(bouncy techno music) >> Thank you, Adam. It's great working with you all week in the studio. We're here, live in Barcelona. TheCUBE's continuous coverage of Cloud City, it's unbelievable. Darragh Grealish is here, he's the chief technology officer and co-founder of 56K.Cloud. I love that name, we're going to talk about that. And Alexander Lerhmann is the director of new business development innovation at Sunrise UPC. Gents, great to see you, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. >> Thanks for having us. >> MWC, you guys made the bet to come here and aren't you glad you did? >> Yeah, we had to go through a lot of processes, but it was totally worth it, you know? >> Yeah, we're going to talk about edge cloud, right, and we're going to talk about developers, and how this whole thing's going to build out. But how do you think about the cloud? You know, we were talking to DR earlier. The cloud, people think it's a place. Increasingly people say, "no, that's actually an experience, it's a development environment." The cloud is expanding to the edge. The data center is just another edge node. How do you guys look at the edge cloud? >> Yeah well, we see the edge cloud as a huge opportunity to monetize on 5G. To bring the understanding, and the features that 5G can deliver into the next generation of developer experience. Because once we address developer experience, we're going to be able to address that next generation of user experience. >> Okay so, let's dig into a little bit about what each of your respective companies does. Tell us about 56K, and I love the name. Maybe a lot of people don't understand it, but y'know. >> Yeah, it's kind of a generation thing. So, I worked for a lot of large companies, all of them super long email addresses. At the same time, I grew up with the 56K modem. The dial-up modem, as you know it. >> Speaker: Right. >> And the transition from dial-up to broadband was massive. I mean, in terms of user experience on the web, you know. The impact on that technology that did, meant that finally you could control the user experience. You had some predictability, and we thought it was a catchy name. People relate to it. I used to work in test automations, so user experience was an important thing. And so, we kind of combine now, cloud and the 56k kind of understanding, so experience. And it's all about addressing that user experience. >> It's a game changer from a consumer experience at that time. >> Exactly. >> And that's obviously the metaphor you're using. Alexander, tell us more about Sunrise UPC, what their relationship is with 56K. >> Yeah, so Sunrise UPC obviously is a telecommunications provider. #2 largest private telecommunication provider in Switzerland. And in terms of partnership with 56K.Cloud, business started the conversation of how we can bring our world together with what 56K.Cloud is doing. We see a lot of things that we can do to kind of improve the offer from our end, to our customers in the wider community as well. >> Yeah so, this is a good example, right? Because we see, we always talk about the global telco industry, but there's a lot of localization, right? >> Alexander: Right. >> There's a lot of public policy that has to be considered. So let's get into the "Cloud" portion of your name. >> Darragh: Yeah. >> You think about things like wavelength. Which is essentially, it's really the outpost for 5G, if you think about it, right. They're not satellites, it's a platform for the development. Tell us about wavelength in 5G, the intersection there, why it's important. >> Yeah so, the edge cloud solution from Amazon, as you've heard of it, it's not just solving existing use cases or problems, it's actually creating new opportunities by combining the technologies of 5G network slicing, network exposed functions, and multiple access edge compute, you know, it's actually the platform. So, what we're trying to do is bring that developer experience at tuning that is dominated in this large ecosystem in the public cloud, stretched into the network because we need to start to see developers to see the network as an asset. Once they realize that speed, bandwidth, and latency, they're not fighting against this to deliver the best user experience. They can orchestrate this. They can be part of the challenge. And once we can get those developers to see the network as a value proposition, and this is the kind of minimum components that would build that next generation, you know, the next opportunities. So you know, you had an interview recently with Jeff Barr from AWS, and he referred to AWS waveband as, "this is not just solving existing issues." He said, "this is an opportunity," you know, combining 5G. 5G is not just 4G plus one, it's a whole stack of capabilities. And once operators realize that, they restack on public cloud, their telco stack. That's modernizing 5G, going to 5G standalone. And then once they're on public cloud, you know, dogfooding, you start to take those technologies, and you bring them to your subscriber base. But the developers that are in that subscriber base, once you address their need, they can have their creativity process, and building those super apps, like DATRON. Once they address that, then you're going to get that ultimate user experience. >> So, as a telco in the local region, you've got an advantage because you've got your presence at the edge, and you're leaning into next-gen, cloud-native, container, sort of developers. We've always said, "developers are going to win the edge." And you don't typically, most telcos anyway, we don't think of them as developer centric. You guys are different. So, can you talk about how you envision leveraging wavelength, and what the role of developers will be in your country? >> Yeah, I think for us first, it's essentially very important to kind of look at new stuff in many ways. You know, my role at the company is to look at innovative things, and to kind of think a little bit ahead, what's coming down the line, and not necessarily being revenue generating today, but maybe something that's coming, >> Dave: Right. >> sometime down the road. And I think that whole area has so much potential, it just plays into so many fields that are relevant for a telco. And it opens a new channel in many ways because, you know, we'll be able to not just sell connectivity, business, connectivity, mobile, all those products to our customers, but we actually take a more sophisticated route by working with a developer community, then I kind of augment the offering, but then we'll hit the customer. >> So we've seen CDNs and over-the-top providers come in, use your network, thank you, >> Darragh: Yes. >> for building out all that great infrastructure. It sounds like this is different. You're actually facilitating the development of new apps. >> Alexander: Yes. What's different, what kind of apps are we talking about here that you can monetize? >> I mean, it's from small to large, literally everything. I think what we've learned with the rollout of 5G is that it actually touches all industries. Maybe there's some others that shine a bit more than others, but fundamentally, it's such a big shift in terms of what we, as a telco, provides. It's not just this smartphone centric world any longer. It's much more like a building customized solution for particular customer segments, and help them in the industry. So, one thing, when I mentioned in particular was we are from Switzerland. Smart farming. Agriculture, right. And we can do a lot of good things there, if you bring all these technologies together and solve problems that this vertical has had in the past, which was literally increase food production, and be sustainable. Now you can do that, you know, in the old days that wasn't possible. >> So you're talking drones, stream data, and 5G enables that. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. I mean, that's a whole new world, and that is a great monetization opportunity. Who owns the data in that example? Is that a discussion that's going on, or? >> Well, who owns the data? The customer owns the data, right. If it's his or hers. >> Dave: Yeah good, right answer. (all laugh) >> How about when you think about 5G features, network slicing, other capabilities. How do you see 56K taking advantage of those, and working with the developer community to really exploit them? >> Yeah so, we've been more than four years already, working in public clouds, primarily on AWS. And what we've done is, you know, a lot of that cloud native migrations we've done, you know, we've seen those technologies. So what we're trying to do is remap that. And how we're doing this is we're going to be launching the 5G developer platform. It's going to be global ecosystem, open ecosystem, you can go and check it out, it's 5g.dev, literally. And in there, what we want to do is expose these new features of 5G, not just in telco language. So we're launching these kind of networks that slice as code, so that you have this infrastructure as code, in the public cloud domain. This is what resonates with developers. You want to stretch that, and like I mentioned earlier, make that network slices code. So search features, and network slicing dynamic narrative slicing is enhanced mobile broadband, geofence ways, speed, bandwidth, ultra reliable low-latency. I've seen it with my own eyes. You can single digit milliseconds. It's ridiculous how accurate it can be. And then there is the massive IOT. So as you see in IOT, but actually bringing narrowband IOT really at scale, and not just you needing technical boundaries, or contractual boundaries to access that, the developer has the same experiences as in public cloud. And so we want to monetize this to a global 5G. >> Single digit latency, right? So I mean, you know what's going to happen. I think that's why I love the name so much, right. And what happened is people being the consumer at first it was like, "oh my gosh!" And then what happened is the developer community said, "look at all the great data apps we can push in." And then now it's just orders of magnitude more that we can do. And we saw video in the early days of video, it was jittery. And so, it's very exciting times. I think about the data center, and how virtualization occurred there. And, it was almost like force fitting an old model into a new model, where the cloud was setting the definition of that new model. And now they're kind of catching up. Telcos are in a similar situation, right? They've got very purpose-built infrastructure. You guys obviously are more forward-thinking in regard, but is there a parallel there with the old sort of virtualization days, and how you're modernizing the network? What's the state of the network today, and where do you see it going? >> Yeah, we've always looked at the network as our prime differentiator, and we had to be on top of new things, and make sure that it is top notch. That's sort of an indisputable- >> Dave: Table stakes. >> Table stakes, exactly. And so I guess from that point alone, you need to continue to look at how can you improve it? How can you make it more efficient? How can we make it more stable? I mean, frictionless is for us, a key word in that context. And I think with those new technologies, there's just more that we can do. And now we can actually, and this is the beauty of it that comes with 5G and all these new cloud technologies. We can actually make the network our offering again, by delivering network enabled services, which is something that comes with 5G that wasn't there with 4G. >> Yeah, those value added services are key. And it's almost like, I think about the virtualization days, but now we're bringing cloud-native containerization, Kubernetes, Docker, to this new world, and you're doing it on a cloud platform. So that's what's different about the data centers. Data centers were trying to do it on general purpose platforms that were kind of being refactored and forced into it. But the cloud has shown us the way, and it's different, isn't it? >> Yeah, exactly. Well, what has shown to us is that we know we no longer have to sell top down or anything. What we're doing is we have to sell developer to developer. There is multiple avenues, not just SIM cards, with subscribers or large enterprises wanting a thousand SIM cards. It's past that. Now it's developers building those augmented kind of user experiences on the apps, on drones. Like you mentioned too, like chargers and stuff, and aqua tech. In the end, these developers need to become aware that the network can be orchestrated by them. And that we can describe it's never against code, in a familiar way, the way they develop those applications. And we need to extend that developer experience with those applications, and not just be talking about, "no, I have slow speed here, I have fast speed.' I mean, we want to enable some really serious, interesting use cases. >> You used the term network as code infrastructure, as code has been a game changer, >> Darragh: Yup. >> in the technology industry. But, much of the infrastructure is not programmable. And so, what what you're envisioning is a world where, whether it's edge, whether it's data center or cloud, it's the same, right? >> Yeah. >> It's the same experience. The developer experience is the same. The program ability spans, that's the layer that spans all those physical locations. That's the game changer. >> Exactly, yeah. That's why we have to break down those technical boundaries inside the telco industry, and make this familiar to developers and expose them. So that's why we're working with all the major ISVs, the vendors, like you've seen here today in Cloud City. What what we're doing is we're making those never exposed functions, if you call it that way, in a way that the developers can relate to. And why that's really important, is because then they have the same experience on the mobile expert app world. But at the same time we've been here at Cloud City, what we realized is actually, the vendors are also interested in that too, because they want to talk across from each other, and build and be more rapid, and actually in the end, build more competitive, be more competitive in terms of the network implementation. Because right now, there isn't yet this value proposition of why do I need a 5G phone. Why do we need a 5G, 4G is just good enough once I have three out of four bars. (Dave laughs) We need to get that 4G to 5G transition. And the developers are going to drive that. >> Well, when customers see the applications, it's going to shine a light. We've got the mobile network operators, we've got the whole 5G networks licensed capability. We've got this edge cloud coming together, real quick. You got to be excited, Alexander. >> That is an absolutely exciting point in our development and in our evolution as an industry, and it's a huge opportunity, because as again, as I said earlier, it is game changing. It's not just an evolution, but it's really a next major step forward to do things differently. >> Guys, great having you. >> Yup. >> We've got to go, We're going to take it back to Adam Burns in the studio. Thanks for watching.

(bouncy techno music) >> Thank you, Adam. It's great working with you all week in the studio. We're here, live in Barcelona. TheCUBE's continuous coverage of Cloud City, it's unbelievable. Darragh Grealish is here, he's the chief technology officer and co-founder of 56K.Cloud. I love that name, we're going to talk about that. And Alexander Lerhmann is the director of new business development innovation at Sunrise UPC. Gents, great to see you, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. >> Thanks for having us. >> MWC, you guys made the bet to come here and aren't you glad you did? >> Yeah, we had to go through a lot of processes, but it was totally worth it, you know? >> Yeah, we're going to talk about edge cloud, right, and we're going to talk about developers, and how this whole thing's going to build out. But how do you think about the cloud? You know, we were talking to DR earlier. The cloud, people think it's a place. Increasingly people say, "no, that's actually an experience, it's a development environment." The cloud is expanding to the edge. The data center is just another edge node. How do you guys look at the edge cloud? >> Yeah well, we see the edge cloud as a huge opportunity to monetize on 5G. To bring the understanding, and the features that 5G can deliver into the next generation of developer experience. Because once we address developer experience, we're going to be able to address that next generation of user experience. >> Okay so, let's dig into a little bit about what each of your respective companies does. Tell us about 56K, and I love the name. Maybe a lot of people don't understand it, but y'know. >> Yeah, it's kind of a generation thing. So, I worked for a lot of large companies, all of them super long email addresses. At the same time, I grew up with the 56K modem. The dial-up modem, as you know it. >> Speaker: Right. >> And the transition from dial-up to broadband was massive. I mean, in terms of user experience on the web, you know. The impact on that technology that did, meant that finally you could control the user experience. You had some predictability, and we thought it was a catchy name. People relate to it. I used to work in test automations, so user experience was an important thing. And so, we kind of combine now, cloud and the 56k kind of understanding, so experience. And it's all about addressing that user experience. >> It's a game changer from a consumer experience at that time. >> Exactly. >> And that's obviously the metaphor you're using. Alexander, tell us more about Sunrise UPC, what their relationship is with 56K. >> Yeah, so Sunrise UPC obviously is a telecommunications provider. #2 largest private telecommunication provider in Switzerland. And in terms of partnership with 56K.Cloud, business started the conversation of how we can bring our world together with what 56K.Cloud is doing. We see a lot of things that we can do to kind of improve the offer from our end, to our customers in the wider community as well. >> Yeah so, this is a good example, right? Because we see, we always talk about the global telco industry, but there's a lot of localization, right? >> Alexander: Right. >> There's a lot of public policy that has to be considered. So let's get into the "Cloud" portion of your name. >> Darragh: Yeah. >> You think about things like wavelength. Which is essentially, it's really the outpost for 5G, if you think about it, right. They're not satellites, it's a platform for the development. Tell us about wavelength in 5G, the intersection there, why it's important. >> Yeah so, the edge cloud solution from Amazon, as you've heard of it, it's not just solving existing use cases or problems, it's actually creating new opportunities by combining the technologies of 5G network slicing, network exposed functions, and multiple access edge compute, you know, it's actually the platform. So, what we're trying to do is bring that developer experience at tuning that is dominated in this large ecosystem in the public cloud, stretched into the network because we need to start to see developers to see the network as an asset. Once they realize that speed, bandwidth, and latency, they're not fighting against this to deliver the best user experience. They can orchestrate this. They can be part of the challenge. And once we can get those developers to see the network as a value proposition, and this is the kind of minimum components that would build that next generation, you know, the next opportunities. So you know, you had an interview recently with Jeff Barr from AWS, and he referred to AWS waveband as, "this is not just solving existing issues." He said, "this is an opportunity," you know, combining 5G. 5G is not just 4G plus one, it's a whole stack of capabilities. And once operators realize that, they restack on public cloud, their telco stack. That's modernizing 5G, going to 5G standalone. And then once they're on public cloud, you know, dogfooding, you start to take those technologies, and you bring them to your subscriber base. But the developers that are in that subscriber base, once you address their need, they can have their creativity process, and building those super apps, like DATRON. Once they address that, then you're going to get that ultimate user experience. >> So, as a telco in the local region, you've got an advantage because you've got your presence at the edge, and you're leaning into next-gen, cloud-native, container, sort of developers. We've always said, "developers are going to win the edge." And you don't typically, most telcos anyway, we don't think of them as developer centric. You guys are different. So, can you talk about how you envision leveraging wavelength, and what the role of developers will be in your country? >> Yeah, I think for us first, it's essentially very important to kind of look at new stuff in many ways. You know, my role at the company is to look at innovative things, and to kind of think a little bit ahead, what's coming down the line, and not necessarily being revenue generating today, but maybe something that's coming, >> Dave: Right. >> sometime down the road. And I think that whole area has so much potential, it just plays into so many fields that are relevant for a telco. And it opens a new channel in many ways because, you know, we'll be able to not just sell connectivity, business, connectivity, mobile, all those products to our customers, but we actually take a more sophisticated route by working with a developer community, then I kind of augment the offering, but then we'll hit the customer. >> So we've seen CDNs and over-the-top providers come in, use your network, thank you, >> Darragh: Yes. >> for building out all that great infrastructure. It sounds like this is different. You're actually facilitating the development of new apps. >> Alexander: Yes. What's different, what kind of apps are we talking about here that you can monetize? >> I mean, it's from small to large, literally everything. I think what we've learned with the rollout of 5G is that it actually touches all industries. Maybe there's some others that shine a bit more than others, but fundamentally, it's such a big shift in terms of what we, as a telco, provides. It's not just this smartphone centric world any longer. It's much more like a building customized solution for particular customer segments, and help them in the industry. So, one thing, when I mentioned in particular was we are from Switzerland. Smart farming. Agriculture, right. And we can do a lot of good things there, if you bring all these technologies together and solve problems that this vertical has had in the past, which was literally increase food production, and be sustainable. Now you can do that, you know, in the old days that wasn't possible. >> So you're talking drones, stream data, and 5G enables that. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. I mean, that's a whole new world, and that is a great monetization opportunity. Who owns the data in that example? Is that a discussion that's going on, or? >> Well, who owns the data? The customer owns the data, right. If it's his or hers. >> Dave: Yeah good, right answer. (all laugh) >> How about when you think about 5G features, network slicing, other capabilities. How do you see 56K taking advantage of those, and working with the developer community to really exploit them? >> Yeah so, we've been more than four years already, working in public clouds, primarily on AWS. And what we've done is, you know, a lot of that cloud native migrations we've done, you know, we've seen those technologies. So what we're trying to do is remap that. And how we're doing this is we're going to be launching the 5G developer platform. It's going to be global ecosystem, open ecosystem, you can go and check it out, it's 5g.dev, literally. And in there, what we want to do is expose these new features of 5G, not just in telco language. So we're launching these kind of networks that slice as code, so that you have this infrastructure as code, in the public cloud domain. This is what resonates with developers. You want to stretch that, and like I mentioned earlier, make that network slices code. So search features, and network slicing dynamic narrative slicing is enhanced mobile broadband, geofence ways, speed, bandwidth, ultra reliable low-latency. I've seen it with my own eyes. You can single digit milliseconds. It's ridiculous how accurate it can be. And then there is the massive IOT. So as you see in IOT, but actually bringing narrowband IOT really at scale, and not just you needing technical boundaries, or contractual boundaries to access that, the developer has the same experiences as in public cloud. And so we want to monetize this to a global 5G. >> Single digit latency, right? So I mean, you know what's going to happen. I think that's why I love the name so much, right. And what happened is people being the consumer at first it was like, "oh my gosh!" And then what happened is the developer community said, "look at all the great data apps we can push in." And then now it's just orders of magnitude more that we can do. And we saw video in the early days of video, it was jittery. And so, it's very exciting times. I think about the data center, and how virtualization occurred there. And, it was almost like force fitting an old model into a new model, where the cloud was setting the definition of that new model. And now they're kind of catching up. Telcos are in a similar situation, right? They've got very purpose-built infrastructure. You guys obviously are more forward-thinking in regard, but is there a parallel there with the old sort of virtualization days, and how you're modernizing the network? What's the state of the network today, and where do you see it going? >> Yeah, we've always looked at the network as our prime differentiator, and we had to be on top of new things, and make sure that it is top notch. That's sort of an indisputable- >> Dave: Table stakes. >> Table stakes, exactly. And so I guess from that point alone, you need to continue to look at how can you improve it? How can you make it more efficient? How can we make it more stable? I mean, frictionless is for us, a key word in that context. And I think with those new technologies, there's just more that we can do. And now we can actually, and this is the beauty of it that comes with 5G and all these new cloud technologies. We can actually make the network our offering again, by delivering network enabled services, which is something that comes with 5G that wasn't there with 4G. >> Yeah, those value added services are key. And it's almost like, I think about the virtualization days, but now we're bringing cloud-native containerization, Kubernetes, Docker, to this new world, and you're doing it on a cloud platform. So that's what's different about the data centers. Data centers were trying to do it on general purpose platforms that were kind of being refactored and forced into it. But the cloud has shown us the way, and it's different, isn't it? >> Yeah, exactly. Well, what has shown to us is that we know we no longer have to sell top down or anything. What we're doing is we have to sell developer to developer. There is multiple avenues, not just SIM cards, with subscribers or large enterprises wanting a thousand SIM cards. It's past that. Now it's developers building those augmented kind of user experiences on the apps, on drones. Like you mentioned too, like chargers and stuff, and aqua tech. In the end, these developers need to become aware that the network can be orchestrated by them. And that we can describe it's never against code, in a familiar way, the way they develop those applications. And we need to extend that developer experience with those applications, and not just be talking about, "no, I have slow speed here, I have fast speed.' I mean, we want to enable some really serious, interesting use cases. >> You used the term network as code infrastructure, as code has been a game changer, >> Darragh: Yup. >> in the technology industry. But, much of the infrastructure is not programmable. And so, what what you're envisioning is a world where, whether it's edge, whether it's data center or cloud, it's the same, right? >> Yeah. >> It's the same experience. The developer experience is the same. The program ability spans, that's the layer that spans all those physical locations. That's the game changer. >> Exactly, yeah. That's why we have to break down those technical boundaries inside the telco industry, and make this familiar to developers and expose them. So that's why we're working with all the major ISVs, the vendors, like you've seen here today in Cloud City. What what we're doing is we're making those never exposed functions, if you call it that way, in a way that the developers can relate to. And why that's really important, is because then they have the same experience on the mobile expert app world. But at the same time we've been here at Cloud City, what we realized is actually, the vendors are also interested in that too, because they want to talk across from each other, and build and be more rapid, and actually in the end, build more competitive, be more competitive in terms of the network implementation. Because right now, there isn't yet this value proposition of why do I need a 5G phone. Why do we need a 5G, 4G is just good enough once I have three out of four bars. (Dave laughs) We need to get that 4G to 5G transition. And the developers are going to drive that. >> Well, when customers see the applications, it's going to shine a light. We've got the mobile network operators, we've got the whole 5G networks licensed capability. We've got this edge cloud coming together, real quick. You got to be excited, Alexander. >> That is an absolutely exciting point in our development and in our evolution as an industry, and it's a huge opportunity, because as again, as I said earlier, it is game changing. It's not just an evolution, but it's really a next major step forward to do things differently. >> Guys, great having you. >> Yup. >> We've got to go, We're going to take it back to Adam Burns in the studio. Thanks for watching.