(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone; I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE NEWS and host of theCUBE, and welcome to our SiliconANGLE NEWS MWC NEWS UPDATE in Barcelona where MWC is the premier event for the cloud telecommunication industry, and in the news here is Red Hat, Red Hat announcing a collaboration with NVIDIA, Samsung and Arm on Efficient Open Networks. Red Hat announced updates across various fields including advanced 5G telecommunications cloud, industrial edge, artificial intelligence, and radio access networks, RAN, and Efficiency. Red Hat's enterprise Kubernetes platform, OpenShift, has added support for NVIDIA's converged accelerators and aerial SDK facilitating RAND deployments on industry standard service across hybrid and multicloud platforms. This composable infrastructure enables telecom firms to support heavier compute demands for edge computing, AI, private 5G, and more, and just also helps network operators adopt open architectures, allowing them to choose non-proprietary components from multiple suppliers. In addition to the NVIDIA collaboration, Red Hat is working with Samsung to offer a new vRAN solution for service providers to better manage their open RAN networks. They're also working with UK chip designer, Arm, to create new networking solutions for energy efficient Red Hat Open Source Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter project, or Kepler, has been donated to the open Cloud Native Compute Foundation, allowing enterprise to better understand their cloud native workloads and power consumptions. Kepler can also help in the development of sustainable software by creating less power hungry applications. Again, Red Hat continuing to provide OpenSource, OpenRAN, and contributing an open source project to the CNCF, continuing to create innovation for developers, and, of course, Red Hat knows what, a lot about operating systems and the telco could be the next frontier. That's SiliconANGLE NEWS. I'm John Furrier; thanks for watching. (monotone 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)

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

(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay thanks, Adam, and the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action, the keynotes are going on in the background. It's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante's on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE, but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, and kicking it off day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me! It's very exciting! I love what you guys have got over here, very fun! >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is, and also, Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> No, I mean, the atmosphere is absolutely palpable. Isn't it? You can just feel it. People walk in and see what the future looks like for the telecoms industry. Very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage, we're really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. After the keynotes are going on, we're going to have DR maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that out. But let's check out this videotape. This is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel, and we'll be right back, and we'll talk about it. (smooth electronic music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson space at MWC 21, and for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is their unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston, or DR, as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat instrumental music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona! I'm here for MWC 21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors, and 70 demos, to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience. We're going to talk about what's in store for the new network, and the future of work. And I'm really excited to create a community, and invite awesome telco executives to see this new feature. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC 21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get-go, we planned this amazing experience that we call Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series, where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs, and awesome vendors, talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud, hosted by John furrier and Dave Vallente. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests focused on telco in the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco, and 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, am on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements, and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested $1,000,000 in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market this week at MWC. The first is at planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement, coupling your network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement, and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing is a planetary scale BSS system, built on top of the TM Forum Open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show floor. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco! I'm super excited to bring to you the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona, and virtually around the world! (upbeat instrumental music) Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry, and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (groovy electronic music) >> Okay, thanks. Just rolling that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel, I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star. And I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision, and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there! I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, it really is. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world! She's innovative, she's exciting. And if we've learned anything over the last 18 months, it's that we need that in this industry, to grow for the future of the industry. So, so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration! >> And I love the fact that she's so takes the tiger by the tail. Because the telco industry is being disrupted, she's just driving the bus here. And I remember, I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon Web Services, she was running the public sector, and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC, and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player! And she was an exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing, and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" >> Now of course, it's always that way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time, people thinking what is going on here, we don't like change, why are being shaken up? But actually, afterwards, in retrospect, they think, "Oh, okay. I see why that happened, and we needed it." So, really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here on theCUBE. Obviously, the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you missed some of the action, this is obviously the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a hybrid event, a lot of virtual action going on. So, you got theCUBE Virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites. But in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, and what was happening around the show. Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (groovy electronic music) (cheerful instrumental music) (groovy electronic music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're on the main floor out here with Chloe, who is emceeing, hosting, and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean so far, day one, I was watching your presentations and fireside chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, no, for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage, and his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing. And in 10 years, it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So, really interesting! I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great. Everyone's excited. It's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content! It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. It's very exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event, so since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event, and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry because of COVID, and people are glad to be here. But a lot of stuff's changed! >> Yeah. It's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed! Digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though, John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> John: Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years. We know that! But what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years. >> Oh, man. That's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks, and telecom, which is basically radios, and wireless, and then mobile. But it's very global, a lot of networks. But now it's evolving! And many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting, that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe, because of all the technology from the cloud players, and from the chips, getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So people look at the chips, the hardware. It's less about the speeds and feeds, it's more about the consumer experience. We got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I went, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, you order it, you pick it up. So that's kind of what can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. So, a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry? That is, the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is there anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well, I think the incumbents are going to lose their positions. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the the company that you don't see. (audience in background applauding) And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this! We saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. >> Chloe: Yeah, for sure. >> She just walked out there, and she's not afraid. >> Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up! And you can see as soon as she walks out, that is what she intends to do today. >> I love her mojo. She's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Chloe: Yep. >> I mean, even when Apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash, when Steve Jobs brought back Apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company, the iPad was a seminal, iPod, a seminal moment. Then the iPhone, and just, the rest is history. That kind of disruption is coming. You're going to see that now. >> Oh, it's exciting though, isn't it? To be future ready, rather than future proof! But actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about wire, as you're on AWS and Google Cloud, why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity. And it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. It's almost like global warming now, the icebergs are melting, and it's going to just change. And because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing, it's not like a better phone. It's a commercial app opportunity, because it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts, or football games, or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out. Can't upload their picture to Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them on the network. That's where 5G solves a problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth, and that's going to bring the edge to life, and that's money. So when you got money, and greed, and power, changing hands, if it's on the table, and the wheel's spinning, it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know! >> Oh, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved! And I suppose it circles back to the fact that DR is really leading the charge, and they're probably thinking, "Okay, what's going on here? This is different. We want something new." You did notice it, OpenRAN is something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here at Cloud City Live mention OpenRAN. What is it all about, Don? Because why all the buzz if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we get excited about it? >> That's a great thing. The 5G certainly will drive the main trend, for sure. OpenRAN is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular, and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation, has been the driver for most of the open source software. So, they're trying to make open software, and open architectures, to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware, and around infrastructure, because we need more infrastructure, we need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices. That could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology, and you want to minimize the licensing, and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What did we look at? So on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Phillip Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud, and within telco. So you just mentioned that OpenRAN is all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easily more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it at risk? >> I think it's going to increase the value of security, and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in a sense that could be explored by hackers, but open can also protect. And I think we've seen open source, and cloud in particular, be more secure. Because everyone said, cloud is not secure, open source is insecure. And as it turns out, when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security threats, but actually I was speaking to some leaders across various industries, and particularly in tech, and they were saying, actually, there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open-source environment, we are able to track them, and measure them, and defend more efficiently. So actually, they're being batted away. But the number is probably the same as it always was, we just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats, and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so to the threats. So on a net basis, it's more, because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look it, there's money involved, they are organized. There's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank, or ransomware is at an all time high. >> Yes! >> So this is like a big problem, and it's beyond the government. It's around individual freedom. So, security is huge. And I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think, the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's, again, about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time, but without collaboration, the industries are going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I'd just say on security, don't download that PDF, if you don't know who it came from. The phishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here of Mobile World Live. We're going to show this next segment, and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience, Chloe, for people who aren't here. To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona, and all the action. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Daniel Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDR. But you can call me DR! Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time! Let's do it. Holy shit! It sure is a great time to be a tech company! I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, Door Dash, or Uber, life's pretty great! Just look at these stock prices over the past five years, with their shareholder value going up and to the right. Totally amazing! But where's telco? Dare I add our stocks to this awesome chart? Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, TIM, America Movil, and Zain Group. Huh. Not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you, senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up! Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T than to Apple, because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people! I get it. You have the security blanket. You're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network, and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network, and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things. But because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far, you haven't had to. Every Telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best. Just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat. And it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting to WeChat, WhatsApp, and the other OTT apps. But it is not just texting. The total adjustable market, or TAM, of the mobile app disruptors is huge! Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about! I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love! They look at every interaction with the customer and say, how do we make the customer love this? Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive, they must make customers love them. So, they focus on it in a big way! And it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70, and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS, and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch, and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps, and becoming customer centered! Retooling around the customer is a huge change, so let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples, and drive big shareholder value, just like the tech companies on that chart! Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies in a variety of categories vying for your subscribers' disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services. Who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high valuations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You! Hello? What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAMs they throw around, you'd be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the cap ex to build out the network, I say to myself, hell yeah! We should totally go do it, and do whatever it takes to go get it. For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a Southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focus started in Rideshare, but then leveraged its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a Telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with the valuable services that helped grow your ARPU. That would be huge! So, how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app! A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great, but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called to Totogi that is going to help carriers build world-class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users. It's not the average order value. It's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user. That's the metric that matters. How many have you used that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top-up, or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences. Like Apple credit cards, no information required application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies. Like how Door Dash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings, because they do simple things, like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app, rather than forced you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. Hm, what do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder. While you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day, you have something that's 10 times better! You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network. 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to, your crappy, over customized, on-premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it, the public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi! Totogi will leverage all those network interactions, and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions, and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network, and all the network interactions, into customer engagement. This is something that super apps don't have, but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focused to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying, massive cap ex investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps, with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day, and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100,000,000 into it. You heard me right. $100,000,000. Is this what it feels like to be SoftBank? I'm investing into Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage their network interactions into super app usage! Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience, and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those telco valuations will go from down here, (buzzes lips) to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts. And I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, "Click. Eh." Everyone says, no way. Telcos can't do it. Zero chance. Total goose egg. (egg cracking) One suggested I build a bonfire with a hundred million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well, I think those people are dead wrong! I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco, and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because Totogi takes the value of the network, and the power of the public cloud, to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focused guys, like the other telcos. Instead, you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors, they know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf, and make the customers want to choose you. You need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We'll have to give up the security blanket of the network, and change. Instead of NPS at the thirties, it needs to be in the seventies. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible! I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me, and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time, and I can't wait to see you there! >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier. Chloe Richardson's filling in for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her involving major action, major pump you up, punch in the face, "Wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here!" She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is, John, there's trillions of dollars on the table, and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in, and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> And it's not going to be, it's going to be a fight! Who will win? >> Who will win, but also who will build the next big thing? (John laughing) >> Someone needs to die in the media conversations. It's always a fight. Something's dead. Something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. Think what's happened is Telco's already acknowledged that they need to change. And the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple. They've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm. You've got all these new things. So, the chips are getting faster, and the software's more open source. And I'm telling you, the cloud is just going to drive that bus right down Cloud Street, and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peepin' on the board as it drives down. (John laughing) John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written, and one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me, what does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets, and growing markets, things behave differently, and certainly economics, and the people, and the makeup, and the mindset. So the telco has been kind of this mature market, it's been changing and growing, but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit. You know, to install a lot of cable, you got to get the rents out of that infrastructure. And that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market. And it's about building, not just operating. And you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together. Builders being software developers, new technology, and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking. But in a growth market, it's turbulent, and the ride might not be quiet, first-class ticket to paradise. It's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer? Are there parallels there? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, replatform with the cloud, and then refactor your business! If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over, or go out of business. And that's what the telcos with all these assets, they're going to get bought, rolled into a SPAC, Special Purpose Acquisition Company, which is super hot in the United States. A lot of roll-ups going on with private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor, or replatform then refactor, they're going to be toast, and they're going to get rolled up, and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad, people, process, technology, and we think, process and technology really to the forefront here. But like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously, Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday, and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations, establishments. How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about? >> Yeah. I mean, education's huge, and this highlights the change that telco's now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around, and mobile was there. But once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So, you start to see people now aware of the value. And if you look at during COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses, and everyone survived because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad Zoom meetings here and there, and some teleconferences that didn't go well, but for the most part we survived, and they really saved everybody. So, they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education. People care about that stuff, so now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why the edge has got trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, "Oh, there's no jobs." Or, "I can't work." That's a bunch of BS, because you can just get online, get on YouTube, and just get a degree. You can get a degree. You can get an Amazon job. It pays a hundred thousand dollars a year! American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds, and be unemployed six months, and then be employed. So negative unemployment means, there's more jobs than people to fill them all, in fact. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that, because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in something, I think there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity. And there's such a skill shortage. There is nobody around to fill it! So it's an interesting problem to have, isn't it? Because it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades! And obviously, telco is in the same space. But what can we do about it do you think, to actually -- >> I think it's going to take leadership, and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university if they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money, if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there. But to me, it's the relationships, the mentorship. You're starting to see a women in tech, and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear courseware. Nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate, or degree, and accreditation, no problem. But the communities are out there, so that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that. And I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills. You can get that online, so why even go to school? So, people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also, even transferring. I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't they, so we could easily be talking to people from other industries, and bringing them into telco, and saying, "Look, bring what you know from your retail background, or your healthcare background, and help us at telco to, again, drive forwards." Just like DR was saying, it's all about the next big thing. >> Well, Danielle is always also driving a lot of change. And if you think about the jobs, and the pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy Leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to the school like that, and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now the jobs that are available weren't around five years ago, so there's no like pedigree or track record. There's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now, from a job standpoint, is people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy League, or the big degree, or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emerging and making things happen. Entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas! >> It's interesting you mention that, John, because we can't have more than five years experience in this space, we know that. But in telco, there is a problem. And maybe it's, again, it's a flipped problem where telco recruiters, or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> I think that's just, I mean I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening, one. But two, I think, you know, to be like a chip engineer, (laughs) you can't learn that online. But if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So, embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely paths you can specialize. Space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on. You see Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on a virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And you know, Danielle Royston always says, "What's going to happen first, Mars colony, or telco adopting public cloud?" And some people think Mars will happen first, but. >> What do you think, John? >> I think Telco's going to get cloud. I mean first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud, and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important, because it's an architectural beachhead. And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. So, the inside baseball, and the inside money, and all the investors are focusing on the edge, because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows, it's a public secret, and it's fun to watch everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah no, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So, it's an interesting flip. And I wonder if, with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development, this efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times, John. >> John: Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So, we're the hybrid CUBE, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. That is critical dynamic! And you're seeing it. Like virtual reality, for instance, now you're seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. You got, companies like Roblox went public recently. Metaverse. It's a good time to be in that business, because experiential human relations are coming. So, I think that's going to be powered by 5G. You know, gamers. So, all good stuff. Chloe, great to be with you here on theCUBE, and we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam, and the team. We're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City. And this is theCUBE, from Cloud City, back to you, Adam, and the studio.

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here for this interview. We're not face to face this year, we're remote because of the pandemic. We've got a great guest, CUBE alumni, John Roese who's the Global Chief Technology Officer at Dell Technologies. John, great to see you. Thank you for remoting in from New Hampshire. Thanks for your time and thanks for coming on. >> Oh, glad to be here. Glad to be here from New Hampshire. The travel is a lot easier this way so-- >> It's been an interesting time. What a year it's been with the pandemic, the good, bad, and the ugly has been playing out. But if you look at the role of technology, the big theme this year at Dell Technologies World is the digital transformation acceleration. Everyone is kind of talking about that, but when you unpack the technology side of it, you're seeing a technology enablement theme that is just unprecedented from an acceleration standpoint. COVID has forced people to look at things that they never had to look at before. Disruption to business models and business systems like working at home. (Furrier laughs) Who would have forecasted that kind of disruption. Workloads changing, workforces working differently with in the mid of things. So an absolute exposure to the core issues and challenges that need to be worked on and double down on. And some cases, projects that might not have been as a priority. So you have all of this going on, customers really trying to double down on the things that are working, the things they need to fix, so they can come out of the pandemic with a growth strategy with modern apps, with cloud and hybrid and multicloud. This has been a huge forcing function. I'd love to get your first reaction to that big wave. >> Yeah, no, no, I think as a technologist, sometimes you can see the future maybe a little clearer than the business people can. Because there's one thing about technology, it either is, or it isn't. Either is code or hardware and real or it's marketing. And we knew the technology evolution was occurring, we knew the multicloud world was real, we knew that machine intelligence was real. And we've been working on this for maybe decades. But prior to COVID, many of these areas were still considered risky or speculative. And people couldn't quite grok exactly why they wanted a machine doing work on their behalf or why they might want an AI to be a participant in their collaboration sessions or why they might want an autonomous vehicle at all. And we were talking about how many people autonomous vehicles that were going to kill as opposed to how many that we're going to help. Then we had COVID. And suddenly we realized that the fragility of our physical world and the need for digital is much higher. And so it's actually opened up an enormous accelerant on people's willingness to embrace new technologies. And so whether it's a predictable acceleration of machine intelligence or autonomous systems, or this realization that the cloud world is actually more than one answer, there's multiple clouds working together. Because if you try to do a digital transformation acceleration, you realize that it's not one problem. It's many, many problems all working together, and then you discover that, hey, some of these can be solved with cloud one and some can be solving with cloud two, and some of them you want to do in your own infrastructure, in a private cloud, and some might belong at the edge. And then suddenly you come to this conclusion that, hey, having strategy has to deal with this system as a system. And so across the board, COVID has been an interesting catalyst to get people to really think practically about the technology available to them and how they might be able to take advantage of it quicker. And that's a mixed blessing for us technologists because they want things sooner, and that means we have to do more engineering. But at the same time, open-minded consumers of technology are very helpful in digital transformations. >> Well, I want to unpack that rethinking with COVID and post COVID. I mean, everything is going to come down to before COVID and after COVID world. I think it's going to be the demarcation that's going to be looked at historically. Before we get into that though, I want to get your thoughts on some of the key pillars of these transformational technologies in play today. Last year at Dell World, when we were physically face to face, we were laying out on theCUBE and in our analysis, the Dell Technologies has got an end to end view. You saw a little bit at VMworld this year, the Project Monterey, is looking much more systematically across the board. You mentioned systems as consequences. The reaction of changes. But lay out for us the key areas, the key pillars of the transformational technologies that customers need to look at now to drive the digital path. >> Yeah, we cast a very wide net. We look at literally thousands of technologies, we organize them and we try to understand and predict which ones are going to matter. And it turns out that over the last couple of years, we figured out there's really six, what I'll call expanding technology areas that are actually probably likely to be necessary for almost any digital transformation. And they aren't exactly what people have been doing historically. So in no particular order, and they may sound obvious, but when you think about your future, it's very likely all six of these are going to touch you. The first is, the obvious one of being able to develop and deliver a multicloud. The cloud journey is by no means done. We are at like the second inning of a nine inning game, maybe even earlier. We have barely created the multiple cloud world, much less the true multicloud world, and then really exploiting and automating has work to be done. But that's a strategic area for us and everybody to navigate forward. In parallel to that, what we realize is that multiple cloud is no longer just present in data centers and public clouds, it's actually existing in the real world. So this idea of edge, the reconstituting of IT out in the real world to deliver the real time behavior necessary to actually serve what we predict will be about 70% of the world's data that will happen outside of data centers. The third is 5G. And that's a very specific technology, and I have a long telco background. I was the CTO of one of the largest telecom companies in the world and I was involved in 2G, 3G and 4G. (Furrier chuckles) 5G is not another G. It is not just faster 4G. It does that, but with things like massive machine type communication with having a million sensorized devices in a kilometer or ultra reliable, low latency communication. The ability to get preferential services to critical streams of data across the infrastructure, mobile edge compute, putting the edge IT out into the cellular environment. And the fact that it's built in the cloud and IT era. So it's programmable, software defined. 5G is going to go from being an outside of the IT discussion to being the fabric inside the IT discussion. And so I will bet that anybody who has people in the real world and that they're trying to deliver a digital experience, will have to take advantage of the capabilities of 5G to do it right. But super strategic important area for Dell and for our industry. Continuing on, we have the data world, the data management world. It's funny, we've been doing data as an industry for a very long time, but the world we were in was the data at rest world, databases, data lakes, traditional applications. And that's great. It still matters, but this new world of data in motion is beginning. And what that means is the data is now moving into pipelines. We're not moving it somewhere and then figuring it out, we're figuring it out as the data flows across this multicloud environment. And that requires an entirely different tool, chain, architecture and infrastructure. But it's incredibly important because it's actually the thing that powers most digital transformation if they're real time. In parallel to that, number five on the list is AI and machine learning. And we have a controversial view on this. We don't view AI as purely a technology. It clearly is a technology, but what we really think customers should think about it as is as a new class of user. Because AIs are actually some of the most aggressive producers and consumers of data and consumers of IT infrastructure. We actually estimate that within the next four or five years, the majority of IT capacity in an enterprise environment will actually be consumed at the behest of the machine learning algorithm or an AI system than a traditional application or person. And all you have to do is do one AI project to understand that I'm correct, because they are just massive demand drivers for your infrastructure, but they have massive return on that demand. They give you things you can't do without them. And then last on the list is this area of security. And to be candid, we have really messed up this area as an industry. We have a security product for every problem, we have proliferation of security technologies. And to make matters worse, we now operate most enterprises on the assumption the bad guys are already inside and we're doing things to prevent them from causing harm. Now, if that's all it is, we really lost this one. So we have an obligation to reverse this trend, to start moving back to embedding the security and the infrastructure with intrinsic security, with zero trust models, with things like SASSY, which is basically creating new models of the edge security paradigm to be more agile and software defined. But most importantly, we have to pull it all together and say, "You know what we're really measuring is the trustworthiness "of the systems we work with, "not the individual components." So this elevation of security to trust is going to be a big journey for all of us. And every one of those six are individual areas, but when you combine them, they actually describe the foundation of a digital transformation. And so it's important for people to be aware of them, it's important for companies like Dell to be very active in all of them, because ultimately what you have today, plus those six properly executed, is the digital transformation outcome that most people are heading towards. >> You just packed it all six pillars into one soundbite. That was awesome. Great insight there. One of the things that's interesting, you mentioned AI. I love that piece around AI being a consumer. They are a consumer of data, they're also a consumer of what used to be handled by either systems or humans. That's interesting. 5G is another one. Pat Gelsinger has said at VMworld that 5G, and when I interviewed him he said 5G is a business app, not a consumer app. Yet, if you look at the recent iPhone announcement by Apple, iPhone 12, and iPhone 12 Pro, 5G is at the center of that announcement. But they're taking it from a different perspective. That's a real world application. They've got the watch, they have new chips in their devices, huge advantage. It's not just bandwidth. And remember the original iPhone launch with 3G if you remember. That made the iPhone. Some are saying if it didn't have the 3G or 2G and 3G, I think it was 3G in the first iPhone. 3G, it would have not been as successful. So again, Apple is endorsing 5G. Gelsinger talks about it as a business app. Double down on that, because I think 5G will highlight some of the COVID issues because people are working at home. They're on the go. They want to do video conferencing. Maybe they want to do this programmable. Unpack the importance of 5G as an enabler and as an IT component. >> Yeah. As I mentioned, 5G isn't just about enhanced mobile broadband which is faster YouTube. It's about much more than that. And because of that combination of technologies, it becomes the connective tissue for almost every digital transformation. So our view by the way, just to give you the Dell official position, we actually view that the 5G or the telecom industry is going through three phases around 5G. The first phase has already happened. It was an early deployment of 5G using traditional technology. It was just 5G as an extension of the 4G environment. That's great, it's out there. There's a phase that we're in right now, which I call the geopolitical phase, where all of a sudden, everybody from companies to countries to industries have realized this is really important. And we have to figure out how to make sure we have a secure source of supply that is based on the best technology. And that has created an interest by people like Dell and VMware and Microsoft, and many other companies to say, "Wait a minute. "This isn't just a telecom thing. "This is, as Pat said a business system. "This is part of the core of all digital." And so that's pulled people like Dell and others more aggressively into the telecom world in this middle phase. But what really is happening is the third phase. And the third phase is a recasting of the architecture of telecom to make it much more like the cloud and IT world. To separate hardware from software, to implemented software defined principles, to putting machine interfaces, to treat it like a cloud and IT system architecturally. And that's where things like OpenRAN, integrated open networks, and these new initiatives are coming into play. All of that from Dell perspective is fantastic because what it says is the telecom world is heading towards companies like us. And so, as you may know, we set up a brand new telecom business at scale up here to our other businesses this year. We already are doing billions of dollars in telecom, but now we believe we should be playing a meaningful tier-one role in this modern telecom ecosystem. It will be a team sport. There's lots of other players we have to work with. But because of the breadth of applications of 5G. And whether it's again, an iPhone with 5G is great to do YouTube, but it's incredibly powerful if you run your business applications on there, and what you want to actually deliver is an immersive augmented experience. So without 5G, it will be very hard to do that. So it becomes a new and improved client. We announced a Latitude 9,000 Series, and we're one of the first to put out a 5G enabled laptop. In certain parts of the world, we're now starting to ship these. Well again, when you have access to millimeter wave and gigabit speed capacity, you can do some really interesting things on that device, more oriented towards what we call collaborative computing which the client device and the adjacent infrastructure have so much bandwidth between them, that they look like one system. And they can share the burden of augmented reality, of data processing, of AI processing all in the real time domain. Carry that a little further, and when we get into the areas like healthcare transformation or educational transformation. What we realize immediately is reach is everything. You want to have a premium broadband experience, and you need a better system to do that. But really the thing that has to happen is not just a Zoom call, but an immersive experience in which a combination of low bandwidth, always on sensors are able to send their data streams back. But also, if you want to have a more immersive experience to really exploit your health situation, being able to do it with holography and other tools, which require a lot more bandwidth is critical. So no matter where you go in a digital transformation in the real world that has real people and things out in the real world involved in it, the digital fabric for connectivity is critical. And you suddenly realize the current architecture's pre-5G aren't sufficient. And so 5G becomes this linchpin to basically make sure that the client and the cloud and the data center all have a framework that they can actually work together without, let's call it a buffering resistance between them called the network. Imagine if the network was an enabler, not an impediment. >> Yeah, I think you're on point here. I think this is really teases out to me the next-gen business transformation, digital transformation because if you think about what you just talked about, connective tissue, linchpin with 5G, data as a driver, multicloud, the six pillars you laid out, and you mentioned systems, connective tissue systems. I mean, you're basically talking tech under the hood like operating system mindset. These systems design are interesting. If you put the pieces together, you can create business value. Not so much speeds and feeds, business value. You mentioned telco cloud. I find that fascinating. I've been saying on theCUBE for years, and I think it's finally playing out. I want to get your reactions of this is, this rise of the specialty cloud. I called it tier-one on the power law kind of the second wave of cloud. Look at Snowflake. They went public. Biggest IPO in the history of the New York Stock Exchange of Wall Street, second to VMware. They built on Amazon. (Furrier laughs) Okay. You have the telco cloud, we have theCUBE cloud, we have the media cloud. So you're seeing businesses looking at the cloud as a business model opportunity, not just buying gear to run something faster, right? So you're getting at something here where it's real benefits are now materializing and are now visible. First of all, do you agree with that? I'm sure you do. I'd love to get your thoughts on that. And if you do, how do companies put this together? Because you need software, you got to have the power source with cloud. What's your reaction to that? >> Absolutely. I think, now obviously there are many clouds. We have some mega clouds out there and then we have lots of other specialty clouds. And by the way, sometimes you remember we view cloud as an operating model, an experience, a way to present an IT service. How it's implemented is less important than what it looks like to the user. Your example of Snowflake. I don't view Snowflake as AWS. I view Snowflake as a storage business. (Furrier chuckles) >> It's a business. >> It's a business cloud. I mean, they could lift it up and move it onto another cloud infrastructure and still be Snowflake. So, as we look forward, we do see more of the consumables that we're going to use and digital transformation appearing as these cloud services. Sometimes they're SaaS cloud, sometimes they're an infrastructure cloud, sometimes they're a private cloud. One of the most interesting ones though that we see that hasn't happened yet is the edge clouds that are going to form. Edge is different. It's in the real time domain, it's distributed. If you do it at scale, it might look like massive amounts of capacity, but it isn't infinite in one place. Public cloud is infinite capacity all in one place. An edge cloud is infinite capacity distributed across 50,000 points of presence at which each of them has a finite amount of capacity. And the other difference though, is that edge clouds tend to live in the real time domain. So 30 millisecond round trip latency. Well, the reason this one's exciting to me is that when you think about what happened at the software and business model innovation, when for instance public clouds and even co-location became more accessible, companies who had this idea that needed a very large capacity of infrastructure that could be consumed as a service suddenly came into existence. Salesforce.com go through the laundry list. But all of those examples were non-real time functions because the clouds they were built on were non-real time clouds if you take them in the end to end, in the system perspective. We know that there are going to be both from the telecom operators and from cloud providers and co-location providers, and even enterprises, a proliferation of infrastructure out in the real time domain called edges. And those are going to be organized and delivered as cloud services. They're going to be pools of flexible elastic capacity. What excites me is suddenly we're going to spawn a level of innovation, where people who had this great idea that they needed to access cloud light capacity, but they ran into the problem that the capacity was too far away from the time domain they needed to operate. And we've already seen some examples of this in AR and VR. Autonomous vehicles require a real time cloud near the car, which doesn't exist yet. When we think about things like smart cities and smart factories, they really need to have that cloud capacity in the time domain that matters if they want to be a real time control system. And so, I don't know exactly what the innovation is going to be, but when you see a new capability show up, in this case, it's inevitable that we're going to see pools of elastic, consumable capacity in the real time environment as edges start to form. It's going to spawn another innovation cycle that could be as big as what happened in the public cloud environment for non-real time. >> Well, I think that's a great point in time series. Databases for one would be one instant innovation. You mentioned data, data management, time is valuable to the latency and this maybe not viable after if you're a car, right? So you pass them. So again, all different concepts. And the one thing that, first of all, I agree with you on this whole cloud thing. A nice edge cloud is going to develop nicely. But the question there is it's going to be software defined, agreed. Security, data, you've got databases, you've got software operated. You mentioned security being broken, and security product for every problem. And you want to bake it in, intrinsic or whatever you call it these days. How do you get the security model? Because you've got access. Do you federate that? How do you build in security at that level? Whether it's a space satellite or a moving vehicle, the edge is the edge. So what's your thoughts on security as you're looking at this mobility, this agility is horizontally scalable distributed system. What's the security paradigm? >> Well the first thing, it has nothing to do with security, but impacts your security outcome in a meaningful way when you talk about the edge. And that is, we have got to stop getting confused that an edge is a single monolithic thing. And we have got to start understanding that an edge is actually a combination of two things. It is a platform that will provide the capacity and a workload that will do the job, the code. And today, what we find is many people are advocating for edges are actually delivering an end to end stack that includes bespoke hardware, its infrastructure, and the workloads and capabilities. If that happens, we end up with 1,000 black boxes that all do one thing, which doesn't make any sense out in the real world. So the minute you shift to what the edge is really going to be, which is a combination of edge platforms and edge workloads, you start your journey towards a better security model. First thing that happens is you can secure and make a high integrity the edge platform. You can make sure that that platform has a hardware to trust, that it operates potentially in a zero trust model, that it has survivability and resiliency, but it doesn't really care what's running on it as much as it has to be stable. Now if you get that one right, now at least you have a stable platform between your public and private environments and the edge. At the workload level though, now you have to think about, well, edge workloads actually should not be bloated. They should not be extremely large scale because there's not enough capacity at the edge. So concepts like SASSY is a good example, which is one of the analyst firms that coined that term. But I like the concept, which is, hey, what if at the edge you're delivering the workload, but the workload is protected by a bunch of cloud-oriented security services that effectively are presented as part of the service chain? So you don't have to have your own firewall built into every workload because you're in an edge architecture, you can use virtual firewalling that's coming to you as a software service, or you can use the SDN, the service chain it into the networking path, and then you can provide deep packet inspection and other services. It all goes back to this idea that, when you deal with the edge, first and foremost, you have to have a reliable stable platform to guarantee a robust foundation. And that is an infrastructure security problem. But then you have to basically deal with the security problems of the workload in a different way than you do it in a data center. In a data center, you have infinite computing. You can put all kinds of appendages on your code, and it's fine because there's just more compute next to you. In the edge, we have to keep the code pure. It has to be an analytics engine or an AI engine for systems control in a factory. And the security services actually have to be a function of the end to end path. More likely delivered as software services slightly upstream. That architectural shift is not something people have figured out yet. But if we get it right, now we actually have a modern, zero trust distributed, software defined, service changeable, dynamic security architecture, which is a much better approach to an intrinsic security than trying to just hard-code the security into the workload and tie it to the platform which never has worked. So we're going to have to have a pretty big rethink to get through this. But for me, it's pretty clear what we have to do. >> Now I'd say that's good observation. Great insight. I'll just double down and ask a followup on that. I get that. I see where you're going with that software defined, software operated service. I love the SASSY concept. We've covered it. But the edge is still purpose-built devices. I mean, we've talked about an iPhone, and you're talking about a watch, you're talking about a space module, whatever it is at the edge on a tower, it could be a radio. I mean, whatever it is, you seem to have purpose-built hardware. You mentioned this root of trust. That'll kind of never kind of go away. You're going to have that. What's your thoughts on that as someone who realizes I got to harden the edge, at least from a hardware standpoint, but I want to be enabled for self-defined. I don't want to have a product be purpose-built and then be obsolete in a year. Because that's again the challenge of supply chain management, building hardware. What's your thoughts on that? >> Yeah. Our edge strategy, we double click a little bit is different than the strategy to build for a data center. We want consistency between them, but there's actually five areas of edge that actually are specific to it. The first is the hardware platform itself. Edge hardware platforms are different than the platforms you put in data centers, whether it be a client or the infrastructure underneath it. And so we're already building hardened devices and devices that are optimized for power and cooling and space constraints in that environment. The second is the runtime on that system is likely to be different. Today we use the V Cloud Foundation where that works very well, but as you get smaller and smaller and further away, you have to miniaturize and reduce the footprint. The control plane, we would like to make that consistent. We are using Tanzu and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform to extend out to the edge. And we think that having a consistent control plan is important, but the way you adapt something like Tanzu from the edge is different because it's in a different place. The fourth is life cycle, which is really about how you secure, how you deploy, how you deal with day two operations. There's no IT person out at the edge, so you're not in a data center. So you have to automate those systems and deal with them in a different way. And then lastly, the way you package an edge solution and deliver it is much different than the way you build a data center. You actually don't want to deal with those four things I just described as individual snowflakes. You want them packaged and delivered as an outcome. And that's why more and more of the edge platform offerings are really cloudlets or they're a platform that you can use to extend your IT capacity without having to think about Kubernetes versus VMs versus other things. It's just part of the infrastructure. So all of that tells us that edge is different enough, that the way you designed for it, the way you implement it, and even the life cycle, it has to take into account that it's not in a data center. The trick is to then turn that into an extended multicloud where the control plane is consistent, or when you push code into production with Kubernetes, you can choose to land that container in a data center or push it out to the edge. So you have both a system consistency goal, but also the specialization of the edge environment. Everything from hardware, to control plane, to lifecycle, that's the reality of how these things have to be built. >> That's a great point. It's a systems architecture, whether you're looking at from the bottoms up component level to top down kind of policy and or software defined. So great insight. I wish we had more time. I'd love to get you back and talk about data. We were talking before you came on camera about data. But quickly before we go, your thoughts on AI and the consequences of AI. AI is a consumer. I love that insight. Totally agree. Certainly it's an application. Technology is kind of horizontal. It can be vertically specialized with data. What's your thoughts on how AI can be better for society and some of the unintended consequences that we manage that. >> Yeah, I'm an optimist. I actually, we've worked with enough AI systems for long enough to see the benefit. Every one of Dell's products today has machine intelligence inside of it. So we can exceed the potential of its hardware and software without it. It's a very powerful tool. And it does things that human beings just simply can't do. I truly believe that it's the catalyst for the next wave of business process functionality, of new innovation. So it's definitely not something to stay away from. That being said, we don't know exactly how it can go wrong. And we know that there are examples where corrupted or bad bias data could influence it and have a bad outcome. And there are an infinite set of problems to go solve with AI, but there are ones that are a little dangerous to go pursue if you're not sure. And so our advice to customers today is, look, you do not need to build The Terminator to get advantage from AI. You can do something much simpler. In fact, in most enterprise context, we believe that the best path is go look at your existing business processes, where there is a decision that's made by a human being, and it's an inefficient decision. And if you can locate those points where a supply chain decision or an engineering decision or a testing decision is done by human beings poorly, and you can use machine intelligence to improve it by five or 10%, you will get a significant material impact on your business if you go after the right processes. At Dell we're doing a ton of AI and machine learning in our supply chain. Why is that important? Well, we happen to have the largest tech supply chain in the world. If we improve it by 1%, it's a gigantic impact on the company. And so our advice to people is you don't have to build man autonomous car. You don't have to build The Terminator. You can apply it much more tactically in spaces that are much safer. Even in the HR examples, we tell our HR people, "Hey, use it for things like performance management "and simplifying the processing of data. "Don't use it to hire a bot." That's a little dangerous right now. Because you might inadvertently introduce racism or sexism into that, and we still have some work to do there. So it's a very large surface area. Go where the safe areas are. It'll keep you busy for the next several years, improving your business in dramatic ways. And as we improve the technology for bias correction and management of AI systems and fault tolerance and simplicity, then go after the hard one. So this is a great one. Go after the easy stuff. You'll get a big benefit and you won't take the risk. >> You get the low hanging fruit learn, iterate through it. I'm glad you guys are using machine learning and AI in the supply chain. Make sure it's secure, big issue. I know you guys were on top of it and have a great operation there. John, great to have you on. John Roese, the Global Chief Technology Officer at Dell Technologies. Great to have you on. Take a minute to close out the last minute here. What's the most important story from Dell Technologies World this year? I know it's virtual. It's not face to face. But beyond that, what's the big takeaway in your mind, if you could share one point, what would it be for the folks watching? >> Yeah, I think the biggest point is something we talked about, which is we are in a period of digital transformation acceleration. COVID is bad, but it woke us up to the possibilities and the need for digital transformation. And so if you were on the fence or if you're moving slowly and now you have an opportunity to move fast. However, moving fast is hard if you try to do it by yourself. And so we've structured Dell, we've the six big areas we're focused on. They only have one purpose, it's to build the modern infrastructure platforms to enable digital transformation to happen faster. And my advice to people is, great. You're moving faster. Pick your partners well. Choose the people that you want to go on the journey with. And we think we're well positioned for that. And you will have much better progress if you take a broad view of the technology ecosystem and you've lightened up the appropriate partnerships with the people that can help you get there. And the outcome is a successful digital leader just is going to handle things like COVID and ease disruption better than a digital laggard. And we now have the data to prove that. So it's all about digital acceleration is the punchline. >> Well great to have you on. Great segment, great insight. And thank you for sharing the six pillars and the conversation. Super relevant on what's going on to create new business value, new opportunities for businesses and society. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)