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

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies: "Creating technologies that drive human progress." >> Good late afternoon from Barcelona, Spain at the Theater of Barcelona. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson of "theCUBE" covering MWC23. This is our third day of continuous wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. And you know we're going to be here tomorrow as well. We've been having some amazing conversations about the ecosystem. And we're going to continue those conversations next. Honore Labourdette is here, the VP global partner, Ecosystem Success Team, Telco Media and Entertainment at Red Hat. And Tony Jeffries joins us as well, a Senior Director of Product Management, Telecom Systems Business at Dell. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Great to have both of you here. So we're going to be talking about the evolution of the telecom stack. We've been talking a lot about disaggregation the last couple of days. Honore, starting with you, talk about the evolution of the telecom stock. You were saying before we went live this is your 15th at least MWC. So you've seen a lot of evolution, but what are some of the things you're seeing right now? >> Well, I think the interesting thing about disaggregation, which is a key topic, right? 'Cause it's so relative to 5G and the 5G core and the benefits and the features of 5G core around disaggregation. But one thing we have to remember, when you disaggregate, you separate things. You have to bring those things back together again in a different way. And that's predominantly what we're doing in our partnership with Dell, is we're bringing those disaggregated components back together in a cohesive way that takes advantage of the new technology, at the same time taking out the complexity and making it easier for our Telco customers to deploy and to scale and to get much more, accelerate the time to revenue. So the trend now is, what we're seeing is two things I would say. One is how do we solve for the complexity with the disaggregation? And how do we leverage the ecosystem as a partner in order to help solve for some of those challenges? >> Tony, jump on in, talk about what you guys announced last week, Dell and Red Hat, and how it's addressing the complexities that Honore was saying, "Hey, they're there." >> Yeah. You know, our customers, our operators are saying, "Hey, I want disaggregation." "I want competition in the market." But at the same time who's going to support all this disaggregation, right? And so at the end of the day, there's going to be an operator that's going to have to figure this out. They're going to have an SLA that they're going to have to meet. And so they're going to want to go with a best-in-class partner with Red Hat and Dell, in terms of our infrastructure and their software together as one combined engineered system. And that's what we call a Dell Telecom infrastructure block for Red Hat. And so at the end of the day, things may go wrong, and if they do, who are they going to call for that support? And that's also really a key element of an engineered system, is this experience that they get both with Red Hat and with Dell together supporting the customer as one. Which is really important to solve this disaggregated problem that can arise from a disaggregated open network situation, yeah. >> So what is the market, the go to market motion look like? People have loyalties in the IT space to technologies that they've embraced and been successful with for years and years. So you have folks in the marketplace who are diehard, you know, dyed red, Red Hat folks. Is it primarily a pull from them? How does that work? How do you approach that to your, what are your end user joint customers? What does that look like from your perspective? >> Sure, well, interestingly enough both Red Hat and Dell have been in the marketplace for a very long time, right? So we do have the brand with those Telco customers for these solutions. What we're seeing with this solution is, it's an emerging market. It's an emerging market for a new technology. So there's an opportunity for both Red Hat and Dell together to leverage our brands with those customers with no friction in the marketplace as we go to market together. So our field sales teams will be motivated to, you know, take advantage of the solution for their customers, as will the Dell team. And I'll let Tony speak to the Dell, go to market. >> Yeah. You know, so we really co-sell together, right? We're the key partners. Dell will end up fulfilling that order, right? We send these engineered systems through our factories and we send that out either directly to a customer or to a OTEL lab, like an intermediate lab where we can further refine and customize that offer for that particular customer. And so we got a lot of options there, but we're essentially co-selling. And Dell is fulfilling that from an infrastructure perspective, putting Red Hat software on top and the licensing for that support. So it's a really good mix. >> And I think, if I may, one of the key differentiators is the actual capabilities that we're bringing together inside of this pre-integrated solution. So it includes the Red Hat OpenShift which is the container software, but we also add our advanced cluster management as well as our Ansible automation. And then Dell adds their orchestration capability along with the features and functionalities of the platform. And we put that together and we offer capability, remote automation orchestration and management capabilities that again reduces the operating expense, reduces the complexity, allows for easy scale. So it's, you know, certainly it's all about the partnership but it's also the capabilities of the combined technology. >> I was just going to ask about some of the numbers, and you mentioned some of them. Reduction of TCO I imagine is also a big capability that this solution enables besides reducing OpEx. Talk about the TCO reduction. 'Cause I know there's some numbers there that Dell and Red Hat have already delivered to the market. >> Yeah. You know, so these infrastructure blocks are designed specifically for Core, or for RAN, or for the Edge. We're starting out initially in the Core, but we've done some market research with a company called ACG. And ACG has looked at day zero, day one and day two TCO, FTE hours saved. And we're looking at over 40 to 50% TCO savings over you know, five year period, which is quite significant in terms of cost savings at a TCO level. But also we have a lot of numbers around power consumption and savings around power consumption. But also just that experience for our operator that says, hey, I'm going to go to one company to get the best in class from Red Hat and Dell together. That saves a lot of time in procurement and that entire ordering process as well. So you get a lot of savings that aren't exactly seen in the FTE hours around TCO, but just in that overall experience by talking to one company to get the best of both from both Red Hat and Dell together. >> I think the comic book character Charlie Brown once said, "The most discouraging thing in the world is having a lot of potential." (laughing) >> Right. >> And so when we talk about disaggregating and then reaggregating or reintegrating, that means choice. >> Tony: Yeah. >> How does an operator approach making that choice? Because, yeah, it sounds great. We have this integration lab and you have all these choices. Well, how do I decide, how does a person decide? This is a question for Honore from a Red Hat perspective, what's the secret sauce that you believe differentiates the Red Hat-infused stack versus some other assemblage of gear? >> Well, there's a couple of key characteristics, and the one that I think is most prevalent is that we're open, right? So "open" is in Red Hat's DNA because we're an open source technology company, and with that open source technology and that open platform, our customers can now add workloads. They have options to choose the workloads that they want to run on that open source platform. As they choose those workloads, they can be confident that those workloads have been certified and validated on our platform because we have a very robust ecosystem of ISVs that have already completed that process with open source, with Red Hat OpenShift. So then we take the Red Hat OpenShift and we put it on the Dell platform, which is market leader platform, right? Combine those two things, the customers can be confident that they can put those workloads on the combined platform that we're offering and that those workloads would run. So again, it goes back to making it simpler, making it easy to procure, easy to run workloads, easy to deploy, easy to operate. And all of that of course equates to saving time always equates to saving money. >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Oh, I thought you wanted to continue. >> No, I think Honore sort of, she nailed it. You know, Red Hat is so dominant in 5G, and what they're doing in the market, especially in the Core and where we're going into the RAN, you know, next steps are to validate those workloads, those workload vendors on top of a stack. And the Red Hat leader in the Core is key, right? It's instant credibility in the core market. And so that's one of the reasons why we, Dell, want to partner with with Red Hat for the core market and beyond. We're going to be looking at not only Core but moving into RAN very soon. But then we do, we take that validated workload on top of that to optimize that workload and then be able to instantiate that in the core and the RAN. It's just a really streamlined, good experience for our operators. At the end of the day, we want happy customers in between our mutual customer base. And that's what you get whenever you do that combined stack together. >> Were operators, any operators, and you don't have to mention them by name, involved in the evolution of the infra blocks? I'm just curious how involved they were in helping to co-develop this. I imagine they were to some degree. >> Yeah, I could take that one. So, in doing so, yeah, we can't be myopic and just assume that we nailed it the first time, right? So yeah, we do work with partners all the way up and down the stack. A lot of our engineering work with Red Hat also brings in customer experience that is key to ensure that you're building and designing the right architecture for the Core. I would like to use the names, I don't know if I should, but a lot of those names are big names that are leaders in our industry. But yeah, their footprints, their fingerprints are all over those design best practices, those architectural designs that we build together. And then we further that by doing those validated workloads on top of that. So just to really prove the point that it's optimized for the Core, RAN, Edge kind of workload. >> And it's a huge added value for Red Hat to have a partner like Dell who can take all of those components, take the workload, take the Red Hat software, put it on the platform, and deliver that out to the customers. That's really, you know, a key part of the partnership and the value of the partnership because nobody really does that better than Dell. That center of excellence around delivery and support. >> Can you share any feedback from any of those nameless operators in terms of... I'm even kind of wondering what the catalyst was for the infra block. Was it operators saying, "Ah, we have these challenges here"? Was it the evolution of the Telco stack and Dell said, "We can come in with Red Hat and solve this problem"? And what's been some of their feedback? >> Yeah, it really comes down to what Honore said about, okay, you know, when we are looking at day zero, which is primarily your design, how much time savings can we do by creating that stack for them, right? We have industry experts designing that Core stack that's optimized for different levels of spectrum. When we do that we save a lot of time in terms of FTE hours for our architects, our operators, and then it goes into day one, right? Which is the deployment aspect for saving tons of hours for our operators by being able to deploy this. Speed to market is key. That ultimately ends up in, you know, faster time to revenue for our customers, right? So it's, when they see that we've already done the pre-work that they don't have to, that's what really resonates for them in terms of that, yeah. >> Honore, Lisa and I happen to be veterans of the Cloud native space, and what we heard from a lot of the folks in that ecosystem is that there is a massive hunger for developers to be able to deploy and manage and orchestrate environments that consist of Cloud native application infrastructure, microservices. >> Right. >> What we've heard here is that 5G equals Cloud native application stacks. Is that a fair assessment of the environment? And what are you seeing from a supply and demand for that kind of labor perspective? Is there still a hunger for those folks who develop in that space? >> Well, there is, because the very nature of an open source, Kubernetes-based container platform, which is what OpenShift is, the very nature of it is to open up that code so that developers can have access to the code to develop the workloads to the platform, right? And so, again, the combination of bringing together the Dell infrastructure with the Red Hat software, it doesn't change anything. The developer, the development community still has access to that same container platform to develop to, you know, Cloud native types of application. And you know, OpenShift is Red Hat's hybrid Cloud platform. So it runs on-prem, it runs in the public Cloud, it runs at the edge, it runs at the far edge. So any of the development community that's trying to develop Cloud native applications can develop it on this platform as they would if they were developing on an OpenShift platform in the public Cloud. >> So in "The Graduate", the advice to the graduate was, "Plastics." Plastics. As someone who has more children than I can remember, I forget how many kids I have. >> Four. >> That's right, I have four. That's right. (laughing) Three in college and grad school already at this point. Cloud native, I don't know. Kubernetes definitely a field that's going to, it's got some legs? >> Yes. >> Okay. So I can get 'em off my payroll quickly. >> Honore: Yes, yes. (laughing) >> Okay, good to know. Good to know. Any thoughts on that open Cloud native world? >> You know, there's so many changes that's going to happen in Kubernetes and services that you got to be able to update quickly. CICD, obviously the topic is huge. How quickly can we keep these systems up to date with new releases, changes? That's a great thing about an engineered system is that we do provide that lifecycle management for three to five years through this engagement with our customers. So we're constantly keeping them up with the latest and the greatest. >> David: Well do those customers have that expertise in-house, though? Do they have that now? Or is this a seismic cultural shift in those environments? >> Well, you know, they do have a lot of that experience, but it takes a lot of that time, and we're taking that off of their plate and putting that within us on our system, within our engineered system, and doing that automatically for them. And so they don't have to check in and try to understand what the release certification matrix is. Every quarter we're providing that to them. We're communicating out to the operator, telling them what's coming up latest and greatest, not only in terms of the software but the hardware and how to optimize it all together. That's the beauty of these systems. These are five year relationships with our operators that we're providing that lifecycle management end to end, for years to come. >> Lisa: So last question. You talked about joint GTM availability. When can operators get their hands on this? >> Yes. Yes. It's currently slated for early September release. >> Lisa: Awesome. So sometime this year? >> Yes. >> Well guys, thank you so much for talking with us today about Dell, Red Hat, what you're doing to really help evolve the telecom stack. We appreciate it. Next time come back with a customer, we can dig into it. That'd be fun. >> We sure will, absolutely. That may happen today actually, a little bit later. Not to let the cat out the bag, but good news. >> All right, well, geez, you're going to want to stick around. Thank you so much for your time. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson. This is Lisa Martin of theCUBE at MWC23 from Barcelona, Spain. We'll be back after a short break. (calm music)

>> And I'm here at Dell's Presence at MWC with vice president of marketing for telecom and Edge Computing, Aaron Chaisson. Aaron, how's it going? >> Doing great. How's it going today, Dave? >> It's going pretty well. Pretty excited about what you've got going here and I'm looking forward to getting the tour. You ready to take a closer look? >> Ready to do it. Let's go take a look! For us in the telecom ecosystem, it's really all about how we bring together the different players that are innovating across the industry to drive value for our CSP customers. So, it starts really, for us, at the ecosystem layer, bringing partners, bringing telecommunication providers, bringing (stutters) a bunch of different technologies together to innovate together to drive new value. So Paul, take us a little bit through what we're doing to- to develop and bring in these partnerships and develop our ecosystem. >> Uh, sure. Thank you Aaron. Uh, you know, one of the things that we've been focusing on, you know, Dell is really working with many players in the open telecom ecosystem. Network equipment providers, independent software vendors, and the communication service providers. And, you know, through our lines of business or open telecom ecosystem labs, what we want to do is bring 'em together into a community with the goal of really being able to accelerate open innovation and, uh, open solutions into the market. And that's what this community is really about, is being able to, you know, have those communications, develop those collaborations whether it's through, you know, sharing information online, having webinars dedicated to sharing Dell information, whether it's our next generation hardware portfolio we announced here at the show, our use case directory, our- how we're dealing with new service opportunities, but as well as the community to share, too, which I think is an exciting way for us to be able to, you know- what is the knowledge thing? As well as activities at other events that we have coming up. So really the key thing I think about, the- the open telecom ecosystem community, it's collaboration and accelerating the open industry forward. >> So- So Aaron, if I'm hearing this correctly you're saying that you can't just say, "Hey, we're open", and throw a bunch of parts in a box and have it work? >> No, we've got to work together to integrate these pieces to be able to deliver value, and, you know, we opened up a- (stutters) in our open ecosystem labs, we started a- a self-certification process a couple of months back. We've already had 13 partners go through that, we've got 16 more in the pipeline. Everything you see in this entire booth has been innovated and worked with partnerships from Intel to Microsoft to, uh, to (stutters) Wind River and Red Hat and others. You go all the way around the booth, everything here has partnerships at its core. And why don't we go to the next section here where we're going to be showing how we're pulling that all together in our open ecosystems labs to drive that innovation? >> So Aaron, you talked about the kinds of validation and testing that goes on, so that you can prove out an open stack to deliver the same kinds of reliability and performance and availability that we expect from a wireless network. But in the opens- in the open world, uh, what are we looking at here? >> Yeah absolutely. So one of the- one of the challenges to a very big, broad open ecosystem is the complexity of integrating, deploying, and managing these, especially at telecom scale. You're not talking about thousands of servers in one site, you're talking about one server in thousands of sites. So how do you deploy that predictable stack and then also manage that at scale? I'm going to show you two places where we're talkin' about that. So, this is actually representing an area that we've been innovating in recently around creating an integrated infrastructure and virtualization stack for the telecom industry. We've been doing this for years in IT with VxBlocks and VxRails and others. Here what you see is we got, uh, Dell hardware infrastructure, we've got, uh, an open platform for virtualization providers, in this case we've created an infrastructure block for Red Hat to be able to supply an infrastructure for core operations and Packet Cores for telecoms. On the other side of this, you can actually see what we're doing with Wind River to drive innovation around RAN and being able to simplify RAN- vRAN and O-RAN deployments. >> What does that virtualization look like? Are we talking about, uh, traditional virtual machines with OSs, or is this containerized cloud native? What does it look like? >> Yeah, it's actually both, so it can support, uh, virtual, uh-uh, software as well as containerized software, so we leverage the (indistinct) distributions for these to be able to deploy, you know, cloud native applications, be able to modernize how they're deploying these applications across the telecom network. So in this case with Red Hat, uh, (stutters) leveraging OpenShift in order to support containerized apps in your Packet Core environments. >> So what are- what are some of the kinds of things that you can do once you have infrastructure like this deployed? >> Yeah, I mean by- by partnering broadly across the ecosystem with VMware, with Red Hat, uh, with- with Wind River and with others, it gives them the ability to be able to deploy the right virtualization software in their network for the types of applications they're deploying. They might want to use Red Hat in their core, they may want to use Wind River in their RAM, they may want to use, uh, Microsoft or VMware for their- for their Edge workloads, and we allow them to be able to deploy all those, but centrally manage those with a common user interface and a common set of APIs. >> Okay, well I'm dying to understand the link between this and the Lego city that the viewers can't see, yet, but it's behind me. Let's take a look. >> So let's take a look at the Lego city that shows how we not deploy just one of these, but dozens or hundreds of these at scale across a cityscape. >> So Aaron, I know we're not in Copenhagen. What's all the Lego about? >> Yeah, so the Lego city here is to show- and, uh, really there's multiple points of Presence across an entire Metro area that we want to be able to manage if we're a telecom provider. We just talked about one infrastructure block. What if I wanted to deploy dozens of these across the city to be able to manage my network, to be able to manage, uh, uh- to be able to deploy private mobility potentially out into a customer enterprise environment, and be able to manage all of these, uh, very simply and easily from a common interface? >> So it's interesting. Now I think I understand why you are VP of marketing for both telecom and Edge. Just heard- just heard a lot about Edge and I can imagine a lot of internet of things, things, hooked up at that Edge. >> Yeah, so why don't we actually go over to another area? We're actually going to show you how one small microbrewery (stutters) in one of our cities nearby, uh, (stutters) my hometown in Massachusetts is actually using this technology to go from more of an analyzed- analog world to digitizing their business to be able to brew better beer. >> So Aaron, you bring me to a brewery. What do we have- what do we have going on here? >> Yeah, so, actually (stutters) about- about a year ago or so, I- I was able to get my team to come together finally after COVID to be able to meet each other and have a nice team event. One of those nights, we went out to dinner at a- at a brewery called "Exhibit 'A'" in Massachusetts, and they actually gave us a tour of their facilities and showed us how they actually go through the process of brewing beer. What we saw as we were going through it, interestingly, was that everything was analog. They literally had people with pen and paper walking around checking time and temperature and the process of brewing the beer, and they weren't asking for help, but we actually saw an opportunity where what we're doing to help businesses digitize what they're doing in their manufacturing floor can actually help them optimize how they build whatever product they're building, in this case it was beer. >> Hey Warren, good to meet you! What do we have goin' on? >> Yeah, it's all right. So yeah, basically what we did is we took some of their assets in the, uh, brewery that were completely manually monitored. People were literally walking around the floor with clipboards, writing down values. And we censorized the asset, in this case fermentation tanks and we measured the, uh, pressure and the temperature, which in fermentation are very key to monitor those, because if they get out of range the entire batch of beer can go bad or you don't get the consistency from batch to batch if you don't tightly monitor those. So we censorized the fermentation tank, brought that into an industrial I/O network, and then brought that into a Dell gateway which is connected 5G up to the cloud, which then that data comes to a tablet or a phone, which they, rather than being out on the floor and monitor it, can look at this data remotely at any time. >> So I'm not sure the exact date, the first time we have evidence of beer being brewed by humanity... >> Yep. >> But I know it's thousands of years ago. So it's taken that long to get to the point where someone had to come along, namely Dell, to actually digitally transform the beer business. Is this sort of proof that if you can digitally transform this, you can digitally transform anything? >> Absolutely. You name it, anything that's being manufactured, sold, uh, uh, taken care of, (stutters) any business out there that's looking to be able to be modernize and deliver better service to their customers can benefit from technologies like this. >> So we've taken a look at the ecosystem, the way that you validate architectures, we've seen an example of that kind of open architecture. Now we've seen a real world use case. Do you want to take a look a little deeper under the covers and see what's powering all of this? >> We just this week announced a new line of servers that power Edge and RAN use cases, and I want to introduce Mike to kind of take us through what we've been working on and really what the power of what this providing. >> Hey Mike, welcome to theCube. >> Oh, glad- glad to be here. So, what I'd really like to talk about are the three new XR series servers that we just announced last week and we're showing here at Mobile World Congress. They are all short depth, ruggedized, uh, very environmentally tolerant, and able to withstand, you know, high temperatures, high humidities, and really be deployed to places where traditional data center servers just can't handle, you know, due to one fact or another, whether it's depth or the temperature. And so, the first one I'd like to show you is the XR7620. This is, uh, 450 millimeters deep, it's designed for, uh, high levels of acceleration so it can support up to 2-300 watt, uh, GPUs. But what I really want to show you over here, especially for Mobile World Congress, is our new XR8000. The XR8000 is based on Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids technology, and this is- happens to be one of the first, uh, EE boost processors that is out, and basically what it is (stutters) an embedded accelerator that makes, uh, the- the processing of vRAN loads very, uh, very efficient. And so they're actually projecting a, uh, 3x improvement, uh, of processing per watt over the previous generation of processors. This particular unit is also sledded. It's very much like, uh, today's traditional baseband unit, so it's something that is designed for low TCO and easy maintenance in the field. This is the frew. When anything fails, you'll pull one out, you pop a new one in, it comes back into service, and the- the, uh, you know, your radio is- is, uh, minimally disrupted. >> Yeah, would you describe this as quantitative and qualitative in terms of the kinds of performance gains that these underlying units are delivering to us? I mean, this really kind of changes the game, doesn't it? It's not just about more, is it about different also in terms of what we can do? >> Well we are (stutters) to his point, we are able to bring in new accelerator technologies. Not only are we doing it with the Intel, uh, uh, uh, of the vRAN boost technologies, but also (stutters) we can bring it, too, but there's another booth here where we're actually working with our own accelerator cards and other accelerator cards from our partners across the industry to be able to deliver the price and performance capabilities required by a vRAN or an O-RAN deployment in the network. So it's not- it's not just the chip technology, it's the integration and the innovation we're doing with others, as well as, of course, the unique power cooling capabilities that Dell provides in our servers that really makes these the most efficient way of being able to power a network. >> Any final thoughts recapping the whole picture here? >> Yeah, I mean I would just say if anybody's, uh, i- is still here in Mobile World Congress, wants to come and learn what we're doing, I only showed you a small section of the demos we've got here. We've got 13 demos across on 8th floor here. Uh, for those of you who want to talk to us (stutters) and have meetings with us, we've got 13 meeting rooms back there, over 500 costumer partner meetings this week, we've got some whisper suites for those of you who want to come and talk to us but we're innovating on going forward. So, you know, there's a lot that we're doing, we're really excited, there's a ton of passion at this event, and, uh, we're really excited about where the industry is going and our role in it. >> 'Preciate the tour, Aaron. Thanks Mike. >> Mike: Thank you! >> Well, for theCube... Again, Dave Nicholson here. Thanks for joining us on this tour of Dell's Presence here at MWC 2023.

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

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

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (ambient music) >> Lisa: Hey everyone, welcome back to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE Live at MWC 23. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. This is day two of four days of cube coverage but you know that, because you've already been watching yesterday and today. We're going to have a great conversation next with EnterpriseWeb and Red Hat. We've had great conversations the last day and a half about the Telco industry, the challenges, the opportunities. We're going to unpack that from this lens. Please welcome Dave Duggal, founder and CEO of EnterpriseWeb and Azhar Sayeed is here, Senior Director Solution Architecture at Red Hat. >> Guys, it's great to have you on the program. >> Yes. >> Thank you Lisa, >> Great being here with you. >> Dave let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of EnterpriseWeb. What kind of business is it? What's the business model? What do you guys do? >> Okay so, EnterpriseWeb is reinventing middleware, right? So the historic middleware was to build vertically integrated stacks, right? And those stacks are now such becoming the rate limiters for interoperability for so the end-to-end solutions that everybody's looking for, right? Red Hat's talking about the unified platform. You guys are talking about Supercloud, EnterpriseWeb addresses that we've built middleware based on serverless architecture, so lightweight, low latency, high performance middleware. And we're working with the world's biggest, we sell through channels and we work through partners like Red Hat Intel, Fortnet, Keysight, Tech Mahindra. So working with some of the biggest players that have recognized the value of our innovation, to deliver transformation to the Telecom industry. >> So what are you guys doing together? Is this, is this an OpenShift play? >> Is it? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, so we've got two projects right her on the floor at MWC throughout the various partners, where EnterpriseWeb is actually providing an application layer, sorry application middleware over Red Hat's, OpenShift and we're essentially generating operators so Red Hat operators, so that all our vendors, and, sorry vendors that we onboard into our catalog can be deployed easily through the OpenShift platform. And we allow those, those vendors to be flexibly composed into network services. So the real challenge for operators historically is that they, they have challenges onboarding the vendors. It takes a long time. Each one of them is a snowflake. They, you know, even though there's standards they don't all observe or follow the same standards. So we make it easier using models, right? For, in a model driven process to on boards or streamline that onboarding process, compose functions into services deploy those services seamlessly through Red Hat's OpenShift, and then manage the, the lifecycle, like the quality of service and the SLAs for those services. >> So Red Hat obviously has pretty prominent Telco business has for a while. Red Hat OpenStack actually is is pretty popular within the Telco business. People thought, "Oh, OpenStack, that's dead." Actually, no, it's actually doing quite well. We see it all over the place where for whatever reason people want to build their own cloud. And, and so, so what's happening in the industry because you have the traditional Telcos we heard in the keynotes that kind of typical narrative about, you know, we can't let the over the top vendors do this again. We're, we're going to be Apifi everything, we're going to monetize this time around, not just with connectivity but the, but the fact is they really don't have a developer community. >> Yes. >> Yet anyway. >> Then you have these disruptors over here that are saying "Yeah, we're going to enable ISVs." How do you see it? What's the landscape look like? Help us understand, you know, what the horses on the track are doing. >> Sure. I think what has happened, Dave, is that the conversation has moved a little bit from where they were just looking at IS infrastructure service with virtual machines and OpenStack, as you mentioned, to how do we move up the value chain and look at different applications. And therein comes the rub, right? You have applications with different requirements, IT network that have various different requirements that are there. So as you start to build those cloud platform, as you start to modernize those set of applications, you then start to look at microservices and how you build them. You need the ability to orchestrate them. So some of those problem statements have moved from not just refactoring those applications, but actually now to how do you reliably deploy, manage in a multicloud multi cluster way. So this conversation around Supercloud or this conversation around multicloud is very >> You could say Supercloud. That's okay >> (Dave Duggal and Azhar laughs) >> It's absolutely very real though. The reason why it's very real is, if you look at transformations around Telco, there are two things that are happening. One, Telco IT, they're looking at partnerships with hybrid cloud, I mean with public cloud players to build a hybrid environment. They're also building their own Telco Cloud environment for their network functions. Now, in both of those spaces, they end up operating two to three different environments themselves. Now how do you create a level of abstraction across those? How do you manage that particular infrastructure? And then how do you orchestrate all of those different workloads? Those are the type of problems that they're actually beginning to solve. So they've moved on from really just putting that virtualizing their application, putting it on OpenStack to now really seriously looking at "How do I build a service?" "How do I leverage the catalog that's available both in my private and public and build an overall service process?" >> And by the way what you just described as hybrid cloud and multicloud is, you know Supercloud is what multicloud should have been. And what, what it originally became is "I run on this cloud and I run on this cloud" and "I run on this cloud and I have a hybrid." And, and Supercloud is meant to create a common experience across those clouds. >> Dave Duggal: Right? >> Thanks to, you know, Supercloud middleware. >> Yeah. >> Right? And, and so that's what you guys do. >> Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Dave, I mean, even the name EnterpriseWeb, you know we started from looking from the application layer down. If you look at it, the last 10 years we've looked from the infrastructure up, right? And now everybody's looking northbound saying "You know what, actually, if I look from the infrastructure up the only thing I'll ever build is silos, right?" And those silos get in the way of the interoperability and the agility the businesses want. So we take the perspective as high level abstractions, common tools, so that if I'm a CXO, I can look down on my environments, right? When I'm really not, I honestly, if I'm an, if I'm a CEO I don't really care or CXO, I don't really care so much about my infrastructure to be honest. I care about my applications and their behavior. I care about my SLAs and my quality of service, right? Those are the things I care about. So I really want an EnterpriseWeb, right? Something that helps me connect all my distributed applications all across all of the environments. So I can have one place a consistency layer that speaks a common language. We know that there's a lot of heterogeneity down all those layers and a lot of complexity down those layers. But the business doesn't care. They don't want to care, right? They want to actually take their applications deploy them where they're the most performant where they're getting the best cost, right? The lowest and maybe sustainability concerns, all those. They want to address those problems, meet their SLAs meet their quality service. And you know what, if it's running on Amazon, great. If it's running on Google Cloud platform, great. If it, you know, we're doing one project right here that we're demonstrating here is with with Amazon Tech Mahindra and OpenShift, where we took a disaggregated 5G core, right? So this is like sort of latest telecom, you know net networking software, right? We're deploying pulling elements of that network across core, across Amazon EKS, OpenShift on Red Hat ROSA, as well as just OpenShift for cloud. And we, through a single pane of deployment and management, we deployed the elements of the 5G core across them and then connected them in an end-to-end process. That's Telco Supercloud. >> Dave Vellante: So that's an O-RAN deployment. >> Yeah that's >> So, the big advantage of that, pardon me, Dave but the big advantage of that is the customer really doesn't care where the components are being served from for them. It's a 5G capability. It happens to sit in different locations. And that's, it's, it's about how do you abstract and how do you manage all those different workloads in a cohesive way? And that's exactly what EnterpriseWeb is bringing to the table. And what we do is we abstract the underlying infrastructure which is the cloud layer. So if, because AWS operating environment is different then private cloud operating environment then Azure environment, you have the networking is set up is different in each one of them. If there is a way you can abstract all of that and present it in a common operating model it becomes a lot easier than for anybody to be able to consume. >> And what a lot of customers tell me is the way they deal with multicloud complexity is they go with mono cloud, right? And so they'll lose out on some of the best services >> Absolutely >> If best of, so that's not >> that's not ideal, but at the end of the day, agree, developers don't want to muck with all the plumbing >> Dave Duggal: Yep. >> They want to write code. >> Azhar: Correct. >> So like I come back to are the traditional Telcos leaning in on a way that they're going to enable ISVs and developers to write on top of those platforms? Or are there sort of new entrance and disruptors? And I know, I know the answer is both >> Dave Duggal: Yep. >> but I feel as though the Telcos still haven't, traditional Telcos haven't tuned in to that developer affinity, but you guys sell to them. >> What, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so >> What we have seen is there are Telcos fall into several categories there. If you look at the most mature ones, you know they are very eager to move up the value chain. There are some smaller very nimble ones that have actually doing, they're actually doing something really interesting. For example, they've provided sandbox environments to developers to say "Go develop your applications to the sandbox environment." We'll use that to build an net service with you. I can give you some interesting examples across the globe that, where that is happening, right? In AsiaPac, particularly in Australia, ANZ region. There are a couple of providers who have who have done this, but in, in, in a very interesting way. But the challenges to them, why it's not completely open or public yet is primarily because they haven't figured out how to exactly monetize that. And, and that's the reason why. So in the absence of that, what will happen is they they have to rely on the ISV ecosystem to be able to build those capabilities which they can then bring it on as part of the catalog. But in Latin America, I was talking to one of the providers and they said, "Well look we have a public cloud, we have our own public cloud, right?" What we want do is use that to offer localized services not just bring everything in from the top >> But, but we heard from Ericson's CEO they're basically going to monetize it by what I call "gouge", the developers >> (Azhar laughs) >> access to the network telemetry as opposed to saying, "Hey, here's an open platform development on top of it and it will maybe create something like an app store and we'll take a piece of the action." >> So ours, >> to be is a better model. >> Yeah. So that's perfect. Our second project that we're showing here is with Intel, right? So Intel came to us cause they are a reputation for doing advanced automation solutions. They gave us carte blanche in their labs. So this is Intel Network Builders they said pick your partners. And we went with the Red Hat, Fort Net, Keysite this company KX doing AIML. But to address your DevX, here's Intel explicitly wants to get closer to the developers by exposing their APIs, open APIs over their infrastructure. Just like Red Hat has APIs, right? And so they can expose them northbound to developers so developers can leverage and tune their applications, right? But the challenge there is what Intel is doing at the low level network infrastructure, right? Is fundamentally complex, right? What you want is an abstraction layer where develop and this gets to, to your point Dave where you just said like "The developers just want to get their job done." or really they want to focus on the business logic and accelerate that service delivery, right? So the idea here is an EnterpriseWeb they can literally declaratively compose their services, express their intent. "I want this to run optimized for low latency. I want this to run optimized for energy consumption." Right? And that's all they say, right? That's a very high level statement. And then the run time translates it between all the elements that are participating in that service to realize the developer's intent, right? No hands, right? Zero touch, right? So that's now a movement in telecom. So you're right, it's taking a while because these are pretty fundamental shifts, right? But it's intent based networking, right? So it's almost two parts, right? One is you have to have the open APIs, right? So that the infrastructure has to expose its capabilities. Then you need abstractions over the top that make it simple for developers to take, you know, make use of them. >> See, one of the demonstrations we are doing is around AIOps. And I've had literally here on this floor, two conversations around what I call as network as a platform. Although it sounds like a cliche term, that's exactly what Dave was describing in terms of exposing APIs from the infrastructure and utilizing them. So once you get that data, then now you can do analytics and do machine learning to be able to build models and figure out how you can orchestrate better how you can monetize better, how can how you can utilize better, right? So all of those things become important. It's just not about internal optimization but it's also about how do you expose it to third party ecosystem to translate that into better delivery mechanisms or IOT capability and so on. >> But if they're going to charge me for every API call in the network I'm going to go broke (team laughs) >> And I'm going to get really pissed. I mean, I feel like, I'm just running down, Oracle. IBM tried it. Oracle, okay, they got Java, but they don't they don't have developer jobs. VMware, okay? They got Aria. EMC used to have a thing called code. IBM had to buy Red Hat to get to the developer community. (Lisa laughs) >> So I feel like the telcos don't today have those developer shops. So, so they have to partner. [Azhar] Yes. >> With guys like you and then be more open and and let a zillion flowers bloom or else they're going to get disrupted in a big way and they're going to it's going to be a repeat of the over, over the top in, in in a different model that I can't predict. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely true. I mean, look, they cannot be in the connectivity business. Telcos cannot be just in the connectivity business. It's, I think so, you know, >> Dave Vellante: You had a fry a frozen hand (Dave Daggul laughs) >> off that, you know. >> Well, you know, think about they almost have to go become over the top on themselves, right? That's what the cloud guys are doing, right? >> Yeah. >> They're riding over their backbone that by taking a creating a high level abstraction, they in turn abstract away the infrastructure underneath them, right? And that's really the end game >> Right? >> Dave Vellante: Yeah. >> Is because now, >> they're over the top it's their network, it's their infrastructure, right? They don't want to become bid pipes. >> Yep. >> Now you, they can take OpenShift, run that in any cloud. >> Yep. >> Right? >> You can run that in hybrid cloud, enterprise web can do the application layer configuration and management. And together we're running, you know, OSI layers one through seven, east to west, north to south. We're running across the the RAN, the core and the transport. And that is telco super cloud, my friend. >> Yeah. Well, >> (Dave Duggal laughs) >> I'm dominating the conversation cause I love talking super cloud. >> I knew you would. >> So speaking of super superpowers, when you're in customer or prospective customer conversations with providers and they've got, obviously they're they're in this transformative state right now. How, what do you describe as the superpower between Red Hat and EnterpriseWeb in terms of really helping these Telcos transforms. But at the end of the day, the connectivity's there the end user gets what they want, which is I want this to work wherever I am. >> Yeah, yeah. That's a great question, Lisa. So I think the way you could look at it is most software has, has been evolved to be specialized, right? So in Telcos' no different, right? We have this in the enterprise, right? All these specialized stacks, all these components that they wire together in the, in you think of Telco as a sort of a super set of enterprise problems, right? They have all those problems like magnified manyfold, right? And so you have specialized, let's say orchestrators and other tools for every Telco domain for every Telco layer. Now you have a zoo of orchestrators, right? None of them were designed to work together, right? They all speak a specific language, let's say quote unquote for doing a specific purpose. But everything that's interesting in the 21st century is across layers and across domains, right? If a siloed static application, those are dead, right? Nobody's doing those anymore. Even developers don't do those developers are doing composition today. They're not doing, nobody wants to hear about a 6 million lines of code, right? They want to hear, "How did you take these five things and bring 'em together for productive use?" >> Lisa: Right. How did you deliver faster for my enterprise? How did you save me money? How did you create business value? And that's what we're doing together. >> I mean, just to add on to Dave, I was talking to one of the providers, they have more than 30,000 nodes in their infrastructure. When I say no to your servers running, you know, Kubernetes,running open stack, running different components. If try managing that in one single entity, if you will. Not possible. You got to fragment, you got to segment in some way. Now the question is, if you are not exposing that particular infrastructure and the appropriate KPIs and appropriate things, you will not be able to efficiently utilize that across the board. So you need almost a construct that creates like a manager of managers, a hierarchical structure, which would allow you to be more intelligent in terms of how you place those, how you manage that. And so when you ask the question about what's the secret sauce between the two, well this is exactly where EnterpriseWeb brings in that capability to analyze information, be more intelligent about it. And what we do is provide an abstraction of the cloud layer so that they can, you know, then do the right job in terms of making sure that it's appropriate and it's consistent. >> Consistency is key. Guys, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure really digging through EnterpriseWeb. >> Thank you. >> What you're doing >> with Red Hat. How you're helping the organization transform and Supercloud, we can't forget Supercloud. (Dave Vellante laughs) >> Fight Supercloud. Guys, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you so much Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Very nice. >> Lisa: We really appreciate it. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage coming to you live from MWC 23. We'll be back after a short break.

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with David Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also here. This is day two of our coverage of MWC 23 on theCUBE. We're super excited. We're in between hall four and five. Stop by if you're here. Dennis Hoffman is here. He's the senior vice president and general manager of the Telecom systems business at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Yousef Khalidi, who's the corporate vice president of Azure for Operators from Microsoft. Gents, Welcome. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you. >> So we saw Satya in the keynote. He wired in. We saw T.K. came in. No AWS. I don't know. They're maybe not part of the show, but maybe next year they'll figure it out. >> Indeed, indeed. >> Lots of stuff happened in the Telecom, but the Azure operator distributed service is the big news, you guys got here. What's that all about? >> Oh, first of all, we changed the name. >> Oh, you did? >> You did? >> Oh, yeah. We have a real name now. It's called the Azure Operator Nexus. >> Oh, I like Nexus better than that. >> David: That's much better, much better. >> Dave: The engineers named it first time around. >> I wish, long story, but thank you for our marketing team. But seriously, not only did we rename the platform, we expanded the platform. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So it now covers the whole spectrum from the far-edge to the public cloud as well, including the near-edge as well. So essentially, it's a hybrid platform that can also run network functions. So all these operators around you, they now have a platform which combines cloud technologies with the choice where they want to run, optimized for the network. >> Okay and so, you know, we've talked about the disaggregation of the network and how you're bringing kind of engineered systems to the table. We've seen this movie before, but Dennis, there are differences, right? I mean, you didn't really have engineered systems in the 90s. You didn't have those integration points. You really didn't have the public cloud, you didn't have AI. >> Right. >> So you have all those new powers that you can tap, so give us the update from your perspective, having now spent a day and a half here. What's the vibe, what's the buzz, and what's your take on everything? >> Yeah, I think to build on what Yousef said, there's a lot going on with people still trying to figure out exactly how to architect the Telecom network of the future. They know it's got to have a lot to do with cloud. It does have some pretty significant differences, one of those being, there's definitely got to be a hybrid component because there are pieces of the Telecom network that even when modernized will not end up centralized, right? They're going to be highly distributed. I would say though, you know, we took away two things, yesterday, from all the meetings. One, people are done, I think the network operators are done, questioning technology readiness. They're now beginning to wrestle with operationalization of it all, right? So it's like, okay, it's here. I can in fact build a modern network in a very cloud native way, but I've got to figure out how to do that all. And another big part of it is the ecosystem and certainly the partnership long standing between Dell and Microsoft which we're extending into this space is part of that, making it easier on people to actually acquire, deploy, and importantly, support these new technologies. >> So a lot of the traditional carriers, like you said, they're sort of beyond the technology readiness. Jose Maria Alvarez in the keynote said there are three pillars to the future Telecom network. He said low latency, programmable networks, and then cloud and edge, kind of threw that in. You agree with that, Yousef? (Dave and Yousef speaking altogether) >> I mean, we've been for years talking about the cloud and edge. >> Yeah. >> Satya for years had the same graphic. We still have it. Today, we have expanded the graphic a bit to include the network as one, because you can have a cloud without connectivity as well but this is very, very, very, very much true. >> And so the question then, Dennis, is okay, you've got disruptors, we had Dish on yesterday. >> Oh, did you? Good. >> Yeah, yeah, and they're talking about what they're doing with, you know, ORAN and all the applications, really taking account of it. What I see is a developer friendly, you know, environment. You got the carriers talking about how they're going to charge developers for APIs. I think they've published eight APIs which is nowhere near enough. So you've got that sort of, you know, inertia and yet, you have the disruptors that are going to potentially be a catalyst to, you know, cross the chasm, if you will. So, you know, put on your strategy hat. >> Yeah. >> Dave: How do you see that playing out? >> Well, they're trying to tap into three things, the disruptors. You know, I think the thesis is, "If I get to a truly cloud native, communications network first, I ought to have greater agility so that I can launch more services and create more revenue streams. I ought to be lower cost in terms of both acquisition cost and operating cost, right, and I ought to be able to create scale between my IT organization, everything I know how to do there and my Telecom network." You know, classic, right? Better, faster, cheaper if I embrace cloud early on. And people like Dish, you know, they have a clean sheet of paper with which to do that. So innovation and rate of innovation is huge for them. >> So what would you do? We put your Clay Christensen hat on, now. What if you were at a traditional Telco who's like, complaining about- >> You're going to get me in trouble. >> Dave: Come on, come on. >> Don't do it. >> Dave: Help him out. Help him out, help him out. So if, you know, they're complaining about CapEx, they're highly regulated, right, they want net neutrality but they want to be able to sort of dial up the cost of those using the network. So what would you do? Would you try to disrupt yourself? Would you create a skunkworks? Would you kind of spin off a disruptor? That's a real dilemma for those guys. >> Well for mobile network operators, the beauty of 5G is it's the first cloud native cellular standard. So I don't know if anybody's throwing these terms around, but 5G SA is standalone, right? >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> So a lot of 'em, it's not a skunkworks. They're just literally saying, "I've got to have a 5G network." And some of 'em are deciding, "I'm going to stand it up all by itself." Now, that's duplicative expense in a lot of ways, but it creates isolation from the two networks. Others are saying, "No, it's got to be NSA. I've got to be able to combine 4G and 5G." And then you're into the brownfield thing. >> That's the hybrid. >> Not hybrid as in cloud, but hybrid as in, you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a converge network. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> So, you know, I would say for a lot of them, they're adopting, probably rightly so, a wait and see attitude. One thing we haven't talked about and you got to get on the table, their high order bit is resilience. >> Dave: Yeah, totally. >> David: Yeah. >> Right? Can't go down. It's national, secure infrastructure, first responder. >> Indeed. >> Anytime you ask them to embrace any new technology, the first thing that they have to work through in their minds is, you know, "Is the juice worth the squeeze? Like, can I handle the risk?" >> But you're saying they're not questioning the technology. Aren't they questioning ORAN in terms of the quality of service, or are they beyond that? >> Dennis: They're questioning the timing, not the inevitability. >> Okay, so they agree that ORAN is going to be open over time. >> At some point, RAN will be cloud native, whether it's ORAN the spec, open RAN the concept, (Yousef speaking indistinctly) >> Yeah. >> Virtual RAN. But yeah, I mean I think it seems pretty evident at this point that the mainframe will give way to open systems once again. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> ERAN, ecosystem RAN. >> Any RAN. (Dave laughing) >> You don't have to start with the ORAN where they're inside the house. So as you probably know, our partner AT&T started with the core. >> Dennis: They almost all have. >> And they've been on the virtualization path since 2014 and 15. And what we are working with them on is the hybrid cloud model to expand all the way, if you will, as I mentioned to the far-edge or the public cloud. So there's a way to be in the brownfield environment, yet jump on the new bandwagon of technology without necessarily taking too much risk, because you're quite right. I mean, resiliency, security, service assurance, I mean, for example, AT&T runs the first responder network for the US on their network, on our platform, and I'm personally very familiar of how high the bar is. So it's doable, but you need to go in stages, of course. >> And they've got to do that integration. >> Yes. >> They do. >> And Yousef made a great point. Like, out of the top 30 largest Telcos by CapEx outside of China, three quarters of them have virtualized their core. So the cloudification, if you will, software definition run on industry standard hardware, embraced cloud native principles, containerized apps, that's happened in the core. It's well accepted. Now it's just a ripple-down through the network which will happen as and when things are faster, better, cheaper. >> Right. >> So as implemented, what does this look like? Is it essentially what we used to loosely refer to as Azure stacked software, running with Dell optimized Telecom infrastructure together, sometimes within a BBU, out in a hybrid cloud model communicating back to Azure locations in some cases? Is that what we're looking at? >> Approximately. So you start with the near-edge, okay? So the near-edge lives in the operator's data centers, edges, whatever the case may be, built out of off the shelf hardware. Dell is our great partner there but in principle, it could be different mix and match. So once you have that true near-edge, then you can think of, "Okay, how can I make sure this environment is as uniform, same APIs, same everything, regardless what the physical location is?" And this is key, key for the network function providers and the NEPs because they need to be able to port once, run everywhere, and it's key for the operator to reduce their costs. You want to teach your workforce, your operations folks, if you will, how to manage this system one time, to automation and so forth. So, and that is actually an expansion of the Azure capabilities that people are familiar with in a public cloud, projected into different locations. And we have technology called Arc which basically models everything. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So if you have trained your IT side, you are halfway there, how to manage your new network. Even though of course the network is carrier graded, there's different gear. So yes, what you said, a lot of it is true but the actual components, whatever they might be running, are carrier grade, highly optimized, the next images and our solution is not a DIY solution, okay? I know you cater to a wide spectrum here but for us, we don't believe in the TCO. The proper TCO can be achieved by just putting stuff by yourself. We just published a report with Analysys Mason that shows that our approach will save 36 percent of the cost compared to a DIY approach. >> Dave: What percent? >> 36 percent. >> Dave: Of the cost? >> Of, compared to DIY, which is already cheaper than classical models. >> And there's a long history of fairly failed DIY, right, >> Yeah. >> That preceded this. As in the early days of public cloud, the network operators wrestled with, "Do I have to become one to survive?" >> Dave: Yeah. Right. >> So they all ended up having cloud projects and by and large, they've all dematerialized in favor of this. >> Yeah, and it's hard for them to really invest at scale. Let me give you an example. So, your biggest tier one operator, without naming anybody, okay, how many developers do they have that can build and maintain an OS image, or can keep track of container technology, or build monitoring at scale? In our company, we have literally thousands of developers doing it already for the cloud and all we're doing for the operator segment is customizing it and focusing it at the carrier grade aspects of it. But so, I don't have half a dozen exterior experts. I literally have a building of developers who can do that and I'm being literal, here. So it's a scale thing. Once you have a product that you can give to multiple people, everybody benefits. >> Dave: Yeah, and the carriers are largely, they're equipment engineers in a large setting. >> Oh, they have a tough job. I always have total respect what they do. >> Oh totally, and a lot of the work happens, you know, kind of underground and here they are. >> They are network operators. >> They don't touch. >> It's their business. >> Right, absolutely, and they're good at it. They're really good at it. That's right. You know, you think about it, we love to, you know, poke fun at the big carriers, but think about what happened during the pandemic. When they had us shift everything to remote work, >> Dennis: Yes. >> Landline traffic went through the roof. You didn't even notice. >> Yep. That's very true. >> I mean, that's the example. >> That's very true. >> However, in the future where there's innovation and it's going to be driven by developers, right, that's where the open ecosystem comes in. >> Yousef: Indeed. >> And that's the hard transition for a lot of these folks because the developers are going to win that with new workloads, new applications that we can't even think of. >> Dennis: Right. And a lot of it is because if you look at it, there's the fundamental back strategy hat back on, fundamental dynamics of the industry, forced investment, flat revenues. >> Dave: Yeah. Right. >> Very true. >> Right? Every few years, a new G comes out. "Man, I got to retool this massive thing and where I can't do towers, I'm dropping fiber or vice a versa." And meanwhile, most diversification efforts into media have failed. They've had to unwind them and resell them. There's a lot of debt in the industry. >> Yousef: Yeah. >> Dennis: And so, they're looking for that next big, adjacent revenue stream and increasingly deciding, "If I don't modernize my network, I can't get it." >> Can't do it. >> Right, and again, what I heard from some of the carriers in the keynote was, "We're going to charge for API access 'cause we have data in the network." Okay, but I feel like there's a lot more innovation beyond that that's going to come from the disruptors. >> Dennis: Oh yeah. >> Yousef: Yes. >> You know, that's going to blow that away, right? And then that may not be the right model. We'll see, you know? I mean, what would Microsoft do? They would say, "Here, here's a platform. Go develop." >> No, I'll tell you. We are actually working with CAMARA and GSMA on the whole API layer. We actually announced a service as well as (indistinct). >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, right. >> And the key there, frankly, in my opinion, are not the disruptors as in operators. It's the ISV community. You want to get developers that can write to a global set of APIs, not per Telco APIs, such that they can do the innovation. I mean, this is what we've seen in other industries, >> Absolutely. >> That I critically can think of. >> This is the way they get a slice of that pie, right? The recent history of this industry is one where 4G LTE begot the smartphone and app store era, a bevy of consumer services, and almost every single profit stream went somewhere other than the operator, right? >> Yousef: Someone else. So they're looking at this saying, "Okay, 5G is the enterprise G and there's going to be a bevy of applications that are business service related, based on 5G capability and I can't let the OTT, over the top, thing happen again." >> Right. >> They'll say that. "We cannot let this happen." >> "We can't let this happen again." >> Okay, but how do they, >> Yeah, how do they make that not happen? >> Not let it happen again? >> Eight APIs, Dave. The answer is eight APIs. No, I mean, it's this approach. They need to make it easy to work with people like Yousef and more importantly, the developer community that people like Yousef and his company have found a way to harness. And by the way, they need to be part of that developer community themselves. >> And they're not, today. They're not speaking that developer language. >> Right. >> It's hard. You know, hey. >> Dennis: Hey, what's the fastest way to sell an enterprise, a business service? Resell Azure, Teams, something, right? But that's a resale. >> Yeah, that's a resale thing. >> See, >> That's not their service. >> They also need to free their resources from all the plumbing they do and leave it to us. We are plumbers, okay? >> Dennis: We are proud plumbers. >> We are proud plumbers. I'm a plumber. I keep telling people this thing. We had the same discussion with banks and enterprises 10 years ago, by the way. Don't do the plumbing. Go add value on the top. Retool your workforce to do applications and work with ISVs to the verticals, as opposed to either reselling, which many do, or do the plumbing. You'd be surprised. Traditionally, many operators do around, "I want to plumb this thing to get this small interrupt per second." Like, who cares? >> Well, 'cause they made money on connectivity. >> Yes. >> And we've seen this before. >> And in a world without telephone poles and your cables- >> Hey, if what you have is a hammer, everything's a nail, right? And we sell connectivity services and that's what we know how to do, and that both build and sell. And if that's no longer driving a revenue stream sufficient to cover this forced investment march, not to mention Huawei rip and government initiatives to pull infrastructure out and accelerate investment, they got to find new ways. >> I mean, the regulations have been tough, right? They don't go forward and ask for permission. They really can't, right? They have to be much more careful. >> Dennis: It is tough. >> So, we don't mean to sound like it's easy for these guys. >> Dennis: No, it's not. >> But it does require a new mindset, new skillsets, and I think some of 'em are going to figure it out and then pff, the wave, and you guys are going to be riding that wave. >> We're going to try. >> Definitely. Definitely. >> As a veteran of working with both Dell and Microsoft, specifically Azure on things, I am struck by how you're very well positioned in this with Microsoft in particular. Because of Azure's history, coming out of the on-premises world that Microsoft knows so well, there's a natural affinity to the hybrid nature of Telecom. We talk about edge, we talk about hybrid, this is it, absolutely the center of it. So it seems like a- >> Yousef: Indeed. Actually, if you look at the history of Azure, from day one, and I was there from day one, we always spoke of the hybrid model. >> Yeah. >> The third point, we came from the on-premises world. >> David: Right. >> And don't get me wrong, I want people to use the public cloud, but I also know due to physics, regulation, geopolitical boundaries, there's something called on-prem, something called an edge here. I want to add something else. Remember our deal on how we are partner-centric? We're applying the same playbook, here. So, you know, for every dollar we make, so many of it's been done by the ecosystem. Same applies here. So we have announced partnerships with Ericson, Nokia, (indistinct), all the names, and of course with Dell and many others. The ecosystem has to come together and customers must retain their optionality to drum up whatever they are on. So it's the same playbook, with this. >> And enterprise technology companies are, actually, really good at, you know, decoding the customer, figuring out specific requirements, making some mistakes the first time through and then eventually getting it right. And as these trends unfold, you know, you're in a good position, I think, as are others and it's an exciting time for enterprise tech in this industry, you know? >> It really is. >> Indeed. >> Dave: Guys, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Dave: It's great to see you. Have a great rest of the show. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. Thank you, Dave. >> All right, keep it right there. John Furrier is live in our studio. He's breaking down all the news. Go to siliconangle.com to go to theCUBE.net. Dave Vellante, David Nicholson and Lisa Martin, we'll be right back from the theater in Barcelona, MWC 23 right after this short break. (relaxing music)

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

>> TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Spain, everybody. We're here at the Theater Live and MWC 23. You're watching theCUBE's Continuous Coverage. This is day two. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also in the house. John Furrier out of our Palo Alto studio covering all the news. Check out silicon angle.com. Okay, we're going to dig into the core infrastructure here. We're going to talk a little bit about servers. Manya Rastogi is here. She's in technical marketing at Dell Technologies. And Abdel Bagegni is technical program manager at the Telecom Infra Project. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Abdel, what is the Telecom Infras Project? Explain to our audience. >> Yeah. So the Telecom Infra Project is a US based non-profit organization community that brings together different participants, suppliers, vendors, operators SI's together to accelerate the adoption of open RAN and open interface solutions across the globe. >> Okay. So that's the mission is open RAN adoption. And then how, when was it formed? Give us the background and some of the, some of the milestones so far. >> Yeah. So the telecom infra project was established five years ago from different vendor leaders and operators across the globe. And then the mission was to bring different players in to work together to accelerate the adoption of, of open RAN. Now open RAN has a lot of potential and opportunities, but in the same time there's challenges that we work together as a community to facilitate those challenges and overcome those barriers. >> And we've been covering all week just the disaggregation of the network. And you know, we've seen this movie sort of before playing out now in, in telecom. And Manya, this is obviously a compute intensive environment. We were at the Dell booth earlier this morning poking around, beautiful booth, lots of servers. Tell us what your angle is here in this marketplace. >> Yeah, so I would just like to say that Dell is kind of leading or accelerating the innovation at the telecom edge with all these ruggedized servers that we are offering. So just continuing the mission, like Abdel just mentioned for the open RAN, that's where a lot of focus will be from these servers will be, so XR 8000, it's it's going to be one of the star servers for telecom with, you know, offering various workloads. So it can be rerun, open run, multi access, edge compute. And it has all these different features with itself and the, if we, we can talk more about the performance gains, how it is based on the Intel CPUs and just try to solve the purpose like along with various vendors, the whole ecosystem solve this challenge for the open RAN. >> So Manya mentioned some of those infrastructure parts. Does and do, do you say TIP or T-I-P for short? >> Abdel: We say TIP. >> TIP. >> Abdel: T-I-P is fine as well. >> Does, does, does TIP or T-I-P have a certification process or a, or a set of guidelines that someone like Dell would either adhere to or follow to be sort of TIP certified? What does that look like? >> Yeah, of course. So what TIP does is TIP accredits what solutions that actually work in a real commercial grade environment. So what we do is we bring the different players together to come up with the most efficient optimized solution. And then it goes through a process that the community sets the, the, the criteria for and accepts. And then once this is accredited it goes into TIP exchange for other operators and the participants and the industry to adopt. So it's a well structured process and it's everything about how we orchestrate the industry to come together and set those requirements and and guidelines. Everything starts with a use case from the beginning. It's based on operators requirements, use cases and then those use cases will be translated into a solution that the industry will approve. >> So when you say operator, I can think of that sort of traditionally as the customer side of things versus the vendor side of things. Typically when organizations get together like TIP, the operator customer side is seeking a couple of things. They want perfect substitutes in all categories so that they could grind vendors down from a price perspective but they also want amazing innovation. How do you, how do you deliver both? >> Yeah, I mean that's an excellent question. We be pragmatic and we bring all players in one table to discuss. MNO's want this, vendors can provide a certain level and we bring them together and they discuss and come up with something that can be deployed today and future proof for the future. >> So I've been an enterprise technology observer for a long time and, you know, I saw the, the attempt to take network function virtualization which never really made much of an impact, but it was a it was the beginning of the enterprise players really getting into this market. And then I would see companies, whether it was Dell or HPE or Cisco, they'd take an X 86 server, put a cool name on it, edge something, and throw it over the fence and that didn't work so well. Now it's like, Manya. We're starting to get serious. You're building relationships. >> Manya: Totally. >> I mentioned we were at the Dell booth you're actually building purpose built systems now for this, this segment. Tell us what's different about this market and the products that you're developing for this market than say the commercial enterprise. >> So you are absolutely right, like, you know, kind of thinking about the journey, there has been a lot of, it has been going for a long time for all these improvements and towards going more open disaggregated and overall that kind of environment and what Dell brings together with our various partners and particularly if you talk about Intel. So these servers are powered by the players four gen intel beyond processors. And so what Intel is doing right now is providing us with great accelerators like vRAN Boost. So it increases performance like doubles what it was able to do before. And power efficiency, it has been an issue for a long, long time and it still continues but there is some improvement. For example 20% reduction overall with the power savings. So that's a step forward in that direction. And then we have done some of our like own testing as well with these servers and continuing that, you know it's not just telecom but also going towards Edge or inferencing like all these comes together not just X 30,000 but for example XR 56 10, 70, 76 20. So these are three servers which combines together to like form telecom and Edge and covers altogether. So that's what it is. >> Great, thank you. So Abdel, I mean I think generally people agree that in the fullness of time all radio access networks are going to be open, right? It's just a matter of okay, how do we get there? How do we make sure that it has the same, you know, quality of service characteristics. So where are we on on that, that journey from your perspective? And, and maybe you could project what, what it's going to look like over this decade. 'Cause it's going to take, you know, years. >> It's going to take a bit of time to mature and be a kind of a plug and play different units together. I think there was a lot, there was a, was a bit of over-promising in a few, in the last few years on the acceleration of open RAN deployment. That, well, a TIP is trying to do is trying to realize the pragmatic approach of the open run deployment. Now we know the innovation cannot happen when you have a kind of closed interfaces when you allow small players to be within the market and bring the value to, to the RAN areas. This is where the innovation happens. I think what would happen on the RAN side of things is that it would be driven by use cases and the operators. And the minute that the operators are no longer can depend on the closed interface vendors because there's use cases that fulfill that are requires some open RAN functionality, be the, the rig or the SMO layers and the different configurations of the rUSE getting the servers to the due side of things. This kind of modular scalability on this layer is when the RAN will, the Open RAN, would boost. This would happen probably, yeah. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, it would happen in, in the next few years. Not next year or the year after but definitely something within the four to five years from now. >> I think it does feel like it's a second half of the decade and you feel like the, the the RAN intelligent controller is going to be a catalyst to actually sort of force the world into this open environment. >> Let's say that the Rick and the promises that were given to, to the sun 10 years ago, the Rick is realizing it and the closed RAN vendors are developing a lot on the Rick side more than the other parts of the, of the open RAN. So it will be a catalyst that would drive the innovation of open RAN, but only time will tell. >> And there are some naysayers, I mean I've seen some you know, very, very few, but I've seen some works that, oh the economics aren't there. It'll, it'll never get there. What, what do you, what do you say to that? That, that it won't ever, open RAN won't ever be as cost effective as you know, closed networks. >> Open RAN will open innovations that small players would have the opportunity to contribute to the, to the RAN space. This opportunity is not given to small players today. Open RAN provides this kind of opportunity and given that it's a path for innovation, then I would say that, you know, different perspectives some people are making sure that, you know the status quo is the way forward. But it would certainly put barriers on on innovation and this is not the way forward. >> Yeah. You can't protect the past in the future. My own personal opinion is, is that it doesn't have to be comparable from a, from a TCO perspective it can be close enough. It's the innovative, same thing with like you watch the, the, the adoption of Cloud. >> Exactly. >> Like cloud was more expensive it's always more expensive to rent, but people seem to be doing public Cloud, you know, because of the the innovation capabilities and the developer capabilities. Is that a fair analogy in this space, do you think? >> I mean this is what all technologies happens. >> Yeah. >> Right? It starts with a quite costly and then the the cost will start dropping down. I mean the, the cost of, of a megabyte two decades ago is probably higher than what it costly terabyte. So this is how technology evolves and it's any kind of comparison, either copper or even the old generation, the legacy generations could be a, a valid comparison. However, they need to be at a market demand for something like that. And I think the use cases today with what the industry is is looking for have that kind of opportunity to pull this kind of demand. But, but again, it needs to go work close by the what happens in the technology space, be it, you know we always talk about when we, we used to talk about 5G, there was a lot of hypes going on there. But I think once it realized in, in a pragmatic, in a in a real life situation, the minutes that governments decide to go for autonomous vehicles, then you would have limitations on the current closed RAN infrastructures and you would definitely need something to to top it up on the- >> I mean, 5G needs open RAN, I mean that's, you know not going to happen without it. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, yeah. But, but what is, but what would you say the most significant friction is between here and the open RAN nirvana? What are, what are the real hurdles that need to be overcome? There's obviously just the, I don't want to change we've been doing this the same way forever, but what what are the, what are the real, the legitimate concerns that people have when we start talking about open RAN? >> So I think from a technology perspective it will be solved. All of the tech, I mean there's smart engineers in the world today that will fix, you know these kind of problems and all of the interability, interruptability issues and, and all of that. I think it's about the mindset, the, the interfaces between the legacy core and RAN has been became more fluid today. We don't have that kind of a hard line between these kind of different aspects. We have the, the MEC coming closer to the RAN, we have the RAN coming closer to the Core, and we have the service based architectures in the Core. So these kind of things make it needs a paradigm shift between how operators that would need to tackle the open RAN space. >> Are there specific deployment requirements for open RAN that you can speak to from your perspective? >> For sure and going in this direction, like, you know evolution with the technology and how different players are coming together. Like that's something I wanted to comment from the previous question. And that's where like, you know these servers that Dell is offering right now. Specific functionality requirements, for example, it's it's a small server, it's short depth just 430 millimeters of depth and it can fit anywhere. So things like small form factor, it's it's crucial because if you, it can replace like multiple servers 10 years ago with just one server and you can place it like near a base band unit or to a cell site on top of a roof wherever. Like, you know, if it's a small company and you need this kind of 5G connection it kind of solves that challenge with this server. And then there are various things like, you know increasing thermals for example temperatures. It is classified like, you know kind of compliant with the negative 5 to 55 degree Celsius. And then we are also moving towards, for example negative 20 to 65 degree Celsius. Which is, which is kind of great because in situations where, which are out of our hands and you need specific thermals for those situations that's where it can solve that problem. >> Are those, are those statistics in those measurements different than the old NEB's standards, network equipment building standards? Or are they, are they in line with that? >> It is, it is a next step. Like so most of our servers that we have right now are negative five to five degree Celsius, for especially the extremely rugged server series and this one XR 8,000 which is focused for the, it's telecom inspired so it's focused on those customers. So we are trying to come up like go a step ahead and also like offering this additional temperatures testing and yeah compliance. So, so it is. >> Awesome. So we, I said we were at the booth early today. Looks like some good traffic people poking around at different, you know, innovations you got going. Some of the private network stuff is kind of cool. I'm like how much does that cost? I think I might like one of those, you know, but- >> [Private 5G home network. >> Right? Why not? Guys, great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for sharing. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. For Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin this is Dave Vellante, theCUBE's coverage. MWC 23 live from the Fida in Barcelona. We'll be right back. (outro music)

(soft corporate jingle) >> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat jingle intro) >> Welcome back to Barcelona. We're here live at the Fira. (laughs) Just amazing day two of MWC23. It's packed today. It was packed yesterday. It's even more packed today. All the news is flowing. Check out siliconangle.com. John Furrier is in the studio in Palo Alto breaking all the news. And, we are here live. Really excited to have Udayan Mukherjee who's the Senior Fellow and Chief Architect of wireless product at Network and Edge for Intel. And, Manish Singh is back. He's the CTO of Telecom Systems Business at Dell Jets. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you >> We're going to talk about greening the network. I wonder, Udayan, if you could just set up why that's so important. I mean, it's obvious that it's an important thing, great for the environment, but why is it extra important in Telco? >> Yeah, thank you. Actually, I'll tell you, this morning I had a discussion with an operator. The first thing he said, that the electricity consumption is more expensive nowadays that total real estate that he's spending money on. So, it's like that is the number one thing that if you can change that, bring that power consumption down. And, if you talk about sustainability, look what is happening in Europe, what's happening in all the electricity areas. That's the critical element that we need to address. Whether we are defining chip, platforms, storage systems, that's the number one mantra right now. You know, reduce the power. Electricity consumption, because it's a sustainable planet that we are living in. >> So, you got CapEx and OpEx. We're talking about the big piece of OpEx is now power consumption? >> Power Consumption >> That's the point. Okay, so in my experience, servers are the big culprit for power consumption, which is powered by core semiconductors and microprocessors. So, what's the strategy to reduce the power consumption? You're probably not going to reduce the bill overall. You maybe just can keep pace, but from a technical standpoint, how do you attack that? >> Yeah, there are multiple defined ways of adding. Obviously the process technology, that micro (indistinct) itself is evolving to make it more low-power systems. But, even within the silicon, the server that we develop, if you look in a CPU, there is a lot of power states. So, if you have a 32 code platform, as an example, every code you can vary the frequency and the C-states, power states. So, if you look into any traffic, whether it's a radio access network, packet code. At any given time the load is not peak. So, your power consumption, actual what we are drawing from the wall, it also needs to vary with that. So, that's how if you look into this there's a huge savings. If you go to Intel booth or Ericson booth or anyone, you will see right now every possible, the packet code, radio access network, everything network. They're talking about our energy consumption, how they're lowering this. These states, as we call it power states, C-state P-state they've built in intel chip for a long time. The cloud providers are taking advantage of it. But Telcos, with even two generation before they used to actually switch it off in the bios. I say no, we need peak. Now, that thing is changing. Now, it's all like, how do I take advantage of the built in technologies? >> I remember the enterprise virtualization, Manish, was a big play. I remember PG&E used to give rebates to customers that would install virtualized software, VMware. >> And SSDs. >> Yeah. And SSDs, you know, yes. Because, the spinning disc was, but, nowhere near with a server consumption. So, how virtualized is the telco network? And then, what I'm saying is there other things, other knobs, you can of course turn. So, what's your perspective on this as a server player? >> Yeah, absolutely. Let me just back up a little bit and start at the big picture to share what Udayan said. Here, day two, every conversation I've had yesterday and today morning with every operator, every CTO, they're coming in and first topic they're talking about is energy. And, the reason is, A, it's the right thing to do, sustainability, but, it's also becoming a P&L issue. And, the reason it's becoming a P&L issue is because we are in this energy inflationary environment where the energy costs are constantly going up. So, it's becoming really important for the service providers to really drive more efficiency onto their networks, onto their infrastructure. Number one. Two, then to your question on what all knobs need to be turned on, and what are the knobs? So, Udayan talked about within the intel, silicon, the C-states, P-states and all these capabilities that are being brought up, absolutely important. But again, if we take a macro view of it. First of all, there are opportunities to do infrastructure audit. What's on, why is it on, does it need to be on right now? Number two, there are opportunities to do infrastructure upgrade. And, what I mean by that is as you go from previous generation servers to next generation servers, better cooling, better performance. And through all of that you start to gain power usage efficiency inside a data center. And, you take that out more into the networks you start to achieve same outcomes on the network site. Think about from a cooling perspective, air cooling but for that matter, even liquid cooling, especially inside the data centers. All opportunities around PUE, because PUE, power usage efficiency and improvement on PUE is an opportunity. But, I'll take it even further. Workloads that are coming onto it, core, RAN, these workloads based on the dynamic traffic. Look, if you look at the traffic inside a network, it's not constant, it's varied. As the traffic patterns change, can you reduce the amount of infrastructure you're using? I.e. reduce the amount of power that you're using and when the traffic loads are going up. So, the workloads themselves need to become more smarter about that. And last, but not the least. From an orchestration layer if you think about it, where you are placing these workloads, and depending on what's available, you can start to again, drive better energy outcomes. And, not to forget acceleration. Where you need acceleration, can you have the right hardware infrastructures delivering the right kind of accelerations to again, improve those energy efficiency outcomes. So, it's a complex problem. But, there are a lot of levers, lot of tools that are in place that the service providers, the technology builders like us, are building the infrastructure, and then the workload providers all come together to really solve this problem. >> Yeah, Udayan, Manish mentioned this idea of moving from one generation to a new generation and gaining benefits. Out there on the street, if you will. Most of the time it's an N plus 2 migration. It's not just moving from last generation to this next generation, but it's really a generation ago. So, those significant changes in the dynamics around power density and cooling are meaningful? You talk about where performance should be? We start talking about the edge. It's hard to have a full-blown raised data center floor edge everywhere. Do these advances fundamentally change the kinds of things that you can do at the base of a tower? >> Yeah, absolutely. Manish talked about that, the dynamic nature of the workload. So, we are using a lot of this AIML to actually predict. Like for example, your multiple force in a systems. So, why is the 32 core as a system, why is all running? So, your traffic profile in the night times. So, you are in the office areas, in the night has gone home and nowadays everybody's working from remote anyway. So, why is this thing a full blown, spending the TDP, the total power and extreme powers. You bring it down, different power states, C-states. We talked about it. Deeper C-states or P-states, you bring the frequency down. So, lot of those automation, even at the base of the tower. Lot of our deployment right now, we are doing a whole bunch of massive MIMO deployment. Virtual RAN in Verizon network. All actually cell-site deployment. Those eight centers are very close to the cell-site. And, they're doing aggressive power management. So, you don't have to go to a huge data centers, even there's a small rack of systems, four to five, 10 systems, you can do aggressive power management. And, you built it up that way. >> Okay. >> If I may just build on what Udayan said. I mean if you look at the radio access network, right? And, let's start at the bottom of the tower itself. The infrastructure that's going in there, especially with Open RAN, if you think about it, there are opportunities now to do a centralized RAN where you could do more BBU pooling. And, with that, not only on a given tower but across a given given coverage area, depending on what the traffics are, you can again get the infrastructure to become more efficient in terms of what traffic, what needs are, and really start to benefit. The pooling gains which is obviously going to give you benefit on the CapEx side, but from an energy standpoint going to give you benefits on the OpEx side of things. So that's important. The second thing I will say is we cannot forget, especially on the radio access side of things, that it's not just the bottom of the tower what's happening there. What's happening on the top of the tower especially with the radio, that's super important. And, that goes into how do you drive better PA efficiency, how do you drive better DPD in there? This is where again, applying AI machine learning there is a significant amount of opportunity there to improve the PA performance itself. But then, not only that, looking at traffic patterns. Can you do sleep modes, micro sleep modes to deep sleep modes. Turning down the cells itself, depending on the traffic patterns. So, these are all areas that are now becoming more and more important. And, clearly with our ecosystem of partners we are continuing to work on these. >> So we hear from the operators, it's an OpEx issue. It's hitting the P&L. They're in search of PUE of one. And, they've historically been wasteful, they go full throttle. And now, you're saying with intelligence you can optimize that consumption. So, where does the intelligence live? Is it in the rig. Where is it all throughout the network? Is it in the silicon? Maybe you could paint a picture as to where those smarts exist. >> I can start. It's across the stack. It starts, we talked about the C-states, P-states. If you want to take advantage of that, that intelligence is in the workload, which has to understand when can I really start to clock things down or turn off the cores. If you really look at it from a traffic pattern perspective you start to really look at a rig level where you can have power. And, we are working with the ecosystem partners who are looking at applying machine learning on that to see what can we really start to turn on, turn off, throttle things down, depending on what the, so yes, it's across the stack. And lastly, again, I'll go back to cannot forget orchestration, where you again have the ability to move some of these workloads and look at where your workload placements are happening depending on what infrastructure is and what the traffic needs are at that point in time. So it's, again, there's no silver bullet. It has to be looked across the stack. >> And, this is where actually if I may, last two years a sea change has happened. People used to say, okay there are C-states and P-states, there's silicon every code. OS operating system has a governor built in. We rely on that. So, that used to be the way. Now that applications are getting smarter, if you look at a radio access network or the packet core on the control plane signaling application, they're more aware of the what is the underlying silicon power state sleep states are available. So, every time they find some of these areas there's no enough traffic there, they immediately goes to a transition. So, the workload has become more intelligent. The rig application we talked about. Every possible rig application right now are apps on xApps. Most of them are on energy efficiency. How are they using it? So, I think lot more even the last two years. >> Can I just say one more thing there right? >> Yeah. >> We cannot forget the infrastructure as well, right? I mean, that's the most important thing. That's where the energy is really getting drawn in. And, constant improvement on the infrastructure. And, I'll give you some data points, right? If you really look at the power at servers, right? From 2013 to 2023, like a decade. 85% energy intensity improvement, right? So, these gains are coming from performance with better cooling, better technology applications. So, that's super critical, that's important. And, also to just give you another data point. Apart from the infrastructure what cache layers we are running and how much CPU and compute requirements are there, that's also important. So, looking at it from a cache perspective are we optimizing the required infrastructure blocks for radio access versus core? And again, really taking that back to energy efficiency outcomes. So, some of the work we've been doing with Wind River and Red Hat and some of our ecosystem partners around that for radio access network versus core. Really again, optimizing for those different use cases and the outcomes of those start to come in from an energy utilization perspective >> So, 85% improvement in power consumption. Of course you're doing, I don't know, 2, 300% more work, right? So, let's say, and I'm just sort of spit balling numbers but, let's say that historically powers on the P&L has been, I don't know, single digits, maybe 10%. Now, it's popping up the much higher. >> Udayan: Huge >> Right? >> I mean, I don't know what the number is. Is it over 20% in some cases or is it, do you have a sense of that? Or let's say it is. The objective I presume is you're probably not going to lower the power bill overall, but you're going to be able to lower the percent of cost on the OpEx as you grow, right? I mean, we're talking about 5G networks. So much more data >> Capacity increasing. >> Yeah, and so is it, am I right about that the carriers, the best they can hope for is to sort of stay even on that percentage or maybe somewhat lower that percentage? Or, do you think they can actually cut the bill? What's the goal? What are they trying to do? >> The goal is to cut the bill. >> It is! >> And the way you get started to cut the bill is, as I said, first of all on the radio side. Start to see where the improvements are and look, there's not a whole lot there to be done. I mean, the PS are as efficient as they can be, but as I said, there are things in DPD and all that still can be improved. But then, sleep modes and all, yes there are efficiencies in there. But, I'll give you one important, another interesting data point. We did a work with ACG Research on our 16G platform. The power edge service that we have recently launched based on Intel's Sapphire Rapids. And, if you look at the study there. 30% TCR reduction, 10% in CapEx gains, 30% in OpEx gains from moving away from these legacy monolithic architectures to cloud native architectures. And, a large part of that OpEx gain really starts to come from energy to the point of 800 metric tonnes of carbon reduction to the point of you could have, and if you really translate that to around 160 homes electric use per year, right? So yes, I mean the opportunity there is to reduce the bill. >> Wow, that's big, big goal guys. We got to run. But, thank you for informing the audience on the importance and how you get there. So, appreciate that. >> One thing that bears mentioning really quickly before we wrap, a lot of these things we're talking about are happening in remote locations. >> Oh, back to that point of distributed nature of telecom. >> Yes, we talked about a BBU being at the base of a tower that could be up on a mountain somewhere. >> No, you made the point. You can't just say, oh, hey we're going to go find ambient air or going to go... >> They don't necessarily... >> Go next to a waterfall. >> We don't necessarily have the greatest hydro tower. >> All right, we got to go. Thanks you guys. Alright, keep it right there. Wall to wall coverage is day two of theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. Stay right there, we'll be right back. (corporate outro jingle)

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

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

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

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

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

>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from The Cube and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The world's leading telcos are trying to shed the stigma of being monopolies lacking innovation. Telcos have been great at operational efficiency and connectivity and living off of transmission, and the costs and expenses or revenue associated with that transmission. But in a world beyond telephone poles and basic wireless and mobile services, how will telcos modernize and become more agile and monetize new opportunities brought about by 5G and private wireless and a spate of new innovations and infrastructure, cloud data and apps? Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Mobile World Congress or now, MWC23, we explore the evolution of the telco business and how the industry is in many ways, mimicking transformations that took place decades ago in enterprise IT. We'll model some of the traditional enterprise vendors using ETR data and investigate how they're faring in the telecommunications sector, and we'll pose some of the key issues facing the industry this decade. First, let's take a look at what the GSMA has in store for MWC23. GSMA is the host of what used to be called Mobile World Congress. They've set the theme for this year's event as "Velocity" and they've rebranded MWC to reflect the fact that mobile technology is only one part of the story. MWC has become one of the world's premier events highlighting innovations not only in Telco, mobile and 5G, but the collision between cloud, infrastructure, apps, private networks, smart industries, machine intelligence, and AI, and more. MWC comprises an enormous ecosystem of service providers, technology companies, and firms from virtually every industry including sports and entertainment. And as well, GSMA, along with its venue partner at the Fira Barcelona, have placed a major emphasis on sustainability and public and private partnerships. Virtually every industry will be represented at the event because every industry is impacted by the trends and opportunities in this space. GSMA has said it expects 80,000 attendees at MWC this year, not quite back to 2019 levels, but trending in that direction. Of course, attendance from Chinese participants has historically been very high at the show, and obviously the continued travel issues from that region are affecting the overall attendance, but still very strong. And despite these concerns, Huawei, the giant Chinese technology company. has the largest physical presence of any exhibitor at the show. And finally, GSMA estimates that more than $300 million in economic benefit will result from the event which takes place at the end of February and early March. And The Cube will be back at MWC this year with a major presence thanks to our anchor sponsor, Dell Technologies and other supporters of our content program, including Enterprise Web, ArcaOS, VMware, Snowflake, Cisco, AWS, and others. And one of the areas we're interested in exploring is the evolution of the telco stack. It's a topic that's often talked about and one that we've observed taking place in the 1990s when the vertically integrated IBM mainframe monopoly gave way to a disintegrated and horizontal industry structure. And in many ways, the same thing is happening today in telecommunications, which is shown on the left-hand side of this diagram. Historically, telcos have relied on a hardened, integrated, and incredibly reliable, and secure set of hardware and software services that have been fully vetted and tested, and certified, and relied upon for decades. And at the top of that stack on the left are the crown jewels of the telco stack, the operational support systems and the business support systems. For the OSS, we're talking about things like network management, network operations, service delivery, quality of service, fulfillment assurance, and things like that. For the BSS systems, these refer to customer-facing elements of the stack, like revenue, order management, what products they sell, billing, and customer service. And what we're seeing is telcos have been really good at operational efficiency and making money off of transport and connectivity, but they've lacked the innovation in services and applications. They own the pipes and that works well, but others, be the over-the-top content companies, or private network providers and increasingly, cloud providers have been able to bypass the telcos, reach around them, if you will, and drive innovation. And so, the right-most diagram speaks to the need to disaggregate pieces of the stack. And while the similarities to the 1990s in enterprise IT are greater than the differences, there are things that are different. For example, the granularity of hardware infrastructure will not likely be as high where competition occurred back in the 90s at every layer of the value chain with very little infrastructure integration. That of course changed in the 2010s with converged infrastructure and hyper-converged and also software defined. So, that's one difference. And the advent of cloud, containers, microservices, and AI, none of that was really a major factor in the disintegration of legacy IT. And that probably means that disruptors can move even faster than did the likes of Intel and Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and the Seagates of the 1990s. As well, while many of the products and services will come from traditional enterprise IT names like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, VMware, AWS, Microsoft, Google, et cetera, many of the names are going to be different and come from traditional network equipment providers. These are names like Ericsson and Huawei, and Nokia, and other names, like Wind River, and Rakuten, and Dish Networks. And there are enormous opportunities in data to help telecom companies and their competitors go beyond telemetry data into more advanced analytics and data monetization. There's also going to be an entirely new set of apps based on the workloads and use cases ranging from hospitals, sports arenas, race tracks, shipping ports, you name it. Virtually every vertical will participate in this transformation as the industry evolves its focus toward innovation, agility, and open ecosystems. Now remember, this is not a binary state. There are going to be greenfield companies disrupting the apple cart, but the incumbent telcos are going to have to continue to ensure newer systems work with their legacy infrastructure, in their OSS and BSS existing systems. And as we know, this is not going to be an overnight task. Integration is a difficult thing, transformations, migrations. So that's what makes this all so interesting because others can come in with Greenfield and potentially disrupt. There'll be interesting partnerships and ecosystems will form and coalitions will also form. Now, we mentioned that several traditional enterprise companies are or will be playing in this space. Now, ETR doesn't have a ton of data on specific telecom equipment and software providers, but it does have some interesting data that we cut for this breaking analysis. What we're showing here in this graphic is some of the names that we've followed over the years and how they're faring. Specifically, we did the cut within the telco sector. So the Y-axis here shows net score or spending velocity. And the horizontal axis, that shows the presence or pervasiveness in the data set. And that table insert in the upper left, that informs as to how the dots are plotted. You know, the two columns there, net score and the ends. And that red-dotted line, that horizontal line at 40%, that is an indicator of a highly elevated level. Anything above that, we consider quite outstanding. And what we'll do now is we'll comment on some of the cohorts and share with you how they're doing in telecommunications, and that sector, that vertical relative to their position overall in the data set. Let's start with the public cloud players. They're prominent in every industry. Telcos, telecommunications is no exception and it's quite an interesting cohort here. On the one hand, they can help telecommunication firms modernize and become more agile by eliminating the heavy lifting and you know, all the cloud, you know, value prop, data center costs, and the cloud benefits. At the same time, public cloud players are bringing their services to the edge, building out their own global networks and are a disruptive force to traditional telcos. All right, let's talk about Azure first. Their net score is basically identical to telco relative to its overall average. AWS's net score is higher in telco by just a few percentage points. Google Cloud platform is eight percentage points higher in telco with a 53% net score. So all three hyperscalers have an equal or stronger presence in telco than their average overall. Okay, let's look at the traditional enterprise hardware and software infrastructure cohort. Dell, Cisco, HPE, Red Hat, VMware, and Oracle. We've highlighted in this chart just as sort of indicators or proxies. Dell's net score's 10 percentage points higher in telco than its overall average. Interesting. Cisco's is a bit higher. HPE's is actually lower by about nine percentage points in the ETR survey, and VMware's is lower by about four percentage points. Now, Red Hat is really interesting. OpenStack, as we've previously reported is popular with telcos who want to build out their own private cloud. And the data shows that Red Hat OpenStack's net score is 15 percentage points higher in the telco sector than its overall average. OpenShift, on the other hand, has a net score that's four percentage points lower in telco than its overall average. So this to us talks to the pace of adoption of microservices and containers. You know, it's going to happen, but it's going to happen more slowly. Finally, Oracle's spending momentum is somewhat lower in the sector than its average, despite the firm having a decent telco business. IBM and Accenture, heavy services companies are both lower in this sector than their average. And real quickly, snowflake's net score is much lower by about 12 percentage points relative to its very high average net score of 62%. But we look for them to be a player in this space as telcos need to modernize their analytics stack and share data in a governed manner. Databricks' net score is also much lower than its average by about 13 points. And same, I would expect them to be a player as open architectures and cloud gains steam in telco. All right, let's close out now on what we're going to be talking about at MWC23 and some of the key issues that we'll be unpacking. We've talked about stack disaggregation in this breaking analysis, but the key here will be the pace at which it will reach the operational efficiency and reliability of closed stacks. Telcos, you know, in a large part, they're engineering heavy firms and much of their work takes place, kind of in the basement, in the dark. It's not really a big public hype machine, and they tend to move slowly and cautiously. While they understand the importance of agility, they're going to be careful because, you know, it's in their DNA. And so at the same time, if they don't move fast enough, they're going to get hurt and disrupted by competitors. So that's going to be a topic of conversation, and we'll be looking for proof points. And the other comment I'll make is around integration. Telcos because of their conservatism will benefit from better testing and those firms that can innovate on the testing front and have labs and certifications and innovate at that level, with an ecosystem are going to be in a better position. Because open sometimes means wild west. So the more players like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, et cetera, that do that and align with their ecosystems and provide those resources, the faster adoption is going to go. So we'll be looking for, you know, who's actually doing that, Open RAN or Radio Access Networks. That fits in this discussion because O-RAN is an emerging network architecture. It essentially enables the use of open technologies from an ecosystem and over time, look at O-RAN is going to be open, but the questions, you know, a lot of questions remain as to when it will be able to deliver the operational efficiency of traditional RAN. Got some interesting dynamics going on. Rakuten is a company that's working hard on this problem, really focusing on operational efficiency. Then you got Dish Networks. They're also embracing O-RAN. They're coming at it more from service innovation. So that's something that we'll be monitoring and unpacking. We're going to look at cloud as a disruptor. On the one hand, cloud can help drive agility, as we said earlier and optionality, and innovation for incumbent telcos. But the flip side is going to also do the same for startups trying to disrupt and cloud attracts startups. While some of the telcos are actually embracing the cloud, many are being cautious. So that's going to be an interesting topic of discussion. And there's private wireless networks and 5G, and hyperlocal private networks, they're being deployed, you know, at the edge. This idea of open edge is also a really hot topic and this trend is going to accelerate. You know, the importance here is that the use cases are going to be widely varied. The needs of a hospital are going to be different than those of a sports venue are different from a remote drilling location, and energy or a concert venue. Things like real-time AI inference and data flows are going to bring new services and monetization opportunities. And many firms are going to be bypassing traditional telecommunications networks to build these out. Satellites as well, we're going to see, you know, in this decade, you're going to have, you're going to look down at Google Earth and you're going to see real-time. You know, today you see snapshots and so, lots of innovations going in that space. So how is this going to disrupt industries and traditional industry structures? Now, as always, we'll be looking at data angles, right? 'Cause it's in The Cube's DNA to follow the data and what opportunities and risks data brings. The Cube is going to be on location at MWC23 at the end of the month. We got a great set. We're in the walkway between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, it's booths CS60. So we'll have a full, they're called Stan CS60. We have a full schedule. I'm going to be there with Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson and the entire Cube crew, so don't forget to stop by. All right, that's a wrap. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristin 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 Silicon Angle, does some great stuff for us. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search "Breaking Analysis" podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and silicon angle.com. And all the video content is available on demand at thecube.net. You can email me directly at david.vellante@silicon angle.com. You can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn post. Please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you at Mobile World Congress, and/or at next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music) (bright music fades)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore '22, formerly VMworld. This is our 12th year covering it. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellente. Two sets, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're starting to get the execs rolling in from VMware. Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware's here. Great to see you. Great keynote, day one. >> Great to be here, John. Great to see you, Dave. Day one, super exciting. We're pumped. >> And you had no problem with the keynotes. We're back in person. Smooth as silk up there. >> We were talking about it. We had to like dust off a cobweb to make some of these inputs. >> It's not like riding a bike. >> No, it's not. We had about 40% of our agencies that we had to change out because they're no longer in business. So, I have to give kudos to the team who pulled it together. They did a fabulous job. >> You do a great check, great presentation. I know you had a lot to crack in there. Raghu set the table. I know this is for him, this was a big moment to lay out the narrative, address the Broadcom thing right out of the gate, wave from Hock Tan in the audience, and then got into the top big news. Still a lot of meat on the bone. You get up there, you got to talk about the use cases, vSphere 8, big release, a lot of stuff. Take us through the keynote. What was the important highlights for you to share, the folks watching that didn't see the keynote or wanted to get your perspective? >> Well, first of all, did any of you notice that Raghu was running on the stage? He did not do that in rehearsal. (John chuckles) I was a little bit worried, but he really did it. >> I said, I betcha that was real. (everyone chuckles) >> Anyways, the jokes aside, he did fabulous. Lays out the strategy. My thinking, as you said, was to first of all speak with their customers and explain how every enterprise is facing with this concept of cloud chaos that Raghu laid out and CVS Health story sort of exemplifies the situation that every customer is facing. They go in, they start with cloud first, which is needed, I think that's the absolutely right approach. Very quickly build out a model of getting a cloud ops team and a platform engineering team which oftentimes be a parallel work stream to a private cloud infrastructure. Great start. But as Roshan, the CIO at CVS Health laid out, there's an inflection point. And that's when you have to converge these because the use cases are where stakeholders, this is the lines of businesses, app developers, finance teams, and security teams, they don't need this stove piped information coming at 'em. And the converge model is how he opted to organize his team. So we called it a multi-cloud team, just like a workspace team. And listen, our commitment and innovations are to solve the problems of those teams so that the stakeholders get what they need. That's the rest of the keynote. >> Yeah, first of all, great point. I want to call out that inflection point comment because we've been reporting coming into VMworld with super cloud and other things across open source and down into the weeds and into the hood. The chaos is real. So, good call. I love how you guys brought that up there. But all industry inflection points, if you go back in history of the tech industry, at every single major inflection point, there was chaos, complexity, or an enemy proprietary. However you want to look at it, there was a situation where you needed to kind of reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. So we're at that inflection point, I think that's consistent. And also the ecosystem floor yesterday, the expo floor here in San Francisco with your partners, it was vibrant. They're all on this wave. There is a wave and an inflection point. So, okay. I buy that. So, if you buy the inflection point, what has to happen next? Because this is where we're at. People are feeling it. Some say, I don't have a problem but they're cut chaos such is the problem. So, where do you see that? How does VMware's team organizing in the industry and for customers specifically to solve the chaos, to reign it in and cross over? >> Yeah, you're a 100% right. Every inflection point is associated with some kind of a chaos that had to be reigned in. So we are focused on two major things right now which we have made progress in. And maybe third, we are still work in-progress. Number one is technology. Today's technology announcements are directly to address how that streamlining of chaos can be done through a cloud smart approach that we laid out. Our Aria, a brand new solution for management, significant enhancements to Tanzu, all of these for public cloud based workloads that also extend to private cloud. And then our cloud infrastructure with newer capabilities with AWS, Azure, as well as with new innovations on vSphere 8 and vSAN 8. And then last but not the least, our continuous automation to enable anywhere workspace. All these are simple innovation that have to address because without those innovations, the problem is that the chaos oftentimes is created because lack of technology and as a result structure has to be put in place because tooling and technology is not there. So, number one goal we see is providing that. Second is we have to be independent, provide support for every possible cloud but not without being a partner of theirs. That's not an easy thing to do but we have the DNA as a company, we have done that with data centers in the past, even though being part of Dell we did that in the data center in the past, we have done that in mobility. And so we have taken the challenge of doing that with the cloud. So we are continually building newer innovation and stronger and stronger partnerships with cloud provider which is the basis of our commercial relationships with Microsoft Azure too, where we have brought Azure VMware solution into VMware cloud universal. Again, that strengthens the value of us being neutral because it's very important to have a Switzerland party that can provide these multi-cloud solutions that doesn't have an agenda of a specific cloud, yet an ecosystem, or at least an influence with the ecosystem that can bring going forward. >> Okay, so technology, I get that. Open, not going to be too competitive, but more open. So the question I got to ask you is what is the disruptive enabler to make that happen? 'Cause you got customers, partners and team of VMware, what's the disruptive enabler that's going to get you to that level? >> Over the hump. I mean, listen, our value is this community. All this community has one of two paths to go. Either, they become stove piped into just the public-private cloud infrastructure or they step up as this convergence that's happening around them to say, "You know what? I have the solution to tame this multi-cloud complexity, to reign the chaos," as you mentioned because tooling and technologies are available. And I know they work with the ecosystem. And our objective is to bring this community to that point. And to me, that is the best path to overcome it. >> You are the connective tissue. I was able to sit into the analyst meeting today. You were sort of the proxy for CVS Health where you talked about the private that's where you started, the public cloud ops team, bringing that together. The platform is the glue. That is the connective tissue. That's where Tanzu comes in. That's where Aria comes in. And that is the disruptive technology which it's hard to build that. >> From a technology perspective, it's an enabler of something that has never been done before in that level of comprehensiveness, from a more of a infrastructure side thinking perspective. Yes, infrastructure teams have enabled self-service portals. Yes, infrastructure teams have given APIs to developers, but what we are enabling through Tanzu is completely next level where you have a lot richer experience for developers so that they never ever have to think about the infrastructure at all. Because even when you enable infrastructure as API, that's still an API of the infrastructure. We go straight to the application tier where they're just thinking about authorized set of microservices. Containers can be orchestrated and built automatically, shifting security left where we're truly checking them or enabling them to check the security vulnerabilities as they're developing the application, not going into the production when they have to touch the infrastructure. To me, that's an enabler of a special power that this new multi-cloud team can have across cloud which they haven't had in the past. >> Yeah, it's funny, John, I'd say very challenging technically. The challenge in 2010 was the software mainframe, remember the marketing people killed that term. >> Yeah, exactly. >> But you think about that. We're going to make virtualization and the overhead associated with that irrelevant. We're going to be able to run any workload and VMware achieved that. Now you're saying we run anything anywhere, any Kubernete, any container. >> That's the reality. That's the chaos. >> And the cloud and that's a new, real problem. Real challenging problem that requires serious engineering. >> Well, I mean it's aspirational, right? Let's get the reality, right? So true spanning cloud, not yet there. You guys, I think your vision is definitely right on in the sense that we'd like the chaos and multicloud's a reality. The question is AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, other clouds, they're not going to sit still. No one's going to let VMware just come up and take everything. You got to enable so the market- >> True, true. I don't think this is the case of us versus them because there is so much that they have to express in terms of the value of every cloud. And this happened in the case of, by the way, whether you go into infrastructure or even workspace solutions, as long as the richest of the experience and richest of the controls are provided, for their cloud to the developers that makes the adoption of their cloud simpler. It's a win-win for every party. >> That's the key. I think the simplest. So, I want to ask you, this comes up a lot and I love that you brought that up, simple and self-service has proven developers who are driving the change, cloud DevOps developers. They're driving the change. They're in charge more than ever. They want self-service, easier to deploy. I want a test, if I don't like it, I want to throw it away. But if I like something, I want to stick with it. So it's got to be self-service. Now that's antithetical to the old enterprise model of solve complexity with more complexity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So the question for you is as the president of VMware, do you feel good that you guys are looking out over the landscape where you're riding into the valley of the future with the demand being automation, completely invisible, abstraction layer, new use case scenarios for IT and whatever IT becomes. Take us through your mindset there, because I think that's what I'm hearing here at this year, VMware Explorer is that you guys have recognized the shift in demographics on the developer side, but ops isn't going away either. They're connecting. >> They're connected. Yeah, so our vision is, if you think about the role of developers, they have a huge influence. And most importantly they're the ones who are driving innovation, just the amount of application development, the number of developers that have emerged, yet remains the scarcest resource for the enterprise are critical. So developers often time have taken control over decision on infrastructure and ops. Why? Because infrastructure and ops haven't shown up. Not because they like it. In fact, they hate it. (John chuckles) Developers like being developers. They like writing code. They don't really want to get into the day to day operations. In fact, here's what we see with almost all our customers. They start taking control of the ops until they go into production. And at that point in time, they start requesting one by one functions of ops, move to ops because they don't like it. So with our approach and this sort of, as we are driving into the beautiful valley of multi-cloud like you laid out, in our approach with the cross cloud services, what we are saying is that why don't we enable this new team which is a reformatted version of the traditional ops, it has the platform engineering in it, the key skill that enables the developer in it, through a platform that becomes an interface to the developers. It creates that secure workflows that developers need. So that developers think and do what they really love. And the infrastructure is seamless and invisible. It's bound to happen, John. Think about it this way. >> Infrastructure is code. >> Infrastructure has code, and even next year, it's invisible because they're just dealing with the services that they need. >> So it's self-service infrastructure. And then you've got to have that capability to simplified, I'll even say automated or computational governance and security. So Chris Wolf is coming on Thursday. >> Yeah. >> Unfortunately I won't be here. And he's going to talk about all the future projects. 'Cause you're not done yet. The project narrows, it's kind of one of these boring, but important. >> Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the oven coming out. >> There's really critical projects coming down the pipeline that support this multi-cloud vision, is it's early days. >> Well, this is the thing that we were talking about. I want to get your thoughts on. And we were commenting on the keynote review, Hock Tan bought VMware. He's a lot more there than he thought. I mean, I got to imagine him sitting in the front row going there's some stuff coming out of the oven. I didn't even, might not have known. >> He'd be like, "Hmm, this extra value." (everyone chuckles) >> He's got to be pretty stoked, don't you think? >> He is, he is. >> There's a lot of headroom on the margin. >> I mean, independent to that, I think the strategy that he sees is something that's compelling to customers which is what, in my assessment, speaking with him, he bought VMware because it's strategic to customers and the strategic value of VMware becomes even higher as we take our multi-cloud portfolio. So it's all great. >> Well, plus the ecosystem is now re-energize. It's always been energized, but energized cuz it's sort of had to be, cuz it's such a strong- >> And there was the Dell history there too. >> But, yeah it was always EMC, and then Dell, and now it's like, wow, the ecosystem's- >> Really it's released almost. I like this new team, we've been calling this new ops kind of vibe going refactored ops, as you said, that's where the action's happening because the developers want to go faster. >> They want to go faster. >> They want to go fast cuz the velocity's paying off of them. They don't want to have to wait. They don't want security reviews. They want policy. They want some guardrails. Show me the track. >> That's it. >> And let me drive this car. >> That's it because I mean think about it, if you were a developer, listen, I've been a developer. I never really wanted to see how to operate the code in production because it took time away for developing. I like developing and I like to spend my time building the applications and that's the goal of Aria and Tanzu. >> And then I got to mention the props of seeing project Monterey actually come out to fruition is huge because that's the future of computing architecture. >> I mean at this stage, if a customer from here on is modernizing their infrastructure and they're not investing in a holistic new infrastructure from a hardware and software perspective, they're missing out an opportunity on leveraging the numbers that we were showing, 20% increase in calls. Why would you not just make that investment on both the hardware and the software layer now to get the benefits for the next five-six years. >> You would and if I don't have to make any changes and I get 20% automatically. And the other thing, I don't know if people really appreciate the new curve that the Silicon industry is on. It blows away the history of Moore's law which was whatever, 35-40% a year, we're talking about 100% a year price performance or performance improvements. >> I think when you have an inflection point as we said earlier, there's going to be some things that you know is going to happen, but I think there's going to be a lot that's going to surprise people. New brands will emerge, new startups, new talent, new functionality, new use cases. So, we're going to watch that carefully. And for the folks watching that know that theCUBE's been 12 years with covering VMware VMworld, now VMware Explore, we've kind of met everybody over the years, but I want to point out a little nuance, Raghu thing in the keynote. During the end, before the collective responsibility sustainment commitment he had, he made a comment, "As proud as we are," which is a word he used, there's a lot of pride here at VMware. Raghu kind of weaved that in there, I noticed that, I want to call that out there because Raghu's proud. He's a proud product guy. He said, "I'm a product guy." He's delivering keynote. >> Almost 20 years. >> As proud as we are, there's a lot of pride at VMware, Sumit, talk about that dynamic because you mentioned customers, your customer is not a lot of churn. They've been there for a long time. They're embedded in every single company out there, pretty much VMware is in every enterprise, if not all, I mean 99%, whatever percentage it is, it's huge penetration. >> We are proud of three things. It comes down to number one, we are proud of our innovations. You can see it, you can see the tone from Raghu or myself, or other executives changes with excitement when we're talking about our technologies, we're just proud. We're just proud of it. We are a technology and product centric company. The second thing that sort of gets us excited and be proud of is exactly what you mentioned, which is the customers. The customers like us. It's a pleasure when I bring Roshan on stage and he talks about how he's expecting certain relationship and what he's viewing VMware in this new world of multi-cloud, that makes us proud. And then third, we're proud of our talent. I mean, I was jokingly talking to just the events team alone. Of course our engineers do amazing job, our sellers do amazing job, our support teams do amazing job, but we brought this team and we said, "We are going to get you to run an event after three years from not they doing one, we're going to change the name on you, we're going to change the attendees you're going to invite, we're going to change the fact that it's going to be new speakers who have never been on the stage and done that kind of presentation. >> You're also going to serve a virtual audience. >> And we're going to have a virtual audience. And you know what? They embraced it and they surprised us and it looks beautiful. So I'm proud of the talent. >> The VMware team always steps up. You never slight it, you've got great talent over there. The big thing I want to highlight as we end this day, the segment, and I'll get your thoughts and reactions, Sumit, is again, you guys were early on hybrid. We have theCUBE tape to go back into the video data lake and find the word hybrid mentioned 2013, 2014, 2015. Even when nobody was talking about hybrid. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Multicloud, Raghu, I talked to Raghu in 2016 when he did the Pat Gelsinger, I mean Raghu, Pat and Andy Jassy. >> Yeah. >> When that cloud thing got cleared up, he cleared that up. He mentioned multicloud, even then 2016, so this is not new. >> Yeah. >> You had the vision, there's a lot of stuff in the oven. You guys make announcements directionally, and then start chipping away at it. Now you got Broadcom buys VMware, what's in the oven? How much goodness is coming out that's like just hitting the fruits are starting to bear on the tree. There's a lot of good stuff and just put that, contextualize and scale that for us. What's in the oven? >> First of all, I think the vision, you have to be early to be first and we believe in it. Okay, so that's number one. Now having said that what's in the oven, you would see us actually do more controls across cloud. We are not done on networking side. Okay, we announced something as project Northstar with networking portfolio, that's not generally available. That's in the oven. We are going to come up with more capability on supporting any Kubernetes on any cloud. We did some previews of supporting, for example, EKS. You're going to see more of those cluster controls across any Kubernetes. We have more work happening on our telco partners for enablement of O-RAN as well as our edge solutions, along with the ecosystem. So more to come on those fronts. But they're all aligned with enabling customers multi-cloud through these five cross cloud services. They're all really, some of them where we have put a big sort of a version one of solution out there such as Aria continuation, some of them where even the version one's not out and you're going to see that very soon. >> All right. Sumit, what's next for you as the president? You're proud of your team, we got that. Great oven description of what's coming out for the next meal. What's next for you guys, the team? >> I think for us, two things, first of all, this is our momentum season as we call it. So for the first time, after three years, we are now being in, I think we've expanded, explored to five cities. So getting this orchestrated properly, we are expecting nearly 50,000 customers to be engaging in person and maybe a same number virtually. So a significant touchpoint, cuz we have been missing. Our customers have departed their strategy formulation and we have departed our strategy formulation. Getting them connected together is our number one priority. And number two, we are focused on getting better and better at making customers successful. There is work needed for us. We learn, then we code it and then we repeat it. And to me, those are the two key things here in the next six months. >> Sumit, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for your valuable time, sharing what's going on. Appreciate it. >> Always great to have chatting. >> Here with the president, the CEO's coming up next in theCUBE. Of course, we're John and Dave. More coverage after the short breaks, stay with us. (upbeat music)