(electronic music) (graphics whooshing) (graphics tinkling) >> Telecommunications is well north of a trillion-dollar business globally, that provides critical services on which virtually everyone on the planet relies. Dramatic changes are occurring in the sector, and one of the most important dimensions of this change is the underlying infrastructure that powers global telecommunications networks. Telcos have been thawing out, if you will, they're frozen infrastructure, modernizing. They're opening up, they're disaggregating their infrastructure, separating, for example, the control plane from the data plane, and adopting open standards. Telco infrastructure is becoming software-defined. And leading telcos are adopting cloud native microservices to help make developers more productive, so they can respond more quickly to market changes. They're embracing technology consumption models, and selectively leveraging the cloud where it makes sense. And these changes are being driven by market forces, the root of which stem from customer demand. So from a customer's perspective, they want services, and they want them fast. Meaning, not only at high speeds, but also they want them now. Customers want the latest, the greatest, and they want these services to be reliable and stable with high quality of service levels. And they want them to be highly cost-effective. Hello and welcome to this preview of Mobile World Congress 2023. My name is Dave Vellante, and at this year's event, theCUBE has a major presence at the show made possible by Dell Technologies, and with me to unpack the trends in telco, and look ahead to MWC23 are Dennis Hoffman, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Dell's telecom business, and Aaron Chaisson, who is the Vice President of Telecom and Edge Solutions Marketing at Dell Technologies, gentlemen, welcome, thanks so much for spending some time with me. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> So, Dennis, let's start with you. Telcos in recent history have been slow to deliver and to monetize new services, and a large part because their purpose-built infrastructure could been somewhat of a barrier to responding to all these market forces. In many ways, this is what makes telecoms, really this market so exciting. So from your perspective, where is the action in this space? >> Yeah, the action Dave is kind of all over the place, partly because it's an ecosystem play. I think it's been, as you point out, the disaggregation trend has been going on for a while. The opportunity's been clear, but it has taken a few years to get all of the vendors, and all of the components that make up a solution, as well as the operators themselves, to a point where we can start putting this stuff together, and actually achieving some of the promise. >> So Aaron, for those who might not be as familiar with Dell's a activities in this area, here we are just ahead of Mobile World Congress, it's the largest event for telecoms, what should people know about Dell? And what's the key message to this industry? >> Sure, yeah, I think everybody knows that there's a lot of innovation that's been happening in the industry of late. One of the major trends that we're seeing is that shift from more of a vertically-integrated technology stack, to more of a disaggregated set of solutions, and that trend has actually created a ton of innovation that's happening across the industry, or along technology vendors and providers, the telecoms themselves. And so, one of the things that Dell's really looking to do is, as Dennis talked about, is build out a really strong ecosystem of partners and vendors that we're working closely together to be able to collaborate on new technologies, new capabilities that are solving challenges that the networks are seeing today. Be able to create new solutions built on those in order to be able to bring new value to the industry. And then finally, we want to help both partners, as well as our CSP providers activate those changes, so that they can bring new solutions to market, to be able to serve their customers. And so, the key areas that we're really focusing on with our customers is, technologies to help modernize the network, to be able to capitalize on the value of open architectures, and bring price performance to what they're expecting, and availability that they're expecting today. And then also, partner with the lines of business to be able to take these new capabilities, produce new solutions, and then deliver new value to their customers. >> Great, thank you, Aaron. So Dennis, you and I, known you for a number of years. I've watched you, you're are a trend spotter. You're a strategic thinker. I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze, and now you got to make it happen. So, how would you describe Dell's strategy in this market? >> Well, it's really two things. And I appreciate the comment, I'm not sure how much of a trend spotter I am, but I certainly enjoy, and I think I'm fascinated by what's going on in this industry right now. Our two main thrusts, Dave, are first round, trying to catalyze that ecosystem, be a force for pulling together a group of folks, vendors that have been flying in fairly loose formation for a couple of years, to deliver the kinds of solutions that move the needle forward, and produce the outcomes that our network operator customers can actually buy and consume, and deploy, and have them be supported. The other thing is, there's a couple of very key technology areas that need to be advanced here. This ends up being a much anticipated year in telecom. Because of the delivery of some open infrastructure solutions that have being developed for years. With the Intel Sapphire Rapids program coming to market, we've of course got some purpose-built solutions on top of that for telecommunications networks. Some expanded partnerships in the area of multi-cloud infrastructure. And so, I would say the second main thrust is, we've got to bring some intellectual property to the party. It's not just about pulling the ecosystem together. But those two things together really form the twin thrusts of our strategy. >> Okay, so as you point out, you obviously not going to go alone in this market, it's way too broad, there's so many routes to market, partnerships, obviously very, very important. So, can you share a little bit more about the ecosystem and partners, maybe give some examples of some of the key partners that you'd be highlighting or working with, maybe at Mobile World Congress, or other activities this year? >> Yeah, absolutely. As Aaron touched on, I'm a visual thinker. The way I think about this thing is a very, very vertical architecture is tipping sideways. It's becoming horizontal. And all of the layers of that horizontal architecture are really where the partnerships are at. So, let's start at the bottom, silicon. The silicon ecosystem is very much focused on this market. And producing very specific products to enable open, high performance telecom networks. That's both in the form of host processors, as well as accelerators. One layer up, of course, is the stuff that we're known for, subsystems, compute storage, the hardware infrastructure that forms the foundation for telco clouds. A layer above that, all of the cloud software layer, the virtualization and containerization software, and all of the usual suspects there, all of whom are very good partners of ours, and we're looking to expand that pretty broadly this year. And then at the top of the layer cake, all of the network functions, all of the VNF's and CNF's that were once kind of the top of proprietary stacks, that are now opening up and being delivered, as well-formed containers that can run on these clouds. So, we're focusing on all of those, if you will, product partnerships, and there is a services wrapper around all of it. The systems integration necessary to make these systems part of a carrier's network, which of course, has been running for a long time, and needs to be integrated with in a very specific way. And so, all of that, together kind of forms the ecosystem, all of those are partners, and we're really excited about being at the heart of it. >> Interesting, it's not like we've never seen this movie before, which is, it's sort of repeating itself in telco. Aaron, you heard my little intro up front about the need to modernize infrastructure, I wonder if I could touch on another major trend, which we're seeing is the cloud, and I'm talkin' about not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. Telcom providers are lookin' to the public cloud for specific use cases, you think about like bursting for an iPhone launch or whatever. But at the same time, these cloud vendors, they're sort of competing with telcos. They're providing local zones, for example, sometimes trying to do an end run on the telco connectivity services, so telecom companies, they have to find the right balance between what they own and what they rent. And I wonder if you could add some color as to what you see in the market and what Dell specifically is doing to support these trends. >> Yeah, and I think the most important thing is what we're seeing, as you said, is these aren't things that we haven't seen before. And I think that telecom is really going through their own set of cloud transformations, and so, one of the hot topics in the industry now is, what is telco cloud? And what does that look like going forward? And it's going to be, as you said, a combination of services that they offer, services that they leverage. But at the end of the day, it's going to help them modernize how they deliver telecommunication services to their customers, and then provide value added services on top of that. From a Dell perspective, we're really providing the technologies to provide the underpinnings to lay a foundation on which that network can be built, whether that's best of breed servers that are built in design for the telecom environments. Recently, we announced our Infer block program, in partnering with virtualization providers, to be able to provide engineered systems that dramatically simplify how our customers can deploy, manage, and lifecycle manage throughout day two operations, an entire cloud environment. And whether they're using Red Hat, whether they're using Wind River, or VMware, or other virtualization layers, they can deploy the right virtualization layer at the right part of their network to support the applications they're looking to drive. And Dell is looking to solve how they simplify and manage all of that, both from a hardware, as well as on management software perspective. So, this is really what Dell's doing to, again, partner with the broader technology community, to help make that telco cloud a reality. >> Aaron, let's stay here for a second, I'm interested in some of the use cases that you're going after with customers. You've got Edge infrastructure, remote work, 5G, where's security fit, what are the focus areas for Dell, and can we double click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's two main areas of telecommunication industry that we're talking to. One, we've really been talking about the sort of the network buyer, how do they modernize the core, the network Edge, the RAN capabilities to deliver traditional telecommunication services, and modernize that as they move into 5G and beyond. I think the other side of the business is, telecoms are really looking from a line of business perspective to figure out how do they monetize that network, and be able to deliver value added services to their enterprise customers on top of these new networks. So, you were just touching on a couple of things that are really critical. In the enterprise space, AI and IoT is driving a tremendous amount of innovation out there, and there's a need for being able to support and manage Edge compute at scale, be able to provide connectivity, like private mobility, and 4G and 5G, being able to support things like mobile workforces and client capabilities, to be able to access these devices that are around all of these Edge environments of the enterprises. And telecoms are seeing as that, as an opportunity for them to not only provide connectivity, but how do they extend their cloud out into these enterprise environments with compute, with connectivity, with client and connectivity resources, and even also provide protection for those environments as well. So, these are areas that Dell is historically very strong at. Being able to provide compute, be able to provide connectivity, and being able to provide data protection and client services, we are looking to work closely with lines of businesses to be able to develop solutions that they can bring to market in combination with us, to be able to serve their end user customers and their enterprises. So, those are really the two key areas, not only network buyer, but being able to enable the lines of business to go and capitalize on the services they're developing for their customers. >> I think that line of business aspect is key, I mean, the telcos have had to sit back and provide the plumbing, cost per bit goes down, data consumption going through the roof, all the over at the top guys have had the field day with the data, and the customer relationships, and now it's almost like the revenge (chuckles) of the telcos. Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell, if you break out the binoculars a little bit. >> Yeah, I think you hit it earlier. We've seen the movie before. This has happened in the IT data center. We went from proprietary vertical solutions to horizontal open systems. We went from client server to software-defined open hardware cloud native. And the trend is likely to be exactly that, in the telecom industry because that's what the operators want. They're not naive to what's happened in the IT data center, they all run very large data centers. And they're trying to get some of the scale economies. Some of the agility, the cost of ownership benefits for the reasons Aaron just discussed. It's clear as you point out, this industry's been really defined by the inability to stop investing, and the difficulty to monetize that investment. And I think now, everybody's looking at this 5G, and frankly, 5G plus 6G, and beyond, as the opportunity to really go get a chunk of that revenue, and Enterprise Edge is the target. >> And 5G is touching so many industries, and that kind of brings me, Aaron into Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got Industry 4.0, you've got our traditional industry and telco colliding. There's public policy. So, give us a teaser to Mobile World Congress 23, what's on deck at the show from Dell? >> Yeah, we're really excited about Mobile World Congress. This, as you know, is a massive event for the industry every year. And it's really the event that the whole industry uses to kick off this coming year. So, we're going to be using this obviously to talk to our customers and our partners about what Dell's looking to do, and what we're innovating on right now, and what we're looking to partner with them around. In the front of the house, we're going to be doin', we're going to be highlighting 13 different solutions and demonstrations to be able to show our customers what we're doing today, and show them the use cases, and put into action, so they get to actually look and feel, and touch, and experience what it is that we're working around. Obviously, meetings are important, everybody knows Mobile World Congress is the place to get those meetings and kickoff for the year. So, we're going to have, we're lookin' at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be lookin' to have across the industry with our customers and partners in the broader community. And of course, we've also got technology that's going to be in a variety of different partner spaces as well. So, you can come and see us in hall three, but we're also going to have technologies, kind of spread all over the floor. And of course, there's always theCUBE. You're going to be able to see us live all four days, all day, every day. You're going to be hearing our executives, our partners, our customers, talk about what Dell is doing to innovate in the industry, and how we're looking to leverage the broader, open ecosystem to be able to transform the network, and what we're lookin' to do. So, in that space, we're going to be focusing on what we're doing from an ecosystem perspective, our infrastructure focus. We'll be talking about what we're doing to support telco cloud transformation. And then finally, as we talked about earlier, how are we helping the lines of business within our telecoms monetize the opportunity? So, these are all different things we're really excited to be focusing on, and look forward to the event next month. >> Yeah, it's going to be awesome in Barcelona at the FITA, as you say, Dell's big presence in hall three, Orange is in there, Deutsche Telecom, Intel's in hall three. VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone, you got some great things to see there. Check that out, and of course, theCUBE, we are super excited to be collaborating with you, we got a great setup. We're in the walkway right between halls four and five, right across from the government of Catalonia, who are the host partners for the event, so there's going to be a ton of action there. Guys, can't wait to see you there, really appreciate your time today. >> Great, thanks. >> Alright, Mobile World Congress, theCUBE's coverage starts on February 27th right after the keynotes. So, first thing in the morning, east coast time, we'll be broadcasting is, Aaron said all week, Monday through Thursday in the show floor, check that out at thecube.net. siliconangle.com has all the written coverage, and go to dell.com, see what's happenin' there, have all the action from the event. Don't miss us, this is Dave Vellante, we'll see you there. (electronic music)

>>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.

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's Flychip Production of theCUBE. We're here at CloudNativeCon and KubeCon here in Austin, Texas. Happy to welcome back to the program, a many-time alum Tom Joyce, who is now the CEO of Pensa. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you too. >> Alright, so Tom, we've had you on, so many different ecosystems, so many different waves of technology. Talk about Pensa, how it fits into this whole cloud native space that we're looking at this channel. >> Great, yeah, and like you said, you and I we've known each other a long time, we've seen a lot of revolutions in technology, and we're in the middle a number of them right now, and at this event you've got the Cloud-native folks and you've got the folks that are tackling connectainers and Kubernetes orchestration. You know, it's interesting, this crowd here is so young, and so creative. The last few days, I was at the Gartner Data Center Infrastructure show, and-- >> Stu: Not so young there? >> Not so young, but the same problems, right? Two different communities trying to solve the same problems. Which are how do we deal with insane complexity? How do we deal with an environment that's now not just three public clouds and some hybrid clouds, but a growing list of specialty clouds. How do we manage all of that? And what Pensa is trying to do, is be a part of solving that problem, using intelligent automation technology. Especially in managing the underlay complexity, the infrastructure layer. It's kind of funny we've gone through a period of time when the whole discussion has been, hey, containers are going to be at Pensa, and infrastructure doesn't matter, and infrastructure is going away. I think there's some truth to how that is evolving, but it still matters especially when you get down to having to deliver services to customers. >> Tom first of all, Dan Cone got on stage from the CNCF, and he said, "It is exciting times for boring infrastructure." >> Tom: Yeah. >> Maybe too exciting. I love that line, because every wave comes out, it was like, Tom you remember, virtualization, I'm not going to have to worry about things like that. >> It's been the biggest revolution, and it is the biggest wave of infrastructure ever. >> We spent a decade fixing that. Containers came out, oh, once again we're extracted away and it's going to take that. So, what do you see as that role, between the infrastructure layer and that cloud native? What are the big challenges? What are your customers seeing, and how Pensa have an effect? >> Well, I think what we're seeing, in my opinion, is we're going from operations running everything to DevOps, to now their starting to talk about NoOps. How do we get to a point where-- >> Ah, we might have argued over the terminology. We need Ops, obviously. >> Here's what I think, I think it's going to be less Ops and more architecture. I think the challenge becomes around, how do you do the design, how do you architect these systems so that they'll work and not fail. It's a lot like one metaphor I heard somebody use and I'm going to steal is we went from drafting on a sketch pad, using CAD technology, to using 3D CAD technology, to automated CAD technology, to now servers providing it. Right? And what happened? Everybody got smarter about architecture being the important part, not the actual physical plugging together. I think the role of the architect, in a cloud native environment, in a Kubernetes environment, in a VM environment, is frankly more important than ever. Somebody needs to know how the tools work, to make sure the the service levels actually deliver. I have sat in a lot of these meetings where people say, "Look, just put your old app in a container "and you can run it anywhere, it'll be fine." Somebody needs to think about the architecture. We want to provide intelligent technology that helps them do that. Like AutoCAD and like some of these things that came along in that ecosystem. >> One of the things I've been poking at, you know, most of this year and coming into this show especially, is people say, "Ah, it's too complicated." The response really is, "Well apologizes, it's never going to get simple." What we need is, I need proper tooling, things like automation to be able to help because humans alone will not be able to fix that. I really need to have the combination of the tooling, proper architecture, as you said. What are you seeing, how's that playing out in the customer environment? >> I think what we're seeing is folks figuring out that number one it's cross domain and cross cloud. So whatever you design needs to work in multiple different environments that are going to end up having different capabilities. Nobody really has deep expertise and everything about networking, everything about containers, everything about compute and storage, but all those things still matter. What folks are asking for is a layer of technology that kind of arbitrates between the underlying infrastructure and the upper level applications, they're actually trying to deliver. And that's where this automation layer, that's submerging comes in. Part of that orchestration, and part of it's what we do. What we're focusing on is design, validate complex designs, build them and deploy them, using tools that help people do that a lot faster and get it right every time. So mistakes don't transpire. >> Yeah, Tom, I want you to help explain to our audience this whole SDN wave, kind of it played out, and sure Vmware NSX and Cisco ACI, they're doing okay, but for a lot of the industry, SDN equals still does nothing. Yet networking critically important, heavily involved in both the container and all this cloud native discussion. How are we fixing networking, how is it being set up for this type of environment versus what we we're trying to do with SDN? >> I think this is a good point, I think you've got SDN and the enterprise. You also have network functions virtualization and the service providers and often overlook that in the enterprise you're going through cloud native and DevOps transitions. And surge providers are going through a revolution of their own. Going from being telcos, becoming digital service providers. The problems are similar that technologies are different. My observation is this, is the hype cycle's real. We've gone through five years of talking about SDN, talking about open stack, talking about network functions virtualization. All of a sudden now, what I've seen in this job is that there's real money getting spent and the technology's being used. NSX's being used in a whole variety of ways that people didn't anticipate. We're seeing in everyone of these service providers, whether they're a classic telcos, they're wired, or they're wireless, or they're cloud. They're investing in technologies to revolutionize how that core of that network works, and how the edged network works. I think the first signs of that are really NSX and SDN. SDN has now gone mainstream because customers have seen that there's a real used case for it. That's kind of your first broadly applicable network function. And I think through the next couple of years, it will be one after another. Those problems are going to get knocked down. Frankly in our business, we started focusing on a lot of these enterprise problems with NSX and VSAN and software defined data center technologies around VMware. We're working on containers, but frankly the biggest area of growth for us is probably going to be these large service providers. It's like a trillion dollar business and it's going to be revolutionized over five years. We're getting involved in a lot of these network functions virtualization conversations. I wouldn't say it does nothing, it does a lot, but getting there, it's been a really hard technology to figure out. >> It took a little bit while to mature. The other thing you've got some strong background on, the management monitoring in this type of environment. What's new? How does that change in the networking space, when we have all microservices and all of these various pieces there? What are you seeing there? >> The short answer is I have a little bit of a controversial view on that. It's not unique but I think-- >> John Ferrer would say, we love controversy here on theCUBE. >> I think monitoring goes away. Monitoring the way it's been done for the last 30 years goes away. I think when we had mainframes, we had client servers, we had internet, and now we have this set of technologies we're working with in virtualization. Every time that transition has happened, there's been a whole bunch of monitoring companies. I think classic monitoring is eventually going to go away. Ultimately, there is a lot of complexity, and the machine needs to manage it, right? The machines going to need to manage it. The eyeballs watching the problem and remediating it to a greater and greater extent, are going to be automation technologies. Versus throwing out more and more alerts in front of a human that says, "I'm just going to turn them off "because I don't know what this means." I think automation technologies are going to replace classic monitoring. Again, you go around this event here, the folks that are doing cloud native, they don't want to have a bunch of monitoring alerts. They're not going to tolerate that. They just want to deliver an application service. They don't want to deal with operations, they don't want to deal with monitoring, they don't want to deal with problems, they want the problems to take care of themselves. That's hard, but I think that's coming. >> Tom, the end users whether it be enterprise, service providers, there's a lot of technology out there, there's a lot of things happening out there. When do they know to call Pensa? Give us some of the big value problems that they should knowing that say, "Oh hey", "Yes that makes sense to me, I need to give you guys a call" >> You can boil it down very simply, we deal with two kinds of people, and they're really the architects. Think about that CAD analogy. We're dealing with people that are doing complex designs in two areas. One is typically software defined data center. So people that are bringing all of these technologies together and need to deliver a working system, maybe a really complex proof of concept or big systems where they're using VMwear, as an example. We help them get that job done, do it fast. That's what the automation systems we provide do. The other is, in large scale service providers. Folks that are dealing with onboarding VNF's, building complex networks and have been grappling with that, with open stack in some of these early technologies for a number of years. We have a revolutionary way to onboard those VNF's, validate designs, deliver designs and do it in a way that integrates with all the open source technologies people are using. To be honest with you, I don't which of those is going to be more important to us, but their two big areas, and our technology applies to both. >> Tom, you've been CEO at a couple of companies now. I want to get your view point, just being the CEO for a startup in today's landscape, what's it like? What advice do you give your peers? When you guys are grabbing a drink at the bar, what are some of the biggest challenges and biggest things that excite you? >> We are to tired to grab a drink at the bar. I'll tell you that I love this. It is a great mental challenge, because again I've been like you, I've been doing this for over 30 years. It forces you to learn and learn and learn and question what you know. And that's what I really like, the opportunity to engage with the leading edge of technology. Frankly all the folks here are young and creative and it's forced me to become better at what I do. There are a lot more unknowns than working for a big company. With a big company, a lot of what you have to do is laid out before you. In this job, I have to constantly force myself to question what I know, to listen to the customer, to learn new things, and it can be tiring, but it's a good kind of tiring. >> Alright, last question I have for you. What are you most proud, what you've done since you've joined Pensa? And give us a little bit of outlook for 2018, for those that are watching, what should we be looking for, kind of miles stone deliverables or other items. >> I think what I'm most proud of, this sounds like a silly statement, but I'm proud of what the team has accomplished. I didn't do anything, right? I don't write the code. We have a bunch of engineers that are actually delivering the product. I think we've been really fortunate to keep all those people and get them focused on some big problems. I'm proud of delivering Pensa Lab to market, and I'm proud of the customers we've signed up, since we launched that just at the beginning of October. I'm proud of what we're doing with Nokia on large scale networking in the NFP area. And frankly I'm proud of the ability of this team to constantly engage and learn and try new things and take risks and screw up and try again. It's that whole experience, it's good to work with good people that you like. >> Alright and 2018? >> 2018 I think is going to be surprising for the people in terms of the kind of the reemergence of open stack. I think open stack is coming back. >> Don't let them hear that Tom, the wolves will come out. Why? >> Well because I think it's reaching at a point where the economics of certain kinds of cloud models, and frankly the economics of the Mware are forcing people to reconsider. But it especially around digital service providers. These large companies have been grappling with "How do we revolutionize our poor networks" for five years dealing with open stack. And they kind of got a lot of the stuff to work now. I think that is another sort of controversial statement. When I got into this job, I was like "Yeah open stack is dead". I was involved with Helion at Hewlett-Packard, and I was like "That's never coming back". Well guess what, it's coming back. I think the other thing is, we're going to see a lot more money being spent on revolutionizing the core networks, and these telcos and digital service providers. That's what I think the big things going to be. >> Absolutely, we've been at the open stack show for any years. The networking component especially for the telco and service providers, absolutely a strong area of focus. Your average enterprise, might not be looking for open stack. >> There might be pockets. >> Internationally there's some pockets, but absolutely. Tom Joyce, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Looking forward to seeing you the next time. And well be back with lots more coverage here from theCUBE at KubeCon. In Austin Texas, you're watching theCUBE.