(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back to "theCUBE" stage here in cloud city, TelcoDr, Telco digital revolution. We had a chance to talk to Rob Haberman, CTO of Nokia software. Great interview as part of our hybrid program here, but we're still on the floor onsite. Let's go listen to my great interview with Ron and what he had to say about the power of the cloud. (upbeat digital music) And welcome to "theCUBE's" coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. It's an in-person and hybrid event and we're here in Palo Alto through remote interview as part of the hybrid, getting as much content as possible, is a great guest Ron Haberman, who is the CTO of Nokia Cloud Network Services known as CNS. Ron's an expert. He's going to come in and share with us his vision and his commentary on openness in the cloud, Telco cloud, the changes at the Edge, of so much going on, so much innovation that's changing the game, that's going to impact lives and society. Ron, thank you for coming on "theCUBE" for this Mobile World Congress special segment. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So the transformation in the cloud is so amazing with 5G. You've got cloud native developers, you've got enterprises changing their architectures, and cloud service probably going to the next level. 5G certainly is a great edge, but the strength of the cloud combined with the new modern applications really is going to be the power. And you start to see people starting to think differently around how developers are building apps and how companies are working together. It's not just one company ruling the world anymore, it's a lot of interoperability, interconnections, a lot of API's openness, kind of sounds like a network. It sounds like a network effect. This is a big deal. What's your take on this whole shift as 5G gets enabling a fast edge and cloud native go hand in hand. What's your take? >> I think 5G and the transformation to cloud native, generically speaking, go very nicely hand in hand. It's important to understand that 5G is not just another G, really because it's more intended for consumption by businesses and not just consumer. And what it means is that it would have a vast impact on how development is done, how the deployment is done and the type of features that would be required from the network. So when we went on our path to start developing for cloud native, primarily, for 5G, it went beyond just being cloud ready. And we started looking at how do we expand the operability with the ecosystems? How do we go into topics such as continuous delivery? How do we create collaboration between CSPs and cloud providers, such as we can provide the advancements. Now, there are quite a few subtopics in the transformation. For example, these might be obvious, but without automation there's really no ability to create a cloud native delivery process. If you're on the cloud, you're creating speed and ability to innovate as well as access, but you also are now required to create a better security system in ways to tie things back together. The multi-vendor environment and the path that it would enable to move to as a service model is again, a topic that can really be established as part of this transition to cloud native and has been greatly in focus for us. And finally there is a bit of a balancing act in some of the use cases in how do we use new technologies such as machine learning, in creating new use cases. For Nokia as a supplier of both the network functions, which are now getting distributed into public cloud in the private cloud, and on the Edges, as well as control systems of different types of OSS, BSS, including charging, enablement, IOP, et cetera, et cetera. It's really about how do we bring these things together in a way that creates use cases that the service providers can position, especially in their now quest to go after B2B, in leveraging their network. >> Yeah, and you guys bring huge strength there on the Nokia side. I want to ask you specifically, as CSPs are collaborating with you guys to leverage that strength of cloud native and open, the question comes up is how fast can they get to a modern, agile, open infrastructure and how fast can they enable value? And that's where this whole interoperability thing, or this interplay between cloud native and innovation hub comes together. Can you take us through how you see that? How cloud service providers are approaching cloud native today? Because that's really kind of where the focus is, how do I get the operating value, with the speed and agility of development, and obviously built in all the security and everything else? That seems to be the disruptor and let's face it, it's been a slow world in the telco place. So cloud has been a speed game with value, but it's an operator game too. What's your thoughts? >> That's right. And look, I'll take you maybe just a little bit into the history of this transition because only just a few years ago, most networks were really build purely with what we're now referring to as SPMS, physical network functions, really a equipment that was installed in a certain pop locations and created the network. We started this transition to virtualization in the world of VMS and then cloud ready and now cloud native. And it's been a few years for these things to come together. And maybe the most important thing that we must get right, is that as we dis-aggregate and in a way it complicates the deployment, if you would, by a few factors, we want to give the tools to indeed go fast, because the name of the game in moving to cloud native is to speed up innovation. So what we've been doing and in collaboration now with Google, is on the one hand, we need to make sure that all of the network functions, the operating models work, into this aggregated cloud. They can go all the way from a private data center through the Edge, into the central data center. Then on the Nokia side, we have to bring the capabilities to tie networks together, be able to migrate workloads between the locations. And maybe most importantly, as we release new versions of our software, as we enable new capabilities, we want to put it in the hands of the service providers and in turn the developers right away. So we need to enable true continuous delivery in the sense that is very familiar in the cloud world, but quite new to telco. So we have- >> You know. All right sorry- >> Go ahead. >> I'm sorry to interrupt, continue. >> Maybe just to give a very practical example of a customer that we share in Europe, Telenet we're starting with an on-premise Anthos based type of deployment, but keeping an eye on moving to the Edge and into the broader cloud, really enabling themselves to be in a multi region and with true Northbound open interfaces for new use cases to be implemented. >> Yeah, Ron, I want to get your thoughts on this. Dave Vellante, my cohost and I we're talking just in an earlier segment around how major inflection points have some characteristics. They all have characters in common. Usually it's proprietary to open shifts happen. And one in point we were looking at was like the nineties, the late eighties, early nineties, when you had proprietary networking protocol stacks, and then OSI stack came out. Obviously we know what happened from there TCP/IP created the best biggest wave of innovation in the computer history we've seen. Similar things happened here. And I won't say proprietary per se, but there were 5G and telcos stuff, that's kind of like operator centric legacy. Are you starting to see this openness come back and I'm not going to say a full stack, but new kinds of disruption and 5G is opening up the door because it's not just consumer technology. A lot of people like the CEO of Intel saying this is a business technology, commercial technology, more than consumer because of the characteristics. And you combine that with cloud native and say openness with scale with cloud services, but you mentioned Google, that's a public cloud. And so public cloud is going to be a disruption, 'cause it brings scale. So it reminds me of this inflection point where you have this new shift and you mentioned networks, these networks are connecting. So you've got a public cloud and Google's known for their networks and their cloud is being highly scalable and secure. But they're not the only network in town. You got a 5G and you got Backhaul, you got all kinds of new heterogeneous environments. What's your comment on that? Because this is what people are talking about. Where's the shift going to go? What wave is this? What's this going to look like? Is this a true disruption or is it more of the same? What's your thoughts? >> I think it's a true disruption. One of the biggest parts of 5G that would enable these new use cases is slicing. Now slicing is a big word describing something that most of us in networks know for quite some time, really the ability to create some kind of a piece of the network that is shared between partners for a particular purpose, with a particular SLA that contains bandwidth and licensing or requirements, locations, et cetera, et cetera. Now the ultimate goal is for an enterprise to be able to interface with the public cloud and with their operator and consume resources completely dynamically. Now, you talked about Google and public cloud. And obviously anybody that used GCP knows that at any point in time, you can go into a region, you can reserve what you need, use what you need, create results, and then either keep it move away, open new locations, et cetera, et cetera. One thing is missing, the connectivity over the mobile air interface to your user. And slicing allows us to combine the power of the true cloud with the ability to dynamically and programmatically, create a slice for a particular purpose. And for us, the ultimate goal is that really networks would become programmable and a developer or their user would be able to interface with the system and literally create network in code. Now there's going to be quite a lot of building blocks required to reach that goal, given that today, most of it is static. But it starts with at least being able to orchestrate resources out of the network, tie them into termination point that by themselves are annex, that are cloud native and potentially even running in the true public cloud and then attach them into a use case. Now you also mentioned openness and Nokia had been on this open path for quite some time in creating choice for our customers, but now with Google coming in with GCP for example, the interface that we create with technology such as Apogee enable openness, not just for our customer being the CSP, but also for the developer to come in from the outside and reside within the ecosystem that they chose and still be able to consume and even create services dynamically. And we enable it with products that interface with that on the other side, which we can get in there. >> Yeah, what's interesting. What you're saying is interesting, I would just call it out because I think it's important. We hear this all the time is that with the Edge and the devices, people are managing an end to end workflow from an application standpoint. But that's very difficult when you don't have networks that are being managed as a heterogeneous environment. So that's a key point you made. So the question I have for you is how can operators best manage this wave? Because this is the holy grail you're talking about here. We're talking about end to end visibility into the workflow as a developer, with the shift left security being built in. No one's debating that, everyone knows that. So as an operator, how do I starting today operate and manage through this? 'Cause I got to operate a large network. It's almost like swapping the engine out at 30,000 feet in the airplane. So how should operators think about taking this step? >> So the first thing to do is to really just accept the fact that there is going to be true legacy... And there are plenty of 3G networks today still operating around the world. There's going to be, to what is now starting to look like semi legacy. So VNX that have only been delivered to networks, maybe in the past couple of years and will carry 4G traffic and will stay in production for quite some time and manage this transition between PMS, VMs, running VNX, VMs running containerized workloads, and true cloud native, which may be bare metal. And as we're working with Google on Anthos, it literally enables this transition by creating a position for us to put the workload in each step of the path, as well as in multiple locations around the network. And what Nokia brings into this equation, it's also a unified view for the operator. So if you're an operator that today runs on VMs on prem, you have some workflows defined and you've been running them in a certain way, we want to keep that view as similar as possible with the tooling that you were enabled to use over the past few years, but create extensions that connects us into the containerized workflow and then a true cloudified workflow out of the same environment. And this is actually in part what we've been collaborating both with some CSPs, as well as with Google on enabling. >> Ron Haberman, CTO, Nokia Cloud Network Services Group, thank you so much for that insight, great commentary. Thank you for sharing your perspective on the future of telco, telco cloud, telco Edge, unifying those networks end to end. Great stuff, thank you for coming on "theCube." >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is Cube's coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. We're in person and we're virtual, it's a hybrid event. Thanks for watching. >> John clearly the power of the public cloud in that interview. Great job, by the way, >> It was great to get Nokia and to hear the operator impact, and that's awesome. More to come. So back to the studio, Adam and the team back at the studio.