>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM 2020, it's the digital IBM 2020, the Think Event Experience. My name is Dave Vellante, and you are watching theCUBE. Steve Canepa is here, he's the global GM of Communications, of the Communications sector for IBM. Steve, how ya doing, good to have you on. >> Doing great Dave, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. I mean, communications is sort of a broad term for the stuff you covered. Telco, Cable, Entertainment, Broadcast, Publishing, Satellite, Sports, Music, Games, I mean, Social, wow. You run the gamut. >> It's exciting times. >> Pretty big role, yeah, I'll say you've got exciting times. With so much going on in your space, and of course this pandemic is really, you know, hit the communications industry in so many different ways. Some tailwinds, some headwinds, and it's just crazy out there. What are you seeing and what are you guys doing to support clients? >> Well, first and importantly, our thoughts go out to everyone. As we're all dealing with this around the world. I have the opportunity to work with clients, in every geography, around the globe and each and everyone of them is busily dealing with how they make sure their employees are safe, how they're providing services to their customers. And, we're right there alongside them, helping them do that as well. For us in the telecommunication space, as you know, it's actually essential, it's an essential industry that's helping the world deal with this as we are all going virtual like this session we're having today. So we're working with clients to help them get their resources in place so that they can support their businesses, their network platforms, their media services in a way that they can keep the business running. Our telecommunications customers all around the globe had to get their resources and work at home environments, we work with many of them, in deploying real-time services. We also work with them in deploying call center chatbot capabilities so that they could answer questions from their customers, from other members of the community as they were coming in. So tremendous opportunity for us to help them respond to what's happening. >> It's actually quite amazing the response, when you think about telco, you think about telco infrastructure, what comes to mind is, it's hard and it's reliable, it works and all of a sudden you've got all these remote workers. The pace of the pivot has been actually quite astounding. I mean your thoughts on that. >> Yeah and it actually goes hand in glove in what way we've been preparing the industry for generally. I mean there's been this evolution that digital service providers that's been happening in the industry now for a number of years and in fact the center point of what we're doing now to help telcos virtualize and abstract those networks so that they're software based services platforms that can respond to these kinds of peak load demand issues. Not that anyone anticipated COVID, but the ability to have a platform, that can scale your business. And allow you to respond, move services where they need to be moved, be much more agile in the way you work. These are all playing in the ability to respond to it. >> Steve I want to ask you about something you said in a recent article in Forbes, you said, winners in the 5G and edge era will be those who embrace a hybrid multicloud approach." Well, first of all, I want to ask you, I mean five G can't get here fast enough, but still you're kind of predicting, my inference a five g and edge era coming this decade, like I said it can't happen soon enough. What are your thoughts on this coming era? >> In my view there's three fundamental things that are happening simultaneously. So first obviously, five g is emerging. It's showing up now. Most service providers around the world are starting to already deploy their private five g capabilities. We're seeing it show up in evolution form, in consumer marketplace. So five g is here and will continue to scale. The second key transformation that's happening is the telco network itself is becoming a hybrid cloud platform. What I mean by that is that just as when video abstracted as a service and it could be deployed over the top service platforms, enabling things like our interview that we're doing today to happen, that got loaded on top of now open IP platform. The same exact thing is happening in the network domain where the network services, data services, voice service, multimedia services are being put on an open platform architecture that allows you to respond. And then the third key thing that's happening in the market is this edge phenomenon. And this is all about the ability to move workloads, to move services out closer to where things happen and take advantage of those key five g features like ultra low latency, increased bandwidth, and of course the ability to slice the network down to dedicated to a specific application. This opens up a whole new set of services. >> Yeah I mean as I was sort of eluding to before, the reliability of telco networks has been the hallmark of that infrastructure. As we move to this more open sort of standardized environments Steve, I would imagine that one of the technical challenges is maintaining that level of reliability and predictability while at the same time being able to support remote workers, etc low latency workloads. Can you comment on that? >> Yeah so a couple of key points there. One is as you may know, IBM acquired Red Hat a little over a year ago. Red Hat has created an open platform for the telco's to modernize their core infrastructure. And the power of that is we can see is this enormous upstream community now and that community can help accelerate the rate pace of transformation is happening, bring innovation in. That's really powerful. The second is, once we go through an open platform, software based platform, we can infuse automation. Extreme levels of automation, and AI for intelligent predictive capability. And now think about the network becoming a living, breathing, responding platform where it's based on software. So we can deploy services and functions and we can automate those services and functions. That level of intelligence serves as the ability to then get out these services. >> So Steve, definitely we had I think a decent understanding of the Red Hat and the strategy around Open Shift and the container approach, hybrid multicloud. What I didn't realize is that there was specificity around the telco industry. Can you talk more specifically about what IBM is doing in that regard? >> Yeah, it's a great question. Red Hat has a very significant presence in 120 telcos around the globe. And so not only they're Red Hat Linux which is kind of a defacto standard in the marketplace, but their open stack architecture now we're moving after the Open Shift architecture. And as part of that the relationship with an enormous upstream community of talent, it's building on those platforms. And so we're able to really infuse into Red Hat the kind of requirements that are necessary for their software platform to serve as the platform, the open platform for the telcos as we go forward. It has been an incredible synergy. I think of it as kind of two puzzle pieces that fit together incredibly well. At IBM we've had the long standing relationship with all the service providers around the world and helping them transform their business and now with Red Hat we have the opportunity to really integrate what we're doing with automation and AI standpoint with all the power of that Red Hat Platform. >> So where do you see the edge fitting into this hybrid multicloud approach? Is it sort of an extension of cloud? Is it a new cloud? We know we are envisioning this seamless experience between on-prem, cloud, multicloud, and edge. >> Yeah I think of it in a kind of simple venn diagram where you have kind of this virtualized open software based telco network on one side and you have the edge on the other and in the middle you have this kind of combination where you do edge in partnership with the telco. And the idea here is that all industries are going to want to provide a next generation of insights to their customers and to their partners. The ability to move those workloads, so think about a manufacturing shop for an example. You know we've already had IoT centers, hundreds if not thousands of them. Now we can infuse video cameras and take a huge amount of data through the enhanced bandwidth of five g and bring that down to an edge platform and analyze that video data in real time, whether employees are in safe zones, maybe with COVID now even, whether or not they're taking the proper social distancing, and looking at actually everything that's coming off of that platform or manufacturing line, looking at the equipment itself and adding AI to that so that we can analyze it in real time. Edge allows us to take advantage of those five g attributes and to put it wherever that workload should run. Whether it's on the plant floor itself, in proximity to where that equipment is, or back at a central office location within the network of a telco. >> Well this is huge for the telcos because for years, I keep talking about their hardened network, but their cost per bit has been coming down. They're responsible for putting in that infrastructure, maintaining that infrastructure and then you got the over the top providers laying out content growing like crazy, has really disrupted that industry. This is going to change the way in which telcos are able to compete, is it not? >> It's a great point. Yes. If you think about the last generation of evolution you know when we went to four g and smartphones came out, think about the Apple App Store as an example. Folks started not going to the telcos anymore for those services, they went to that OTP capability to get those applications. Now think about about in this edge world as we essentially are creating platforms for innovation for businesses and all industries. And they can now innovate on those platforms and create incredible value in their business and the telcos now can add beyond just the transport capability, but artificial intelligence, automation, they can expose certain data capabilities, they can make those applications smarter, understanding proximity data, that could be applied to things like logistics or pricing or as I said operations like in manufacturing. So a tremendous new set of value in fact most analysts say a trillion dollars in value is going to be created here. And the opportunity I see is that the open network platform becomes a way for the service providers to not only capture value for themselves, but to accelerate the value for businesses in all industries. >> Well I think we're going to see some huge moves in the chess board. More M and A. I mean it's going to be a very exciting time and of course five g's at the heart of it, but Steve I wonder if you could give us IBM's point of view in terms of where we are with five g, I mean sometimes I see it pop up on my phone and I'm like come on, that's not real five g quite yet. We heard recently that Apple might somewhat delay it's new phones that maybe five g's involved in that, but it's going to take some time for that infrastructure to roll out but what's your point of view on sort of that time frame and the business impact that we can all expect? >> Yeah I know, it's a good question. And we will see it roll out over time. Some things are starting to roll out now. Think about stadiums or other venues where you have a manufacturing shop floor as an example, oil rig off the coast. I mean you have environments where you could create five g infrastructure in a private model today and then of course consumer models are going to roll out as cities continue to get deployed by the various service providers. But I think the important point which is what we've spoken about so far, is that as we start to create this platform capability around the edge and we start to transform those network themself to coincide telcos platform, we can start to capture those values today in a four g world and as five g comes along you just essentially evolve into the capabilities that that brings especially with regards to latency and bandwidth. Now some applications where slicing will be really important. Think about a medical operation where a doctor is consulting on a surgery in a remote location. Now if I know for sure that bandwidths going to be there, that doctor no longer has to be in the same location as that robotic equipment as an example. So the ability to have dedicated bandwidth which will come with five g, will be an important attribute that gets added. >> I mean the possibilities are really mind boggling. You mentioned stadiums. Now of course hopefully at some point we'll be able to go to football games again. But I mean the last decade was all about how big can you make the screen in the stadium versus this screen. This is where a lot of the action is going to be now. Replays and just the whole experience, ordering goods and services. And then of course hardened environments like oil rigs etc so really we're not just going to return to the last decade we've been talking about that a lot here. Go ahead please. >> An example that I like to mention just 'cause it kind of brings us all together, think about first responders. Now we're in the midst of the COVID thing but soon in California again unfortunately we'll probably get close to fire season. Think in a five g edge world what that might look like. So the minute that fire starts in some location in California, drones are in the air sending video down to an edge platform that's being analyzed to understand where that fire's going and importantly everything that's in it's path and how to best battle it. Sensors coming in from IoT centers in the area feeding in data. Our weather company app feeding in real time weather statistics, wind path, temperature changes, that are going to influence the way that that that fire performs. And now with the announcement we made Samsung just recently with our edge platform, the ability to have those first responders have sensors on them, Samsung devices that are measuring their vital signs and with the predictive models that are being built, we'll know whether that first responders' in distress or about to be in distress. The ability to scale our inbound communications capability digitally so that chat bots can handle this enormous increase in the amount of folks calling in to get information on what's happening in real time. And of course with the AI in that edge platform. Moving all of that physical equipment, the asset, humans, the first responders, in the optimal position at all times in order to get that fire out as soon as possible. I think it's a good example of how we can see these capabilities come together in a five g and edge world and allow us to get enormous value, saving lives, saving property, responding to an incident like that. >> I mean that's a great example of how you're going to put innovation into action 'cause you touched all points. Imagine the amount of data now that's being created and that example that you just gave, I mean it's just going exponential. Applying artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, and then the other phrase you used is real time. And we're talking about real time or near real time decisions actually being made potentially often times by the machines or in combination with humans so that these actions can be taken of course it's all occurring on an infrastructure that's sort of an expanding definition of cloud, not just on prem, not just hybrid, not just multicloud but now the edge. It's really going to be an exciting 10 years. >> You got it exactly right. And importantly, using that example, once that fire's put out, that edge platform can wind back down to where it was before the incident occurred. But all the intelligence that was gained during that, can be taken to the next incident has it happens. So this agility becomes really powerful 'cause we get the cumulative learning that happens in these models going forward. >> Amazing. So where can people go to get some more information on sort of IBM's edge approach? >> If you go to IBM.com, you'll see information on both on IBM edge solutions that we're putting forward into marketplace and what we're doing specifically with the telecommunication service providers to help them transform their networks to take advantage of this incredible opportunity. >> Well Steve, thanks so much for your time. Really great discussion. I appreciate you comin on and sharing with our community. >> My pleasure. Thank you. >> And thank you everybody. This is theCUBE's continuous coverage of IBM Think 2020, the Digital Event Experience. My name's Dave Vellante. Keep it right there, I'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxing music)