>> 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)

(light corporate music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to VMware Explore 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. Our 12th year covering VMware's User Conference, formerly known as VMworld, now rebranded as VMware Explore. Two great cube alumnus coming down the cube. Ricky Cooper, SVP, Worldwide Partner Commercials VMware, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> We just had a great chat- >> Good to see you again. >> With the Discovery and, of course, Joseph George, vice president of Compute Industry Alliances. Great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> So guys this year is very curious in VMware. A lot goin' on, the name change, the event. Big, big move. Bold move. And then they changed the name of the event. Then Broadcom buys them. A lot of speculation, but at the end of the day, this conference kind of, people were wondering what would be the barometer of the event. We're reporting this morning on the keynote analysis. Very good mojo in the keynote. Very transparent about the Broadcom relationship. The expo floor last night was buzzing. >> Mhm. >> I mean, this is not a show that's lookin' like it's going to be, ya' know, going down. >> Yeah. >> This is clearly a wave. We're calling it Super Cloud. Multi-Cloud's their theme. Clearly the cloud's happenin'. We not to date ourselves, but 2013 we were discussing on theCUBE- >> We talked about that. Yeah. Yeah. >> Discover about DevOps infrastructure as code- >> Mhm. >> We're full realization now of that. >> Yep. >> This is where we're at. You guys had a great partnership with VMware and HPE. Talk about where you guys see this coming together because customers are refactoring. They are lookin' at Cloud Native. The whole Broadcom visibility to the VMware customer bases activated them. They're here and they're leaning in. >> Yeah. >> What's going on? >> Yeah. Absolutely. We're seeing a renewed interest now as customers are looking at their entire infrastructure, bottoms up, all the way up the stack, and the notion of a hybrid cloud, where you've got some visibility and control of your data and your infrastructure and your applications, customers want to live in that sort of a cloud environment and so we're seeing a renewed interest. A lot of conversations we're having with customers now, a lot of customers committing to that model where they have applications and workloads running at the Edge, in their data center, and in the public cloud in a lot of cases, but having that mobility, having that control, being able to have security in their own, you know, in their control. There's a lot that you can do there and, obviously, partnering with VMware. We've been partners for so long. >> 20 years about. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. At least 20 years, back when they invented stuff, they were inventing way- >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> VMware's got a very technical culture, but Ricky, I got to say that, you know, we commented earlier when Raghu was on, the CEO, now CEO, I mean, legendary product. I sent the trajectory to VMware. Everyone knows that. VMware, I can't know whether to tell it was VMware or HP, HP before HPE, coined hybrid- >> Yeah. >> 'Cause you guys were both on. I can't recall, Dave, which company coined it first, but it was either one of you guys. Nobody else was there. >> It was the partnership. >> Yes. I- (cross talking) >> They had a big thing with Pat Gelsinger. Dave, remember when he said, you know, he got in my grill on theCUBE live? But now you see- >> But if you focus on that Multi-Cloud aspect, right? So you've got a situation where our customers are looking at Multi-Cloud and they're looking at it not just as a flash in the pan. This is here for five years, 10 years, 20 years. Okay. So what does that mean then to our partners and to our distributors? You're seeing a whole seed change. You're seeing partners now looking at this. So, look at the OEMs, you know, the ones that have historically been vSphere customers are now saying, they're coming in droves saying, okay, what is the next step? Well, how can I be a Multi-Cloud partner with you? >> Yep. Right. >> How can I look at other aspects that we're driving here together? So, you know, GreenLake is a great example. We keep going back to GreenLake and we are partaking in GreenLake at the moment. The real big thing for us is going to be, right, let's make sure that we've got the agreements in place that support this SaaS and subscription motion going forward and then the sky's the limit for us. >> You're pluggin' that right into GreenLake, right? >> Well, here's why. Here's why. So customers are loving the fact that they can go to a public cloud and they can get an SLA. They come to a, you know, an On-Premise. You've got the hardware, you've got the software, you've got the, you know, the guys on board to maintain this through its life cycle. >> Right. I mean, this is complicated stuff. >> Yeah. >> Now we've got a situation where you can say, hey, we can get an SLA On-Premise. >> Yeah. And I think what you're seeing is it's very analogous to having a financial advisor just manage your portfolio. You're taking care of just submitting money. That's really a lot of what the customers have done with the public cloud, but now, a lot of these customers are getting savvy and they have been working with VMware Technologies and HPE for so long. They've got expertise. They know how they want their workloads architected. Now, we've given them a model where they can leverage the Cloud platform to be able to do this, whether it's On-Premise, The Edge, or in the public cloud, leveraging HPE GreenLake and VMware. >> Is it predominantly or exclusively a managed service or do you find some customers saying, hey, we want to manage ourself? How, what are you seeing is the mix there? >> It is not predominantly managed services right now. We're actually, as we are growing, last time we talked to HPE Discover we talked about a whole bunch of new services that we've added to our catalog. It's growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of folks are definitely interested in the pay as you go, obviously, the financial model, but are now getting exposed to all the other management that can happen. There are managed services capabilities, but actually running it as a service with your systems On-Prem is a phenomenal idea for all these customers and they're opening their eyes to some new ways to service their customers better. >> And another phenomenon we're seeing there is where partners, such as HPA, using other partners for various areas of their services implementation as well. So that's another phenomenon, you know? You're seeing the resale motion now going into a lot more of the services motion. >> It's interesting too, you know, I mean, the digital modernization that's goin' on. The transformation, whatever you want to call it, is complicated. >> Yeah. >> That's clear. One of the things I liked about the keynote today was the concept of cloud chaos. >> Yeah. >> Because we've been saying, you know, quoting Andy Grove at Intel, "Let chaos rain and rain in the chaos." >> Mhm. >> And when you have inflection points, complexity, which is the chaos, needs to be solved and whoever solves it kicks the inflection point, that's up into the right. So- >> Prime idea right here. Yeah. >> So GreenLake is- >> Well, also look at the distribution model and how that's changed. A couple of points on a deal. Now they're saying, "I'll be your aggregator. I'll take the strain and I'll give you scale." You know? "I'll give you VMware Scale for all, you know, for all of the various different partners, et cetera." >> Yeah. So let's break this down because this is, I think, a key point. So complexity is good, but the old model in the Enterprise market was- >> Sure. >> You solve complexity with more complexity. >> Yeah. >> And everybody wins. Oh, yeah! We're locked in! That's not what the market wants. They want some self-service. They want, as a service, they want easy. Developer first security data ops, DevOps, is already in the cycle, so they're going to want simpler. >> Yeah. >> Easier. Faster. >> And this is kind of why I'll say, for the big announcement today here at VMware Explore, around the VMware vSphere Distributed Services Engine, Project Monterey- >> Yeah. >> That we've talked about for so long, HPE and VMware and AMD, with the Pensando DPU, actually work together to engineer a solution for exactly that. The capabilities are fairly straightforward in terms of the technologies, but actually doing the work to do integration, joint engineering, make sure that this is simple and easy and able to be running HPE GreenLake, that's- >> That's invested in Pensando, right? >> We are. >> We're all investors. Yeah. >> What's the benefit of that? What's, that's a great point you made. What's the value to the customer, bottom line? That deep co-engineering, co-partnering, what does it deliver that others don't do? >> Yeah. Well, I think one example would be, you know, a lot of vendors can say we support it. >> Yep. >> That's great. That's actually a really good move, supporting it. It can be resold. That's another great move. I'm not mechanically inclined to where I would go build my own car. I'll go to a dealership and actually buy one that I can press the button and I can start it and I can do what I need to do with my car and that's really what this does is the engineering work that's gone on between our two companies and AMD Pensando, as well as the business work to make that simple and easy, that transaction to work, and then to be able to make it available as a service, is really what made, it's, that's why it's such a winner winner with our- >> But it's also a lower cost out of the box. >> Yep. >> Right. >> So you get in whatever. Let's call it 20%. Okay? But there's, it's nuanced because you're also on a new technology curve- >> Right. >> And you're able to absorb modern apps, like, you know, we use that term as a bromide, but when I say modern apps, I mean data-rich apps, you know, things that are more AI-driven not the conventional, not that people aren't doing, you know, SAP and CRM, they are, but there's a whole slew of new apps that are coming in that, you know, traditional architectures aren't well-suited to handle from a price performance standpoint. This changes that doesn't it? >> Well, you think also of, you know, going to the next stage, which is to go to market between the two organizations that before. At the moment, you know, HPE's running off doing various different things. We were running off to it again, it's that chaos that you're talking about. In cloud chaos, you got to go to market chaos. >> Yeah. >> But by simplifying four or five things, what are we going to do really well together? How do we embed those in GreenLake- >> Mhm. >> And be known in the marketplace for these solutions? Then you get a, you know, an organization that's really behind the go to market. You can help with sales activation the enablement, you know, and then we benefit from the scale of HPE. >> Yeah. >> What are those solutions I mean? Is it just, is it I.S.? Is it, you know, compute storage? >> Yeah. >> Is it, you know, specific, you know, SAP? Is it VDI? What are you seeing out there? >> So right now, for this specific technology, we're educating our customers on what that could be and, at its core, this solution allows customers to take services that normally and traditionally run on the compute system and run on a DPU now with Project Monterey, and this is now allowing customers to think about, okay, where are their use cases. So I'm, rather than going and, say, use it for this, we're allowing our customers to explore and say, okay, here's where it makes sense. Where do I have workloads that are using a lot of compute cycles on services at the compute level that could be somewhere else like networking as a great example, right? And allowing more of those compute cycles to be available. So where there are performance requirements for an application, where there is timely response that's needed for, you know, for results to be able to take action on, to be able to get insight from data really quick, those are places where we're starting to see those services moving onto something like a DPU and that's where this makes a whole lot more sense. >> Okay. So, to get this right, you got the hybrid cloud, right? >> [Ricky And Joseph] Yes. >> You got GreenLake and you got the distributed engine. What's that called the- >> For, it's HPE ProLiant- >> ProLiant with- >> The VMware- >> With vSphere. >> That's the compute- >> Distributed. >> Okay. So does the customer, how do you guys implement that with the customer? All three at the same time or they mix and match? What's that? How does that work? >> All three of those components. Yeah. So the beauty of the HP ProLiant with VMware vSphere-distributed services engine- >> Mhm. >> Also known as Project Monterey for those that are keeping notes at home- >> Mhm. >> It's, again, already pre-engineered. So we've already worked through all the mechanics of how you would have to do this. So it's not something you have to go figure out how you build, get deployment, you know, work through those details. That's already done. It is available through HPE GreenLake. So you can go and actually get it as a service in partnership with our customer, our friends here at VMware, and because, if you're familiar and comfortable with all the things that HP ProLiant has done from a security perspective, from a reliability perspective, trusted supply chain, all those sorts of things, you're getting all of that with this particular (indistinct). >> Sumit Dhawan had a great quote on theCUBE just an hour or so ago. He said you have to be early to be first. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> I love that quote. Okay. So you were- >> I fought the urge. >> You were first. You were probably a little early, but do you have a lead? I know you're going to say yes, okay. Let's just- >> Okay. >> Let's just assume that. >> Okay. Yeah. >> Relative to the competition, how do you know? How do you determine that? >> If we have a lead or not? >> Yeah. If you lead. If you're the best. >> We go to the source of the truth which is our customers. >> And what do they tell you? What do you look at and say, okay, now, I mean, when you have that honest conversation and say, okay, we are, we're first, we're early. We're keeping our lead. What are the things that you- >> I'll say it this way. I'll say it this way. We've been in a lot of businesses where there, where we do compete head-to-head in a lot of places. >> Mhm. >> And we know how that sales process normally works. We're seeing a different motion from our customers. When we talk about HPE GreenLake, there's not a lot of back and forth on, okay, well, let me go shop around. It is HP Green. Let's talk about how we actually build this solution. >> And I can tell you, from a VMware perspective, our customers are asking us for this the other way around. So that's a great sign is that, hey, we need to see this partnership come together in GreenLake. >> Yeah. >> It's the old adage that Amazon used to coin and Andy Jassy, you know, they do the undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> [Ricky And Joseph] Yeah. >> A lot of that's now Cloud operations. >> Mhm. >> Underneath it is infrastructure's code to the developer. >> That's right. >> That's at scale. >> That's right. >> And so you got a lot of heavy lifting being done with GreenLake- >> Right. >> Which is why there's no objections probably. >> Right. >> What's the choice? What are you going to shop? >> Yeah. >> There's nothing to shop around. >> Yeah, exactly. And then we've got, you know, that is really icing on the cake that we've, you know, that we've been building for quite some time and there is an understanding in the market that what we do with our infrastructure is hardened from a reliability and quality perspective. Like, times are tough right now. Supply chain issues, all that stuff. We've talked, all talked about it, but at HPE, we don't skimp on quality. We're going to spend the dollars and time on making sure we got reliability and security built in. It's really important to us. >> We had a great use case. The storage team, they were provisioning with containers. >> Yes. >> Storage is a service instantly we're seeing with you guys with VMware. Your customers' bringing in a lot of that into the mix as well. I got to ask 'cause every event we talk about AI and machine learning- >> Mhm. >> Automation and DevOps are now infiltrating in with the CICD pipeline. Security and data become a big conversation. >> [Ricky And Joseph] Agreed. >> Okay. So how do you guys look at that? Okay. You sold me on Green. Like, I've been a big fan from day one. Now, it's got maturity on it. I know it's going to get a lot more headroom to do. There's still a lot of work to do, but directionally it's pretty accurate, you know? It's going to be a success. There's still concern about security, the data layer. That's agnostic of environment, private cloud, hybrid, public, and Edge. So that's important and security- >> Great. >> Has got a huge service area. >> Yeah. >> These are on working progress. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> How do you guys view those? >> I think you've just hit the net on the head. I mean, I was in the press and journalist meetings yesterday and our answer was exactly the same. There is still so much work that can be done here and, you know, I don't think anybody is really emerging as a true leader. It's just a continuation of, you know, tryin' to get that right because it is what is the most important thing to our customers. >> Right. >> And the industry is really sort of catching up to that. >> And, you know, when you start talking about privacy and when you, it's not just about company information. It's about individuals' information. It's about, you know, information that, if exposed, actually could have real impact on people. >> Mhm. >> So it's more than just an I.T. problem. It is actually, and from HPE's perspective, security starts from when we're picking our suppliers for our components. Like, there are processes that we put into our entire trusted supply chain from the factory on the way up. I liken it to my golf swing. My golf swing. I slice right like you wouldn't believe. (John laughing) But when I go to the golf pros, they start me back at the mechanics, the foundational pieces. Here's where the problems are and start workin' on that. So my view is, our view is, if your infrastructure is not secure, you're goin' to have troubles with security as you go further up. >> Stay in the sandbox. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So to speak, you know, they're driving range on the golf analogy there. I love that. Talk about supply chain security real quick because you mentioned supply chain on the hardware side. You're seeing a lot of open source and supply chain in software, trusted software. >> Yep. >> How does GreenLake look at that? How do you guys view that piece of it? That's an important part. >> Yeah. Security is one of the key pillars that we're actually driving as a company right now. As I said, it's important to our customers as they're making purchasing decisions and we're looking at it from the infrastructure all the way up to the actual service itself and that's the beauty of having something like HPE GreenLake. We don't have to pick, is the infrastructure or the middle where, or the top of stack application- >> It's (indistinct), right? >> It's all of it. >> Yeah. >> It's all of it. That matters. >> Quick question on the ecosystem posture. So- >> Sure. >> I remember when HP was, you know, one company and then the GSIs were a little weird with HP because of EDS, you know? You had data protector so we weren't really chatting up Veeam at the time, right? And as soon as the split happened, ecosystem exploded. Now you have a situation where you, Broadcom, is acquiring VMware. You guys, big Broadcom customer. Has your attitude changed or has it not because, oh, we meet with the customers already. Well, you've always said that, but have you have leaned in more? I mean, culturally, is HPE now saying, hmm, now we have some real opportunities to partner in new ways that we don't have to sleep with one eye open, maybe. (John laughing) >> So first of all, VMware and HPE, we've got a variety of different partners. We always have. >> Mhm. >> Well before any Broadcom announcement came along. >> Yeah, sure. >> We've been working with a variety of partners. >> And that hasn't changed. >> And that hasn't changed. And, if your question is, has our posture toward VMware changed at all, the answer's absolutely not. We believe in what VMware is doing. We believe in what our customers are doing with VMware and we're going to continue to work with VMware and partner with the (indistinct). >> And of course, you know, we had to spin out ourselves in November of last year, which I worked on, you know, the whole Dell thing. >> Yeah. We still had the same chairman. >> Yeah. There- (Dave chuckling) >> Yeah, but since then, I think what's really become very apparent and not, it's not just with HPE, but with many of our partners, many of the OEM partners, the opportunity in front of us is vast and we need to rely on each other to help us as, you know, solve the customer problems that are out there. So there's a willingness to overlook some things that, in the past, may have been, you know, barriers. >> But it's important to note also that it's not that we have not had history- >> Yeah. >> Right? Over, we've got over 200,000 customers join- >> Hundreds of millions of dollars of business- >> 100,000, over 10,000, or 100,000 channel partners that we all have in common. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yep. >> There's numerous- >> And independent of the whole Broadcom overhang there. >> Yeah. >> There's the ecosystem floor. >> Yeah. >> The expo floor. >> Right. >> I mean, it's vibrant. I mean, there's clearly a wave coming, Ricky. We talked about this briefly at HPE Discover. I want to get an update from your perspectives, both of you, if you don't mind weighing in on this. Clearly, the wave, we're calling it the Super Cloud, 'cause it's not just Multi-Cloud. It's completely different looking successes- >> Smart Cloud. >> It's not just vendors. It's also the customers turning into clouds themselves. You look at Goldman Sachs and- >> Yep. >> You know, I think every vertical will have its own power law of Cloud players in the future. We believe that to be true. We're still testing that assumption, but it's trending in when you got OPEX- >> [Ricky And Joseph] Right. >> Has to go to in-fund statement- >> Yeah. >> CapEx goes too. Thanks for the Cloud. All that's good, but there's a wave coming- >> Yeah. >> And we're trying to identify it. What do you guys see as this wave 'cause beyond Multi-Cloud and the obvious nature of that will end up happening as a state and what happens beyond that interoperability piece, that's a whole other story, and that's what everyone's fighting for, but everyone out in that ecosystem, it's a big wave coming. They've got their surfboards. They're ready to go. So what do you guys see? What is the next wave that everyone's jacked up about here? >> Well, I think that the Multi-Cloud is obviously at the epicenter. You know, if you look at the results that are coming in, a lot of our customers, this is what's leading the discussion and now we're in a position where, you know, we've brought many companies over the last few years. They're starting to come to fruition. They're starting to play a role in, you know, how we're moving forward. >> Yeah. >> Some of those are a bit more applicable to the commercial space. We're finding commercial customers that never bought from us before. Never. Hundreds and hundreds are coming through our partner networks every single quarter, you know? So brand new to VMware. The trick then is how do you nurture them? How do you encourage them? >> So new logos are comin' in. >> New logos are coming in all the time, all the time, from, you know, from across the ecosystem. It's not just the OEMs. It's all the way back- >> So the ecosystem's back of VMware. >> Unbelievably. So what are we doing to help that? There's two big things that we've announced in the recent weeks is that Partner Connect 2.0. When I talked to you about Multi-Cloud and what the (indistinct), you know, the customers are doing, you see that trend. Four, five different separate clouds that we've got here. The next piece is that they're changing their business models with the partners. Their services is becoming more and more apparent, et cetera, you know? And the use of other partners to do other services, deployment, or this stuff is becoming prevalent. Then you've got the distributors that I talked about with their, you know, their, then you route to market, then you route to business. So how do you encapsulate all of that and ensure your rewarding partners on all aspects of that? Whether it's deployment, whether it's test and depth, it's a points-based system we've put in place now- >> It's a big pie that's developing. The market's getting bigger. >> It's getting so much bigger. And then you help- >> I know you agree, obviously, with that. >> Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, I think for a long time we were asking the question of, is it going to be there or is it going to be here? Which was the wrong question. (indistinct cross talking) Now it's everything. >> Yeah. >> And what I think that, what we're seeing in the ecosystem, is that people are finding the spots that, where they're going to play. Am I going to be on the Edge? >> Yeah. >> Am I going to be on Analytics Play? Am I going to be, you know, Cloud Transition Play? There's a lot of players are now emerging and saying, we're- >> Yeah. >> We're, we now have a place, a part to play. And having that industry view not just of, you know, a commercial customer at that level, but the two of us are lookin' at Teleco, are looking at financial services, at healthcare, at manufacturing. How do these new ecosystem players fit into the- >> (indistinct) lifting. Everyone can see their position there. >> Right. >> We're now being asked for simplicity and talk to me about partner profitability. >> Yes. >> How do I know where to focus my efforts? Am I spread too thin? And, you know, that's, and my advice that the partner ecosystem out there is, hey, let's pick out spots together. Let's really go to, and then strategic solutions that we were talking about is a good example of that. >> Yeah. >> Sounds like composability to me, but not to go back- (laughing) Guys, thanks for comin' on. I think there's a big market there. I think the fog is lifted. People seeing their spot. There's value there. Value creation equals reward. >> Yeah. >> Simplicity. Ease of use. This is the new normal. Great job. Thanks for coming on and sharing. (cross talking) Okay. Back to live coverage after this short break with more day one coverage here from the blue set here in Moscone. (light corporate music)

>> Announcer: TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022, theCube's continuous wall to wall coverage, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Keith Basil is here as the General Manager for the Edge Business Unit at SUSE. Keith, welcome to theCube, man good to see you. >> Great to be here, it's my first time here and I've seen many shows and you guys are the best. >> Thanks you. >> Thank you very much. >> Big fans of SUSE you know, we've had Melissa on several times. >> Yes. >> Let's start with kind of what you guys are doing here at Discover. >> Well, we're here to support our wonderful partner HPE, as you know SUSE's products and services are now being integrated into the GreenLake offering. So that's very exciting for us. >> Yeah. Now tell us about your background. It's quite interesting you've kind of been in the mix in some really cool places. Tell us a little bit about yourself. >> Probably the most relevant was I used to work at Red Hat, I was a Product Manager working in security for OpenStack and OpenShift working with DOD customers in the intelligence community. Left Red Hat to go to Rancher, started out there as VP of Edge Solutions and then transitioned over to VP of Product for all of Rancher. And then obviously we know SUSE acquired Rancher and as of November 1st, of 2020, I think it was. >> Dave: 2020. >> Yeah, yeah time is flying. I came over, I still remained VP of Product for Rancher for Cloud Native Infrastructure. And I was working on the edge strategy for SUSE and about four months ago we internally built three business units, one for the Linux business, one for enterprise container management, basically the Rancher business, and then the newly minted business unit was the Edge business. And I was offered the role to be GM for that business unit and I happily accepted it. >> Very cool. I mean the market dynamics since the 2018 have changed dramatically, IBM bought Red Hat. A lot of customers said, "Hmm let's see what other alternatives are out there." SUSE popped its head up. You know, Melissa's been quite, you know forthcoming about that. And then you acquire Rancher in 2020, IPO in 2021. That kind of gives you another tailwind. So there's a new market when you go from 2018 to 2022, it's a completely changed dynamic. >> Yes and I'm going to answer your question from the Rancher perspective first, because as we were at Rancher, we had experimented with different flavors of the underlying OS underneath Kubernetes or Kubernetes offerings. And we had, as I said, different flavors, we weren't really operating system people for example. And so post-acquisition, you know, one of my internal roles was to bring the two halves of the house together, the philosophies together where you had a cloud native side in the form of Rancher, very progressive leading innovative products with Rancher with K3s for example. And then you had, you know, really strong enterprise roots around compliance and security, secure supply chain with the enterprise grade Linux. And what we found out was SUSE had been building a version of Linux called SLE Micro, and it was perfectly designed for Edge. And so what we've done over that time period since the acquisition is that we've brought those two things together. And now we're using Kubernetes directives and philosophies to manage all the way down to the operating system. And it is a winning strategy for our customers. And we're really excited about that. >> And what does that product look like? Is that a managed service? How are customers consuming that? >> It could be a managed service, it's something that our managed service providers could embrace and offer to their customers. But we have some customers who are very sophisticated who want to do the whole thing themselves. And so they stand up Rancher, you know at a centralized location at cloud GreenLake for example which is why this is very relevant. And then that control plane if you will, manages thousands of downstream clusters that are running K3s at these Edge locations. And so that's what the complete stack looks like. And so when you add the Linux capability to that scenario we can now roll a new operating system, new kernel, CVE updates, build that as an OCI container image registry format, right? Put that into a registry and then have that thing cascade down through all the downstream clusters and up through a rolling window upgrade of the operating system underneath Kubernetes. And it is a tremendous amount of value when you talk to customers that have this massive scale. >> What's the impact of that, just take us through what happens next. Is it faster? Is it more performant? Is it more reliable? Is it processing data at the Edge? What's the impact of the customer? >> Yes, the answer is yes to that. So let's actually talk about one customer that we we highlighted in our keynote, which is Home Depot. So as we know, Kubernetes is on fire, right? It is the technology everybody's after. So by being in demand, the skills needed, the people shortage is real and people are commanding very high, you know, salaries. And so it's hard to attract talent is the bottom line. And so using our software and our solution and our approach it allows people to scale their existing teams to preserve those precious human resources and that human capital. So that now you can take a team of seven people and manage let's say 3000 downstream stores. >> Yeah it's like the old SRE model for DevOps. >> Correct. >> It's not servers they're managing one to many. >> Yes. >> One to many clusters. >> Correct so you've got the cluster, the life cycle of the cluster. You already have the application life cycle with the classic DevOps. And now what we've built and added to the stack is going down one step further, clicking down if you will to managing the life cycle of the operating system. So you have the SUSE enterprise build chain, all the value, the goodness, compliance, security. Again, all of that comes with that build process. And now we're hooking that into a cloud native flow that ends up downstream in our customers. >> So what I'm hearing is your Edge strategy is not some kind of bespoke, "Hey, I'm going after Edge." It connects to the entire value chain. >> Yes, yeah it's a great point. We want to reuse the existing philosophies that are being used today. We don't want to create something net new, cause that's really the point in leverage that we get by having these teams, you know, do these things at scale. Another point I'm going to make here is that we've defined the Edge into three segments. One is the near Edge, which is the realm of the-- >> I was going to ask about this, great. >> The telecommunications companies. So those use cases and profiles look very different. They're almost data center lite, right? So you've had regional locations, central offices where they're standing up gear classic to you machines, right? So things you find from HPE, for example. And then once you get on the other side of the access device right? The cable modem, the router, whatever it is you get into what we call the far Edge. And this is where the majority of the use cases reside. This is where the diversity of use cases presents itself as well. >> Also security challenges. >> Security challenges. Yes and we can talk about that following in a moment. And then finally, if you look at that far Edge as a box, right? Think of it as a layer two domain, a network. Inside that location, on that network you'll have industrial IOT devices. Those devices are too small to run a full blown operating system such as Linux and Kubernetes in the stack but they do have software on them, right? So we need to be able to discover those devices and manage those devices and pull data from those devices and do it in a cloud native way. So that's what we called the tiny Edge. And I stole that name from the folks over at Microsoft. Kate and Edrick are are leading a project upstream called Akri, A-K-R-I, and we are very much heavily involved in Akri because it will discover the industrial IOT devices and plug those into a local Kubernetes cluster running at that location. >> And Home Depot would fit into the near edge is that correct? >> Yes. >> Yeah okay. >> So each Home Depot store, just to bring it home, is a far Edge location and they have over 2,600 of these locations. >> So far Edge? You would put far Edge? >> Keith: Far Edge yes. >> Far edge, okay. >> John: Near edge is like Metro. Think of Metro. >> And Teleco, communication, service providers MSOs, multi-service operators. Those guys are-- >> Near Edge. >> The near edge, yes. >> Don't you think, John's been asking all week about machine learning and AI, in that tiny Edge. We think there's going to be a lot of AI influencing. >> Keith: Oh absolutely. >> Real time. And it actually is going to need some kind of lighter weight you know, platform. How do you fit into that? >> So going on this, like this model I just described if you go back and look at the SUSECON 2022 demo keynote that I did, we actually on stage stood up that exact stack. So we had a single Intel nook running SLE Micro as we mentioned earlier, running K3s and we plugged into that device, a USB camera which was automatically detected and it loaded Akri and gave us a driver to plug it into a container. Now, to answer your question, that is the point in time where we bring in the ML and the AI, the inference and the pattern recognition, because that camera when you showed the SUSE plush doll, it actually recognized it and put a QR code up on the screen. So that's where it all comes together. So we tried to showcase that in a complete demo. >> Last week, I was here in Vegas for an event Amazon and AWS put on called re:Mars, machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. >> Okay. >> Kind of but basically for me was an industrial edge show. Cause The space is the ultimate like glam to edge is like, you're doing stuff in space that's pretty edgy so to speak, pun intended. But the industrial side of the Edge is going to, we think, accelerate with machine learning. >> Keith: Absolutely. >> And with these kinds of new portable I won't say flash compute or just like connected power sources software. The industrial is going to move really fast. We've been kind of in a snails pace at the Edge, in my opinion. What's your reaction to that? Do you think we're going to see a mass acceleration of growth at the Edge industrial, basically physical, the physical world. >> Yes, first I agree with your assessment okay, wholeheartedly, so much so that it's my strategy to go after the tiny Edge space and be a leader in the industrial IOT space from an open source perspective. So yes. So a few things to answer your question we do have K3s in space. We have a customer partner called Hypergiant where they've launched satellites with K3s running in space same model, that's a far Edge location, probably the farthest Edge location we have. >> John: Deep Edge, deep space. >> Here at HPE Discover, we have a business unit called SUSE RGS, Rancher Government Services, which focuses on the US government and DOD and IC, right? So little bit of the world that I used to work in my past career. Brandon Gulla the CTO of of that unit gave a great presentation about what we call the tactical Edge. And so the same technology that we're using on the commercial and the manufacturing side. >> Like the Jedi contract, the tactical military Edge I think. >> Yes so imagine some of these military grade industrial IOT devices in a disconnected environment. The same software stack and technology would apply to that use case as well. >> So basically the tactical Edge is life? We're humans, we're at the Edge? >> Or it's maintenance, right? So maybe it's pulling sensors from aircraft, Humvees, submarines and doing predictive analysis on the maintenance for those items, those assets. >> All these different Edges, they underscore the diversity that you were just talking Keith and we also see a new hardware architecture emerging, a lot of arm based stuff. Just take a look at what Tesla's doing at the tiny Edge. Keith Basil, thanks so much. >> Sure. >> For coming on theCube. >> John: Great to have you. >> Grateful to be here. >> Awesome story. Okay and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier. This is day three of HPE Discover 2022. You're watching theCube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, I'm back. I'm John Furrier with theCube. We're here in the middle of the action at Mobile World Congress at Cloud City is where the action is. Danielle Royston and Telco DR. Digital disruption here happening. This next interview I did with Casey Choi, the Executive Vice President at Samsung. I did this remotely. He couldn't be here in person. We wanted to bring him in for a conversation. I had a chance to record this with him. He talks about the intelligent Human Edge or Industry 4.0. It was about Edge computing, Samsung as a leader. Obviously we know what they do. They're part of this IOT revolution, Casey Choi, brilliant executive I really enjoyed my conversation. Take a listen. (upbeat music) Welcome to theCube's coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. I'm John Furrier host of theCube. We're here with Cube alumni, Casey Choi's Executive Vice President and GM of the Global Mobile B2B Team, Communications Team at Samsung. Casey, great to see you. Thank you for coming off for the special Remote Mobile World Congress. We're here in person, but also hybrid event. We got a lot of remote interviews. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. >> John. Great to see you. Great as always to be with you and great to be at least here, virtually with the team and in Barcelona from WC. >> You know, in Samsung, we think about the edge. You are leading a team that's driving this innovation. We've talked in the past about Industry 4.0, but the innovation at the intelligent edge, human edge is a big part of it, with 5G. It's just another G, but it's not just another G you got to have a backbone. You got to have a back haul. You got to have an interconnection. You have commercial, not just consumer technology. So the edge is becoming both this human and device commercial environment. So the industry is quickly moving to this. You call it the 4.0 trend. What do you see happening? This is a clear change over the Telco is not what it used to be. Change is coming fast. A lot of disruption, what's your view? >> Yeah, I think we see a number of things done. And certainly from our perspective, which is, I think we've got somewhat of a unique view on this because of our huge focus really in consumer use and attitudes. And certainly it's been informed by what we've seen, what we've all collectively seen over the last year and a half or so, and are still seeing today. And I think one of the things that we're certainly experiencing is I think the edge is it's expanding further out. I think it's also getting more tightly coupled in many respects to the human factor. And it's not just a set of billions of discrete sensors anymore. And I think the evolution of our thinking around this has changed quite a bit from the IOT Version One variant of this. We put more of what I would call billions of these things, communicating all kinds of information, either to the cloud or the data centers and doing it in a very voluminous way. And what we're saying is with the advent of more the human to machine interface, and certainly the capabilities that we're saying both on the network and the device side, it's really redefining how we're thinking about edge. And certainly here at Samsung and with some of our partners, and we're starting to call this more of the intelligent human edge, where the human factor really begins to play a big role in how we're defining the Internet Of Things. And those things include really people. And this is how we're looking at it. >> I love the theme, the human edge, I think that's very relevant. I want to get a human aspect of here tied into the industry side, because as we emerge from the pandemic and move to a broader economic recovery, you see the psychology of the industry where cloud is one of the shining examples of what the pandemic highlighted cloud speed, cloud agility. And now you're seeing with openness in the Teleco industry, that cloud is coming in, open cloud interoperability. So coming out of the pandemic, cloud is the theme is driving an economic recovery, which is driving the psychology of we're back to real life, we're back to business, but it's not business as usual. The fashion is changing. The attitudes are changing. You mentioned that, and now the disruption of how cloud will be implemented. And it seems to be Telco is where these edge and cloud are just completely radically changing, what was once a kind of a slow moving Telco space. So how do you see the partnerships and coming out of the pandemic, some of the response of cloud impact, cloud technology, public cloud impact on this new Telcom? >> Yeah. Let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think we see two dimensions on this, certainly on the carrier side, the operator's side of the equation, we're certainly partnered with everybody across the globe on that. Certainly there's been a definitive impact around software defined everything, right? So, and this has been accelerated really by the standards that have started to develop around 5G. And even now there's a lot of discussion and I'm sure there'll be a lot of it around WMC about 6G and what is happening there. But I think with the advent of things like O-RAN for example, and some of the activity that we're seeing really around NEC type solutions and opportunities, the traditional role of the carrier and the operator is evolving and has to evolve, right? It is now much more aligned with the provision of these types of services that are very different from the type of data or voice services that we've seen in the past. So certainly we're seeing that transition. The second big transition is really around the notion of hybridity. Now we've been talking about this now in the industry for a while, but I think it's really starting to take firm root the idea of not only multiple clouds, but clouds that are deployed either on prem or certainly, available as a service in its various forms. So I think that combination along with the advances that we're seeing in the technology, and this was both on the connectivity side. So certainly around the ultra reliable, low latency communications, what we're seeing with things like slicing, for example, starting to take root as well as frankly, the devices themselves are getting that much more powerful and compact. This is what we're saying with SOC technologies is what we're seeing with the functions being moved more and more to on device capability. So I think about hybrid, I mean, in my past to think about it more as a small data center. How do you compact it, move it out to somewhere else. Now we're thinking about it more in terms of the type of processing capability that you can put really in the hands of the human or hands of the device. And at that point, you really start to get different use cases, start to emerge from that. So this is how we're thinking about this extension and what I'm talking about more as, an expansion on the edge, further out. >> I love is it splicing or slicing, what's the term? Slicing is the technology? >> Slicing, network slicing. >> Slicing, not splicing cable. >> Yeah. >> Slicing. >> Not splicing cable, no. >> Okay so this come up a lot, so splicing kind of points to this end to end, workflows. You look at some of the modern development, the frameworks of successful, you're seeing these multifunctional teams kind of having an end to end visibility into the modern application workflow from CIC pipeline, whatever. Now, if you take the concept of O-RAN you mentioned Open Radio Access Networks, this kind of brings up this idea of interoperability, because if you're going to have end to end and you add edge to it, you have to have the ability to watch something go end to end, but it's never been like that in the past because you had to traverse multiple networks. So this becomes kind of this hybrid a little bit deeper. Can you share how you see that and how Samsung's working with folks and how you guys are addressing this because you can be at the edge, but ultimately you've got to integrate. So you've got openness, you've got the idea of interoperability issues, and you ultimately have to move around and work with other networks, other clouds and other systems. This is not, it's not always like that. So can you share how this is evolving and how real this is and what is your view on it. >> Yeah, our thinking on this. I mean, let me start by maybe tackling this in a little bit of a different angle. One of the things that we see as one of the barriers around interoperability has really been more on the application side of the equation. And this is actually the third component in making all of this work. And let me just be very clear in what I'm saying here, I think in terms of mobile architectures and really Edge architectures, it has been one of the last bastions, if you will of closed architectures, there've been very much what I would call purpose-built architectures at the edge. Certainly that's been driven by things like the industrial side coming together with more of the commercial side of the equation, but we think it's time really to extend the interoperability of what we are seeing really on the IT side of the equation and really driven by cloud native. This was really in the area of containers. It's in the area of microservices, it's in the area of cloud native development. And if we're really talking about this, we really need to extend that interoperability from the application point of view on the data point of view, really to the end point. And this is where some of the work that we're doing, and we really embarked on in earnest last year with Red Hat and IBM, and with VMware for example, in really opening up that edge architecture to really the open source community, as well as really to the microservices architectures that we have now seen propagate down from the cloud into hybrid architecture. So this has been really one of the key focus areas for us. The network interoperability has really been driven by the standards that we've seen and that have been really adopted by the industry. And when it comes to, for example 5G standards. what we've been more focused on quite honestly, is the interoperability on the application and data side. And we think that by extending, if you will, that write once run many type concepts down into the edge and into the device, that this is going to open up really a wealth of opportunity for us on the application and on the data side. >> That's awesome, I love the openness, love the innovation you guys are doing. I think that's where the action is and that's where the growth is going to be. I do have to ask you how you see edge computing in the IOT era in terms of security. Are we more vulnerable because of it now? And how are you guys addressing the issue of security and data privacy at the edge? What's your opinion on that? What's Samsung doing? >> I mean, we just have to look at the news today, it's obvious that we are more vulnerable, right? There's no doubt that points of vulnerability are being exposed and they're probably being exposed in now industrial areas, right? Certainly with what we've seen, just even recently with some of the attacks that, that have occurred. So a couple of things there, number one, we are relying very heavily on our long history around establishing root of trust in kind of zero trust environments. We've had our Knox platform as an example, we just celebrated, in fact, our 10th year of the product. In fact, it was announced at MWC back about 10 years ago. So this is something that, that we're celebrating, it's an anniversary. Our belief on this is that we really need to ensure that we maintain a hardware-based route across when it comes to the edge. We can't only rely upon software protection at that layer. We can't naturally rely upon some of the network protections that are there. So, we've shipped about 3 billion devices with our Knox Security Suite over the last 10 years. And this is something that we're relying very heavily on. Not only for again, that hardware based root of process. So one of the key solutions, there's our Knox Vault product, which we just released a few months back. This is really a safe within a safe concept, really ensuring that the biometric password and other user data is protected. It's really what drives some of our strategy around making sure that we rely upon something that protects all of the back doors that are resident, not only at the software layer, but at the hardware layer as well. And then management is the other key piece of this, security without the ability of managing these thousands to millions of devices is really somewhat compromised. So we've extended a lot of our Knox management capability at our device level really to address some of those particular attributes, as well as these fleets become more prominent. And they start to take on workloads that are more critical to IOT type workloads. >> Casey, great to have you on. Your insight's awesome. Love what you're doing at Samsung. And again, you're a leader, you've been there, you've seen those cycles of innovation. I have to ask you my final question for you is a personal one and a professional one. The last Mobile World Congress was 2019. In person, last year was canceled a lot's happened in the industry since 20 something months ago. Now we're going to be in person, a lot of hybrid still remotely, but there'll be people in person. The world's changed. What is the big change in the Telco, Telco Cloud, Telco Edge, what's happened in these 20 plus months since the last Mobile World Congress that people should pay attention to? What's the most important thing in your mind? >> Most important? Thank God John. You're putting me on the spot here, right? I think it's wisdom to be quite honest with you. I mean, we've certainly all collectively learned a lot in terms of user patterns and what people need and want. And I hope to think that collective wisdom is going to be a key part of how we drive this going forward. And then if I can just pick one more, I would say re-invention, I think what we're starting to see is that coming out of, again from 2019 to what we're seeing now, we do see this opportunity reinventing and rethinking. And I think that's the difference. And the pace of that is going to really dictate how we look at this and how we collectively solve these challenges. So I hope to think we're wiser and that we're more imaginative coming out of this. And again after being in this industry for 30 years, we've not seen the types of things that we've seen over the last couple. So I hope to think that this is a pivot point for all of us. >> Well, Samsung is certainly a leader in many areas and great to see you on theCube here and the theme in your talks around intelligence, human edge innovation, open. This is a force that's happening. And I think the big change, as you said, the wisdom combined with a reinvention is happening and it's going to be very interesting ride, should be fun to work on. >> It will be John and I thank you for our friendship and our relationship over the years. It's always great to see you and to be with you. And again, we're very optimistic as we always have, coming out of this And again, thanks for the time and have a great MWC. >> You too, Casey Choi, Executive Vice President General Manager of the Global Mobile Business to Business Unit Commercial Unit at Samsung. This is theCube's coverage of Mobile World Congress. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Okay. We're back here. That was Casey Choi. Talk about wisdom, collective wisdom coming out of the pandemic. Great friend of theCube, great friend of the industry doing great work there. Casey Choi. Like we are doing here on the ground at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City, as well as Adam and the team in the studio. So back to you, Adam and team.

from around the globe it's thecube with coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon north america 2020 virtual brought to you by red hat the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners welcome to thecube's coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon 2020 the virtual edition i'm lisa martin i've got a couple of guests with me here today please welcome ken holtz the principal partner manager for red hat hey ken and welcome to the cube hi lisa thank you and benito lopez is also joining us senior manager of business development and the solutions provider services provider vertical excuse me f5 from f5 hi benito how are how are you i'm good you're in san francisco thank you all right yes we're all very socially distanced so guys kubecon cloudnativecon the virtual version here still the opportunity to engage with a lot of leaders in the community folks interested let's go ahead and start with you as we look at this very dynamic environment in which we are all living and working organizations are under even more pressure to deliver the information and the services and the experiences that customers demand internal customers external customers i know f5 is known for load balancing and load balancing is one of those tools that can certainly help with that but talk to us about what's kind of going on what's new in that respect from fbi's perspective we have evolved into an adaptive application services company what do i mean by adaptive application services it's the ability to scale secure and protect application applications wherever they may recite whether they're in the far edge whether in the cloud whether they're on premises and the ability to also observe the the analytics and telemetry emanating from those applications to be able to act upon what we see in that space so when we talk about service based architecture it's all about no longer being reliant on a in the on a single vendor on a monolithic application set of services or on what they call a vertical stack appliance service based architecture means you want it to be a scalable architecture whereby you can add the dock subtract um different types of network functions in 5g so the way this is going to be depend the the key enabler for a services-based architecture is going to be container based services whereby services will no longer just be applications are going to be disaggregated into micro services right in container clusters and f5's role here is to be able to scale and secure that traffic into a service provider environment more importantly our role is to turn a container-based architecture which is not service provider grade into a service provider-grade architecture which means we can actually see the services provide specific protocols into that container cluster and more importantly um scale and secure and apply the right policies within a containerized environment again containers is all about a service base is part of a service based architecture and containers today especially on kubernetes need a service provider grade platform of which we provide that market all right so kubernetes seeing a lot of activity with telco customers what are some of the challenges major we'll stick with you for another few seconds here what are some of the challenges that you're seeing that you're helping customers to work through well one is the first challenge is how do you make kubernetes telco great that's the first challenge so what f5 does is we actually um act as the ingress and egress point into kubernetes environment whereby we see telco as we were able to scale and secure telco specific protocols that kubernetes today um does not support and we work closely with red hat in that space um together with their open shift architecture to open shift platform cut we work with red hat today uh with um uh with respect to the openshift platform and that helps the service provider have a telco cloud-like platform that is um scalable that is secure and that is highly performant and low-latent all right so speaking of red hat let's bring ken into the conversation here kind of same question for you as we look at the activity uh in telco with respect to kubernetes let's talk to some of the ways that that red hat is helping customers address some of the challenges so that they can leverage that technology to to really move their businesses forward especially in such a dynamic environment right now thanks lisa so red hat has a goal of ensuring our openshift platform is ready and hardened enough to enable telco workloads for our 5g platform while we work with other partners f5 has been one of our key partners in this particular space for the first time openshift networking is natively integrating seamlessly with the commercial load balancer from f5 making it ready for telco 5g this is a co-engineered co-developed solution a new piece of software that we've implemented together oven kubernetes is enterprise and service provider ready we believe ovn will help significantly with latency overall and this is an evolution we have our first implementation of this now and we're working now on making this even more cloud-native which means making it more performant more resilient and even more capable and ready for telco grade requirements so can continuing on with you for a second in terms of how you're working together with customers to maybe customize or adapt the technologies can you talk to me a little bit about some of the customer feedback like some of those challenges that they're facing in today's environment which as we know is so dynamic and probably going to be for a while what's the customer like influence in terms of the partnership and the code development well so my focus at red hat is on partnership and the ecosystem partner management team allows red hat to meet the needs of a growing number of red hat partners the team serves as a partner's single point of contact for product questions roadmap updates engineering interlocks and general guidance for how to partner with red hat and with open source communities to achieve their business goals so uh we we're we're helping the end customers through our tight partnership imagine a lot of collaboration there so benito let's talk from your perspective from f5's perspective on the partnership and the collaboration that you have together and with your customers to help them be successful well ecosystems partnerships are going to be critical for our success as a company and more importantly as service providers today especially as i mentioned earlier around with respect to us they migrate and transform their networks from 4g to 5g um the architecture is going to horizontalize it's going to require a telcograde type of infrastructure manager a telcograde os and at the same time it's going to require a telco grade um and security platform and therefore red hat with its um them with them being what we call as a leader in open source and open and containers with their openshift platform we see them as a vital partner in working with service providers to transform their networks into a teleco great containerized environment right so as they migrate into um as they migrate from just software virtualization to containerization which is going to be critical for 5g um red hat is a key partner for us to work with to ensure that their network is their containerized network is telego-grade and highly performant and secure excellent thanks and ken back to you i know the audience would like to hear kind of some more specifics on the collaboration between you guys and also kind of beyond what they can see what's coming down the pipe in terms of open source projects or kind of beyond that yeah so some of some examples of our work together uh would include joint roadmap alignment uh we're very closely tied together on on the roadmap front early pre-pre-ga enablement early access to code and we have a goal of achieving certification here so we'd like to to achieve certification which provides assurance of compatibility and support avoids vendor lock-in and dispels any security concerns that customers may have excellent well guys anything else that you want to add here to the audience that is attending this virtual edition of kubecon cloud nativecon 2020 benito to you well i'd like to just say that as you migrate to as your network begins to transform and you are looking at the containerized architecture f5 and red hat are your best partners to have that telco grade architecture infrastructure in place i like that both statement very well put ken less thoughts from you i think benito said it best and i just wanted to say thanks a lot for having having us and this has been fun excellent guys thank you for sharing what's going on with the f5 red hat partnership how you're helping customers in telco with kubernetes the challenges there to alleviate ken bonito thanks for joining me on thecube today thank you thank you for my guests i'm lisa martin and you're watching thecube you

>>Ly from San Diego, California. It's the cube covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem Marsh. >>Welcome back to San Diego. It's CubeCon cloud native con 2019. You're watching the cube. I'm streaming in my cohost for three days of live coverage is John Troyer and happened at welcome fresh off the keynote stage to my right is as hers as har who's the chief architect for telco at red hat and the man that was behind the scenes for a lot of it, hunting Garcia, telco solutions manager at red hat. A gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us and a very interesting keynote. So you know 5g uh, you know, my background's networking, we all watch it. Um, uh, let's say my telco provider already says that I have something related to five G on my phone that we grumble a little bit about, but we're not going to talk about that where we are going to talk about his keynote. Uh, we had a China mobile up on stage. Uh, maybe a, I love a little bit behind the scenes as you were saying. Uh, you know, the cloud native enabled not just uh, you know, the keynote and what it's living, but it gets a little bit of what >>well, sure. Um, look, when we took on this particular project to build a cloud native environment, uh, for five genes, we spent a lot of time planning and in fact this is a guy who actually did, you know, most of that work, um, to do a lot of planning in terms of picking different components and getting that together. Um, one of the things that cloud native environment allows us to do is bring things up quickly. The resilience part of it and the scale bar, right? Those are the two important components and attributes of cloud native. In fact, what happened last night was obviously one of the circuit breakers trapped and we actually lost power to that particular entire part that is onstage. I mean, nobody knows about this. I didn't talk about it as part of the keynote, but guess what? Through because it was cloud native because it was built in an automated fashion. People were able to work. Yes, they spent about three hours or so to actually get that back up. But we got it back up and running and we showed it live today. But what, I'm not trying to stress on how it failed a white fail. I'm trying to stress on how quickly things came back up and more important. The only cloud native way of doing things could have done that. Otherwise it wouldn't have been possible. All right. >>as, as the man behind the scenes there. Uh, it's great when we have, you know, here's actually the largest telco provider in the world. Uh, you know, showing what it, it's happened. So the title Kubernetes everywhere that telco edge gets a little bit of a hind, the scenes as to kind of the, the, the mission of building the solution and how you got it, you know, your, your, your customers, your partners, uh, engaged and excited to participate in. >> This is what's that very thirsting enterprise through realize. Actually, we took four months around, uh, 15 partners. And, uh, I would say partners >>because in that case, I'm taking, uh, uh, bell Canada and China mobile is a partners. They are part of the project. They were giving us a requirement, helping us all the way to it and together other, uh, more, uh, commercial partners. And of course, uh, as whatsover Allianz, like the team in the and the open interface, Allianz is, we're working with us is, was about 8,200 people working behind the scenes to get this work, uh, to have a lab, uh, directly, completely set up with a full, uh, Fuji containerized MoMA and network in France, uh, have the same in Montreal. Fuji and fogey called directly Montiel as well, uh, in one of our partners, uh, Calum labs and then bringing here the fudgey pop, uh, and have everything connected to the public cloud. So we have everything in there. So all the technology, all the mobile technology was there. >>We have enterprise technology that we're using to connect all the, all the labs and the, and the pop here with the public cloud to. Uh, um, technology and we have of course deployed as, as a, as our, uh, was mentioning. We deployed Kubernete is on the public cloud and we have as well Kubernete is open, rehabbed, open stack, uh, sorry. They had OpenShift container platform running on the, on all the premise in the lab in France and Davi, Marcia and they pop here. Uh, as I say, it was kind of an interesting enterprise. We have some hiccups last night, but uh, we were able to put that out the world telco, >>very specialized, very high service level agreements. I always want by phone to work and so a little bit, uh, uses different terminology than the rest of it sometimes. Right. And MP and VNF and VCO. But so maybe let's real to tell people a little bit like what are we actually talking about here? I mean, people also may not be following edge and, and teleco and what's actually sitting in their home town or, or it used to be embedded chips and none, it was a like Linux, but we're actually talking about installing Kubernetes clusters in a lot of different, really interesting typologies. That's absolutely true actually with the way how, and described it as perfect in the sense that we actually had Kubernetes clusters sitting in a data center environment in France, in Montreal and a remote pop that's sitting here on stage. So it was not just independent clusters but also stretch clusters where we actually had some worker nodes here that will attach back to the Montreal cluster. >>So the flexibility that it gave us was just awesome. We can't achieve that. Uh, you know, in general. But you brought up an interesting topic around, uh, you know, Getty or, uh, or, or the Teleco's operating environment, which is different and cloud native principles has, are a little bit different where they weren't very high availability, they weren't very high reliability with good amount of redundancy. Well, cloud native and actually those attributes to you. But the operational model is very different. You have to almost use codas throwaway hardware as throwaway and do a horizontal scale model to be able to build that. Whereas in the older environment, hardware was a premium switches and routers with a premium and you couldn't have a failure. So you needed all of those, you know, compliance of high availability and upgradability and so on. Here I'm upgrading processes in Linux, I'm upgrading applications. I can go deploy anytime, tear them down. Anytime I'm monitoring the infrastructure, using metrics, using telemetry. That wasn't the case before. So a different operating environment, but it provides actually better residency models than what telcos are actually yesterday. Yeah. >>Um, it's a complicated ecosystem to put all these pieces together. Uh, it gives, gives a little insight as to, uh, you know, red hats, leadership and uh, the, the, the partners that help you put it in. >>I will let him answer that. >>Um, is another, our first rodeo. We have been working on the vitro central office project with the, with the leaner foundation, uh, networking and Hopi NFV community for three last years. Uh, let's say, and the interesting part of this one is that even though we typically get with working with what the technology that they are using now, uh, we decided it's time to go with the technologies that we'll be using from now on. Um, but of course, uh, there is a set of partners that we need. We need to build the infrastructure from scratch. So for example, we have a Lenovo that was bringing all the, all the servers, uh, for the, for the set up in, uh, and here in San Diego, which actually the San Diego pub was built originally in Raleigh, Illinois, facilities and cheap all over the country to here for the show. Uh, and uh, then we have the fabric part. >>So the networking part, that's his cologne. Uh, this was working and bringing us the software defined fabric, uh, to connect all the different future. And then, then we start building this over layers on top. So we have, they had OpenShift container platform for the to completely deploy over metal servers. And then we start adding all the rest of the components, like the four G core fundamental Tran, like dividing for GFG radio from Altron, uh, together with Intel come Scott. That's his building. He started building the mobile part of it in Montreal, a San Diego. And then we add on top of that. Then we start adding the IMS core in the public cloud and then we connect everything through the by tuning. >>So a couple of things that I'd like to highlight in terms of coordinating partners, getting to know when they're ready, figuring out an onboarding process that gives them a sandbox to play with their configurations first before you connect them back into the main environment. Partitioning that working simultaneously with Malden, we had a Slack board that was full of messages every day. We had a nonstop, you know, every morning we had a scam call, right then it's like a scrum meeting every morning, just a daily stand up from eight 30 to nine 30. And we continue that all over the day. >>So as her, one of the things I really like to China mobile, uh, when they talked about in the keynote, first of all they said, you know, the problem is, you know, 20 by 2026, you know, it's, it's rainbows and unicorns and you know, 5g, uh, you know, will help enable so much around the planet. Seriously. Um, but you know, today she, she talked about major challenge in the rollout and infrastructure and service and capability. So, you know, help us understand a little bit the hype from reality of where we are with five G what we could expect. >>Absolutely. We are going through the hype phase right now, right? We are absolutely all the operators want FFG service to be delivered for sure. The reason why they want it to be delivered as they don't want to be left behind. Now there are some operators when we in more opportunistic and looking at 5g as a way to insert themselves into different conversations, IOT conversation, um, smart city conversation, right? Um, edge compute conversation. So they're being very strategic about how the big, the set of technologies, how they go deploy in that particular infrastructure and strategically offer capabilities and build partnerships. Nobody's going to rip out their existing three G four G network and replace that with 5g by 2026. It's not gonna happen, but what will happen by 2026 is an incremental phase of services that will be continued to offer. As an example, I'll give you, um, cable providers are looking at 5g as a way to get into homes because they can deploy in millimeter wave band a radio closer to the house and get a very high speed multi-gigabit high speed connection into the home without having to worry about what's your copper look like? >>Do I have fiber to the home? Do I have fiber to the business and so on. And so. So that's actually an interesting, >>okay, so you're saying solving the last mile issue in a very targeted use. >>Absolutely. So that's one. The other area might be running a partnership with BMW Toyota in, you know, some of these car companies to provide telemetry back from cars into their own, you know, operating environment so that they know what's going on, what's being used, how is it being used, how can we, how can we do provide diagnosis before the car actually begins to fail? Uh, big, you know, private environments like oil and gas mining, they are going to deploy public safety and security where all of these, you know, policemen on and safety personnel are required to now use body cams. Now you have video feeds coming from hundreds of people. There are deployment and incidents. Now you can take that information you need high speed broadband, you need the ability to analyze data and do analytics and provide feedback immediately so that they can actually act. So do three, this specific targeted use case, even a country like India where they're talking about using 5g for very specific use cases, not replacing your phone calling. >>I love that point. And it kind of ties back into some of the other things you were saying about the a agility and the operational model. And I relate it back to it. You know, my, again, my perception of some telco maybe 20 years old and that they had a tendency to do very monolithic projects. And you know, when you're out, when you're rolling out a infrastructure across the country, there's a certain, uh, monolithic nature to it. But you're talking about rolling out one, rolling out individual projects rolling out. That's also the advice we give to it. Try it with one thing, you know, try open shift with that one application and then also though, but it takes uh, the upskilling and the cultural model. So true with your telco petitioners who are, we're on Slack, they're with you and I, you know, I don't, I don't know if there's any relation, any other kinds of things to pull out about the mirror of, of the it transformation with telco transformation and colon Turner. That's actually a good point that you bring up, >>right? Look, the costs of building, if I have infrastructure from ground up is extremely high. If they want to completely revamp that. You're talking about replacing every single radio, you're talking about adding capacity more adding, you know, backhaul capacity and so on. So that isn't going to happen overnight. It's going to happen. It may take even more 10 years. Right. I mean in the most interesting thing, that stat stack that I saw was even LTE is going to grow. LTE subscriber count is going to grow for the next two years before it flatmates. So we're not going to LTE four G that's been around for a decade almost. Right. And it's going to still grow for the next two years, then it's going to flatten and then you'll start to see more 5g subscribers. Now back to the point that you were bringing up in terms of operational model change and in terms of how things will be I D principles applying it principles to telco. >>Um, there are still some challenges that we need to solve in Coobernetti's environment in particular, uh, to address the teleco side of the house. And in fact through this particular proof of concept, that was one of the things we were really attempting to highlight and shine a light on. Um, but in terms of operational models, what use applicable and it will now be totally applicable on the telco network, the CIC pipeline. There's delivery of applications and software that testing and integration, the, you know, um, operational models. Absolutely. Those, in fact, I actually have a number of service providers and telcos that I talked to who are actually thinking about a common platform for it end telco network. And they are now saying, okay, red hat, can you help us in terms of designing this type of a system. So I think what could speak to you a little bit about, uh, in this context is how the same infrastructure can be used for any kind of application. So you want to talk about how the community's platform can be used to deploy CNS and then to deploy applications and how you've shown that. Yeah. Well this is what, >>what we have been doing, right. So we have, uh, the coordinators platform does, is actually deploy and the services we have, all these partners are bringing their Cloudnative uh, function, uh, applications on top of that, that what we are calling the CNF the quantities and network functions. And basically what we were doing as well during the whole process is that we have, those partners are still developing, still finishing the software. So we were building and deploying at the same time and testing on the same time. So during the last four months, and even I can tell you even just to deny >>even last night, so the full CACD pipeline that we deploy in ID side, here it is in operation on the network side. >>Well yeah. So, so I, I want to give you the final word cause you know, John was talking about it cycles, you know, if you think about enterprises, how long they used to take to deploy things, uh, and what cloud data is doing for them. Uh, it sounds like we're going through a similar trends. >>Absolutely big in a big way. Um, telcos are actually deploying a private cloud environment and they're also leveraging public cloud in mind. In fact, sometimes they using public cloud as sandbox for their development to be completed until they get deployed and private. Claremont, they still need the private time enrollment for their own purposes, like security, data sovereignty and uh, you know, their own operational needs. So, but they want to make it as transparent as possible. And in fact, that was one of the things we want to also attempted to show, which is a public cloud today, a private cloud and bare metal, a private cloud on OpenStack. And it was like, and you know, it came together, it worked, but it is real. That's more important. And, uh, for enterprise and for telcos to be literally going down the same path with respect to their applications, their services and their operational models. I think this is really a dream come true. >>Well, congratulations on the demo. Uh, but even more importantly, congratulations on the progress. Great to see, uh, you know, the global impact that's going to have in the telecommunications market. Definitely look forward to hearing more than. >>Thank you very much. Thank you. The opportunity to >>actually be here. All right. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman back with lots more here from CubeCon Claude, date of con 2019 in San Diego, California. Thanks for watching the queue.

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. (lively electronic music) Hello everyone and welcome to special Cube coverage here in San Francisco, California. We're at VMware's Radio 2018 event. This is their annual R&D event where all the best people, smartest people, come together to collaborate on new projects, new innovations. Not imitation, innovation. Had great speakers up there. They had Steve Herrick, Cube alumni, now a venture capitalist, formerly CTO of VMware. And our first guest here today is Ray O'Farrell, executive vice president and CTO of VMware, been on theCUBE before. Great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Great to see you, good morning. >> So I love this event 'cause it's, like you mentioned before we came on camera, Steve Herrick said it's like a sales kick-off for engineers. >> Correct yeah, yep. >> Which is like a rah, rah but also, you know, really motivating, but also putting out the north star. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Which is the innovation message. >> [Ray] Correct. >> So take minute to talk about what this event is. Explain to the folks, what is Radio 2018? There's a lot of history involved here. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Behind us is a t-shirt row of, you know, key milestones of VMware history. You know, think inside the box, now it's, think inside the cloud. What's this event about? >> So, um, the event has quite a few years. This is like the 14th year we've done this, right? And when it started, what it was really focused on was, in some ways, a recognition that, as the company begins to grow, as you begin to build new products and engage in new partnerships, In order to keep innovation alive, you almost need to manage it. The problem is you can't manage innovation. Almost by, you know, by definition it's something chaotic. It's an inspirational idea. It's something that was not expected. That's what makes it innovation. But what you can do, is you can create a culture which promotes that innovation or creates opportunities for those ideas to emerge. Or when those ideas do emerge, make sure there's a place for them to be heard and there's an opportunity for a network to build around them. And Radio is a part of that. We have lots of other programs in VMware to help keep driving that culture of innovation, but Radio is probably the primary one. >> Talk about some of the history from this event. What has come out of these events? 'Cause I wanna get into some of the specific questions around how R&D works these days vis-a-vis how it used to work. But, specifically, what has come out of these events? Can you point to any things that kind of popped out? Because R&D, I won't say hit or miss, but it's the idea is to experiment and try new things and nail it. What has come out of VMware's Radio years of history? >> Yeah, so, very practically, we get a lot of patents out of Radio. That's just a very practical sense. As people are building up the papers, as they're looking at the ideas they want to drive, as they work with different teams to build prototypes. Quite a few times people do that at Radio when they're making a presentation. They'll generate ideas, invention disclosures, which generate new patents. This show alone, even though we just actually entering the show at this stage, has already generated about nearly 240 IDFs. A lot of those have the potential to become patents. So it's very, very practical and pragmatic about the generation of patents and new ideas. When you look at the products side of things, quite often what you see at Radio is not necessarily a new product in a whole new area. What you tend to see is, we have existing technologies bubbling in different spaces and now, because you're able to bring these teams together, somebody gets an idea that says, Oh, I can combine machine learning with what we're doing in terms of logging and now I've got an interesting product to help support our customers, you know, deal with real world problems. >> So, it's not take that hill, build me a blockchain product, it's more of, take a step back, zoom back, look at the big picture, understand the fusion of where things are coming together, look at architecture. Is that kind of the-- >> Yeah, actually, sometimes there is the, take that hill, take the blockchain product, but quite often, it starts as something small. You have a Radio event where somebody will say blockchain is cool and interesting. Here's how you run it in a more efficient fashion on vSphere, something like that. And that would be a poster session. And it's only then when somebody sees that that says, I can really run blockchain on vSphere? Can I do it better even now it's physical in some way? And that's when the story emerges. So you don't necessarily see the product announcement coming from Radio itself. What you see is the core of that idea and then a few months later, or the next major VMWorld, or two VMWorlds out, you begin to see these things emerging. >> It's like you're creating sparks of innovation, throw onto the fire, create some action. >> That's exactly the way it works. You know, things like, a lot of stuff what we do in containers. You know, the VMware integrated containers, the combination of containers and VMs from a security point of view. You can trace a lot of that back to ideas that were generated for Radio. And it's pretty rigorous. People have to go through, submit papers, there's a submit ideas. And, you know, our most senior engineers crawl all over those and critique them and so, you know-- >> So it's competitive? >> Oh, it's very competitive. That it is, in many ways, it's a mark of honor to be invited to Radio or to present a paper and so people fight very hard to do so. >> Built in gamifications called just be smart and show some good papers. >> Yes, it's a little bit tougher today. >> How much goes into the prep for this? Because obviously that's a great bar. You guys set a high bar, high is great. And it's a great place here for people to stretch and flex their technical muscle. >> Yep. >> What's the process? How do people get to that bar? Do they collaborate? Is there meet-ups? Is there organic processes of top-down? How do you guys handle it? >> So we've a lot of different processes or programs around driving innovation, but when you look at Radio itself, and it leverages some of those others, but when you look at Radio itself, basically we create a Radio committee. The one for next year will be starting somewhere in the next couple of weeks, right? We create a Radio committee. It is typically driven by members of the office of the CTO, but works and pulls in our fellows, our principle engineers, and we form a committee which really splits into two different directions. One of which is all around the technical papers, the presentations which are gonna be presented later here today. And another one which focuses around how do you do the keynotes? How do you get invited speakers? How do you create this inspirational, you know pervasive sense of innovation. And so you have those two groups working, while cooperating somewhat independently of each other. And it takes a long time. So for instance, only about 15% of the papers which are actually submitted are presented here. So there's a lot of work going through, scanning those, combining those. One of the most exciting things you can do at VMware is, if you go back somewhere in around the February timeframe, all of our most senior engineers sit in one of our largest conference rooms with a bunch of engineers submitting papers and so on, and there is a lively debate working through paper after paper, idea after idea, and saying is this a good thing for Radio? Is this original? Hey, nobody else thought of that. What we gonna be able to do to do that? Or, in some cases, saying these two people, one from Bangalore, one from Bulgaria, we've earned these sites all over the world, these ideas look similar. Can we get those guys to talk to each other? And see what comes out of that. >> So it's kind of a team-building exercise. At the same time, pre-innovation, but it's interesting. You've mentioned you've got the challenge of the papers, which is, you know, get the accuracy on the facts, original content, original ideas. >> [Ray] Correct. >> And then the content program for the event has to be inspiring and motivating at the same time Two different things, but two design standards for you guys. >> Yeah. And, you know, we need to combine them both and, 80% to 90% of the people who are here are hardcore R&D engineers. Their day job is to write code, produce product, archetype product, right? And, you know, if you haven't worked with a group of senior engineers, they are not going to be tolerant of presentations which, oh, we saw that before-- >> [John] Or fluff. >> Or fluff, right. They want to get hardcore into the meat. In fact, the presentations that you see that get some of the highest ratings, tend to be those that are deeply technical in nature. You know VMware's software base is primarily systems software, systems engineering. They expect to see deeply technical solutions to how to attack some real world problems. >> You guys do have some smart people. It's great to have you on theCUBE. This is our ninth year doing VMWorld. Great to start coming in to the more technical events. It's fantastic. The question I gotta ask for you is, Pat Gelsinger always says on theCUBE, he's says on theCUBE a few times, but consistent theme, you gotta get out in front of that next wave or you're driftwood. To the point of, don't just take that point product at view, jump on the wave. And the wave is all about the next 10 years or 20 years. What is the wave that you guys are, that you would categorize, obviously Cloud is key, but as you have the hyper-convergence and the on-premise private cloud boom and VSAN's great. We've seen great results from that. The cloud's right there. You've got Amazon, you got Microsoft, kicking butt on the numbers. As the R&D tries not to get caught up into the fashionable day to day, you can have the long view. >> [Ray] Yeah. >> What's the wave for the long view? >> So I think there's two waves we're looking at. One of them is you need to spend a lot of time with customers and understand what their agenda is. What their innovation agenda is. You look at that, you see, you know, products popping up. How will I leverage AI in a new and interesting way? How will I do something with Blockchain? You know, I want to run AI algorithms, I need different hardware and different management software to do that. So we focus on those and make sure we're doing that. But perhaps, more importantly, I think when you begin to look at what's happening with the industry right now, you know, you saw private cloud, you saw public cloud, you see how you connect these together. It's actually that connectivity is going to be important. You know, I believe you're going to see the emergence of Edge infrastructure, but isolated? That's not powerful. Now combine that Edge infrastructure with how you can leverage what's going into the public cloud or how you're going to be able to secure all these in a way that falls back into, you know, even Teleco in some way. You're now beginning to see this synergy across all of those things. And I think, you know, that's where our sweet spot is. We know how to deal with those hard, how do I connect things together? How do I manage complex different piece of systems software? So that's where we're gonna see it. >> Well, it's great stuff. One of the benefits of being so close to VMware over the past nine years, and I was showing you some of our online data analysis. When I look at the VMware ecosystem, the interesting see the evolution and kind of the journey, 14 years. And looking at the milestones. Clearly, infrastructure, on-premise data center. And then you saw that emergence of clouds. You start to see these markets emerge. Cloud, big data comes on the scene. Data warehouse in the infrastructure. Now, that's AI, cloud is bigger. All kind of taking a little bit off the infrastructure, kind of squeezing that down, but it moves up into the Cloud. And now you've got that, over the top, Blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralized applications. In the middle of these circles, is security, IOT, and data. >> Correct. >> You guys are right there, so I have to ask you, because they're all, the confluence of all of those are coming together. You're not up here playing Blockchain, although there's some stuff we can get into. You got some AI influencing. So, in the center of infrastructure, Cloud, AI, and Blockchain, etc. is security data, IOT. How is that coming together? What's the R&D task? >> So, actually, I think the key word you used there was confluence. You cannot really look at these as independent things. And, you know, so our focus is what does it mean to be, essentially, the infrastructure. The infrastructure management story for that new form of multi-Cloud, Edge, IOT type of narrative. So our role there is, we believe security is one of the key things to focus on. And we believe that, in that new world, connectivity is a key part of what goes on. The Edge was taught to the Cloud. The Cloud was taught to the Teleco. The Teleco was taught to the IOT. >> [John] They need power. >> Right. They need power, they need communication. They need those things. So a lot of the time, a lot of where we focus comes back to intersects. We do believe that software-defined networking is a key way of being able to deliver a new fluidity of when you get that confluence. And intersects very quickly brings you into security. That's how you begin to understand how you isolate those components, understand what you need to do to detect. When that Edge IOT device is not even the device you think it is. Somebody might have replaced it. That's where you begin to be able to see the communications as a result sort of from that. So security is key, interconnectivity is key, and you know, when we speak about IOT itself, I've got kind of a dual role at VMware. While I'm the CTO at VMware, I also focus on IOT for Dell Technologies. And when we look at that, you know, today many of the examples of IOT are very narrow, almost point, solutions. The real power will come when you begin to combine across those solutions. You know, the thing that tells you the weather, the thing that tells you the traffic, and then the thing that tells you, you know, what's the best way to get there in your car, or whatever it is. Combine those things, now you gotta secure all that. 'Cause you're sharing information. >> [John] It's super exciting. It's probably the best time to be doing R&D because Dave Vellante and I always talk about on theCUBE all the time, that, you know, if everything was Cloud operations, because the confluence is happening, what is IOT? >> [Ray] Yep. >> You have a thin Edge, could be a windfarm, traffic signal, sensor network, or it could be a data center. The data center could be an Edge. I mean, you could look at it any way, it depends on how you look at it. >> One of the biggest questions that comes up all the time is what exactly is the edge, right? And I think, you know, it means different things within different industries. It's very clear on the extreme edge. That's a device, it's a windfarm, it's measuring the behavior of a robot, or something like that. And it's very clear on the other side. That's a Cloud, I run a bunch of analytics over there. It's the interesting piece in the middle where it is both, you know, a lot of opportunity and a lot of, you know, difficulty defining it. Is the SD1 server inside of an office, is that edge? Yeah, that looks like edge, it's at the edge of the network. But it's not controlling something physical. But that SD1 server inside in a retail store, may well also be doing something with the refrigerators or the cold chain or something in that store. And now you begin to see it more as kind of an IOT device. >> That's awesome, and it's great conversation. Certainly fodder for more R&D and more innovation and the management site's key. And, I think the holy grail on all this is programmable networks, right? Come on, we've been waiting. How fast is that coming, pedal harder, come on. I know you've got to go thanks for coming on. >> But I do wanna ask you, you guys are, I wanna give you some props and just get your thoughts on obviously Blockchain. We see things like Filecoin had a very huge ICO on the IPFs side, but, you know, they didn't really have a product, but they're promising, hey, store using decentralized, we have them in the Blockchain. Obviously, it's a network storage infrastructure, it's not so much selling tokens with token economics, although it does have a piece of it. That's gonna impact you guys on the horizon. What's the current state of you guys view, your view, the team's view of Blockchain-- >> Of Blockchain? Obviously, a lot of the hype and even some of the valuations and things you see are tied to what's happening on the financial side. Bitcoin, and so on. We're not focused on that at all. What we're saying is Blockchain, or more specifically, a distributed hyper-ledger, forms the basis of a community of companies or organizations being able to, essentially, look at trust as a service. I've got a contract with you, we're now able to look across a group of companies and say we all agree, that contract is valid because of our leverage of this blockchain. That then becomes an application story. How do I run it more efficiently? How do I make sure I run it securely? How do I make sure that that community is able to leverage that service in a shared fashion? And that's what we're focused on. In fact, one of the more interesting things is when you look at things like Blockchain, when it's used in the context of something like Bitcoin, there's a degree what people value is an anonymity. We don't know who bought it, but somebody bought it. But when you look at it from a trust point of view, we actually want to be able to see who exactly did the contract. I agree that you put the contract, we worked the contract together, and we're all agreeing with that. So you see these changes when you begin to bring these technologies into enterprise. >> Efficiencies come, big time-- >> Correct. >> On supply chain. >> Exactly. Actually, we've put a lot of focus on efficiencies. We've got a research team whose job has been very focused on, given Blockchain, how do I improve the core algorithms? How do I make them more applicable to something that'd be run by a typical enterprise, or by a group of enterprises? And, you know, that's a little bit unusual for us because we're entering a kind of an application space, but what's good about this application space, it is hard systems engineering. And that's what we know how to do and that's why we think this is a great application space for us to be able to deliver real value. >> And the key word is engineering, you also mentioned earlier, community. Open Source has brought this community dynamic together where there's no middle men. This is the beautiful thing of the future infrastructure. How do you manage it? How do you make it secure trust as a service. >> Yes. >> You guys are doing a great job. Based on our data, you are on the ecosystem. You guys have all the waves covered. >> Okay. >> Ray thanks for coming on. >> Great, thank you very much. >> I appreciate the conversation. I'm John Furrier, here in San Francisco for VMware's Radio 2018. 14th year of their annual engineering kick-off, motivation, hardcore engineering critique, and also collaboration where the sparks of innovation are happening. Be right back with more. Thanks for watching. (lively electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube! Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Rebecca: Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18. We are here in Las Vegas at the Venetian I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Thomas Squeo. He is the Senior Vice President for Digital Transformation & Enterprise Architecture at West Corp. Thanks so much for coming on the show! >> Good morning, thank you for having me. >> So Digital Transformation, you're the SVP it's a buzzword of the technology industry and also at this conference. Tell us a little bit about how you describe it what it means and then also about West's journey. >> Sure, so in my own role within West Digital Transformation gives me an opportunity to have higher amounts of contact with the business side of the organization. Whether it be customer success, product management, looking at our strategic accounts team and basically working across all aspects of the business. While I am running Enterprise Architecture I also run product engineering for the organization and those combined rolls give me the opportunity to take things from strategy to tactic inside the organization but the Digital Transformation component gives me the context for what the organization needs to move towards. >> Dave: Essentially, you guys are a digital company, right? >> We are. >> So, I mean, you're digital evolving maybe. What is Digital Transformation mean to a company like yours that's born digital if you will? >> Right, so we came out of a traditional Teleco background so everything about our business was driven by software and up until about 2015 it was very human capital intensive. So what we've done is we've kind of re-tooled ourself to be a more forward looking technology organization that's driven by software delivering solutions on behalf of our customers. And that includes much more of a service and solution portfolio then it does in a human capital portfolio. >> So as you transition from a business to a digital business what was the roll of data? How did the data model evolve? >> Well I think that one of the things that we look at in our data model is that because of the scope and scale of our business, they have different data model requirements for different aspects of our business. Our safety business operates under DHS critical infrastructure rules whereas our unified communications is particularly dictated by regulatory and compliance environments and healthcare, education, commercial and utility markets and other aspects depending on what kind of notifications are going out. It might be under HIPA, high trust and those kinds of things Those are really kind of the drivers for us to be able to prioritize how it effects our data model and our INFOSEC profile. >> So you have to have sort of semi-siloed data model, right? >> Correct. So we don't see a lot of customer movement across the organization only about 30% of our customers buy from multiple West businesses and they're typically very compartmentalized around the use and consumption model that we actually have been approached for. >> So as the digital leader, does that present challenges for you or it is what it is and you just deal with it? >> Thomas: It actually presents more opportunities than anything else and the reason why is because we can take learning from very forward looking, leaning cloud native platforms and be able to apply that into some of our legacy business or we could also look at something like the regulatory environment than how certain businesses actually satisfy that and be able to mature some other aspects of our business that might be a little bit more loose or came in through an acquisition that wasn't governed by kind of an organization of the scale of ours. >> Rebecca: So you're a very progressive leader and before the cameras were rolling we were talking a little bit about how there is this mentality particularly in IT this sort of break it, fix it mentality and keeping going that way. What's your best advice for people in rolls in IT and elsewhere in the organization to get out of that mindset? >> Well the most important thing I think is that you have to move out of an order taker roll and your really have to kind of move into a either a strategic advisor kind of an internal consultancy model where in which your IT leadership team is not necessarily seeking a seat at the table, that's kind of a cliche in that regard but much more of how do you partner with the General Managers, Segment Presidents and so on and so forth as an advisor on the side working with them on how they consume the technology services across the organization. That's really how we focused our architecture team as opposed to necessarily looking at bringing in an external consultancy to kind of lead and broker that conversation inside the organization. >> Dave: What are you doing with ServiceNow? >> So we are actually, we've just released in April our first phase with ServiceNow. It was a significant transition over multiple service management platforms. We've rolled out service management and knowledge already. We're underway with operations management next. And we're talking about all the aspects of it. So we're taking very much an out of the box approach. We're not doing an customizations, we're doing a lot more configuration around workflow and so on. We've been able to establish a really strong leadership presence around the organization from a governing perspective, how we're going to float those changes into the organization and then ultimately how are we going to deliver. We kind of take it as kind of the base fractal as the first phase and first implementation. And then how do you expand upon that to ultimately make sure it's woven into the fabric in the organization as a tool for not only employee experience but customer experience as well. >> So no custom mods. Check. >> Thomas: No custom mods. >> Smart. How about a single CMDB with a siloed or a fractured data model. >> Thomas: That's very much a part of our strategy. >> So okay, you bought into that. >> We look at asset management as kind of the bridge between logical Enterprise Architecture models and how it actually translates into physical infrastructure the CMDB is that source of truth for that and we're looking to ServiceNow to be able to provide that for our organization and that includes not only in our on prem instances, our virtualized environments our hybrid cloud environments ultimately looking at them as kind of a cloud management provider as we scale up and take advantage of that. And that includes charge back, show back being able to show what consumption is, being able to have our capacity teams be able to do forecasts based on, you know, cyclical environments where or storms or things like that move across and effect where our compute resources are ultimately deployed. >> But you don't get there overnight. I mean you got organizational barriers you got politics involved. What's the timeline look like to effect that? >> We started our transformation journey in late 2015. We reorganized the initial aspects of our IT organization everything but product development in 2016 and really spent the next 18 months kind of driving towards table setting on a platform level, not only in how we were dealing with service management but how our cloud native platform was being built out, our CICD tools data center consolidation all those activities. And then ultimately when in 2017 we reorganized the last elements of our product engineering and our development organization and now really kind of lit a fuse if you will on that transformation journey. So rather than necessarily have it start at on point and look at the distance between strategic kind of alignment we've actually gone and put definite milestones and breakpoints for us to be able to kind of reenergize that part of the organization. >> Thomas, thanks so much for coming on theCube it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vallante we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge '18 in a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From Milpitas, California, at the edge of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering autonomous vehicles. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey. Welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Milpitas, California at the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicle Event. Autotech Council is an interesting organization really trying to bring a lot of new Silicon Valley technology companies, and get them involved with what's going on in industries. They've done a Teleco Council. This is the auto one. We were here last year. It was all about mapping. This is really kind of looking at the state of autonomous vehicles. We're excited to be here. It's a small intimate event, about 300 people. A couple of cool, dem hook cars out side. And our first guest is here. He's Suneil Mishra. He is the strategic marketing for Tensyr. Nice to be here. >> Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate you having us. >> Yeah. So, give us the overview on Tensyr. >> Sure. So we're a Silicon Valley startup, venture-backed. We're actually just coming out of stealth. So you're one of the first folks to hear about-- >> Jeff: Congratulations. >> what we're up to. And we're basically doing software platforms to actually accelerate autonomous vehicles into production, doing all the things around safety and efficiency, and ROI that will be important when we actually want to make money on all of this stuff. >> Right. So what does that mean because obviously, you're in Palo Alto. I'm in Palo Alto. We see the Waymo cars driving around all the time. And it seems like every day I see a few more cars running around with LIDAR stacks on top. You know, those are all kind of R and D login miles, doing a lot of tests. What are some of the real challenges to get it from where it is today to actual production? And how are you guys helping that process? >> Sure. So yeah, I mean a lot of what people don't think about is these R and D kind of pilot cars. They actually are doing R and D. It's trial and error. That's the whole point of R and D. When you get to production, you can't have that error part anymore. And so safety suddenly becomes a critical element. And part of the things of getting safety is being much more efficient on the vehicle because you have to do a lot more software in order to be safe across multiple different kinds of examples of streets, and locations, of weather conditions, and so on. So, we basically provide essentially all of the glue, all of the grunt work, at the lower levels, to make things as efficient as possible, as safe as possible, as secure as possible. And also making things adaptable and flexible. There's lots of different hardware coming down the pipeline from all different vendors. And if you're a production vehicle, it's which ones you choose. There may be different configurations for different cost points of vehicles. And then of course when you're looking to the future as a production vehicle manufacturer, how do you know which pieces of hardware to use and whether your software will work or not? We kind of give you a lot of insight into all of those things that allow you to certify that your products are safe. And so we don't build the stacks themselves, but we actually take people self-driving models, and we accelerate them onto the vehicles. >> Jeff: With your software in the ecosystem of the self-driving car hardware. >> Exactly. So we have an actual runtime engine that will set on the end device, in this case a vehicle. And it will actually optimize the scheduling, the orchestration of all of your code. That makes it much more efficient. And we can monitor that so you can mitigate for safety. And if something does go wrong, we're essentially like a black box where you can actually see what actually happened to your software. >> So it's interesting. We talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on that a lot of the self-driving vehicles are Fords. We talked to the guys at Phantom and apparently, it's a really nice system to be able to get computer control into the control mechanisms of the car. But you said there's a whole layer of how do you define being able to interact with the control systems of the car, versus is it safe, is it ready for production, and kind of taking it beyond that R and D level. So what are some of the real challenges that people need to be aware of when we're going to make that big leap. >> Yeah, so I mean, a couple of the big things that happen is when you're seeing these pilot vehicles driving around, the amount of software that they actually have on there to control the vehicles is very tuned for the particular cases. That's why you see a lot of these vehicles out in places like Arizona where it's sunny weather. You're not having to deal with snow and all the rest of that stuff. >> Jeff: Right. >> If they actually take a car and move it to Michigan for the snow test, they'll actually deploy different software to do the snow case. But when you're actually in a production vehicle, and nobody can actually come back and change that software, you're going to have to load all of those types of solution, on at the same time. That requires more space, more compute power. And so for solutions like ours, we actually allow the production manufacturers to figure out what the optimal solutions are in those cases because you can't come back and change the software. You don't have an engineer that can go tweak that code. And you don't have a safety driver, of course, to go grab the wheel if something goes wrong. These things essentially have to be able to go out there in the wilderness for years and years, and actually work. So it's a whole different classification of problem that takes a lot more compute power. And people who are seeing those giant sets of sensor rigs don't probably realize there's also a giant trunk for clarisitive, where if there's compute power in the back, running 3,000 watts of power. When you actually get to deployment, you're going to have an embedded system with maybe 500 watts of power. So you have less compute power, and you're trying to do more with it. So it's quite a challenging problem, to actually jump to production. And we're kind of smoothing out a lot of those wrinkles. >> Right. So, I just want to get your kind of perspective on kind of the Apple approach, which everyone kind of sees Tesla as. Right? It's soup to nuts, it's the car's design, it's the software, versus kind of an industry approach where you have all these different players, obviously, 300 people here at this event. There's autonomous vehicle events going on all over the place where you got all these component manufacturers, and component parts, coming together to create the industry autonomous vehicles versus just the Tesla. So what's kind of the vibe in the industry? It feels like early days. Everybody's cooperating. How is this think kind of coalescing? >> Yeah. I think what we're seeing, we basically talk to people up and down the stack, because anyone who's doing this stuff is a potential customer for us, so automotive OEMs to tier one suppliers, to the AI startups are building these software stacks, they're all potential customers for us. What we're seeing from everyone is they're saying there's so many difficult problems to solve along this path that no company can really do it themselves. And of course, you're seeing big companies investing billions of dollars. But it's great because everybody's saying, let's find people that specialize, whether it's in sensors, or compute, all the rest of those things. And kind of get them, and partner with them, have everybody solve the right problem that they're specialized and focused on. And we essentially can kind of come in and we solve parts of those problems, but we're also kind of the glue that fills a lot of those things together. So we actually see ourselves as being quite advantageous in that anyone who's doing their specialized piece, contributes into the collective. And we kind of build that collective and make it easy for the actual end vendor that's trying to sell a car or run a service, to actually access all those mechanisms. >> And are kind of the old school primary manufacturers still the focal point of the coalescing around this organization or are they losing kind of that position? >> I wouldn't say their losing it. It's kind of an interesting play. So you've got a bunch of traditional automotive guys who actually don't really, not to diss them, but they don't really understand large-scale software because they haven't had that in their vehicles until now. And at the same time you've got kind of your startup mode software experts that don't really understand a lot about automotive. But eventually, it's got to go on a car. And so what we're finding is the automotive manufacturers are really saying to get to production, we need certain kinds of safety guarantees and ROI and so on. So they're really driving from that point of view. The software guys are kind of saying, well, we're just going to throw the software over to you and sort of, good luck. So, we're actually finding both sides care, but nobody's quite sure who should be taking the lead. So I think we're getting to the point where ultimately, automotive manufacturers will be the one shipping vehicles and that software's going to be on their car. So they're going to be the ones that care about it most. So we're actually seeing them being quite proactive about how do we solve these problems. How do we get from the R and D stage to the actual production stage? So that's where we're seeing a lot of the interest on our side. >> All right, Suneil. We could go on forever, but we have to leave it there. And congratulations on your launch and coming out of stealth. And we're excited to watch the story unfold. >> Great. Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate the time. >> All right. He's Suneil. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching The Cube from the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicle Event in Milpitas, California. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> [Voiceover] Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Palo Alto, California inside theCube's new studios, 4500 square feet in Palo Alto, just opened up last month and excited to be here. Breaking down Mobile World Congress all day, from 8 a.m. to 6, today and tomorrow. As their day ends, we're going to pick up the coverage, do the analysis, get some commentary and reaction to all the news and also the big trends and my next guest here in the studio is Saar Gillai, friend of the Cube, Cube alumni, and former HPE Senior Vice President GM of the teleco business. Ran the cloud, then a variety of things with Meg Whitman at HPE, now he's independent board member and in between gigs on the beach, clipping coupons as we say, Saar, great to see you, looking good. >> Great to be here, nice studio. >> I'm excited that you could come in, this is exactly why we're having our show here in this new studio because a lot of folks that don't take the big trek to Barcelona who don't have to can come in and talk to us and you've been a veteran of Mobile World Congress for many years. Again, you ran, and actually built the cloud biz and also built the, I won't say NFV biz, but essentially the teleco communications division for HPE so you know a lot about what's happening in the industry and more importantly Mobile World Congress. This is the year that all the accelerant is coming to the table, all the rocket fuel is being poured out on to the bonfire, the matches are going to be lit, it's called 5G, it's called IOT, internet of things, internet of people, the devices look good, they all want to be Apple, they all want to be over the top, running entertainment, smart cities, cars, 5G is the holy grail, we're done. But seriously, where is the meat on the bone on this thing? Is it real, is this transformation hype or reality at Mobile World Congress? >> Yes. (laughing) >> Yes, hype or yes, it's real? >> There's a lot of hype, but there's some reality. I mean I think first of all, 5G is the latest thing, it used to be LTE, now it's 5G. What does 5G actually mean? Really, for people, what 5G means is you should have a lot more capacity, right? So 5G talks about even up to one gigabit in certain cases, lower latency and so forth. Now the thing about wireless is you know, there's no secrets in wireless, okay? It's not like... >> It's a physics game. >> ...Yeah, it's physics, it's not like ethernet, where you can go from one meg to 10 meg then all you have to do is run more line and you're good. If that was so easy in wireless right now, we'd all be getting one gigabyte right, but we're not. So the only way you increase capacity in wireless is through smaller cells, and there are some mimo technologies and so forth. You know, 5G talks abouts technologies that will enable you to do that, but it's much more of an evolution than revolution and people need to understand that. There's no fundamental shift, what they're talking about in 5G is adding a lot more bandwidth. Today, most of the frequencies being used are sub five gigahertz, those are great frequencies to go through walls, they're not that great in terms of capacity and there's not that much of them. Like AT&T might have 60 megahertz, that's the entire capacity they have in the U.S. And that's not much. And so they're talking about using millimeter waves, other things like 27 gig, 28 gig, 60 gig. Now, those do have a lot more capacity, they have other problems, they don't go through walls. So, I think instead of thinking about 5G, we need to think about, okay, what problems are we trying to solve? Like, what problems is this going to solve? I think in some sense, it's... ...while everyone wants more broadband, some of it is a solution looking for a problem. >> [John] Yeah, it's a field of dreams too dynamic, build it, they will come. That has been a network operator concept, right? And then we know the operators, and you and I have talked about this on theCube many years, the operators are having business model challenges, problems, challenges, there are opportunities, but at the same time there is a bigger picture I want to get your thoughts on. So in a vacuum, there's limitations, there's physics, but now, you're looking at a connected network, and this is the end to end concept, so under the covers of wireless, assuming wireless has its topology, architectural things you could do, smaller cells, different frequencies, how it's going through walls is preferred, longer distance, longer latency through walls, that's the ideal scenario. But I think there's a bigger picture around the different types of wireless networks, but there's cars, there's mobility, actual true mobility, 60 miles an hour in a car versus walking down the street or sitting in a stadium or at home. These are use cases. How much of it is a wireless problem versus another problem? NFV, end to end, virtualization, help us parse that through, how should we think about this? >> There's two issues, there's a wireless problem, we can talk about the different segments that make sense and don't make sense or how much they have to evolve to make sense. And then fundamentally, the networks are very... ...they're not that agile as we know. Which is why NFV really, if you remove NFV, and you just... ...NFV's about creating agility, and yes their doing for virtualization and yada yada, but it's about creating agility, creating automation, right? You can't have these... ...a lot of these networks were designed years ago even 3GPP, this is a decade old. And so yes, there's a lot of work that has to be done and creating much more agility in a network because the network isn't built for that. Just if you think about even simple things like number of subscribers that can go on and off, right? Okay, if you have a cell phone. Like today, if you look in the world there might be 80 billion subscribers, lets say. If you look at the number of cell phones and so forth. But once you start IOT, you might have 100 billion because every device will be a network. That's a different management system, right? Also, those devices may go on and off every day, right? Because you buy a new device, you plug it in the wall. Okay, phones, you don't start a new phone every day, right? People buy a phone to use it, so, the network becomes much more dynamic, the back end has to be more dynamic, that has a side effect and so there's a lot of work that has to be done on the backend to make it more dynamic. That's the backend problem and then, you know, they are working on it. >> [John] And the bright spots there are what? What are the bright spots happening today, this week at Mobile World Congress and the trends around the backend? >> Well, you know, I mean Mobile World Congress is a show, right? And these are not sexy things, so we probably won't hear a lot about them, but you hear about orchestration, automation, network virtualization, basically moving all this through the cloud paradigm, where you have a lot more flexibility. I mean if you think about what's happening NFV these days for example, you don't hear a lot about it, but what is happening a lot is onboarding work. Okay, we've talked a lot about it, from that hype, now we're into build-out, right? So you hear less about it, but stuff is actually happening. >> [John] So it's operational. >> [Saar] It's operational stuff. >> Yeah >> [Saar] They're modifying the system so that they can be ready to work when you get to that point. On the radio side, I think the important thing to understand is like you said exactly, there's multiple use cases for 5G. The most interesting and immediate one, potentially is to use wireless to compete against cable. Which is fixed wireless access. You know, there, the telecos for years have wanted to do it, there was this whole discussion about fiber, then it turned out fiber's expensive. >> [John] Yeah, you've got to trench it, you've got to provision it to your home, you've got to roll a truck. >> Took Google a few years to figure that out, but even for Google, it's expensive. >> [John] People who have done that said you're crazy, but Google's has had so many deep pockets and Facebook does the same thing with their kind of R&D projects. >> They figured it out, there are technologies, millimeter wave is a bit hard because it doesn't go through walls, but I think when we talk about capacities, it's not for your mobile phone, it's for other things, it's mostly for fixed wireless access. There's a whole discussion about cars, I personally, because we're talking about opinions here, I don't understand the problem so much because the reality is the car's going to be a mobile data center. So 90 percent of the data that's generated by the car will be kept in the car and the car will be sending analytics and metrics up so it doesn't need gigabits. It's not like every time you turn you need to get it an instruction. Maybe that's what the network guys want you to believe because then you need like zero latency. But you don't need that, it's much easier to invest in a better system in the car. So the car's not going to figure out... >> [John] The car is a computer, it's not a peripheral. >> Yeah, it's a peripheral. >> [John] It's a data center to your point. >> [Saar] It's a full data center. It's the edge that computes, so I don't think that's an issue, I think the car will need coverage and so forth. >> But that's a different thing, cars are great examples so let's take on this one. 'Cause this is a perfect mental model. A car is going to have all this capacity like a big computer >> [Saar] It's a data center. >> [John] Or a data center. >> [Saar] A mini data center. >> A lot of things, a lot of instrumentation, a lot of software, glue. >> [Saar] It's going to have 10 computers, big systems, it's like a little data center. >> But it also moves fast, so it's a true mobile data center. So it needs mobility. So mobility has trade-offs, right, with the wireless piece at least. Depends on how you're uploading. >> Again, it depends on the capacity. Mobility has certain elements when you get into Doppler Effect and so on. It's always a capacity trade off. All of you have talked on your cell phone or used data on your cell phone in your plane, we know this. When the plane's landing, that's 150 miles an hour when the plane lands, okay, and it works pretty well. >> We all cheat, don't turn on your cell phones, we're landing. >> [Saar] Yeah, exactly. >> We've all done it. >> So again, if you want to run a gigabit, it's a problem, if you want to run less it's not such a big deal if a car's going 60 miles an hour. So it depends. Now if you define the use cases, I need a gigabit for every car, there's a million cars, that's a problem. If you define the use case, as something else it's not a big problem. There is a problem though, and I think that is something that the 5G is trying to address in terms of more on the backend of density. >> Density in terms of signal, or density in terms of... >> In terms of support, so for example, the one place you can never use a cell phone is in a conference, because too many people are trying to get on at the same time. It's a statistical model. >> [John] A-station issues. >> It breaks, and so with a car also, you're going to have high density because if you have a traffic jam, all these cars are talking or receiving, so that's a bigger issue. And 5G does talk about that as well, but that's a bigger issue than pure capacity. Pure capacity, great, I'll give you this much megahertz... >> [John] I agree with that. >> You can do that on WiFi today. >> [John] I totally agree with that. So let's take a step back I want to get a little color on Mobile World Congress. Talk about what's going on right now. So it's dinner, people at parties, what goes on? People want to always ask me, John what always happens? First of all, Barcelona is a great city as you know, we've been there together for some HP events, as well as for Mobile World Congress. What's happening, you always make the comment it's a Biz Dev show which means it's business development going on. All the top executives go there, deals are being cut, but it's also a large trade show as you will for mobility. >> I think like you said, from my experience, the biggest value of Mobile World Congress is not the show itself, with all due respect to the show, it's the fact that everybody and anybody who is somebody is there, that's why we're not there. So you can meet people. And so if you want to meet a bunch of people, teleco leaders and so forth, that's what you do. This is the place. You all say, okay, we'll meet at Mobile World Congress. So like for example, when I was down there I would basically go back to back from in the morning until 10 at night, in meetings, dinners, whatever with CEOs of various telecos or CEOs of partners and so on. Everybody's there, and I never actually got to see the show because I never got out of a meeting. And most of what happens there is that. That's amazing because again, everybody's there. >> [John] There's a huge ecosystem involved. Talk about that ecosystem because this is the dynamic. And first of all, we don't have to go there because we've got theCube here so we're there virtually, digitally, and that's what we do now. This is great, in the studio, we save ourselves the three day flight to go to Barcelona. It is crazy there, but it is about the community there, because you have that opportunity to get the feedback, do deals. >> [Saar] A lot of deals around there. >> [John] A lot of deals happening, also feedback, trying to connect the dots and having the right product strategies. What are some of the things that you think is happening right now from a business standpoint in these meetings, right now? Are people still scratching their heads on over the top, is it the classic problems, what's the current state of the union? >> Well, you saw Vimpel Com change their name to some other thing, so I think what you're seeing right now, is there's still sort of multiple dynamics going on. One dynamic is there's people maneuvering around how 5G ends up closing and there was some discussions about that, there was some release done about hey we should speed it up and then Enrique said no this is silly. So there are some discussions, there is some maneuvering going on like any time when you're doing a spec, when does it freeze, when does it not freeze? Some of the telecos want this, and so forth. That's sort of in the background going on. They're still trying to figure out, you know, business model is still an issue. The people are experimenting and you're going to see a lot of that, experimenting with apps, experimenting with these monetization strategies. So there's a lot of that going on, trying to figure out, okay, how do we monetize the network in a better fashion? >> What do you think the best path is from your perspective? Just putting your industry hat on, if you had to kind of lay down some epic commentary to the teleco bosses, hey you got to cannibalize your own, get out in front, what would you advise them in terms of what to get out in front of, what to double down on? >> I think some of them are actually doing this, but I think first of all, I think they should forget about worrying about the technology. I mean, technology is very important, we need to take care of that, but really, they need to know what are they good at? What are they strong at? So their strong at a customer relationship, they have customers that they quote unquote have as partners, those customers, and they're very strong so what can you do with that partnership as opposed to all kinds of other random stuff. Now, if you look at what they're doing, they're doing different things. Some of them are like buying different media companies, so there's no easy path, but they're going to have to use their strength as opposed to try to become somebody they're not. They're not going to become Google, they're not going to become Amazon, they're not going to become one of those guys. They do need to become more cloudified just to be efficient, but that's because that's sort of the... ...just to play, you have to pay that card, but they're not going to be better than the existing, but they do have a very strong relationship with customers, they could probably sell them more things if they focus on good customer service. Customers are happy to work with them if they get a good deal and a frictionless environment. So, I would certainly encourage all of them, and I know many of them are focused on this, to improve your frictionless interaction for the customer. If the customer has a frictionless interaction and gets a good deal, they'll do business with them. >> Are you worried about the teleco's customer relationship when they have this decoupling trend kind of happening where the consumers want to take their phone or device and uncouple it from the network and just add more mobility across networks. So if there's better connectivity, I could be able to hop between Verizon, AT&T, whoever, that seems to be something that a lot of folks technically are saying from an architectural standpoint, having that personal centric view versus a network centric tie-in. Is that on the radar at all? Or is that still kind of in a way, fantasy? >> It's like people are still using AOL, right? >> [John] Who? Who? (laughing) >> They voted for Trump then, huh? >> I'm not going there right now, we can discuss that later. The point is, the primary area where there's problems in that area is roaming. And there's a lot of discussion about roaming. 55 or 60 percent of people turn off data when they go overseas because the roaming fares are so incredibly expensive which makes no sense. Why would I have a longer cost because I happen to have an AT&T contract in Europe, I'm not using more data than somebody in Europe and it's going through the backend of the internet anyways. So I think there... >> [John] It's a great way to jack the user with more fees. >> But that's not sustainable. >> Of course. >> I think there, you're going to see pressure of people and there's some companies who provide apps, and cards and sim cards, but there's now soft ways of doing it, there you're going to see pressure and I think eventually that will go the way of the messaging, where... >> [John] Like WhatsApp >> Yeah, they'll come up with something that will allow you to have data at a much cheaper rate, I don't know, does it make sense to switch carriers in the local market if you have a good price? I mean, what's the point? So again it all comes back to, do they give you a frictionless service? If they give you a frictionless service that is at reasonable cost, then you'll use it. So you've got to look at places... ...where their going to have people leave them is where they don't do that. And there are places they don't do that, roaming is one of those places. >> [John] So I've got to ask you about IOT, obviously it's the hottest trend, AI's more of the mental model that people get their arms around, they see virtual reality, augmented reality, they call that AI, it's more of a mental model, it's really not AI, but IOT is really where the action is. People see networks, where devices as you mention are coming on and off, you just don't provision those as static devices. They're very dynamic. Your take on the IOT market, what's your view on that? Because a lot of action happening there. >> I've been involved in IOT and different people have different names for what T means, I won't go there here. >> [John] T and P, things and people. Let it be watch... >> [Saar] Well T could mean things, it could mean other things too, but the point is, IOT ...I was working in a company that was doing IOT when we called machine to machine, if we had called it IOT, it would have been better. The point is IOT is, this is extremely fragmented, it's a super super fragmented market. And it has different ecosystems. The more complex part of IOT is not the front end, it's the backend of how do you manage devices how do you tie them to some app, how do you configure them, provision them? >> [John] 'Cause of the backend, infrastructures are different. Some are IT based... >> Think about it, you've got all these devices how do you upgrade them? How do you make sure they don't start a denial of service attack on their own? How do you provision them, how do you manage their life cycle? HPE has some product in that area, a global connectivity platform, but other people as well. So, this is a bigger problem. The backend is a much bigger problem than the front end. What's the problem? Hypothetically, I can stick a SIM card into anything and it's now a device. Most of these things do not have a high bandwidth. Low bandwidth coverage is pretty good in urban centers, not if you go to Utah, but other places. So, the biggest problem is backend. Now obviously there's a lot of advancements that can be done on the front end too, because of power issues. The biggest problem with IOT is depending what you want, you have a power issue. For example, we used to do this back in the day, you built these little devices, you stick them on containers, and then you can find out where the container is at any given moment. That's great, but how long does this thing last? I think IOT is a very big thing that's happening, I think most of the problem in IOT is not in the front end, it's in the back. >> [John] Yeah, I would agree with that. Also it allows you to get more data too. Another problem is storing up more data which is security, data, IT management, basic stuff. >> [Saar] Very basic stuff, and that stuff is hard to fix because again usually IOT is not a green field that are going to connect to something that exists. You're just augmenting it with IOT like if it's a power meter or something so now you have this existing ecosystem that has to interact with something that is brand new and so there are various companies who build interfaces and how to solve it, there's management issues. But I think IOT is real. >> [John] So let's talk about cloud. So cloud you also had your hand in at HP as well, you had a wireless background, the folks might not know that, going back before then. The cloud really is an opportunity, we see that with Amazon and then Microsoft's now got their stock up and so obviously cloud, it's a bigger game, it's hybrid, it's happening and then you have all these other fringe things developing around the mobility piece. How is the cloud changing the Mobile World Congress game? Because now it's a show that kind of blends. It feels like CES on one hand, it feels like Cloud World on another. It feels like IOT and teleco world, and all these things are kind of in a melting pot. >> Well I think to me, when I look at Mobile World Congress, I think of okay, it's teleco world, really because whatever the telecos happen to be doing is what the show is about, right? If you think about the telecos, we're talking about companies that have a capital like I think AT&T spends like 20 billion dollars a year or something in that range. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of capital budget and whatever those folks are interested in is what shows up in that show. >> [John] So it's still a Teleco show dominant, you don't see that changing at all? >> No, but what teleco is, is changing, right? I mean they have broadcast, so what I'm saying is whatever the telecos are interested in is what shows up in that show. Drones, cars, telecos have their hands in all these things. And that's why it shows up in the show. Because ultimately the show is about the telecom space and the primary players. If you go down there, the booths that are as big as a country club, you know the Ericssons and so forth, it's a teleco show and people who want to be relevant like Intel as they want to be more relevant in wireless is building a bigger and bigger booth over there. But what teleco is really is about connecting things and as there's more things to connect, telecos get involved in other things. If they see a business opportunity, for example drones, lets go back to talk about that because there's a whole drone day and all this other stuff there. I mean drones need higher... ...I don't think they need so much bandwidth although it depends what kind of video you want to do. But they do need reliable connectivity. It's something useful, right? And today, you could argue connectivity it's not super reliable, it's pretty reliable, but we all have dropped calls every five minutes, right? I mean if a drone drops a call, that may not be that easy. There's use cases around these things >> [John] And back to your earlier point, I think this is the most important for the folks to listen to and hone in on is that there's a use case in every corner depending on the view of the market. Drones is one. Take virtual reality, augmented reality, that's another. IT, enterprises connecting, entertainment over the top, smart cities, these are all kind of nuanced areas. >> But when people want to understand, separate the hype from the non-hype, see if you can understand the use case. If you can't understand the use case or if the use case seems out there, then the technology is probably out there. Technology on it's own is fascinating, but if there's no use case that makes sense right here right now like again, for example, if I got a gigabit to my phone right now, would it make a difference in my life? An extra 20 hours of battery life would make a difference in my life more than a gigabit. >> That's a good point, right now battery life is more important than connectivity, but as the network transformation which is a big buzz word for this show is coming to the surface, that's an end to end architecture with software. So we think about traversing cloud, software, delivering of apps and services that's different. Now the apps have more headroom in that case, but then to your point, the backend's got to be... ...under the hood has to be smarter. Or is network transformation not yet there? >> Well I think what's happened is that the OTT, the OTTs started developing 20 years later, and surprise surprise, when you develop 20 years later, you have advantages, doesn't matter who you are, so their backend is a much further generation than the teleco's backend and so that's why when you connect to OTT services, it's consumer experience, it feels seamless and so forth, when you connect to the telecos backend, it's sort of a mismatch. And so they need to sort of fix that and that's part of the NFV transformation they're working on and again it's not because they had any limitations its because they had existing stuff, it's much easier to build from scratch. >> Final comment on Mobile World Congress this year, and outlook for the next year, your thoughts? >> We need to parse out what actually comes out of there. It's still early, I think 5G, 5Gs going to be what people are going to talk about, this is the thing. It means multiple things, but that's because the entire teleco world, if you think about it, if you look at the revenue of the suppliers and so forth who have been in a holding pattern ever since 4G sort of, in China, they finished 4G deployment and so the next big capital spending is going to be 5G, and so you're going to see the providers push anything to get that going. That's just the bottom line. >> Great. Saar Gallai, final comment, what are you working on now? Obviously we got to know you at a personal level with HPE, I've seen your roles, and the last one was really handling that teleco business which you grew up from a handful of people to hundreds of people, thousands of people. You're a land grabber, kingdom builder, empire builder. What are you up to now, what are you looking at for opportunity? I know you're doing some investing, you have some independent boards, what's your world like now here in Silicon Valley, what's your activities look like, and what's your thoughts on the valley in general and entrepreneurship and your activities? >> First of all, what I'm doing, the good news is I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley and so I'm very busy doing various interactions with bbcs, with startups, consulting, looking at different businesses, there's so much interesting things going on. Every morning you can look at new things that people bring over. Whether they're teleco related or not teleco related. Just some amazing things going on. Something from new wireless protocols to cloudification and so on, and I also sit on a few boards so I'm spending a lot of time doing that, looking at different things. >> [John] What's exciting for you right now? What's getting you jazzed up? >> There's so many different things, like I said, I think... >> [John] What's the coolest thing? >> The coolest things, some of the most cool things are.. >> [John] Confidential? >> Yeah, stealthy, I would say. I'm looking at some wireless stuff that's pretty revolutionary that I think could be new protocols that sort of change the whole dynamic of how wireless works, that's pretty interesting. And then I'm looking at some other things that are just how you apply cloud to different problems in the world. If you look at the cloud paradigm, it's existed for a fair amount of time now, but although we talk about it all day, most of the things in the world, most of the apps, most of the problem sets are not leveraging any in the cloud. They're still at best using >> [John] Recycled IT. >> Recycled IT, or sometimes even Windows 98 for all you know, right? In Africa, Africa went to wireless directly, they never did wired. So there may be a lot of industries that never go from Windows to proper data centers. They just go straight from basic Windows directly to the cloud. There's lots of opportunities that are interesting there. I'm looking at a few CEO options. But it's very exciting, there's so much going on. There's just so many things happening. >> [John] Well let's get into that tomorrow, you're going to come by tomorrow at 4:30, folks watching tomorrow at 4:30 Pacific Time, Saar will be back in the studio, we're going to dig in to the entrepreneurial landscapes, I think one of the things that you highlighted that we were talking about earlier is that sometimes you have technology looking for a problem, and the reality is that most of the game changing opportunities come out of left field that no one sees, these are the revolutionary game changers, the new technology, the hard stuff, not just some app that gets built, it's the real hardcore tech that could be applied to some of these real problems. And I think that's going to be the key. Saar Gallai here inside the studio, breaking down Mobile World Congress with theCube here in Palo Alto covering what's happening in Barcelona. We got some still phone-ins, late night in Barcelona, we're going to make those shortly, be right back with more coverage after this short break. (soft music)