors, you have the service integrators, you have the automation enablers, but kind of they are talking in silos. Everyone, this is my raci, this is what I'm responsible for. I, I'm not able, I don't want to get into something else while we are going the extra mile by working proactively in that ecosystem to... Let's bring brains together, find out what's one plus one can bring three for our customers, so we make it end-to-end seamless experience, not only on the technical part, but also on the business aspect side of it. >> So, so the partnership, it's about reducing the pen. I will say eliminating it. So this is the, the core of it. And you mentioned getting better coverage for your phone. I do want to point out that the phones are great, but if you look at the premises of a 5G network, it's to enable a lot more things that will touch your life that are beyond the consumer and the phone. Stuff like connected vehicles. So for example, something as simple as collision avoidance, the ability for the car that goes in front of you to be able to see what's happening and broadcast this information to the car behind that have no ability to see it. And basically affect our life in a way that makes our driving safer. And for this, you need a ultra low, reliable low latency communication. You need a 5G network. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you know, we think about, "Well we just have to be connected all the time." But those are some of the emerging technologies that are going to be potentially lifesaving, and, and really life transforming that you guys are helping to enable. So, really great stuff there, but so much promise coming down the road. What's next for Dell and Wind River? And, and when you're in conversations with prospective CSP's, what is the superpower that you deliver together? I'd love to get both of your perspectives. >> So, if you look at it, number one, customers look at it, last savings and their day-to-day operation. In 5G nature, we are talking the introduction of ORAN. This is still picking up. But there is a mutualization and densification of ORAN. And this is where we're talking on monetizing my deployment. Then the third phase, we're talking sustainability and advanced service introduction. Where I want to move not only ORAN, I want to bring the edge at the same side, I want to define the advanced use cases of edge, where it enables me with this pre-work being done to deliver more services and better SLA services. By end of the day, 5G as a girl mentioned earlier, is not about a good better phone coverage, or a better speed robot, but what customized SLA's I can deliver. So it enables me to deliver different business streams to my end users. >> Yeah. >> So yeah. I will say there are two pens. One, it's the technology side. So for an example, energy efficiency. It's a very big pin point. And sustainability. So we work a lot around this, and basically to advance this. So if you look at the integrated solution today, it's very highly optimized for resource consumption. But to be able to more dynamically be able to change your power profile without compromising the SLA. So this is one side. The other side, it's about all those applications that will come to the 5G network to make our life better. It's about integrating, validating, certifying those applications. So, it's not just easy to deploy an ORAN network, but it's easy to deploy those applications. >> I'd be curious to get your perspective on the question of ROI in this, in this space. Specifically with the sort of the macro headwinds (clears throat) the economies of the world are facing right now, if you accept that. What does the ROI timeline look like when you're talking about moving towards ORAN, adopting VRAN, an amazing, you know, a plethora of new services that can be delivered, but will these operators have the appetite to take that, make that investment and take on that risk based upon the ROI time horizon? Any thoughts on that? >> Yeah. So if you look at the early days or ORAN introduction in particular, most of the entrepreneurs of ORAN and Virtual RAN ran into the challenges of not only the complexity of open ecosystem, but the integration, is like the redos of the work. And that's where we are trying to address it via pre-engineered system or building an engineer system proactively before getting it to the customers. Per our result or outcomes we get, we are talking about 30 to 50% savings on the optics. We are talking 110 ROI for our customers, simply because we are reducing the redos, the time spent to discover and explore. Because we've done that rework ahead of time, we found the optimization issues. Just for example, any customer can buy the same components from any multiple vendors, but how I can bring them together and give, deliver for me the best performance that I can fully utilize, that's, that's where it brings the value for our customer, and accelerate the deployment and the operation of the network. >> Do you have anything to add before we close in the next 30 seconds? >> Yeah. Yeah. (laughs) >> Absolutely. I would say, we start to see the data coming from two years of operation at scale. And the data supports performance. It's the same or better than traditional system. And the cost of operation, it's as good or better than traditional. Unfortunately, I can't provide more specific data. But the point is, when something is unknown in the beginning, of course you're more afraid, you take more conservative approach. Now the data starts to flow. And from here, the intention needs to go even better. So more efficiency, so cost less than traditional system, both to operate as well as to build up. But it's definitely the data that we have today says, the, ORAN system is at part, at the minimum. >> So, definite ROI there. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about how you're helping organizations not just address the complexities of moving from close to open, but to your point, eliminating them. We appreciate your time and, and your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. Live from MWC23. We'll be back after a short break. (outro music)

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

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, guys and gals, good to see you. It's theCUBE live in Barcelona at MWC23. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante on day one of four days of wall to wall CUBE coverage. Dave, today is ecosystem day. We've had some great conversations about why the open ecosystem is so important and some of the key players in it. >> Well and I'm in search of disruptors, so I'm looking for, okay, who are the network operators that are going to actually lean into the future and drive it and challenge the existing incumbents. We'll talk about that today. >> And we're going to be talking about that next. We've got one of our alumni back with us. Satish Iyer is here, the Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you. >> Richard Leitao is with us as well, the Vice President of National Development at DISH Network. Welcome. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, lots of, this is day one, the theme is velocity. I feel like the day has gone by so quickly. But Dell and DISH have partnered together on a multi-year initiative to build your nationwide cloud-native 5G network that's going to cover a lot of the US. Talk a little bit about that partnership, we'll get both of your perspectives. Richard, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So thank you again for having me. So DISH had the opportunity of, of going through this experience, of innovating once more. For the ones that know DISH, DISH is a company that was founded in 1980 by an innovator, a disruptor. Of course, in the course of the next 40 years, we had the opportunities of even disrupting ourselves. We launched our first satellite TV service. We then launched the first streaming, video streaming platform, disrupting our own satellite business. And since 2008, we have been acquiring Spectrum and, you know, Spectrum, the most valuable asset of a wireless operator. We felt that this was the right opportunity, having 5G , having O-RAN, and we decided to go full in in a greenfield project building national network, 5G O-RAN cloud-based network, one of a kind network in in the US and, and most of all, using O-RAN, it's very important to us, what, what it can bring and it can bring to DISH but to the entire ecosystem of, of this sector in the US. >> Satish, talk a little bit about the partnership from Dell's perspective and some of the unique advantages that Dell is delivering to DISH. >> Oh absolutely. Again, like Richard was saying, I mean the telecom network is being desegregated as we speak. You know, companies like DISH and everybody else is looking at what are the best-in-class technologies we can bring to the table. I would like to say that, you know, the cloud is coming to the telco world, right? A lot of us have seen the tremendous transformation in the cloud world in the last few years. Now, you know, DISH is a big enterprise company. As you know, you know, we are pretty strong within the cloud space and enterprise space. So what we try to work with DISH is Dell, is to bring to DISH is, you know, that notion of cloud scale and the cloud ecosystem into telecom, right? By means best-in-class infrastructure products, best-in-class software products, to allow somebody like DISH to innovate and incre, you know, basically expand and build their O-RAN network. So it's absolutely important for us as we build and get into the telecom space to work with somebody like DISH who's also disrupting as a carrier in that space. >> So it's early days for Open RAN but you've decided, "okay, we're all in". >> Yeah. >> Right? So (chuckling) you burn the bridge, as they say, "go for it". (Lisa chuckles) So when you talk to most people, they say, "okay, it's, it's, it's, it's immature." It's got to be able to get to the levels of, of the, the the hardened stack reliability. But of course it brings the advantage of flexibility and speed. Are you optimizing for one or the other right now? How are you dealing with that balance? >> Well, it, it's, it's not mature in the sense that most of operators that think about it, they have a legacy network. And in order to go full in on the O-RAN side, they need to scrap a lot of things that they have and honestly, they don't want, and it doesn't make sense. So being a greenfield operator, give us that advantage. Give us the advantage and, and desegregation, it's all about chip sets, boxes and software and the chip sets part and what I like the most in desegregation is the time of innovation. The time that we can use new chip sets coming into the market, the size of the boxes that we are using. Obviously our footprint onsite is much smaller than traditional carriers or proprietary systems. So all of that Dell has been critical in supporting us. Supporting us having the best chip sets, having the smallest footprint and, you know, the software, the cycle of innovation is much faster than in proprietary systems. So ma-, it's maturing. I'm glad to say that probably two years ago here O-RAN was more like a, a pilot type of technology. It is not, we are live, we are live for more than 30 million customers in the US and, you know, the performance levels are very similar to traditional networks. >> So you don't just buy a nationwide cloud-native 5G network out of the box, you got to- >> No, you don't. >> You got to build it. So I'm curious as to what Dell's role is in that, in that build out. >> Right? >> How and how, I'm really curious how to, how you would grade Dell but we'll get there. >> Yeah, I mean, look, yes, you don't. So I think the, the, the first and foremost is again, as, as we, Dell, comes into the telco space, one of the things we have to look at is to understand what makes Dell better in the enterprise space, right? It is the best-in-class infrastructure. It is the software ties together. As you talk about desegregated networks, it's important to understand lot of these piece parts have to still be touched together, right? So I think the integration and integration aspects becomes really key which is really Dell is very good at. So one of the things we are working really closely with DISH Tech, you know Richard was alluding to, is bringing all, not just bringing all the software and hardware assets together, but how do you continuously innovate and keep fixing things faster, right? So in the old days, traditional ways, you have a software stack, it takes you 18 months, 20 months to actually get an upgrade done. Here we have continuously CI/CD pipelines where if you want to a change done within, within a week's or within a few days, where we can actually go and test and make sure these things work. So I think a lot of the best enterprise software practices, cloud practices, combined with whatever needs for telco, actually is what makes it very unique. >> I, I saw that this started out as an FCC compliance initiative that turned into a partnership, obviously a very successful one. Richard, talk about what DISH saw in Dell that really made it the right choice, knowing you have choices, you have options. >> You know, we saw the capability to execute, but we also saw the capability to innovate. From an execution level, at the end of the day, like we were talking, we started the project in the middle of COVID, and we had the first mandate to cover 20% of the US population by June, 2022. And now we have a second one, 70% of US population by June 2023. At the beginning of the project, it was all about availability of materials, logistics, how to distribute, how to transport material. So Dell has a world-class supply chain, we felt that working with Dell through all these challenges made things easier. So from an execution perspective, whenever you need to build a network and you, you are building thousands of sites, you need to have materials, you need to distribute them and you need to install them. Dell helped us across the board. Our expectations obviously will change. We have a network, we want to cooperate with Dell in many other areas. We want to, you know, leverage on Dell ability to reach the enterprise market, to have private 5G offers. So hopefully this collaboration will endure in time and, and, you know, will change and evolve in time. >> And it's a big bet. I mean, it's not like a single, it's not like a little transaction that you guys are doing. I feel like, you know Michael Dell and Eric Carlson had dinner and they said, "okay, we're going to, we're going to partner up and this is going to be a multi-decade partnership. You had to be transparent, "Hey, we're new at this, even though we're really good at enterprise tech and so you're going to, obviously if you take a chance on us, here's what we promise you." >> Absolutely. >> And vice versa, you guys had to say, "all right, hey, we're willing to roll the dice because we're trying to change the world." So what was that dynamic like? I mean, how did, I'm curious as to this has to be a lot of different levels, engineering, senior management, board level discussions. >> You know, we felt a huge buy-in from Dell on the Open RAN concept. >> Right. >> Yeah, okay. >> And, you know, edge computing and, and the ability to get us the best product and evolve the best product, Intel is is critical in all these offerings. Intel has a great relationship with Dell. Dell helped us. Dell sponsored the DISH program and some of these suppliers, So it was definitely good to have their support and the buy-in on the O-RAN concept. We felt it from day one and we felt secure on that. >> Yeah, I mean, I, to add to that, I mean, you know DISH was very instrumental in driving, dictating and executing to our roadmap, right? They're one of the key, I mean, since they are out there and they're really turning in a way, it's important that a customer who's actually at the out front of innovation, helps us drive our own roadmap. So to Richard's point, a lot of our product roadmaps, in terms of what have you built and all that, was based on what DISH thinks as going to be market-based requirements. They also helped us a lot in the integration aspects. Like I said, one of the things about open desegregation of these networks is there is a lot of integration because, you know, there is, it's not a one, one monolithic pipe smokestack anymore. You are picking up best-in-class pieces, bits and pieces and tying it together. And it's important to understand when you tie it together things will go wrong, right? So there is a lot of learnings from an integration standpoint. Supportability, deployment, one of the things Richard talked about was supply chain, you know. Other Dell's ability to, lot of these deployments, a lot of these configs in the factory, right, in the second part. So especially a lot of these partnerships started during COVID time and as you all know, you know what we went through two years ago. So we had to make sure that lot of these things are done in one place and a factory, and not done in the field because we couldn't do a lot of these things. So there's a lot of, lot of experimentation, lot of, lot, lot of innovation on that. >> So it's 2030, what's this look like? What's the vision if we can work backwards from there? Well, a, a great network coverage to the entire country, bringing new services to enterprises, to verticals, bringing value add to customers and, you know, technology cycles, they are lasting much less than they were. I cannot even say what will happen in three years. 2030, I mean, I know, I know somebody has a vision for 2030. That's another thing. (everyone laughs) >> A lot of it is "build it and they will come", right? >> Yeah. >> I mean it really is right? You put that network in place and then innovation happens on top. That's the best thing. >> Yeah. And look and and I think the biggest people think about Open RAN in terms of cost, which, you know, you, you have some things in cost that you appreciate in Open RAN. The footprint, the the possibility to diversify suppliers and and have more competition. But for me, Open RAN is about innovation and cycles of innovation. I used to work for Nokia, I used to work for Alcatel. I knew from the generation of an idea to an execution and having a feature delivered to a certain customer, it, it took months. We want innovation to take weeks. We are innovating at the speed, speed of the cloud. We are cooperating with new players, players on the cloud and, and we expect things to happen much faster than they traditionally happen on the telecom sector. >> Move fast and break things. >> Well, we also expect that speed- >> Break and fix. (everyone laughs) >> Yeah, thank you for that. >> But speaking of speed, your customers expect that, right? They expect the service to be up 24/7. They expect to be able to access whatever content they want, whenever they want from wherever they are. So comment, Richard, in our last few minutes here of, of how the, the Dell partnership is helping DISH to really deliver the excellent customer experience that your customers just expect that you're going to deliver. >> Well by setting up the system, number one, we are leveraging on a number of services. And I mentioned the supply chain, but in reality Dell made much more than that for our 20% milestone and is supporting our 70% milestone by installing, testing, verifying most of our data center equipment. We found that this offering from Dell was really addressing some of our needs because, you know, we, we believe they know a lot in this area and they, they can provide the best advice and the best speed to market in, in terms of having this equipment. Because we are working on a time clock, we need to have this done as soon as possible. You know for the future, I hope that they can help us in driving more services. I hope they can bring all the infrastructure that we need to offer to our customers. And, you know, we keep committed to O-RAN. O-RAN is really important. We are not compromising that. And I think the future is bright for both of us. >> Yeah, and Dell learns from the experience. >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. >> There's got to be a catalyst for expanding your roadmap and vision in telecom. >> Yeah, I mean, like you said, I mean, you asked a 2030 question and I think that, you know, know six, seven years from now I think people should look at what DISH and Dell and say they were the trailblazers of make, bringing Open RAN to the market and making 5G a reality. I mean, you talk about 5G, but every 5G is on a different stages. I do think that this combination, this partnership has the best chance to be the first ones to actually have a truly Open RAN network to be successful in commercial. >> Awesome guys. Trailblazers, Dell and DISH. Well, we look forward to watching this story unfold. Thank you- >> Thank you. >> for joining Dave and me on the program today talking about what you're doing together. We appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you, bye. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Barcelona at MWC23. We'll be back after a short break, so we'll see you soon.

(light music) >> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Spain everyone. Lisa Martin here with theCUBE Dave Vellante, my co-host for the next four days. We're live in Barcelona, covering MWC23. This is only day one, but I'll tell you the theme of this conference this year is velocity. And I don't know about you Dave, but this day is flying by already. This is ecosystem day. We're going to have a great discussion on the ecosystem next. >> Well we're seeing the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, and that necessitates an ecosystem open- we're going to talk about Open RAN, we've been talking about even leading up to the show. It's a critical technology enabler and it's compulsory to have an ecosystem to support that. >> Absolutely compulsory. We've got two guests here joining us, Gautam Bhagra, Vice President partnerships at Dell, and Scott Walker, Vice President of global Telco ecosystem at Wind River. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Nice to be here. >> Thanks For having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So you've got some news, this is day one of the conference, there's some news, Gautam, and let's start with you, unpack it. >> Yeah, well there's a lot of news, as you know, on Dell World. One of the things we are very excited to announce today is the launch of the Open Telecom Ecosystems Community. I think Dave, as you mentioned, getting into an Open RAN world is a challenge. And we know some of the challenges that our customers face. To help solve for those challenges, Dell wants to work with like-minded partners and customers to build innovative solutions, and join go-to-market. So we are launching that today. Wind River is one of our flagship partners for that, and I'm excited to be here to talk about that as well. >> Can you guys talk a little bit about the partnership, maybe a little bit about Wind River so the audience gets that context? >> Sure, absolutely, and the theme of the show, Velocity, is what this partnership is all about. We create velocity for operators if they want to adopt Open RAN, right? We simplify it. Wind River as a company has been around for 40 years. We were part of Intel at one point, and now we're independent, owned by a company called Aptiv. And with that we get another round of investment to help continue our acceleration into this market. So, the Dell partnership is about, like I said, velocity, accelerating the adoption. When we talk to operators, they have told us there are many roadblocks that they face, right? Like systems integration, operating at scale. 'Cause when you buy a traditional radio access network solution from a single supplier, it's very easy. It's works, it's been tested. When you break these components apart and disaggregate 'em, as we talked about David, it creates integration points and support issues, right? And what Dell and Wind River have done together is created a cloud infrastructure solution that could host a variety of RAN workloads, and essentially create a two layer cake. What we're, overall, what we're trying to do is create a traditional RAN experience, with the innovation agility and flexibility of Open RAN. And that's really what this partnership does. >> So these work, this workload innovation is interesting to me because you've got now developers, you know, the, you know, what's the telco developer look like, you know, is to be defined, right? I mean it's like this white sheet of paper that can create all this innovation. And to do that, you've got to have, as I said earlier, an ecosystem. But you've got now, I'm interested in your Open RAN agenda and how you see that sort of maturity model taking place. 'Cause today, you got disruptors that are going to lean right in say "Hey, yeah, that's great." The traditional carriers, they have to have a, you know, they have to migrate, they have to have a hybrid world. We know that takes time. So what's that look like in the marketplace today? >> Yeah, so I mean, I can start, right? So from a Dell's perspective, what we see in the market is yes, there is a drive towards, everyone understands the benefits of being open, right? There's the agility piece, the innovation piece. That's a no-brainer. The question is how do we get there? And I think that's where partnerships become critical to get there, right? So we've been working with partners like Wind River to build solutions that make it easier for customers to start adopting some of the foundational elements of an open network. The, one of the purposes in the agenda of building this community is to bring like-minded developers, like you said like we want those guys to come and work with the customers to create new solutions, and come up with something creative, which no one's even thought about, that accelerates your option even quicker, right? So that's exactly what we want to do as well. And that's one of the reasons why we launched the community. >> Yeah, and what we find with a lot of carriers, they are used to buying, like I said, traditional RAN solutions which are provided from a single provider like Erickson or Nokia and others, right? And we break this apart, and you cloudify that network infrastructure, there's usually a skills gap we see at the operator level, right? And so from a developer standpoint, they struggle with having the expertise in order to execute on that. Wind River helps them, working with companies like Dell, simplify that bottom portion of the stack, the infrastructure stack. So, and we lifecycle manage it, we test- we're continually testing it, and integrating it, so that the operator doesn't have to do that. In addition to that, wind River also has a history and legacy of working with different RAN vendors, both disruptors like Mavenir and Parallel Wireless, as well as traditional RAN providers like Samsung, Erickson, and others soon to be announced. So what we're doing on the northbound side is making it easy by integrating that, and on the southbound side with Dell, so that again, instead of four or five solutions that you need to put together, it's simply two. >> And you think about today how we- how you consume telco services are like there's these fixed blocks of services that you can buy, that has to change. It's more like the, the app stores. It's got to be an open marketplace, and that's where the innovation's going to come in, you know, from the developers, you know, top down maybe. I don't know, how do you see that maturity model evolving? People want to know how long it's going to take. So many questions, when will Open RAN be as reliable. Does it even have to be? You know, so many interesting dynamics going on. >> Yeah, and I think that's something we at Dell are also trying to find out, right? So we have been doing a lot of good work here to help our customers move in that direction. The work with Dish is an example of that. But I think we do understand the challenges as well in terms of getting, adopting the technologies, and adopting the innovation that's being driven by Open. So one of the agendas that we have as a company this year is to work with the community to drive this a lot further, right? We want to have customers adopt the technology more broadly with the tier one, tier two telcos globally. And our sales organizations are going to be working together with Wind Rivers to figure out who's the right set of customers to have these conversations with, so we can drop, drive, start driving this agenda a lot quicker than what we've seen historically. >> And where are you having those customer conversations? Is that at the operator level, is it higher, is it both? >> Well, all operators are deploying 5G in preparation for 6G, right? And we're all looking for those killer use cases which will drive top line revenue and not just make it a TCO discussion. And that starts at a very basic level today by doing things like integrating with Juniper, for their cloud router. So instead of at the far edge cell site, having a separate device that's doing the routing function, right? We take that and we cloudify that application, run it on the same server that's hosting the RAN applications, so you eliminate a device and reduce TCO. Now with Aptiv, which is primarily known as an automotive company, we're having lots of conversations, including with Dell and Intel and others about vehicle to vehicle communication, vehicle to anything communication. And although that's a little bit futuristic, there are shorter term use cases that, like, vehicle to vehicle accident avoidance, which are going to be much nearer term than autonomous driving, for example, which will help drive traffic and new revenue streams for operators. >> So, oh, that's, wow. So many other things (Scott laughs) that's just opened up there too. But I want to come back to, sort of, the Open RAN adoption. And I think you're right, there's a lot of questions that that still have to be determined. But my question is this, based on your knowledge so far does it have to be as hardened and reliable, obviously has to be low latency as existing networks, or can flexibility, like the cloud when it first came out, wasn't better than enterprise IT, it was just more flexible and faster, and you could rent it. And, is there a similar dynamic here where it doesn't have to replicate the hardened stack, it can bring in new benefits that drive adoption, what are your thoughts on that? >> Well there's a couple of things on that, because Wind River, as you know, where our legacy and history is in embedded devices like F-15 fighter jets, right? Or the Mars Rover or the James Web telescope, all run Wind River software. So, we know about can't fail ultra reliable systems, and operators are not letting us off the hook whatsoever. It has to be as hardened and locked down, as secure as a traditional RAN environment. Otherwise they will (indistinct). >> That's table stakes. >> That's table stakes that gets us there. And when River, with our legacy and history, and having operator experience running live commercial networks with a disaggregated stack in the tens of thousands of nodes, understand what this is like because they're running live commercial traffic with live customers. So we can't fail, right? And with that, they want their cake and eat it too, right? Which is, I want ultra reliable, I want what I have today, but I want the agility and flexibility to onboard third party apps. Like for example, this JCNR, this Juniper Cloud-Native Router. You cannot do something as simple as that on a traditional RAN Appliance. In an open ecosystem you can take that workload and onboard it because it is an open ecosystem, and that's really one of the true benefits. >> So they want the mainframe, but they want (Scott laughs) the flexibility of the developer cloud, right? >> That's right. >> They want their, have their cake eat it too and not gain weight. (group laughs) >> Yeah I mean David, I come from the public cloud world. >> We all don't want to do that. >> I used to work with a public cloud company, and nine years ago, public cloud was in the same stage, where you would go to a bank, and they would be like, we don't trust the cloud. It's not secure, it's not safe. It was the digital natives that adopted it, and that that drove the industry forward, right? And that's where the enterprises that realized that they're losing business because of all these innovative new companies that came out. That's what I saw over the last nine years in the cloud space. I think in the telco space also, something similar might happen, right? So a lot of this, I mean a lot of the new age telcos are understanding the value, are looking to innovate are adopting the open technologies, but there's still some inertia and hesitancy, for the reasons as Scott mentioned, to go there so quickly. So we just have to work through and balance between both sides. >> Yeah, well with that said, if there's still some inertia, but there's a theme of velocity, how do you help organizations balance that so they trust evolving? >> Yeah, and I think this is where our solution, like infrastructure block, is a foundational pillar to make that happen, right? So if we can take away the concerns that the organizations have in terms of security, reliability from the fundamental elements that build their infrastructure, by working with partners like Wind River, but Dell takes the ownership end-to-end to make sure that service works and we have those telco grade SLAs, then the telcos can start focusing on what's next. The applications and the customer services on the top. >> Customer service customer experience. >> You know, that's an interesting point Gautam brings up, too, because support is an issue too. We all talk about when you break these things apart, it creates integration points that you need to manage, right? But there's also, so the support aspect of it. So imagine if you will, you had one vendor, you have an outage, you call that one vendor, one necktie to choke, right, for accountability for the network. Now you have four or five vendors that you have to work. You get a lot of finger pointing. So at least at the infrastructure layer, right? Dell takes first call support for both the hardware infrastructure and the Wind River cloud infrastructure for both. And we are training and spinning them up to support, but we're always behind them of course as well. >> Can you give us a favorite customer example of- that really articulates the value of the partnership and the technologies that it's delivering to customers? >> Well, Infra Block- >> (indistinct) >> Is quite new, and we do have our first customer which is LG U plus, which was announced yesterday. Out of Korea, small customer, but a very important one. Okay, and I think they saw the value of the integrated system. They don't have the (indistinct) expertise and they're leveraging Dell and Wind River in order to make that happen. But I always also say historically before this new offering was Vodafone, right? Vodafone is a leader in Europe in terms of Open RAN, been very- Yago and Paco have been very vocal about what they're doing in Open RAN, and Dell and Wind River have been there with them every step of the way. And that's what I would say, kind of, led up to where we are today. We learned from engagements like Vodafone and I think KDDI as well. And it got us where we are today and understanding what the operators need and what the impediments are. And this directly addresses that. >> Those are two very different examples. You were talking about TCO before. I mean, so the earlier example is, that's an example to me of a disruptor. They'll take some chances, you know, maybe not as focused on TCO, of course they're concerned about it. Vodafone I would think very concerned about TCO. But I'm inferring from your comments that you're trying to get the industry, you're trying to check the TCO box, get there. And then move on to higher levels of value monetization. The TCO is going to come down to how many humans it takes to run the network, is it not, is that- >> Well a lot of, okay- >> Or is it devices- >> So the big one now, particularly with Vodafone, is energy cost, right? >> Of course, greening the network. >> Two-thirds of the energy consumption in RAN is the the Radio Access Network. Okay, the OPEX, right? So any reductions, even if they're 5% or 10%, can save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So we do things creatively with Dell to understand if there's a lot of traffic at the cell site and if it's not, we will change the C state or P state of the server, which basically spins it down, so it's not consuming power. But that's just at the infrastructure layer. Where this gets really powerful is working with the RAN vendors like Samsung and Ericson and others, and taking data from the traffic information there, applying algorithms to that in AI to shut it down and spin it back up as needed. 'Cause the idea is you don't want that thing powered up if there's no traffic on it. >> Well there's a sustainability, ESG, benefit to that, right? >> Yes. >> And, and it's very compute intensive. >> A hundred percent. >> Which is great for Dell. But at the same time, if you're not able to manage that power consumption, the whole thing fails. I mean it's, because there's going to be so much data, and such a intense requirement. So this is a huge issue. Okay, so Scott, you're saying that in the TCO equation, a big chunk is energy consumption? >> On the OPEX piece. Now there's also the CapEx, right? And Open RAN solutions are now, what we've heard from our customers today, are they're roughly at parity. 'Cause you can do things like repurpose servers after the useful life for a lower demand application which helps the TCO, right? Then you have situations like Juniper, where you can take, now software that runs on the same device, eliminating at a whole other device at the cell site. So we're not just taking a server and software point of view, we're taking a whole cell site point of view as it relates to both CapEx and OPEX. >> And then once that infrastructure it really gets adopted, that's when the innovation occurs. The ecosystem comes in. Developers now start to think of new applications that we haven't thought of yet. >> Gautam: Exactly. >> And that's where, that's going to force the traditional carriers to respond. They're responding, but they're doing so very carefully right now, it's understandable why. >> Yeah, and I think you're already seeing some news in the, I mean Nokia's announcement yesterday with the rebranding, et cetera. That's all positive momentum in my opinion, right? >> What'd you think of the logo? >> I love the logo. >> I liked it too. (group laughs) >> It was beautiful. >> I thought it was good. You had the connectivity down below, You need pipes, right? >> Exactly. >> But you had this sort of cool letters, and then the the pink horizon or pinkish, it was like (Scott laughs) endless opportunity. It was good, I thought it was well thought out. >> Exactly. >> Well, you pick up on an interesting point there, and what we're seeing, like advanced carriers like Dish, who has one of the true Open RAN networks, publishing APIs for programmers to build in their 5G network as part of the application. But we're also seeing the network equipment providers also enable carriers do that, 'cause carriers historically have not been advanced in that way. So there is a real recognition that in order for these networks to monetize new use cases, they need to be programmable, and they need to publish standard APIs, so you can access the 5G network capabilities through software. >> Yeah, and the problem from the carriers, there's not enough APIs that the carriers have produced yet. So that's where the ecosystem comes in, is going to >> A hundred percent >> I think there's eight APIs that are published out of the traditional carriers, which is, I mean there's got to be 8,000 for a marketplace. So that's where the open ecosystem really has the advantage. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> So it all makes sense on paper, now you just, you got a lot of work to do. >> We got to deliver. Yeah, we launched it today. We got to get some like-minded partners and customers to come together. You'll start seeing results coming out of this hopefully soon, and we'll talk more about it over time. >> Dave: Great Awesome, thanks for sharing with us. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you for sharing, stopping by, sharing what's going on with Dell and Wind River, and why the opportunity's in it for customers and the technological evolution. We appreciate it, you'll have to come back, give us an update. >> Our pleasure, thanks for having us. (Group talks over each other) >> All right, thanks guys >> Appreciate it. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, Live from MWC23 in Barcelona. theCUBE is the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(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) >> Okay, Chloe, thank you very much. Hey folks, in here in the Cloud City We with Danielle Royston. Great to see you. Watching you up on stage, I got to say, as the CEO of TelcoDR, leader and chief executive of that company. As well as a great visionary, you laid out the vision. It's hard to debate that. I mean, I think there's people who will say that vision, is like freedom, no one can debate it. It's not going to happen. >> Yeah, there's still a lot of debate in our industry about it. There's a lot of articles being written about it. I've referenced one about, you know, should we let the dragons into the castle? For me, I think it's super obvious. I think other industries are like "Duh, we've made the move." And Telco is still like, "Hmm, we're not sure." And so, am I a visionary, I don't know. I'm just sort of just Babe Ruth-ing it a little bit. I think that's where we're going. >> You know you do, you have a lot of content, podcasts, you write blogs, you do a lot of speaking. You brought it all together on stage, right? That has got to feel good. >> Yeah. >> You've got a body of work and it came together very nicely. How did you feel up there? >> Oh my God, it's absolutely nerve wrecking. I sort of feel like, you know, could you tell if my hands were shaking? Right, could you tell that my heart was racing? >> It's a good feeling. >> I don't know. >> Come on! >> I'll be honest, I'm happy it's over, I'm happy. I think I did a really great job and I'm really happy >> Yeah, you did a great job, I love the dragon reference-- >> Have it in the can. >> Fantastic, loved the Game of Thrones vibe there. It was cool-- >> Totally. >> One of the things I wanted pick up on, I thought it was very interesting and unique was the iPhone reference 14 years ago, because that really, to me, was a similar moment because that shifted the smartphone. A computer that happened to make phone calls. And then we all knew who was the leader at that time, Nokia, Blackberry with the phones, and they became toast. That ushered in a whole another era of change, wealth creation, innovation, new things. >> Yeah. Well, up until that moment, carriers had been designing the phones themselves. They were branded with their logos. And so Steve Jobs fought for the design of the iPhone. He designed it with the consumer, with the user in mind. But I think what it really, I mean, it's such a big pivotal moment in our industry because it singled the end of voice revenue and ushered in the era of data. But it also introduced the OTT players, right? That came in through the apps and started a siphon approved from the carriers. And this is like, it's a pivotal moment in the industry, like, changed the industry forever. >> It's a step function, it was a step function change, it's obvious, everyone knew it. But what's interesting is that we were riffing yesterday about O-RAN and Android. So you have iPhone, but Android became a very successful open source project that changed the landscape of the handset. Some are saying that that kind of phenomenon is coming here. Into Telco with software, kind of like an Android model where that'll come in. What's your thoughts on that, reaction to that? >> Yeah, well the dis-aggregation of the hardware, right? We're in the iconic Erickson booth, right? They get most of their revenue from RAN, from Radio Access Networks. And now with the introduction of Open RAN, right? With 50% less CapEx, 40% less OPEX, you know, I think it's easiest for Greenfield operators like Dish, that are building a brand new network. But just this month, Vodafone announced they're going to build the world's largest Open RAN network. Change is happening and the big operators are starting to adopt Open RAN in a real big way. >> So to me, riding the dragon means taking the advantage of new opportunities on top of that dragon. Developing apps like the iPhone did. And you mentioned Android, they got it right. Remember the Windows Phone, right? They tried to take Windows and shove it to the phone-- >> Barely. >> It was a kin phone too. >> I try to delete it from my, look here, beep! >> I'm going to take this old world app and I'm going to shove it into the new world, and guess what, it failed. So if the Telco is trying to do the same thing here, it will fail, but if they start building 5G apps in the cloud and pick the cloud native and think about the consumer, isn't really that the opportunity that you're talking about? >> Well, I think it is, absolutely. And I think it's a wake up call for the vendors in our space, right? And I'm certainly trying to become a vendor with Totogi. I'm really pushing my idea. But you can't take, using your Windows example on the Windows Phone, you can't take a Windows app and stuff it onto a phone and you can't take these old school applications that were written 20 years ago and just stuff them into the cloud, right? Cloud is not a place, it's a way to design applications and it all needs to be rewritten and let's go write, rewrite it. >> It's not a destination as we always say. Let's take a step back on the keynote 'cause I know we just did a couple of highlights there, wasn't the whole thing. We were watching it, by the way, we thought you did a great job, you were very cool and calm under pressure. But take us through the core ideas in the keynote. Break down the core elements of what the talk was about. >> Yeah, I think the headline really is, you know, just like there were good and bad things about the iPhone, right? It killed voice, but introduced data and all these other things. There's good and bad things about the public cloud, right? It's not going to be smooth sailing, no downsides. And so I acknowledge that, even though I'm the self appointed queen, you know? This self appointed evangelist. And so, I think that if you completely ignore the public cloud, try to stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist, I think there's nothing but downsides for Telcos. And so I think you need to learn how to maximize the advantage there, ride he dragon, like spew some fire and, you know, get some speed and height, and then you can double your ARPU. But I think, going from there, so the next three, I was trying to give examples of what I meant by that, of why it's a double-edged sword, why it's two sides of the coin. And I think there's three areas, which is the enterprise, the network, and a relationship with subscribers. And so that really what the talk, that's what the talk is about >> The three main pillars. >> Yeah, yeah! >> Future, work, enterprise, transition, Open RAN. >> The network and then the relationship with the subscribers. >> Those are the structural elements you see. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> What's the most important one you think, right now, that people are focused on? >> I mean, I think the first one, with work, that's an easy one to do, because there's not too much downside, right? I think we all learned that we could work productively from home. The reason public cloud matter there is because we had tools like Zoom and G Suite and we didn't need to be, I mean, imagine if that this had happened even 20 years ago, right? Broadband at the home wasn't ready, the tools weren't ready. I mean, it would have been, I mean a bigger disaster than it was, right? And so this is an opportunity to sort of ride this work from home wave that a lot of CEOs are saying, we're not coming back or we're going to have smaller offices. And all of those employees need fiber to their home. They need 5G at their home. I mean, if I'm a head of enterprise in a Telco, I am shifting my 5G message from like random applications or whatever, to be like, how are you getting big pipes to the home so your workers can be productive there? And that, I don't hear Telco's talking about that and that's a really big idea. >> You know, you say it's a no brainer, but it's interesting you had your buildings crumbling, which was great, very nice effect in the talk. I heard a executive, Wall Street executive the other day, talking about how, "My people will be back in the office. "I'm going to mandate vaccinations, they're going to be back "in the office, you work for me. "Even though it's an employee friendly environment "right now, I don't care". And I was shocked. I go, okay, this is just an old guy. But, and it's not just the fact that it's an old guy, old guard doing that because I take two examples of old guys, Michael Dell and Frank Slootman. >> Yeah. >> Right, Michael Dell, you know, hundred billion dollar company, Frank Slootman, hottest, you know, software company. Both of them, sort of agree. It's a no brainer. >> Yeah. >> Why should I spend all this money on buildings? And my people are going to be more productive. They love it, so. Why fight the fashion? >> Well, I think the office and I can talk about this for a long time and I know we don't have that much time, but on offices, it's a way to see when did you come in and when did you leave, and look over your shoulder and what we're working on. And that's what offices are for. Now, we tell ourselves it's about collaboration and all this other stuff. And you know, these guys are saying, "come back to the office." It's because they don't have an answer on how to manage productivity. What are you working on? Are you off, are you authentically working 40 hours a week? I want to see, I know if at least you're here, you're here. Now, you might be playing, you know, Minesweeper. You might be playing Minesweeper on your computer, but at least you were, your butt was at your computer. So yeah, I think this is a pivotal moment in work. I think Telcos could push it, to work from home. We'll get you the pipes, we'll get you the cloud-based tools to help manage productivity, to change in work style. >> Yeah, and we've covered this in theCube many times, about how software is going to enable this virtual first model, no one's actually built software for virtual first. I think that's going to happen. Again, back to your team software, but I want to ask you about software defined infrastructure. You mentioned O-RAN, and as software eats the world and eats infrastructure, you still need infrastructure. So, talk about the relationship of how you see O-RAN competing and winning with the balance of software versus the commodity argument. >> Yeah, and I think this is really where people get scared in Telco. I mean, authentically nervous, right. Where you're like, okay, really the public cloud is at that network edge, right? We're really going to like, who are we? It's an identity crisis. We're not the towers anymore. We're renting space, right? We're now dis-aggregating the network, putting the edge cloud right there and it's AWS or Google. Who are we, what do we do, are we networks? Are we a tech company? Right, and so I'm like, guys, you are your subscribers and you don't focus on that. I mean, it's kind of like a last thought. >> So you're like a therapist then too, not just an evangelist. >> I'm a little bit of a therapist. >> Okay, lay down on the couch, Telco. >> Let's talk about what your problems are. (laughs) >> They have tower issues. >> All seriousness, no but, the tower is changing is backhauling. Look at direct connects for instance. The rise of direct and killed the exchanges. I mean, broadband, backhaul, last mile, >> Yeah. >> Completely, still issues, >> Yeah. >> But it's going to software and so that's there. The other thing I want to get to quickly, I know we don't have a lot of time, is the love relationship you talk about with subscribers. We had Peter Adderton on, from a Boost Mobile, formerly Boost Mobile, earlier. He was saying, if you don't have a focus on the customer, then you're just selling minutes and that's it. >> Yeah. >> And his point was, they don't really care. >> Yeah. Let's talk about organizational energy, right? How much energy is contained within any organization, not just Telco, but any organization. To some of your people time is the hours they work per week. And then you think of that as a sack on how you're allocating your time and spending your time, right? And so I think they spend 50% of their time, maybe more, fighting servers, machines, the network, right? And having all these battles. How much of that organizational energy is dedicated to driving great subscriber experiences? And it just shrunk, right? And I think that's where the public cloud can really help them. Like ride the dragon. Let the dragon deal with some of this underlying stuff. So that you can ride a dragon, survey the land, focus on your subscriber and back to the software. Use software, just like the OTT players are doing. They are taking away your ARPU. They're siphoning your ARPU, 'cause they're providing a better customer experience. You need to compete on that dimension. Not the network, not the three Telcos in the country. You're competing again, WhatsApp, Apple, Amazon, Facebook. And you spent how much of your organizational energy to focus on that? Very small. >> And that's where digital platforms roll by, it uses the word platform, why? Because everybody wants to be a platform. Why do you want to be a platform? Because I want to be like Amazon, they're a platform. And you think about Netflix, right? It's not, you know, you don't think about Netflix UK or Netflix Spain, right? >> It's global. >> There's one Netflix >> Yeah, yeah. >> You don't think about their marketing department or their sales department or their customer service, you think about the app. >> Yeah. >> You know. One interface. And that's what digital platforms allow you to do. And granted, there's a lot of public policy to deal with, but if you're shooting satellites up in space, >> Yeah. >> You know, now, you own that space, right, global network. >> And what makes Netflix so good, I think, is that it knows you, right? It knows what you're watching and recommends things, and you're like, "Oh, I would like that, that's great." Who knows more about you than your mobile phone? Carry it everywhere you go, right? What you're watching, what you're doing, who you're calling, what time did you wake up? And right now all of that data we talked about a couple of days ago, it's trapped in siloed old systems. And like why do people think Google knows so much about you? Telco knows about you. And to start to use that to drive a great experience. >> And you've got a great relationship with Netflix. The relationship we have with our our carrier is to your admin, "can you call these guys? "I don't know, I lost the password, I can't get in". >> Right. >> It's like-- >> Or you get SIM hacked-- >> I don't have an hour and a half to call your call center 'cause you don't have a chat bot, right. >> I don't have time. >> Chat bot, right. I can't even do the chat bot because my problem is, you're like, I got to talk to someone. All of their systems are built with the intention of a human being on the other side, and there's all this awesome chat bot AI that works. >> Yeah. >> Set it free. >> Yeah, yeah, right. You almost rather go to the dentist, then calling your carrier. >> Well, we're going to wrap things up here on the keynote review. Did you achieve what you wanted to achieve? I mean, controversy, bold vision, leadership, also that came across, but people they know who you are now. You're out there and that's great news. >> Yeah. I think I rocked the Telco universe and I'm really, that was my goal, and I think I accomplish it so, very excited. >> Well, we love having you on theCUBE. It's great to have great conversations, not only are you dynamic and smart, you're causing a lot of controversy, in a good way and getting, waking people up. >> Making people talk, that's a start. >> And I think, the conversations are there. People are talking and having relationships on the ecosystem open, it's all there. Danielle Royston, you are a digital revolution, DR. Telco DR, thanks for coming to theCube. >> Thank you so much, always fun. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks. >> Of course, back to the Cloud City studios. Adam is going to take it from here and continue on day three of theCube. Adam in studio, thanks for having us and take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it, we're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have Amol Phadke who's the Managing Director, Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave, so we want to bring him in and get commentary while we end out day two. Obviously, the story here is CLOUD CITY. We are in the CLOUD CITY. Amol, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. I'm very excited to be here, virtually at MWC 21. >> Oh we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert and you're the only thing standing between Bon Jovi and all the great stuff so. >> A lot of people watching. >> Thanks for coming on. Seriously you guys got some big news first Ericsson partners with you guys on 5G, platform deal with anthesis as well as open O-ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge testament to the industry. Obviously Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you're no stranger to large scale. What's the news? Tell us why this Ericsson news is so important. Let's start with the Ericsson announcement. >> Sure, so, John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Ericsson for the last few months, the partnership, the reason we feel this is very important to the industry is we are actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not done in isolation. You in fact saw in the press release that we have already launched something together with Telecom Italia in Italy. Because you will see that also in the press. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSPs monetize 5G and Edge, which is a real team at the moment using Google Clouds solutions like the Edge computing platform and Anthos and Ericsson's cutting Edge 5G components, 5G solutions. And if we can onboard this together at the CSPs, such as Telecom Italia, that creates massive time to market efficiency. So that's point 1. Speed and agility is key John. But then point 2, it also unlocks a lot of Edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare and so on. Which we are already starting to launch together with Ericsson. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuous wave of Cloud Native innovation that you just highlighted, John. We are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really try and create this Cloud Native Application Suite for 5G over time. >> Talk about the innovations around Cloud, because the message we're hearing this year at Mobile World Congress is that the public cloud is driving the innovation and you know, I can be a little bit over the top and say, so the Telcos are slow, they're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there, they're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept, Cloud Native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that, encapsulate that older technology and integrate it in. So this is not a rip and replace, someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the Telco's. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >> Spot on, John, spot on. We, we believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is, when you talk about that containerization and write once and deploy everywhere type architecture, that we are trying to do, that's where the Cloud Native be really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5G solutions with the operators at Telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to go create that again and again for every deployment. As long as you have Anthos and Ericsson working, you should be able to have the same experience everywhere. >> Yeah, John and I talk all the time in theCUBE about how developers are really going to drive the Edge. You're clearly doing that with your Distributor Cloud, building out a Telco Cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving and a lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about Edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >> Sure, so I think David first of all, it's a fantastic segue into how we are looking at analytics at the Edge, right? So we, we have realized that (connection disruption) is a very, very data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned, is definitely something that we can offload to the Edge? Why is that so important? In the pandemic era think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously, needing zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products and manufacturing. That's a very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the Edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Ericsson and a Google Cloud and Telecom Italia type of carrier, gives you that Edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to a factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run the AI influencing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >> Great, thank you for that and now the other piece of the announcement of course is the open, Open RAN. We've been talking about that all week. And you know, you well remember when Cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. And of course, now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the Telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually are pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component? Maybe first talk about the Open RAN piece, why that's important and how security fits? >> Sure, so first of all, Open RAN is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time. In the radio layer, we believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and desegregating that radio layer. And why is that so important? 80% of the operators spent globally is on radio across the entire infrastructure, 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that and if you created synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware, standard purpose software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in PCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and becomes a really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution, that's about to get larger with 5G and the capillarity that 5G needs. You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware, software with open interfaces, is an extremely important cost dimension too. And on the revenue side, the things is that, the reason we got so excited with Open RAN was, you can now run a lot of API's on the radio net itself. That then suddenly brings a whole developer community on the radio layer. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing yours and mine experiences at a device level, from the cell tower. And so that really is what is driving us towards this Open RAN type announcement. >> John: Amol, we've only got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on Open Source and the innovation. Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of TelcoDr. She's a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone, 14 years ago was launched, okay. And you think about Open, and you mentioned proprietary with the 5G, and having O-RAN be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs, increase the surface area of infrastructure. Everyone wins, 'cause everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry, and Open Source is driving that. Is Android the playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at Telco? >> Absolutely John and the parallel analogy that you raised is spot on. We believe in the Telco world Anthos multi-cloud as a unifying software development layer and the app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation. Whether it's a radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the IT side of house. Same software running everywhere. That really allows you that whole CICD SRE type development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for start, that would be for systems to come on. >> John: That's great stuff. And I was, just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at Mobile World Congress. Amol, thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news with Google. Congratulations on the Ericsson Anthos platform deal as well as the Open Ran Alliance. Congratulations, good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on theCUBE featured segments. So, watch that interview. >> Thank you John. Glad to be here. >> Thanks Amol. Managing Director, Telecom Industry Solutions at Google, obviously player, he's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology to get the chops Dave, and we're going to now, bring on Danielle Royston, she's here, I want to bring her up on the stage. Bon Jovi's about to go on, behind us, Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in CLOUD CITY. Dave, Bon Jovi is right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of TelcoDR, Danielle Royston, great to see you. She's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you have a mic. Great to see you. >> Oh, it's great to be here, awesome. >> We are going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote but thanks for coming by and closing, swinging by. >> I know we're closing down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day today at MWC and in CLOUD CITY. >> And Bon Jovi by the way. >> Day two, I mean really starting to get packed. >> And I mean, everyone's coming in, the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening. >> A lot of buzz about CLOUD CITY out there in the hallway. >> Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited >> Awesome. >> with how it's going, so yeah. >> Well, this is awesome, while we got you here, we want to put you to work being theCUBE analyst for this segment. You just heard Google. We broke them in for a breaking news segment. Obviously, so hard news Ericsson partnership. We're in the, actually former Ericsson booth. They're not even here, it's now the TelcoDR booth. But that's and then Open RAN again, Open Source. You got 5G, you got Open Source all happening. What's your take on this, as you're seeing this? >> Yeah, I think, you know, there's two big, and I talked about in my keynote this morning, there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it--MWC 21 I certainly wanted to make it about the Public Cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is Open RAN, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, we saw these two. >> I loved your keynote, we were here live Chloe was here filling in for Dave while Dave was going to do some research and getting some breaking stories. But you are on stage and, and we were talking, Chloe's like, these there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, that the money's in the middle of the table and it's changing hands. If people don't watch it. And then you onstage said there's trillions of dollars. This is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You've got operators and builders trying to figure out, it feels like Dev Ops is coming in here. >> Yeah. >> I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's the, what do you? >> Yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the Public Cloud, to double your ARPU without massive CapEx expenditure. And I think the CSPs has always viewed to get the increase in ARPU, I got to build out the network, I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our ARPU, why not? We should do that absolutely. >> You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave. Got to ride the wave or become driftwood, as John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the Telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the Edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the Edge and that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. But, obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have, they're going to have to embrace Cloud Native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. >> Well, I think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to. Now, historically they haven't had this opportunity. Historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented, it's available. There's developers out there that know it. And so I think that's the big opportunity. And this might be the, the big use case that they've been looking for with 5G and looking forward to 6G. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSPs to do that. >> I think that's an important point because you've got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay, those are pretty safe bets, right? Those guys are going to be around. >> You think, I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. And like, are you guys nuts? They're safe bets. >> Safe bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you've got to move fast. >> Yeah. >> That's the other piece of it. >> Yeah. >> You got to change your business model. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Well, you got to be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? Does Snowflake trust Amazon? It sure did to get them where they are, but now they're looking at other options. >> That is a great example, John. It really is, because there's a company that can move fast, but the same time they compete, but the same time they add incremental value. >> And so here you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering, Telcos aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new. Well containers do, will help them manage that operational legacy, but culturally, if they don't move, they're going to have an asset that'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building CapEx and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value's shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle, love to get your thoughts on this, because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, >> Yeah. >> Then you can, don't have to try to extract the rents out of the CapEx or, what's your thought, I mean. >> Yeah, I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in Telco, right. There, I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right? Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their investment and for your own benefit and start to focus, and we heard Amol talking about it, starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us, right, yeah. >> Well, you've talking about that many times that you exhibit, you're right. If the conversation has been, has to go beyond, okay, we're just connectivity. It's got to be going to be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges, ah great. >> Yeah. >> Tick that box. Right, it's those value added services that you're talking about. And it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in, and creativity in the industry. It's just a blank piece of paper. >> Well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right? We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving up ads and you're like, how did it? >> Facebook does? >> Right, Facebook. But you know who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother even, your Telco. >> Yeah. >> You take your phone with you everywhere, right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide a really great experience. >> And by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Totogi and the investment hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing and the there's a good, there's a whole new team, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I want to hold that, we're going to meet tomorrow. I want to, I want to, leave that here. >> Stay in the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That, it's that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook now trillion dollar valuations. >> Yeah. >> It's all about the data and the Telco's have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >> I think there's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise, siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them, and you certainly do it without, and we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight , it's useless, right? And so to Totogi, we announced the launch of Totogi, I'll get a little to Totogi plug in there, right. Totogi is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve it would have been solved already. But I think the key is leveraging the Public Cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provide to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue, right. And you know, we've heard some keynotes from GSMA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, Telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep, it's not fair. That's life, right? >> Yeah. >> Stop complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they're happy to give you more money. >> Yeah, and I think that's the message about the assets too. But one thing I will say, this Mobile World Congress, is that we've been having a lot of fun here in CLOUD CITY. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote. You have a spring to your step. CLOUD CITY is beautiful, spectacular here. >> Yeah. >> Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip so far. >> Well number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered in and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a bunch. You know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and that was really fun. But yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes the attendance is reduced. You know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups. And yeah the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right? The senior leadership teams are in the booth. We're having meetings, we're having amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the Public Cloud. >> Yeah, the pandemic helped. >> I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off. I think I'm right in the right moment. It's Awesome. >> Do you think that, do you think that they'll think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line, struggled and then winners. >> Yeah. >> Big time tale wind, booming. Obviously the Zooms of the world. Telco's did well. They were up and running, business was good. You think they might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >> Yeah, I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation. We're digital Telco, we're digitally enabled. And I think the pandemic really tested this, right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM? Or do you need to go to a store, in person, to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of Telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver sims, and all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot. >> Agile. >> Right, agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big wake up call. >> Telemedicine booming. >> So If you were in a digital business during the pandemic. In general, you're out of business, maybe unless you were a Telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh-oh, if we don't move. >> I mean, I am not kidding right. As an ex-CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, >> Facts. >> Right, in some country, once a month on Tuesday between 10 and 2. And I'm like, how are you doing business, like that? That's like the dark ages. >> Yeah, this is where the crypto guys got it right, with know your customer. >> Yeah, right. >> 'Cause they have the data. >> Well, they had to, they had to. >> Yeah. >> There's a lot of things that's going wrong on crypto, we don't want to, we could do a whole show on that. But Danielle great to have you drop by, obviously Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy, Patriot's fan. >> Yeah. >> Dave, we love him. >> Fantastic. >> Well, I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi, right? We knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. That, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging like the way things have been done in Telco. Kind of just shattering the glass ceiling in lots of different ways, right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me, right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl, oh, so. >> Well we are punk rock. They're rock and roll. >> Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten The Clash, right. Black Flag, right. I'm a little bit older than you. >> Bon Jovi's good. >> Right, we'll go with Bon Jovi. >> We like both of them. >> Accessible, right. >> Once's more conservative rock and roll still edgy. >> Yeah, so really excited to get them here. I've met him before. And so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk, so yeah. >> Yeah, he's going to be inspiration he'll talk space, SpaceX, >> Oh yeah. >> And possibly Starlink. >> Talking about the edge. >> Starlink, right. >> Starlink. >> I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites and I think that's really interesting for rural. For rural right in Telco, right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower, I think. I mean, that's an interesting idea right there, yeah. >> It's exciting, he's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming in and saying why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, A or B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. >> Yeah. >> I think eventually the generation shifts in time. >> It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it, yeah. >> Great, great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >> Awesome team. >> I'm excited to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership is, so thank you so much, yeah. >> TheCUBE, theCUBE's rocking inside the CLOUD CITY. The streets of the CLOUD CITY are hustling and booming. >> Packed. >> Packed in here. All stuff, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Yep, thanks so much. >> Bon Jovi is here, we got a shot of Bon Jovi. Do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? >> Yeah, there it is. >> There it is, yeah. >> Okay, he's about to come on stage and we're going to take a break here. We're going to take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

(soft music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, my name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE and we're here with Guido Appenzeller, who is the CTO of the Data Platforms Group at Intel. Guido, welcome to theCUBE, come on in. >> Aww, thanks Dave, I appreciate it. It's great to be here today. >> So I'm interested in your role at the company, let's talk about that, you're brand new, tell us a little bit about your background. What attracted you to Intel and what's your role here? >> Yeah, so I'm, I grew up with the startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley, I came from my PhD and never left. And, built software companies, worked at software companies worked at VMware for a little bit. And I think my initial reaction when the Intel recruiter called me, was like, Hey you got the wrong phone number, I'm a software guy, that's probably not who you're looking for. And, but we had a good conversation but I think at Intel, there's a realization that you need to look at what Intel builds more as this overall system from an overall systems perspective. That the software stack and then the hardware components are all getting more and more intricately linked and, you need the software to basically bridge across the different hardware components that Intel is building. So again, I was the CTO for the Data Platforms Group, so that builds the data center products here at Intel. And it's a really exciting job. And these are exciting times at Intel, with Pat, I've got a fantastic CEO at the helm. I've worked with him before at VMware. So a lot of things to do but I think a very exciting future. >> Well, I mean the, the data centers the wheelhouse of Intel, of course your ascendancy was a function of the PCs and the great volume and how you change that industry but really data centers is where, I remember the days people said, Intel will never be at the data center, it's just the toy. And of course, you're dominant player there now. So your initial focus here is really defining the vision and I'd be interested in your thoughts on the future what the data center looks like in the future where you see Intel playing a role, what are you seeing as the big trends there? Pat Gelsinger talks about the waves, he says, if you don't ride the waves you're going to end up being driftwood. So what are the waves you're driving? What's different about the data center of the future? >> Yeah, that's right. You want to surf the waves, that's the way to do it. So look, I like to look at this and sort of in terms of major macro trends, And I think that the biggest thing that's happening in the market right now is the cloud revolution. And I think we're well halfway through or something like that. And this transition from the classic, client server type model, that way with enterprises running all data centers to more of a cloud model where something is run by hyperscale operators or maybe run by an enterprise themselves of (indistinct) there's a variety of different models. but the provisioning models have changed. It's much more of a turnkey type service. And when we started out on this journey I think the, we built data centers the same way that we built them before. Although, the way to deliver IT have really changed, it's going through more of a service model and we really know starting to see the hardware diverge, the actual silicon that we need to build and how to address these use cases, diverge. And so I think one of the things that is probably most interesting for me is really to think through, how does Intel in the future build silicon that's built for clouds, like on-prem clouds, edge clouds, hyperscale clouds, but basically built for these new use cases that have emerged. >> So just a quick, kind of a quick aside, to me the definition of cloud is changing, it's evolving and it used to be this set of remote services in a hyperscale data center, it's now that experience is coming on-prem it's connecting across clouds, it's moving out to the edge it's supporting, all kinds of different workloads. How do you see that sort of evolving cloud? >> Yeah, I think, there's the biggest difference to me is that sort of a cloud starts with this idea that the infrastructure operator and the tenant are separate. And that is actually has major architectural implications, it just, this is a perfect analogy, but if I build a single family home, where everything is owned by one party, I want to be able to walk from the kitchen to the living room pretty quickly, if that makes sense. So, in my house here is actually the open kitchen, it's the same room, essentially. If you're building a hotel where your primary goal is to have guests, you pick a completely different architecture. The kitchen from your restaurants where the cooks are busy preparing the food and the dining room, where the guests are sitting, they are separate. The hotel staff has a dedicated place to work and the guests have a dedicated places to mingle but they don't overlap, typically. I think it's the same thing with architecture in the clouds. So, initially the assumption was it's all one thing and now suddenly we're starting to see like a much cleaner separation of these different areas. I think a second major influence is that the type of workloads we're seeing it's just evolving incredibly quickly, 10 years ago, things were mostly monolithic, today most new workloads are microservice based, and that has a huge impact in where CPU cycles are spent, where we need to put an accelerators, how we build silicon for that to give you an idea, there's some really good research out of Google and Facebook where they run numbers. And for example, if you just take a standard system and you run a microservice based an application but in the microservice-based architecture you can spend anywhere from I want to say 25 in some cases, over 80% of your CPU cycles just on overhead, and just on, marshaling demarshaling the protocols and the encryption and decryption of the packets and your service mesh that sits in between all of these things, that created a huge amount of overhead. So for us might have 80% go into these overhead functions really all focus on this needs to be on how do we enable that kind of infrastructure? >> Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about workloads if we can, the overhead there's also sort of, as the software as the data center becomes software defined thanks to your good work at VMware, it is a lot of cores that are supporting that software-defined data center. And then- >> It's at VMware, yeah. >> And as well, you mentioned microservices container-based applications, but as well, AI is coming into play. And what is, AI is just kind of amorphous but it's really data-oriented workloads versus kind of general purpose ERP and finance and HCM. So those workloads are exploding, and then we can maybe talk about the edge. How are you seeing the workload mix shift and how is Intel playing there? >> I think the trends you're talking about is definitely right, and we're getting more and more data centric, shifting the data around becomes a larger and larger part of the overall workload in the data center. And AI is getting a ton of attention. Look if I talk to the most operators AI is still an emerging category. We're seeing, I'd say five, maybe 10% percent of workloads being AI is growing, they're very high value workloads. And they're very challenging workloads, but it's still a smaller part of the overall mix. Now edge is big and edge is two things, it's big and it's complicated because of the way I think about edge is it's not just one homogeneous market, it's really a collection of separate sub markets It's, very heterogeneous, it runs on a variety of different hardware. Edge can be everything from a little server, that's fanless, it's strapped to a phone, a telephone pole with an antenna on top of it, to aid a microcell, or it can be something that's running inside a car, modern cars has a small little data center inside. It can be something that runs on an industrial factory floor, the network operators, there's pretty broad range of verticals that all looks slightly different in their requirements. And, it's, I think it's really interesting, it's one of those areas that really creates opportunities for vendors like HPE, to really shine and address this heterogeneity with a broad range of solutions, very excited to work together with them in that space. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you brought HPE into the discussion, 'cause we're here at HPE Discover, I want to connect that. But so when I think about HPE strategy, I see a couple of opportunities for them. Obviously Intel is going to play in every part of the edge, the data center, the near edge and the far edge, and I gage HPE does as well with Aruba. Aruba is going to go to the far edge. I'm not sure at this point, anyway it's not yet clear to me how far, HPE's traditional server business goes to the, inside of automobiles, we'll see, but it certainly will be at the, let's call it the near edge as a consolidation point- >> Yeah. >> Et cetera and look the edge can be a race track, it could be a retail store, it could be defined in so many ways. Where does it make sense to process the data? But, so my question is what's the role of the data center in this world of edge? How do you see it? >> Yeah, look, I think in a sense what the cloud revolution is doing is that it's showing us, it leads to polarization of a classic data into edge and cloud, if that makes sense, it's splitting, before this was all mingled a little bit together, if my data centers my basement anyways, what's the edge, what's data center? It's the same thing. The moment I'm moving some workloads to the clouds I don't even know where they're running anymore then some other workloads that have to have a certain sense of locality, I need to keep closely. And there are some workloads you just can't move into the cloud. There's, if I'm generating lots of all the video data that I have to process, it's financially a completely unattractive to shift all of that, to a central location, I want to do this locally. And will I ever connect my smoke detector with my sprinkler system be at the cloud? No I won't, this stuff, if things go bad, that may not work anymore. So I need something that's that does this locally. So I think there's many reasons, why you want to keep something on premises. And I think it's a growing market, it's very exciting, we're doing some very good stuff with friends like HPE, they have the ProLiant DL, one 10 Gen10 Plus server with our latest a 3rd Generation Xeons on them the Open RAN, which is the radio access network in the telco space. HP Edgeline servers, also a 3rd Generation Xeons there're some really nice products there that I think can really help addressing enterprises, carriers and a number of different organizations, these edge use cases. >> Can you explain, you mentioned Open RAN, vRAN, should we essentially think of that as kind of the software-defined telco? >> Yeah, exactly. It's software-defined cellular. I actually, I learned a lot about that over the recent months. When I was taking these classes at Stanford, these things were still done in analog, that doesn't mean a radio signal will be processed in an analog way and digest it and today typically the radio signal is immediately digitized and all the processing of the radio signal happens digitally. And, it happens on servers, some of them HPE servers. And, it's a really interesting use case where we're basically now able to do something in a much, much more efficient way by moving it to a digital, more modern platform. And it turns out you can actually virtualize these servers and, run a number of different cells, inside the same server. And it's really complicated because you have to have fantastic real-time guarantees versus sophisticated software stack. But it's a really fascinating use case. >> A lot of times we have these debates and it's maybe somewhat academic, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it. And debate is about, how much data that is processed and inferred at the edge is actually going to come back to the cloud, most of the data is going to stay at the edge, a lot of it's not even going to be persisted. And the counter to that is, so that's sort of the negative is at the data center, but then the counter that is there going to be so much data, even a small percentage of all the data that we're going to create is going to create so much more data, back in the cloud, back in the data center. What's your take on that? >> Look, I think there's different applications that are easier to do in certain places. Look, going to a large cloud has a couple of advantages. You have a very complete software ecosystem around you, lots of different services. You'll have first, if you need very specialized hardware, if I wanted to run the bigger learning task where somebody needed a 1000 machines, and then this runs for a couple of days, and then I don't need to do that for another month or two, for that is really great. There's on demand infrastructure, having all this capability up there, at the same time it costs money to send the data up there. If I just look at the hardware cost, it's much much cheaper to build it myself, in my own data center or in the edge. So I think we'll see, customers picking and choosing what they want to do where, and that there's a role for both, absolutely. And so, I think there's certain categories. At the end of the day why do I absolutely need to have something at the edge? There's a couple of, I think, good use cases. One is, let me actually rephrase a little bit. I think it's three primary reasons. One is simply a bandwidth, where I'm saying, my video data, like I have a 100 4K video cameras, with 60 frames per second feeds, there's no way I'm going to move that into the cloud. It's just, cost prohibitive- >> Right. >> I have a hard time even getting (indistinct). There might be latency, if I need want to reliably react in a very short period of time, I can't do that in the cloud, I need to do this locally with me. I can't even do this in my data center. This has to be very closely coupled. And, then there's this idea of fade sharing. I think, if I want to make sure that if things go wrong, the system is still intact, anything that's sort of an emergency kind of a backup, an emergency type procedure, if things go wrong, I can't rely on the big good internet connection, I need to handle things, things locally, that's the smoke detector and the sprinkler system. And so for all of these, there's good reasons why we need to move things close to the edge so I think there'll be a creative tension between the two but both are huge markets. And I think there's great opportunities for HP ahead to work on all these use cases. >> Yeah, for sure, top brand is in that compute business. So before we wrap up today, thinking about your role, part of your role is a trend spotter. You're kind of driving innovation righty, surfing the waves as you said, skating to the puck, all the- >> I've got my perfect crystal ball right here, yeah I got. >> Yeah, all the cliches. (Dave chuckles) puts a little pressure on you, but, so what are some of the things that you're overseeing that you're looking towards in terms of innovation projects particularly obviously in the data center space, what's really exciting you? >> Look, there's a lot of them and I pretty much all the interesting ideas I get from talking to customers. You talk to the sophisticated customers, you try to understand the problems that they're trying to solve and they can't solve right now, and that gives you ideas to just to pick a couple, one thing what area I'm probably thinking about a lot is how can we build in a sense better accelerators for the infrastructure functions? So, no matter if I run an edge cloud or I run a big public cloud, I want to find ways how I can reduce the amount of CPU cycles I spend on microservice marshaling demarshaling, service mesh, storage acceleration and these things like that. And so well clearly, if this is a large chunk of the overall cycle budget, we need to find ways to shrink that to make this more efficient. So then I think, so this basic infrastructure function acceleration, sounds probably as unsexy as any topic would sound but I think this is actually really, really interesting area and one of the big levers we have right now in the data center. >> Yeah, I would agree Guido, I think that's actually really exciting because, you actually can pick up a lot of the wasted cycles now and that drops right to the bottom line, but please- >> Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of funny we're still measuring so much with SPEC and rates of CPU's performances, it's like, well, we may actually be measuring the wrong thing. If 80% of the cycles of my app are spent in overhead, then the speed of the CPU doesn't matter as much, it's other functions that (indistinct). >> Right. >> So that's one. >> The second big one is memory is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, and it's memory cost 'cause, memory prices, they used to sort of decline at the same rate that our core counts and then clock speeds increased, that's no longer the case. So we've run to some scaling limits, there's some physical scaling limits where memory prices are becoming stagnant. And this has become a major pain point for everybody who's building servers. So I think we need to find ways how we can leverage memory more efficiently, share memory more efficiently. We have some really cool ideas in that space that we're working on. >> Well, yeah. And Pat, let me just sorry to interrupt but Pat hinted to that and your big announcement. He talked about system on package and I think is what you used to talk about what I call disaggregated memory and better sharing of that memory resource. And that seems to be a clear benefit of value creation for the industry. >> Exactly. If this becomes a larger, if for our customers this becomes a larger part of the overall costs, we want to help them address that issue. And the third one is, we're seeing more and more data center operators that effectively power limited. So we need to reduce the overall power of systems, or maybe to some degree just figure out better ways of cooling these systems. But I think there's a lot of innovation that can be done there to both make these data centers more economical but also to make them a little more Green. Today data centers have gotten big enough that if you look at the total amount of energy that we're spending, this world as mankind, a chunk of that is going just to data center. And so if we're spending energy at that scale, I think we have to start thinking about how can we build data centers that are more energy efficient that are also doing the same thing with less energy in the future. >> Well, thank you for laying those out, you guys have been long-term partners with HP and now of course HPE, I'm sure Gelsinger is really happy to have you on board, Guido I would be and thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here and great to be at the HP show. >> And thanks for being with us for HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, you're watching theCUBE the leader in digital tech coverage, be right back. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Well, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great conversation with two great guests, going to explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security. And as the world goes digital, we're going to have that deep dive conversation around how it's all transforming. We've got Ki Lee, Vice President of Booz Allen's Digital Business. Ki, great to have you. John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen's Digital Cloud Solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. >> And thanks for having us, John. >> So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale, and that's really modern applications and consumer, and then here for national security and for governments here in the U.S. is military impact. And as digital transformation starts to go to the next level, you're starting to see the architectures emerge where the edge, the IoT edge, the industrial IoT edge, or any kind of edge concept, 5G is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You got Amazon with Snowball, Snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology, that's IT like and operational technologies. It's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption, so I want to get into it. Ki, let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast in this new architecture of digital? >> Yeah, John, I think it's a great question. And if I could just share our observation on why we even started investing in edge. You mentioned the cloud, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of IT, then you take a look from mainframes to desktops to servers to cloud to mobile and now IoT, what we observed was that industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of an evolution of IT, right? So as you mentioned, with industry spending billions on IoT and edge, we just feel that that's going to be the next evolution. If you take a look at, you mentioned 5G, I think 5G will be certainly an accelerator to edge because of the resilience, the lower latency and so forth. But taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right, and what Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into the space, we're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows storage to be ubiquitous. We think that the next generation internet will be space-based. So when you think about it, connected, it won't be connected servers per se, it will be connected devices. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> That's kind of some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in edge. >> I want to come back to that piece around space and edge and bring it from a commercial and then also tactical architecture in a minute 'cause there's a lot to unpack there, role of open source, modern application development, software and hardware supply chains, all are core issues that are going to emerge. But I want to get with John real quick on cloud impact, because you think about 5G and the future of work or future of play, you've got people, right? So whether you're at a large concert like Coachella or a 49ers or Patriots game or Redskins game if you're in the D.C. area, you got people there, of congestion, and now you got devices now serving those people. And that's their play, people at work, whether it's a military operation, and you've got work, play, tactical edge things. How is cloud connecting? 'Cause this is like the edge has never been kind of an IT thing. It's been more of a bandwidth or either telco or something else operationally. What's the cloud at scale, cloud operations impact? >> Yeah, so if you think about how these systems are architected and you think about those considerations that Ki kind of touched on, a lot of what you have to think about now is what aspects of the application reside in the cloud, where you tend to be less constrained. And then how do you architect that application to move out towards the edge, right? So how do I tier my application? Ultimately, how do I move data and applications around the ecosystem? How do I need to evolve where my application stages things and how that data and those apps are moved to each of those different tiers? So when we build a lot of applications, especially if they're in the cloud, they're built with some of those common considerations of elasticity, scalability, all those things; whereas when you talk about congestion and disconnected operations, you lose a lot of those characteristics, and you have to kind of rethink that. >> Ki, let's get into the aspect you brought up, which is space. And then I was mentioning the tactical edge from a military standpoint. These are use cases of deployments, and in fact, this is how people have to work now. So you've got the future of work or play, and now you've got the situational deployments, whether it's a new tower of next to a stadium. We've all been at a game or somewhere or a concert where we only got five bars and no connectivity. So we know what that means. So now you have people congregating in work or play, and now you have a tactical deployment. What's the key things that you're seeing that it's going to help make that better? Are there any breakthroughs that you see that are possible? What's going on in your view? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what's enabling all of this, again, one is transport, right? So whether it's 5G to increase the speed and decrease the latency, whether it's things like Starlink with making transport and comms ubiquitous, that tied with the fact that ships continue to get smaller and faster, right? And when you're thinking about tactical edge, those devices have limited size, weight, power conditions and constraints. And so the software that goes on them has to be just as lightweight. And that's why we've actually partnered with SUSE and what they've done with K3s to do that. So I think those are some of the enabling technologies out there. John, as you've kind of alluded to it, there are additional challenges as we think about it. We're not, it's not a simple transition and monetization here, but again, we think that this will be the next major disruption. >> What do you guys think, John, if you don't mind weighing in too on this as modern application development happens, we just were covering CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, DockerCon, containers are very popular. Kubernetes is becoming super great. As you look at the telco landscape where we're kind of converging this edge, it has to be commercially enterprise grade. It has to have that transit and transport that's intelligent and all these new things. How does open source fit into all this? Because we're seeing open source becoming very reliable, more people are contributing to open source. How does that impact the edge in your opinion? >> So from my perspective, I think it's helping accelerate things that traditionally maybe may have been stuck in the traditional proprietary software confines. So within our mindset at Booz Allen, we were very focused on open architecture, open based systems, which open source obviously is an aspect of that. So how do you create systems that can easily interface with each other to exchange data, and how do you leverage tools that are available in the open source community to do that? So containerization is a big drive that is really going throughout the open source community. And there's just a number of other tools, whether it's tools that are used to provide basic services like how do I move code through a pipeline all the way through? How do I do just basic hardening and security checking of my capabilities? Historically, those have tend to be closed source type apps, whereas today you've got a very broad community that's able to very quickly provide and develop capabilities and push it out to a community that then continues to adapt and add to it or grow that library of stuff. >> Yeah, and then we've got trends like Open RAN. I saw some Ground Station for the AWS. You're starting to see Starlink, you mentioned. You're bringing connectivity to the masses. What is that going to do for operators? Because remember, security is a huge issue. We talk about security all the time. Where does that kind of come in? Because now you're really OT, which has been very purpose-built kind devices in the old IoT world. As the new IoT and the edge develop, you're going to need to have intelligence. You're going to be data-driven. There is an open source impact key. So, how, if I'm a senior executive, how do I get my arms around this? I really need to think this through because the security risks alone could be more penetration areas, more surface area. >> Right. That's a great question. And let me just address kind of the value to the clients and the end users in the digital battlefield as our warriors to increase survivability and lethality. At the end of the day from a mission perspective, we know we believe that time's a weapon. So reducing any latency in that kind of observe, orient, decide, act OODA loop is value to the war fighter. In terms of your question on how to think about this, John, you're spot on. I mean, as I've mentioned before, there are various different challenges, one, being the cyber aspect of it. We are absolutely going to be increasing our attack surface when you think about putting processing on edge devices. There are other factors too, non-technical that we've been thinking about s we've tried to kind of engender and kind of move to this kind of edge open ecosystem where we can kind of plug and play, reuse, all kind of taking the same concepts of the open-source community and open architectures. But other things that we've considered, one, workforce. As you mentioned before, when you think about these embedded systems and so forth, there aren't that many embedded engineers out there. But there is a workforce that are digital and software engineers that are trained. So how do we actually create an abstraction layer that we can leverage that workforce and not be limited by some of the constraints of the embedded engineers out there? The other thing is what we've, in talking with several colleagues, clients, partners, what people aren't thinking about is actually when you start putting software on these edge devices in the billions, the total cost of ownership. How do you maintain an enterprise that potentially consists of billions of devices? So extending the standard kind of DevSecOps that we move to automate CI/CD to a cloud, how do we move it from cloud to jet? That's kind of what we say. How do we move DevSecOps to automate secure containers all the way to the edge devices to mitigate some of those total cost of ownership challenges. >> It's interesting, as you have software defined, this embedded system discussion is hugely relevant and important because when you have software defined, you've got to be faster in the deployment of these devices. You need security, 'cause remember, supply chain on the hardware side and software in that too. >> Absolutely. >> So if you're going to have a serviceability model where you have to shift left, as they say, you got to be at the point of CI/CD flows, you need to be having security at the time of coding. So all these paradigms are new in Day-2 operations. I call it Day-0 operations 'cause it should be in everyday too. >> Yep. Absolutely. >> But you've got to service these things. So software supply chain becomes a very interesting conversation. It's a new one that we're having on theCUBE and in the industry Software supply chain is a superly relevant important topic because now you've got to interface it, not just with other software, but hardware. How do you service devices in space? You can't send a break/fix person in space. (chuckles) Maybe you will soon, but again, this brings up a whole set of issues. >> No, so I think it's certainly, I don't think anyone has the answers. We sure don't have all the answers but we're very optimistic. If you take a look at what's going on within the U.S. Air Force and what the Chief Software Officer Nic Chaillan and his team, and we're a supporter of this and a plankowner of Platform One. They were ahead of the curve in kind of commoditizing some of these DevSecOps principles in partnership with the DoD CIO and that shift left concept. They've got a certified and accredited platform that provides that DevSecOps. They have an entire repository in the Iron Bank that allows for hardened containers and reciprocity. All those things are value to the mission and around the edge because those are all accelerators. I think there's an opportunity to leverage industry kind of best practices as well and patterns there. You kind of touched upon this, John, but these devices honestly just become firmware. The software is just, if the devices themselves just become firmware , you can just put over the wire updates onto them. So I'm optimistic. I think all the piece parts are taking place across industry and in the government. And I think we're primed to kind of move into this next evolution. >> Yeah. And it's also some collaboration. What I like about, why I'm bringing up the open source angle and I think this is where I think the major focus will shift to, and I want to get your reaction to it is because open source is seeing a lot more collaboration. You mentioned some of the embedded devices. Some people are saying, this is the weakest link in the supply chain, and it can be shored up pretty quickly. But there's other data, other collective intelligence that you can get from sharing data, for instance, which hasn't really been a best practice in the cybersecurity industry. So now open source, it's all been about sharing, right? So you got the confluence of these worlds colliding, all aspects of culture and Dev and Sec and Ops and engineering all coming together. John, what's your reaction to that? Because this is a big topic. >> Yeah, so it's providing a level of transparency that historically we've not seen, right? So in that community, having those pipelines, the results of what's coming out of it, it's allowing anyone in that life cycle or that supply chain to look at it, see the state of it, and make a decision on, is this a risk I'm willing to take or not? Or am I willing to invest and personally contribute back to the community to address that because it's important to me and it's likely going to be important to some of the others that are using it? So I think it's critical, and it's enabling that acceleration and shift that I talked about, that now that everybody can see it, look inside of it, understand the state of it, contribute to it, it's allowing us to break down some of the barriers that Ki talked about. And it reinforces that excitement that we're seeing now. That community is enabling us to move faster and do things that maybe historically we've not been able to do. >> Ki, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned battlefield, and I've been covering a lot of the tactical edge around the DOD's work. You mentioned about the military on the Air Force side, Platform One, I believe, was from the Air Force work that they've done, all cloud native kind of directions. But when you talk about a war field, you talk about connectivity. I mean, who controls the DNS in Taiwan, or who controls the DNS in Korea? I mean, we have to deploy, you've got to stand up infrastructure. How about agility? I mean, tactical command and control operations, this has got to be really well done. So this is not a trivial thing. >> No. >> How are you seeing this translate into the edge innovation area? (laughs) >> It's certainly not a trivial thing, but I think, again, I'm encouraged by how government and industry are partnering up. There's a vision set around this joint all domain command control, JADC2. And then all the services are getting behind that, are looking into that, and this vision of this military, internet of military things. And I think the key thing there, John, as you mentioned, it's not just the connected of the sensors, which requires the transport again, but also they have to be interoperable. So you can have a bunch of sensors and platforms out there, they may be connected, but if they can't speak to one another in a common language, that kind of defeats the purpose and the mission value of that sensor or shooter kind of paradigm that we've been striving for for ages. So you're right on. I mean, this is not a trivial thing, but I think over history we've learned quite a bit. Technology and innovation is happening at just an amazing rate where things are coming out in months as opposed to decades as before. I agree, not trivial, but again, I think there are all the piece parts in place and being put into place. >> I think you mentioned earlier that the personnel, the people, the engineers that are out there, not enough, more of them coming in. I think now the appetite and the provocative nature of this shift in tech is going to attract a lot of people because the old adage is these are hard problems attracts great people. You got in new engineering, SRE like scale engineering. You have software development, that's changing, becoming much more robust and more science-driven. You don't have to be just a coder as a software engineer. You could be coming at it from any angle. So there's a lot more opportunities from a personnel standpoint now to attract great people, and there's real hard problems to solve, not just security. >> Absolutely. Definitely. I agree with that 100%. I would also contest that it's an opportunity for innovators. We've been thinking about this for some time, and we think there's absolute value from various different use cases that we've identified, digital battlefield, force protection, disaster recovery, and so forth. But there are use cases that we probably haven't even thought about, even from a commercial perspective. So I think there's going to be an opportunity just like the internet back in the mid '90s for us to kind of innovate based on this new kind of edge environment. >> It's a revolution. New leadership, new brands are going to emerge, new paradigms, new workflows, new operations, clearly great stuff. I want to thank you guys for coming on. I also want to thank Rancher Labs for sponsoring this conversation. Without their support, we wouldn't be here. And now they were acquired by SUSE. We've covered their event with theCUBE virtual last year. What's the connection with those guys? Can you guys take a minute to explain the relationship with SUSE and Rancher? >> Yeah. So it's actually it's fortuitous. And I think we just, we got lucky. There's two overall aspects of it. First of all, we are both, we partner on the Platform One basic ordering agreement. So just there we had a common mentality of DevSecOps. And so there was a good partnership there, but then when we thought about we're engaging it from an edge perspective, the K3s, right? I mean, they're a leader from a container perspective obviously, but the fact that they are innovators around K3s to reduce that software footprint, which is required on these edge devices, we kind of got a twofer there in that partnership. >> John, any comment on your end? >> Yeah, I would just amplify, the K3s aspects in leveraging the containers, a lot of what we've seen success in when you look at what's going on, especially on that tactical edge around enabling capabilities, containers, and the portability it provides makes it very easy for us to interface and integrate a lot of different sensors to close the OODA loop to whoever is wearing or operating that a piece of equipment that the software is running on. >> Awesome, I'd love to continue the conversation on space and the edge and super great conversation to have you guys on. Really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities of this new shift that's happening as the next big thing is coming quickly. And it's here on us and that's cloud, I call it cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment, edge with 5G changing the game. Ki, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and re-pivoting or refactoring their existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers. There's a pattern emerging. You got to be in the cloud, you got to be leveraging data, you got to be horizontally scalable, but you got to have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. That's the playbook. Some people are making it. Some people are not getting there. So I'd ask you guys, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance. Launching a satellite, a couple of hundred K, you can launch a CubeSat. That could be good and bad. So the telco business is changing radically. Cloud, telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5G, certainly business commercial benefits more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? >> As we think through cloud to edge, one thing that we realize, because our definition of edge, John, was actually at the point of data collection on the sensor themselves. Others' definition of edge is we're a little bit further back, what we call it the edge of the IT enterprise. But as we look at this, we realize that you needed this kind of multi echelon environment from your cloud to your tactical clouds where you can do some processing and then at the edge of themselves. Really at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about, it's still all about the data, right? The AI needs the data, the telco is transporting the data. And so I think if you think about it from a data perspective in relationship to the telcos, one, edge will actually enable a very different paradigm and a distributed paradigm for data processing. So, hey, instead of bringing the data to some central cloud which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the products to the data. So mitigate what's actually being sent over those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them. So I think at the end of the day, the telcos are going to have a pretty big component to this, even from space down to ground station, how that works. So the network of these telcos, I think, are just going to expand. >> John, what's your perspective? I mean, startups are coming out. The scalability, speed of innovation is a big factor. The old telco days had, I mean, months and years, new towers go up and now you got a backbone. It's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. >> Yeah, so I definitely echo the sentiments that Ki would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, faster speeds being available in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about facing an adversary that's a near-peer threat, the first thing they're going to do is make it contested, congested, and you have to be able to survive. While yes, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms to places we've not had it before, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over-rely on it, assuming it'll always be there. 'Cause I know in my experience wearing the uniform, and even if I'm up against an adversary, that's the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, continue survivable and lethal. So that's something I think, as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that. So when I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How do I continue the mission? >> Yeah, it's interesting. And if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology, Ki, it's been like siloed. "Okay, we've got a workplace workforce project, and we have the tactical edge, and we have the siloed IT solution," when really work and play, whether it's work here in John's example, is the war fighter. And so his concern is safety, his life and protection. >> Yeah. >> The other department has to manage the comms, (laughs) and so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go. So all this is, they all integrate it now. It's not like one department. It's like it's together. >> Yeah. John, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this siloed thinking not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise. From a digital battlefield perspective, it's a joint fight, so even across these enterprise of enterprises, So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally. We have to integrate, we have to inter-operate, and by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated too, not reinventing the wheel. >> Yeah, and I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. 5G obviously, that's more deployments, not as centralized in terms of the spectrum. It's more dense. It's going to create more connectivity options. How do you guys see that impacting? Because certainly more gear, like obviously not the centralized tower, from a backhaul standpoint but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless transit is key. That's the real edge here. How do you guys see that evolving? >> We're seeing a lot of innovations actually through small companies who are really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point because what they're doing is showing the art of the possible. Because again, we're in a different environment now. There's different rules. There's different capabilities. But then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, some of the larger companies, the Amazons, the Microsofts, also investing as well. So I think the merge of the, you know, or the unconstrained or the possible by these small companies that are just kind of driving innovations supported by the maturity and the heft of these large companies who are building out these hardened kind of capabilities, they're going to converge at some point. And that's where I think we're going to get further innovation. >> Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys, as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scale, role of data. We hit out all the key points I think here. As they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. The developers are now going to be on the front lines. Mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? >> It's such a great question. So I think you touched upon it. One is take the holistic approach. You mentioned architectures a couple of times, and I think that's critical. Understanding how your edge architectures will let you connect with your cloud architecture so that they're not disjointed, they're not siloed. They're interoperable, they integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. I think the second thing is be patient. It took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for about three years now. And we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were discussing around edge and kind of pulling that all together. But it took us some time to even figure it out, hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value out for our clients? So being a little bit patient in thinking through kind of how we can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor. >> John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the points that Ki raised, I would, number one, amplify the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment of legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, patience, open, all that, that I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of upskilling. This is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. How do you go through this lifecycle? How's security embedded? So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation I think is key. >> John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen Digital Cloud Solutions, thanks for sharing that great insight. Ki Lee, Vice President at Booz Allen Digital Business. Gentlemen, great conversation. Thanks for that insight. And I think people watching are going to probably learn a lot on how to evaluate startups to how they put their architecture together. So I really appreciate the insight and commentary. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier. This is theCUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching. 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(soft music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, my name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE and we're here with Guido Appenzeller, who is the CTO of the Data Platforms Group at Intel. Guido, welcome to theCUBE, come on in. >> Aww, thanks Dave, I appreciate it. It's great to be here today. >> So I'm interested in your role at the company, let's talk about that, you're brand new, tell us a little bit about your background. What attracted you to Intel and what's your role here? >> Yeah, so I'm, I grew up with the startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley, I came from my PhD and never left. And, built software companies, worked at software companies worked at VMware for a little bit. And I think my initial reaction when the Intel recruiter called me, was like, Hey you got the wrong phone number, I'm a software guy, that's probably not who you're looking for. And, but we had a good conversation but I think at Intel, there's a realization that you need to look at what Intel builds more as this overall system from an overall systems perspective. That the software stack and then the hardware components are all getting more and more intricately linked and, you need the software to basically bridge across the different hardware components that Intel is building. So again, I was the CTO for the Data Platforms Group, so that builds the data center products here at Intel. And it's a really exciting job. And these are exciting times at Intel, with Pat, I've got a fantastic CEO at the helm. I've worked with him before at VMware. So a lot of things to do but I think a very exciting future. >> Well, I mean the, the data centers the wheelhouse of Intel, of course your ascendancy was a function of the PCs and the great volume and how you change that industry but really data centers is where, I remember the days people said, Intel will never be at the data center, it's just the toy. And of course, you're dominant player there now. So your initial focus here is really defining the vision and I'd be interested in your thoughts on the future what the data center looks like in the future where you see Intel playing a role, what are you seeing as the big trends there? Pat Gelsinger talks about the waves, he says, if you don't ride the waves you're going to end up being driftwood. So what are the waves you're driving? What's different about the data center of the future? >> Yeah, that's right. You want to surf the waves, that's the way to do it. So look, I like to look at this and sort of in terms of major macro trends, And I think that the biggest thing that's happening in the market right now is the cloud revolution. And I think we're well halfway through or something like that. And this transition from the classic, client server type model, that way with enterprises running all data centers to more of a cloud model where something is run by hyperscale operators or maybe run by an enterprise themselves of (indistinct) there's a variety of different models. but the provisioning models have changed. It's much more of a turnkey type service. And when we started out on this journey I think the, we built data centers the same way that we built them before. Although, the way to deliver IT have really changed, it's going through more of a service model and we really know starting to see the hardware diverge, the actual silicon that we need to build and how to address these use cases, diverge. And so I think one of the things that is probably most interesting for me is really to think through, how does Intel in the future build silicon that's built for clouds, like on-prem clouds, edge clouds, hyperscale clouds, but basically built for these new use cases that have emerged. >> So just a quick, kind of a quick aside, to me the definition of cloud is changing, it's evolving and it used to be this set of remote services in a hyperscale data center, it's now that experience is coming on-prem it's connecting across clouds, it's moving out to the edge it's supporting, all kinds of different workloads. How do you see that sort of evolving cloud? >> Yeah, I think, there's the biggest difference to me is that sort of a cloud starts with this idea that the infrastructure operator and the tenant are separate. And that is actually has major architectural implications, it just, this is a perfect analogy, but if I build a single family home, where everything is owned by one party, I want to be able to walk from the kitchen to the living room pretty quickly, if that makes sense. So, in my house here is actually the open kitchen, it's the same room, essentially. If you're building a hotel where your primary goal is to have guests, you pick a completely different architecture. The kitchen from your restaurants where the cooks are busy preparing the food and the dining room, where the guests are sitting, they are separate. The hotel staff has a dedicated place to work and the guests have a dedicated places to mingle but they don't overlap, typically. I think it's the same thing with architecture in the clouds. So, initially the assumption was it's all one thing and now suddenly we're starting to see like a much cleaner separation of these different areas. I think a second major influence is that the type of workloads we're seeing it's just evolving incredibly quickly, 10 years ago, things were mostly monolithic, today most new workloads are microservice based, and that has a huge impact in where CPU cycles are spent, where we need to put an accelerators, how we build silicon for that to give you an idea, there's some really good research out of Google and Facebook where they run numbers. And for example, if you just take a standard system and you run a microservice based an application but in the microservice-based architecture you can spend anywhere from I want to say 25 in some cases, over 80% of your CPU cycles just on overhead, and just on, marshaling demarshaling the protocols and the encryption and decryption of the packets and your service mesh that sits in between all of these things, that created a huge amount of overhead. So for us might have 80% go into these overhead functions really all focus on this needs to be on how do we enable that kind of infrastructure? >> Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about workloads if we can, the overhead there's also sort of, as the software as the data center becomes software defined thanks to your good work at VMware, it is a lot of cores that are supporting that software-defined data center. And then- >> It's at VMware, yeah. >> And as well, you mentioned microservices container-based applications, but as well, AI is coming into play. And what is, AI is just kind of amorphous but it's really data-oriented workloads versus kind of general purpose ERP and finance and HCM. So those workloads are exploding, and then we can maybe talk about the edge. How are you seeing the workload mix shift and how is Intel playing there? >> I think the trends you're talking about is definitely right, and we're getting more and more data centric, shifting the data around becomes a larger and larger part of the overall workload in the data center. And AI is getting a ton of attention. Look if I talk to the most operators AI is still an emerging category. We're seeing, I'd say five, maybe 10% percent of workloads being AI is growing, they're very high value workloads. So (indistinct) any workloads, but it's still a smaller part of the overall mix. Now edge is big and edge is two things, it's big and it's complicated because of the way I think about edge is it's not just one homogeneous market, it's really a collection of separate sub markets It's, very heterogeneous, it runs on a variety of different hardware. Edge can be everything from a little server, that's (indistinct), it's strapped to a phone, a telephone pole with an antenna on top of it, to (indistinct) microcell, or it can be something that's running inside a car, modern cars has a small little data center inside. It can be something that runs on an industrial factory floor, the network operators, there's pretty broad range of verticals that all looks slightly different in their requirements. And, it's, I think it's really interesting, it's one of those areas that really creates opportunities for vendors like HPE, to really shine and address this heterogeneity with a broad range of solutions, very excited to work together with them in that space. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you brought HPE into the discussion, 'cause we're here at HPE Discover, I want to connect that. But so when I think about HPE strategy, I see a couple of opportunities for them. Obviously Intel is going to play in every part of the edge, the data center, the near edge and the far edge, and I gage HPE does as well with Aruba. Aruba is going to go to the far edge. I'm not sure at this point, anyway it's not yet clear to me how far, HPE's traditional server business goes to the, inside of automobiles, we'll see, but it certainly will be at the, let's call it the near edge as a consolidation point- >> Yeah. >> Et cetera and look the edge can be a race track, it could be a retail store, it could be defined in so many ways. Where does it make sense to process the data? But, so my question is what's the role of the data center in this world of edge? How do you see it? >> Yeah, look, I think in a sense what the cloud revolution is doing is that it's showing us, it leads to polarization of a classic data into edge and cloud, if that makes sense, it's splitting, before this was all mingled a little bit together, if my data centers my basement anyways, what's the edge, what's data center? It's the same thing. The moment I'm moving some workloads to the clouds I don't even know where they're running anymore then some other workloads that have to have a certain sense of locality, I need to keep closely. And there are some workloads you just can't move into the cloud. There's, if I'm generating lots of all the video data that I have to process, it's financially a completely unattractive to shift all of that, to a central location, I want to do this locally. And will I ever connect my smoke detector with my sprinkler system be at the cloud? No I won't (Guido chuckles) this stuff, if things go bad, that may not work anymore. So I need something that's that does this locally. So I think there's many reasons, why you want to keep something on premises. And I think it's a growing market, it's very exciting, we're doing some very good stuff with friends like HPE, they have the ProLiant DL, one 10 Gen10 Plus server with our latest a 3rd Generation Xeons on them the Open RAN, which is the radio access network in the telco space. HP Edgeline servers, also a 3rd Generation Xeons there're some really nice products there that I think can really help addressing enterprises, carriers and a number of different organizations, these edge use cases. >> Can you explain, you mentioned Open RAN, vRAN, should we essentially think of that as kind of the software-defined telco? >> Yeah, exactly. It's software-defined cellular. I actually, I learned a lot about that over the recent months. When I was taking these classes at Stanford, these things were still done in analog, that doesn't mean a radio signal will be processed in an analog way and digest it and today typically the radio signal is immediately digitized and all the processing of the radio signal happens digitally. And, it happens on servers, some of them HPE servers. And, it's a really interesting use case where we're basically now able to do something in a much, much more efficient way by moving it to a digital, more modern platform. And it turns out you can actually virtualize these servers and, run a number of different cells, inside the same server. And it's really complicated because you have to have fantastic real-time guarantees versus sophisticated software stack. But it's a really fascinating use case. >> A lot of times we have these debates and it's maybe somewhat academic, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it. And debate is about, how much data that is processed and inferred at the edge is actually going to come back to the cloud, most of the data is going to stay at the edge, a lot of it's not even going to be persisted. And the counter to that is, so that's sort of the negative is at the data center, but then the counter that is there going to be so much data, even a small percentage of all the data that we're going to create is going to create so much more data, back in the cloud, back in the data center. What's your take on that? >> Look, I think there's different applications that are easier to do in certain places. Look, going to a large cloud has a couple of advantages. You have a very complete software ecosystem around you, lots of different services. You'll have first, if you need very specialized hardware, if I wanted to run the bigger learning task where somebody needed a 1000 machines, and then this runs for a couple of days, and then I don't need to do that for another month or two, for that is really great. There's on demand infrastructure, having all this capability up there, at the same time it costs money to send the data up there. If I just look at the hardware cost, it's much much cheaper to build it myself, in my own data center or in the edge. So I think we'll see, customers picking and choosing what they want to do where, and that there's a role for both, absolutely. And so, I think there's certain categories. At the end of the day why do I absolutely need to have something at the edge? There's a couple of, I think, good use cases. One is, let me actually rephrase a little bit. I think it's three primary reasons. One is simply a bandwidth, where I'm saying, my video data, like I have a 100 4K video cameras, with 60 frames per second feeds, there's no way I'm going to move that into the cloud. It's just, cost prohibitive- >> Right. >> I have a hard time even getting (indistinct). There might be latency, if I need want to reliably react in a very short period of time, I can't do that in the cloud, I need to do this locally with me. I can't even do this in my data center. This has to be very closely coupled. And, then there's this idea of fade sharing. I think, if I want to make sure that if things go wrong, the system is still intact, anything that's sort of an emergency kind of a backup, an emergency type procedure, if things go wrong, I can't rely on the big good internet connection, I need to handle things, things locally, that's the smoke detector and the sprinkler system. And so for all of these, there's good reasons why we need to move things close to the edge so I think there'll be a creative tension between the two but both are huge markets. And I think there's great opportunities for HP ahead to work on all these use cases. >> Yeah, for sure, top brand is in that compute business. So before we wrap up today, thinking about your role, part of your role is a trend spotter. You're kind of driving innovation righty, surfing the waves as you said, skating to the puck, all the- >> I've got my perfect crystal ball right here, yeah I got. >> Yeah, all the cliches. (Dave chuckles) puts a little pressure on you, but, so what are some of the things that you're overseeing that you're looking towards in terms of innovation projects particularly obviously in the data center space, what's really exciting you? >> Look, there's a lot of them and I pretty much all the interesting ideas I get from talking to customers. You talk to the sophisticated customers, you try to understand the problems that they're trying to solve and they can't solve right now, and that gives you ideas to just to pick a couple, one thing what area I'm probably thinking about a lot is how can we build in a sense better accelerators for the infrastructure functions? So, no matter if I run an edge cloud or I run a big public cloud, I want to find ways how I can reduce the amount of CPU cycles I spend on microservice marshaling demarshaling, service mesh, storage acceleration and these things like that. And so well clearly, if this is a large chunk of the overall cycle budget, we need to find ways to shrink that to make this more efficient. So then I think, so this basic infrastructure function acceleration, sounds probably as unsexy as any topic would sound but I think this is actually really, really interesting area and one of the big levers we have right now in the data center. >> Yeah, I would agree Guido, I think that's actually really exciting because, you actually can pick up a lot of the wasted cycles now and that drops right to the bottom line, but please- >> Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of funny we're still measuring so much with SPEC and rates of CPU's performances, it's like, well, we may actually be measuring the wrong thing. If 80% of the cycles of my app are spent in overhead, then the speed of the CPU doesn't matter as much, it's other functions that (indistinct). >> Right. >> So that's one. >> The second big one is memory is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, and it's memory cost 'cause, memory prices, they used to sort of decline at the same rate that our core counts and then clock speeds increased, that's no longer the case. So we've run to some scaling limits, there's some physical scaling limits where memory prices are becoming stagnant. And this has become a major pain point for everybody who's building servers. So I think we need to find ways how we can leverage memory more efficiently, share memory more efficiently. We have some really cool ideas in that space that we're working on. >> Well, yeah. And Pat, let me just sorry to interrupt but Pat hinted to that and your big announcement. He talked about system on package and I think is what you used to talk about what I call disaggregated memory and better sharing of that memory resource. And that seems to be a clear benefit of value creation for the industry. >> Exactly. If this becomes a larger, if for our customers this becomes a larger part of the overall costs, we want to help them address that issue. And the third one is, we're seeing more and more data center operators that effectively power limited. So we need to reduce the overall power of systems, or maybe to some degree just figure out better ways of cooling these systems. But I think there's a lot of innovation that can be done there to both make these data centers more economical but also to make them a little more Green. Today data centers have gotten big enough that if you look at the total amount of energy that we're spending, this world as mankind, a chunk of that is going just to data center. And so if we're spending energy at that scale, I think we have to start thinking about how can we build data centers that are more energy efficient that are also doing the same thing with less energy in the future. >> Well, thank you for laying those out, you guys have been long-term partners with HP and now of course HPE, I'm sure Gelsinger is really happy to have you on board, Guido I would be and thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here and great to be at the HP show. >> And thanks for being with us for HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, you're watching theCUBE the leader in digital tech coverage, be right back. (soft music)