>> And I'm here at Dell's Presence at MWC with vice president of marketing for telecom and Edge Computing, Aaron Chaisson. Aaron, how's it going? >> Doing great. How's it going today, Dave? >> It's going pretty well. Pretty excited about what you've got going here and I'm looking forward to getting the tour. You ready to take a closer look? >> Ready to do it. Let's go take a look! For us in the telecom ecosystem, it's really all about how we bring together the different players that are innovating across the industry to drive value for our CSP customers. So, it starts really, for us, at the ecosystem layer, bringing partners, bringing telecommunication providers, bringing (stutters) a bunch of different technologies together to innovate together to drive new value. So Paul, take us a little bit through what we're doing to- to develop and bring in these partnerships and develop our ecosystem. >> Uh, sure. Thank you Aaron. Uh, you know, one of the things that we've been focusing on, you know, Dell is really working with many players in the open telecom ecosystem. Network equipment providers, independent software vendors, and the communication service providers. And, you know, through our lines of business or open telecom ecosystem labs, what we want to do is bring 'em together into a community with the goal of really being able to accelerate open innovation and, uh, open solutions into the market. And that's what this community is really about, is being able to, you know, have those communications, develop those collaborations whether it's through, you know, sharing information online, having webinars dedicated to sharing Dell information, whether it's our next generation hardware portfolio we announced here at the show, our use case directory, our- how we're dealing with new service opportunities, but as well as the community to share, too, which I think is an exciting way for us to be able to, you know- what is the knowledge thing? As well as activities at other events that we have coming up. So really the key thing I think about, the- the open telecom ecosystem community, it's collaboration and accelerating the open industry forward. >> So- So Aaron, if I'm hearing this correctly you're saying that you can't just say, "Hey, we're open", and throw a bunch of parts in a box and have it work? >> No, we've got to work together to integrate these pieces to be able to deliver value, and, you know, we opened up a- (stutters) in our open ecosystem labs, we started a- a self-certification process a couple of months back. We've already had 13 partners go through that, we've got 16 more in the pipeline. Everything you see in this entire booth has been innovated and worked with partnerships from Intel to Microsoft to, uh, to (stutters) Wind River and Red Hat and others. You go all the way around the booth, everything here has partnerships at its core. And why don't we go to the next section here where we're going to be showing how we're pulling that all together in our open ecosystems labs to drive that innovation? >> So Aaron, you talked about the kinds of validation and testing that goes on, so that you can prove out an open stack to deliver the same kinds of reliability and performance and availability that we expect from a wireless network. But in the opens- in the open world, uh, what are we looking at here? >> Yeah absolutely. So one of the- one of the challenges to a very big, broad open ecosystem is the complexity of integrating, deploying, and managing these, especially at telecom scale. You're not talking about thousands of servers in one site, you're talking about one server in thousands of sites. So how do you deploy that predictable stack and then also manage that at scale? I'm going to show you two places where we're talkin' about that. So, this is actually representing an area that we've been innovating in recently around creating an integrated infrastructure and virtualization stack for the telecom industry. We've been doing this for years in IT with VxBlocks and VxRails and others. Here what you see is we got, uh, Dell hardware infrastructure, we've got, uh, an open platform for virtualization providers, in this case we've created an infrastructure block for Red Hat to be able to supply an infrastructure for core operations and Packet Cores for telecoms. On the other side of this, you can actually see what we're doing with Wind River to drive innovation around RAN and being able to simplify RAN- vRAN and O-RAN deployments. >> What does that virtualization look like? Are we talking about, uh, traditional virtual machines with OSs, or is this containerized cloud native? What does it look like? >> Yeah, it's actually both, so it can support, uh, virtual, uh-uh, software as well as containerized software, so we leverage the (indistinct) distributions for these to be able to deploy, you know, cloud native applications, be able to modernize how they're deploying these applications across the telecom network. So in this case with Red Hat, uh, (stutters) leveraging OpenShift in order to support containerized apps in your Packet Core environments. >> So what are- what are some of the kinds of things that you can do once you have infrastructure like this deployed? >> Yeah, I mean by- by partnering broadly across the ecosystem with VMware, with Red Hat, uh, with- with Wind River and with others, it gives them the ability to be able to deploy the right virtualization software in their network for the types of applications they're deploying. They might want to use Red Hat in their core, they may want to use Wind River in their RAM, they may want to use, uh, Microsoft or VMware for their- for their Edge workloads, and we allow them to be able to deploy all those, but centrally manage those with a common user interface and a common set of APIs. >> Okay, well I'm dying to understand the link between this and the Lego city that the viewers can't see, yet, but it's behind me. Let's take a look. >> So let's take a look at the Lego city that shows how we not deploy just one of these, but dozens or hundreds of these at scale across a cityscape. >> So Aaron, I know we're not in Copenhagen. What's all the Lego about? >> Yeah, so the Lego city here is to show- and, uh, really there's multiple points of Presence across an entire Metro area that we want to be able to manage if we're a telecom provider. We just talked about one infrastructure block. What if I wanted to deploy dozens of these across the city to be able to manage my network, to be able to manage, uh, uh- to be able to deploy private mobility potentially out into a customer enterprise environment, and be able to manage all of these, uh, very simply and easily from a common interface? >> So it's interesting. Now I think I understand why you are VP of marketing for both telecom and Edge. Just heard- just heard a lot about Edge and I can imagine a lot of internet of things, things, hooked up at that Edge. >> Yeah, so why don't we actually go over to another area? We're actually going to show you how one small microbrewery (stutters) in one of our cities nearby, uh, (stutters) my hometown in Massachusetts is actually using this technology to go from more of an analyzed- analog world to digitizing their business to be able to brew better beer. >> So Aaron, you bring me to a brewery. What do we have- what do we have going on here? >> Yeah, so, actually (stutters) about- about a year ago or so, I- I was able to get my team to come together finally after COVID to be able to meet each other and have a nice team event. One of those nights, we went out to dinner at a- at a brewery called "Exhibit 'A'" in Massachusetts, and they actually gave us a tour of their facilities and showed us how they actually go through the process of brewing beer. What we saw as we were going through it, interestingly, was that everything was analog. They literally had people with pen and paper walking around checking time and temperature and the process of brewing the beer, and they weren't asking for help, but we actually saw an opportunity where what we're doing to help businesses digitize what they're doing in their manufacturing floor can actually help them optimize how they build whatever product they're building, in this case it was beer. >> Hey Warren, good to meet you! What do we have goin' on? >> Yeah, it's all right. So yeah, basically what we did is we took some of their assets in the, uh, brewery that were completely manually monitored. People were literally walking around the floor with clipboards, writing down values. And we censorized the asset, in this case fermentation tanks and we measured the, uh, pressure and the temperature, which in fermentation are very key to monitor those, because if they get out of range the entire batch of beer can go bad or you don't get the consistency from batch to batch if you don't tightly monitor those. So we censorized the fermentation tank, brought that into an industrial I/O network, and then brought that into a Dell gateway which is connected 5G up to the cloud, which then that data comes to a tablet or a phone, which they, rather than being out on the floor and monitor it, can look at this data remotely at any time. >> So I'm not sure the exact date, the first time we have evidence of beer being brewed by humanity... >> Yep. >> But I know it's thousands of years ago. So it's taken that long to get to the point where someone had to come along, namely Dell, to actually digitally transform the beer business. Is this sort of proof that if you can digitally transform this, you can digitally transform anything? >> Absolutely. You name it, anything that's being manufactured, sold, uh, uh, taken care of, (stutters) any business out there that's looking to be able to be modernize and deliver better service to their customers can benefit from technologies like this. >> So we've taken a look at the ecosystem, the way that you validate architectures, we've seen an example of that kind of open architecture. Now we've seen a real world use case. Do you want to take a look a little deeper under the covers and see what's powering all of this? >> We just this week announced a new line of servers that power Edge and RAN use cases, and I want to introduce Mike to kind of take us through what we've been working on and really what the power of what this providing. >> Hey Mike, welcome to theCube. >> Oh, glad- glad to be here. So, what I'd really like to talk about are the three new XR series servers that we just announced last week and we're showing here at Mobile World Congress. They are all short depth, ruggedized, uh, very environmentally tolerant, and able to withstand, you know, high temperatures, high humidities, and really be deployed to places where traditional data center servers just can't handle, you know, due to one fact or another, whether it's depth or the temperature. And so, the first one I'd like to show you is the XR7620. This is, uh, 450 millimeters deep, it's designed for, uh, high levels of acceleration so it can support up to 2-300 watt, uh, GPUs. But what I really want to show you over here, especially for Mobile World Congress, is our new XR8000. The XR8000 is based on Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids technology, and this is- happens to be one of the first, uh, EE boost processors that is out, and basically what it is (stutters) an embedded accelerator that makes, uh, the- the processing of vRAN loads very, uh, very efficient. And so they're actually projecting a, uh, 3x improvement, uh, of processing per watt over the previous generation of processors. This particular unit is also sledded. It's very much like, uh, today's traditional baseband unit, so it's something that is designed for low TCO and easy maintenance in the field. This is the frew. When anything fails, you'll pull one out, you pop a new one in, it comes back into service, and the- the, uh, you know, your radio is- is, uh, minimally disrupted. >> Yeah, would you describe this as quantitative and qualitative in terms of the kinds of performance gains that these underlying units are delivering to us? I mean, this really kind of changes the game, doesn't it? It's not just about more, is it about different also in terms of what we can do? >> Well we are (stutters) to his point, we are able to bring in new accelerator technologies. Not only are we doing it with the Intel, uh, uh, uh, of the vRAN boost technologies, but also (stutters) we can bring it, too, but there's another booth here where we're actually working with our own accelerator cards and other accelerator cards from our partners across the industry to be able to deliver the price and performance capabilities required by a vRAN or an O-RAN deployment in the network. So it's not- it's not just the chip technology, it's the integration and the innovation we're doing with others, as well as, of course, the unique power cooling capabilities that Dell provides in our servers that really makes these the most efficient way of being able to power a network. >> Any final thoughts recapping the whole picture here? >> Yeah, I mean I would just say if anybody's, uh, i- is still here in Mobile World Congress, wants to come and learn what we're doing, I only showed you a small section of the demos we've got here. We've got 13 demos across on 8th floor here. Uh, for those of you who want to talk to us (stutters) and have meetings with us, we've got 13 meeting rooms back there, over 500 costumer partner meetings this week, we've got some whisper suites for those of you who want to come and talk to us but we're innovating on going forward. So, you know, there's a lot that we're doing, we're really excited, there's a ton of passion at this event, and, uh, we're really excited about where the industry is going and our role in it. >> 'Preciate the tour, Aaron. Thanks Mike. >> Mike: Thank you! >> Well, for theCube... Again, Dave Nicholson here. Thanks for joining us on this tour of Dell's Presence here at MWC 2023.

>> (Narrator) The CUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding by Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fira Barcelona. It's theCUBE live at MWC23 our third day of coverage of this great, huge event continues. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've got Dell and Dish here, we are going to be talking about what they're doing together. Andy Sheahen joins as global director of Telecom Cloud Core and Next Gen Ops at Dell. And Marc Rouanne, one of our alumni is back, EVP and Chief Network Officer at Dish Wireless. Welcome guys. >> Great to be here. >> (Both) Thank you. >> (Lisa) Great to have you. Mark, talk to us about what's going on at Dish wireless. Give us the update. >> Yeah so we've built a network from scratch in the US, that covered the US, we use a cloud base Cloud native, so from the bottom of the tower all the way to the internet uses cloud distributed cloud, emits it, so there are a lot of things about that. But it's unique, and now it's working, so we're starting to play with it and that's pretty cool. >> What's some of the proof points, proof in the pudding? >> Well, for us, first of all it was to do basic voice and data on a smartphone and for me the success would that you won't see the difference for a smartphone. That's base line. the next step is bringing this to the enterprise for their use case. So we've covered- now we have services for smartphones. We use our brand, Boost brand, and we are distributing that across the US. But as I said, the real good stuff is when you start to making you know the machines and all the data and the applications for the enterprise. >> Andy, how is Dell a facilitator of what Marc just described and the use cases and what their able to deliver? >> We're providing a number of the servers that are being used out in their radio access network. The virtual DU servers, we're also providing some bare metal orchestration capabilities to help automate the process of deploying all these hundreds and thousands of nodes out in the field. Both of these, the servers and the bare metal orchestra product are things that we developed in concert with Dish, working together to understand the way, the best way to automate, based on the tooling their using in other parts of their network, and we've been with you guys since day one, really. >> (Marc) Absolutely, yeah. >> Making each others solutions better the whole way. >> Marc, why Dell? >> So, the way the networks work is you have a cloud, and you have a distributed edge you need someone who understands the diversity of the edge in order to bring the cloud software to the edge, and Dell is the best there, you know, you can, we can ask them to mix and match accelerators, processors memory, it's very diverse distributed edge. We are building twenty thousands sides so you imagine the size and the complexity and Dell was the right partner for that. >> (Andy) Thank you. >> So you mentioned addressing enterprise leads, which is interesting because there's nothing that would prevent you from going after consumer wireless technically, right but it sounds like you have taken a look at the market and said "we're going to go after this segment of the market." >> (Marc) Yeah. >> At least for now. Are there significant differences between what an enterprise expects from a 5G network than, verses a consumer? >> Yeah. >> (Dave) They have higher expectations, maybe, number one I guess is, if my bill is 150 dollars a month I can have certain levels of expectations whereas a large enterprise the may be making a much more significant investment, are their expectations greater? >> (Marc) Yeah. >> Do you have a higher bar to get over? >> So first, I mean first we use our network for consumers, but for us it's an enterprise. That's the consumer segment, an enterprise. So we expose the network like we would to a car manufacturer, or to a distributor of goods of food and beverage. But what you expect when you are an enterprise, you expect, manage your services. You expect to control the goodness of your services, and for this you need to observe what's happening. Are you delivering the right service? What is the feedback from the enterprise users, and that's what we call the observability. We have a data centric network, so our enterprises are saying "Yeah connecting is enough, but show us how it works, and show us how we can learn from the data, improve, improve, and become more competitive." That's the big difference. >> So what you say Marc, are some of the outcomes you achieved working with Dell? TCO, ROI, CapX, OpX, what are some of the outcomes so far, that you've been able to accomplish? >> Yeah, so obviously we don't share our numbers, but we're very competitive. Both on the CapX and the OpX. And the second thing is that we are much faster in terms of innovation, you know one of the things that Telecorp would not do, was to tap into the IT industry. So we access to the silicon and we have access to the software and at a scale that none of the Telecorp could ever do and for us it's like "wow" and it's a very powerful industry and we've been driving the consist- it's a bit technical but all the silicone, the accelerators, the processors, the GPU, the TPUs and it's like wow. It's really a transformation. >> Andy, is there anything anagallis that you've dealt with in the past to the situation where you have this true core edge, environment where you have to instrument the devices that you provide to give that level of observation or observability, whatever the new word is, that we've invented for that. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean has there, is there anything- >> Yeah absolutely. >> Is this unprecedented? >> No, no not at all. I mean Dell's been really working at the edge since before the edge was called the edge right, we've been selling, our hardware and infrastructure out to retail shops, branch office locations, you know just smaller form factors outside of data centers for a very long time and so that's sort of the consistency from what we've been doing for 30 years to now the difference is the volume, the different number of permutations as Marc was saying. The different type of accelerator cards, the different SKUS of different server types, the sheer volume of nodes that you have in a nationwide wireless network. So the volumes are much different, the amount of data is much different, but the process is really the same. It's about having the infrastructure in the right place at the right time and being able to understand if it's working well or if it's not and it's not just about a red light or a green light but healthy and unhealthy conditions and predicting when the red lights going to come on. And we've been doing that for a while it's just a different scale, and a different level of complexity when you're trying to piece together all these different components from different vendors. >> So we talk a lot about ecosystem, and sometimes because of the desire to talk about the outcomes and what the end users, customers, really care about sometimes we will stop at the layer where say a Dell lives, and we'll see that as the sum total of the component when really, when you talk about a server that Dish is using that in and of itself is an ecosystem >> Yep, yeah >> (Dave) or there's an ecosystem behind it you just mentioned it, the kinds of components and the choices that you make when you optimize these devices determine how much value Dish, >> (Andy) Absolutely. >> Can get out of that. How deep are you on that hardware? I'm a knuckle dragging hardware guy. >> Deep, very deep, I mean just the number of permutations that were working through with Dish and other operators as well, different accelerator cards that we talked about, different techniques for timing obviously there's different SKUs with the silicon itself, different chip sets, different chips from different providers, all those things have to come together, and we build the basic foundation and then we also started working with our cloud partners Red Hat, Wind River, all these guys, VM Ware, of course and that's the next layer up, so you've got all the different hardware components, you've got the extraction layer, with your virtualization layer and or ubernetise layer and all of that stuff together has to be managed compatibility matrices that get very deep and very big, very quickly and that's really the foundational challenge we think of open ran is thinking all these different pieces are going to fit together and not just work today but work everyday as everything gets updated much more frequently than in the legacy world. >> So you care about those things, so we don't have to. >> That's right. >> That's the beauty of it. >> Yes. >> Well thank you. (laughter) >> You're welcome. >> I want to understand, you know some of the things that we've been talking about, every company is a data company, regardless of whether it's telco, it's a retailer, if it's my bank, it's my grocery store and they have to be able to use data as quickly as possible to make decisions. One of the things they've been talking here is the monetization of data, the monetization of the network. How do you, how does Dell help, like a Dish be able to achieve the monetization of their data. >> Well as Marc was saying before the enterprise use cases are what we are all kind of betting on for 5G, right? And enterprises expect to have access to data and to telemetry to do whatever use cases they want to execute in their particular industry, so you know, if it's a health care provider, if it's a factory, an agricultural provider that's leveraging this network, they need to get the data from the network, from the devices, they need to correlate it, in order to do things like automatically turn on a watering system at a certain time, right, they need to know the weather around make sure it's not too windy and you're going to waste a lot of water. All that has data, it's going to leverage data from the network, it's going to leverage data from devices, it's going to leverage data from applications and that's data that can be monetized. When you have all that data and it's all correlated there's value, inherit to it and you can even go onto a forward looking state where you can intelligently move workloads around, based on the data. Based on the clarity of the traffic of the network, where is the right place to put it, and even based on current pricing for things like on demand insists from cloud providers. So having all that data correlated allows any enterprise to make an intelligent decision about how to move a workload around a network and get the most efficient placing of that workload. >> Marc, Andy mentions things like data and networks and moving data across the networks. You have on your business card, Chief Network Officer, what potentially either keeps you up at night in terror or gets you very excited about the future of your network? What's out there in the frontier and what are those key obstacles that have to be overcome that you work with? >> Yeah, I think we have the network, we have the baseline, but we don't yet have the consumption that is easy by the enterprise, you know an enterprise likes to say "I have 4K camera, I connect it to my software." Click, click, right? And that's where we need to be so we're talking about it APIs that are so simple that they become a click and we engineers we have a tendency to want to explain but we should not, it should become a click. You know, and the phone revolution with the apps became those clicks, we have to do the same for the enterprise, for video, for surveillance, for analytics, it has to be clicks. >> While balancing flexibility, and agility of course because you know the folks who were fans of CLIs come in light interfaces, who hate gooeys it's because they feel they have the ability to go down to another level, so obviously that's a balancing act. >> But that's our job. >> Yeah. >> Our job is to hide the complexity, but of course there is complexity. It's like in the cloud, an emprise scaler, they manage complex things but it's successful if they hide it. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> It's the same. You know we have to be emprise scaler of connectivity but hide it. >> Yeah. >> So that people connect everything, right? >> Well it's Andy's servers, we're all magicians hiding it all. >> Yeah. >> It really is. >> It's like don't worry about it, just know, >> Let us do it. >> Sit down, we will serve you the meal. Don't worry how it's cooked. >> That's right, the enterprises want the outcome. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> They don't want to deal with that bottom layer. But it is tremendously complex and we want to take that on and make it better for the industry. >> That's critical. Marc I'd love to go back to you and just I know that you've been in telco for such a long time and here we are day three of MWC the name changed this year, from Mobile World Congress, reflecting mobilism isn't the only thing, obviously it was the catalyst, but what some of the things that you've heard at the event, maybe seen at the event that give you the confidence that the right players are here to help move Dish wireless forward, for example. >> You know this is the first, I've been here for decades it's the first time, and I'm a Chief Network Officer, first time we don't talk about the network. >> (Andy) Yeah. >> Isn't that surprising? People don't tell me about speed, or latency, they talk about consumption. Apps, you know videos surveillance, or analytics or it's, so I love that, because now we're starting to talk about how we can consume and monetize but that's the first time. We use to talk about gigabytes and this and that, none of that not once. >> What does that signify to you, in terms of the evolution? >> Well you know, we've seen that the demand for the healthcare, for the smart cities, has been here for a decade, proof of concepts for a decade but the consumption has been behind and for me this is the oldest team is waking up to we are going to make it easy, so that the consumption can take off. The demand is there, we have to serve it. And the fact that people are starting to say we hide the complexity that's our problem, but don't even mention it, I love it. >> Yep. Drop the mic. >> (Andy and Marc) Yeah, yeah. >> Andy last question for you, some of the things we know Dell has a big and verging presents in telco, we've had a chance to see the booth, see the cool things you guys are featuring there, Dave did a great tour of it, talk about some of the things you've heard and maybe even from customers at this event that demonstrate to you that Dell is going in the right direction with it's telco strategy. >> Yeah, I mean personally for me this has been an unbelievable event for Dell we've had tons and tons of customer meetings of course and the feedback we're getting is that the things we're bring to market whether it's infrablocks, or purposeful servers that are designed for the telecom network are what our customers need and have always wanted. We get a lot of wows, right? >> (Lisa) That's nice. >> "Wow we didn't know Dell was doing this, we had no idea." And the other part of it is that not everybody was sure that we were going to move as fast as we have so the speed in which we've been able to bring some of these things to market and part of that was working with Dish, you know a pioneer, to make sure we were building the right things and I think a lot of the customers that we talked to really appreciate the fact that we're doing it with the industry, >> (Lisa) Yeah. >> You know, not at the industry and that comes across in the way they are responding and what their talking to us about now. >> And that came across in the interview that you just did. Thank you both for joining Dave and me. >> Thank you >> Talking about what Dell and Dish are doing together the proof is in the pudding, and you did a great job at explaining that, thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guest and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from MWC 23 day three. We will be back with our next guest, so don't go anywhere. (upbeat music)

(intro music) >> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (gentle music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. As you well know, we are live at MWC23 in Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our coverage, as you know, 'cause you've been watching the first two days. A lot of conversations about ecosystem, a lot about disruption in the telco industry. We're going to be talking about Open RAN. You've heard some of those great conversations, the complexities, the opportunities. Two guests join Dave and me. Abdullah Abuzaid, Technical Product Manager at Dell, and Gil Hellmann, VP Telecom Solutions Engineering and Architecture at Wind River. Welcome to the program guys. >> Thank you. >> Nice to be here. >> Let's talk a little bit about Dell and Wind River. We'll each ask you both the same question, and talk to us about how you're working together to really address the complexities that organizations are having when they're considering moving from a closed environment to an open environment. >> Definitely. Thank you for hosting us. By end of the day, the relationship between Dell and Wind River is not a new. We've been collaborating in the open ecosystem for long a time enough. And that's one of the, our partnership is a result of this collaboration where we've been trying to make more efficient operation in the ecosystem. The open environment ecosystem, it has the plus and a concern. The plus of simplicity, choice of multiple vendors, and then the concern of complexity managing these vendors. Especially if we look at examples for the Open RAN ecosystem, dealing with multiple vendors, trying to align them. It bring a lot of operational complexity and TCO challenges for our customers, from this outcome where we build our partnership with Wind River in order to help our customer to simplify, or run deployment, operation, and lifecycle management and sustain it. >> And who are the customers, by the way? >> Mainly the CSP customers who are targeting Open RAN and Virtual RAN deployments. That digital transformation moving towards unified cloud environment, or a seamless cloud experience from Core to RAN, these are the customers we are working with them. >> You'll give us your perspective, your thoughts on the partnership, and the capabilities that you're enabling, the CSPs with that. >> Sure. It's actually started last year here in Barcelona, when we set together, and started to look at the, you know, the industry, the adoption of Open RAN, and the challenges. And Open RAN brings a lot of possibilities and benefit, but it does bring a lot of challenges of reintegrating what you desegregate. In the past, you purchase everything from one vendor, they provide the whole solution. Now you open it, you have different layers. So if you're looking at Open RAN, you have, I like to look at it as three major layers, the management, application, and the infrastructure. And we're starting to look what are the challenges. And the challenges of integration, of complexity, knowledge that operator has with cloud infrastructure. And this is where we basically, Dell and Winder River set together and say, "How can we ease this? "How we can make it simpler?" And we decided to partner and bring a joint infrastructure solution to market, that's not only integrated at a lab at the factory level, but it basically comes with complete lifecycle management from the day zero deployment, through the day two operation, everything done through location, through Dell supported, working out of the box. So basically taking this whole infrastructure layer integration pain out, de-risking everything, and then continuing from there to work with the ecosystem vendor to reintegrate, validate the application, on top of this infrastructure. >> So what is the, what is the Wind River secret sauce in this, in this mix, for folks who aren't familiar with what Wind River does? >> Yes, absolutely. So Wind River, for many, many don't know, we're in business since 1981. So over 40 years. We specialize high performance, high reliability infrastructure. We touch every aspect of your day and your life. From the airplane that you fly, the cars, the medical equipment. And if we go into the telco, most of the telco equipment that it's not virtualized, not throughout the fight today, using our operating system. So from all the leading equipment manufacturers and even the smaller one. And as the world started to go into desegregation in cloud, Wind River started to look at this and say, "Okay, everything is evolving. Instead of a device that included the application, the hardware, everything fused together, it's now being decomposed. So instead of providing the operating environment to develop and deploy the application to the device manufacturer, now we're providing it basically to build the cloud. So to oversimplify, I call it a cloud OS, okay. It's a lot more than OS, it's an operating environment. But we took basically our experience, the same experience that, you know, we used in all those years with the telco equipment manufacturer, and brought it into the cloud. So we're basically providing solution to build an on-premises scalable cloud from the core all the way to the far edge, that doesn't compromise reliability, doesn't compromise performance, and address all the telco needs. >> So I, Abdullah, maybe you can a answer this. >> Yeah. >> What is the, what does the go-to-market motion look like, considering that you have two separate companies that can address customers directly, separately. What does that, what does that look like if you're approaching a possible customer who is, who's knocking on the door? >> How does that work? >> Exactly. And this effort is a Dell turnkey sales service offering, or solution offering to our customers. Where Dell, in collaboration with Wind River, we proactively validate, integrate, and productize the solution as engineered system, knock door on our customer who are trying to transform to Open RAN or open ecosystem. We can help you to go through that seamless experience, by pre-validating with whatever workload you want to introduce, enable zero touch provisioning, and during the day one deployment, and ensure we have sustainable lifecycle management throughout the lifecycle of the product in, in operate, in operational network, as well as having a unified single call of support from Dell side. >> Okay. So I was just going to ask you about support. So I'm a CSP, I have the solution, I go to Dell for support. >> Exactly. >> Okay. So start with Dell, and level one, level two. And if there are complex issues related to the cloud core itself, then Wind River will be on our back supporting us. >> Talk a little bit about a cust, a CSP example that is, is using the technology, and some of the outcomes that they're able to achieve. I'd love to get both of your perspectives on that. >> Vodafone is a great example. We're here in Barcelona. Vodafone is the first ora network in Europe, and it's using our joint solution. >> What are some of the, the outcomes that it's helping them to achieve? >> Faster time to market. As you see, they already started to deploy the ORAN in commercial network, and very successful in the trials that they did last year. We're also not stopping there. We're evolving, working with them together to improve like stuff around energy efficiency. So continue to optimize. So the outcome, it's just simplifying it, and you know, ready to go. Using experience that we have, Wind River is powering the first basically virtualized RAN 5G network in the world. This is with Verizon. We're at the very large scale. We started this deployment in late '20 and '19, the first site. And then through 2020 to 2022, we basically rolled in large scale. We have a lot of experience learning from it, which what we brought into the table when we partnered with Dell. A lot of experience from how you deploy at scale. Many sites from a central location, updates, upgrade. So the whole day two operation, and this is coming to bearing the solution that basically Vodafone is deploying now, and which allowed them... If I, if I look at my engagement with Verizon, started years before we started. And it took quite some time until we got stuff running. And if you look at the Vodafone time schedule, was significantly compressed compared to the Verizon first deployment. And I can tell you that there are other service providers that were announced here by KDI, for example. It's another one moving even faster. So it's accelerating the whole movement to Ora. >> We've heard a lot of acceleration talk this week. I'd love to get your perspective, Abdullah, talking about, you know, you, you just mentioned two huge names in Telco, Vodafone and Verizon. >> Yep. >> Talk a little bit about Dell's commitment to helping telecommunications companies really advance, accelerate innovation so that all of us on the other end have this thing that just works wherever we are 24 by 7. >> Not exactly. And this, we go back to the challenges in Open ecosystem. Managing multiple vendors at the same time, is a challenge for our customers. And that's why we are trying to simplify their life cycle by have, by being a trusted partner, working with our customer through all the journey. We started with Dish in their 5G deployment. Also with Vodafone. We're finding the right partners working with them proactively before getting into, in front of the customer to, we've done our homework, we are ready to simplify the process for you to go for it. If you look at the RAN in particular, we are talking with the 5g. We have ran the simplification, but they still have on the other side, limited resources and skillset can support it. So, bringing a pro, ahead of time engineer system, with a zero touch of provisioning enablement, and sustainable life cycle management, it lead to the faster time to market deployment, TCO savings, improved margins for our customers, and faster business revenue for their end users. >> Solid outcomes. >> And, and what you just just described, justifies the pain associated with disaggregating and reintegrating, which is the way that Gill referenced it, which I think is great because you're not, you're not, you're not re-aggregating, (laughs) you're reintegrating, and you're creating something that's better. >> Exactly. >> Moving forward. Otherwise, why would you do it? >> Exactly. And if you look at it, the player in the ecosystem, you have the vendors, you have the service integrators, you have the automation enablers, but kind of they are talking in silos. Everyone, this is my raci, this is what I'm responsible for. I, I'm not able, I don't want to get into something else while we are going the extra mile by working proactively in that ecosystem to... Let's bring brains together, find out what's one plus one can bring three for our customers, so we make it end-to-end seamless experience, not only on the technical part, but also on the business aspect side of it. >> So, so the partnership, it's about reducing the pen. I will say eliminating it. So this is the, the core of it. And you mentioned getting better coverage for your phone. I do want to point out that the phones are great, but if you look at the premises of a 5G network, it's to enable a lot more things that will touch your life that are beyond the consumer and the phone. Stuff like connected vehicles. So for example, something as simple as collision avoidance, the ability for the car that goes in front of you to be able to see what's happening and broadcast this information to the car behind that have no ability to see it. And basically affect our life in a way that makes our driving safer. And for this, you need a ultra low, reliable low latency communication. You need a 5G network. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you know, we think about, "Well we just have to be connected all the time." But those are some of the emerging technologies that are going to be potentially lifesaving, and, and really life transforming that you guys are helping to enable. So, really great stuff there, but so much promise coming down the road. What's next for Dell and Wind River? And, and when you're in conversations with prospective CSP's, what is the superpower that you deliver together? I'd love to get both of your perspectives. >> So, if you look at it, number one, customers look at it, last savings and their day-to-day operation. In 5G nature, we are talking the introduction of ORAN. This is still picking up. But there is a mutualization and densification of ORAN. And this is where we're talking on monetizing my deployment. Then the third phase, we're talking sustainability and advanced service introduction. Where I want to move not only ORAN, I want to bring the edge at the same side, I want to define the advanced use cases of edge, where it enables me with this pre-work being done to deliver more services and better SLA services. By end of the day, 5G as a girl mentioned earlier, is not about a good better phone coverage, or a better speed robot, but what customized SLA's I can deliver. So it enables me to deliver different business streams to my end users. >> Yeah. >> So yeah. I will say there are two pens. One, it's the technology side. So for an example, energy efficiency. It's a very big pin point. And sustainability. So we work a lot around this, and basically to advance this. So if you look at the integrated solution today, it's very highly optimized for resource consumption. But to be able to more dynamically be able to change your power profile without compromising the SLA. So this is one side. The other side, it's about all those applications that will come to the 5G network to make our life better. It's about integrating, validating, certifying those applications. So, it's not just easy to deploy an ORAN network, but it's easy to deploy those applications. >> I'd be curious to get your perspective on the question of ROI in this, in this space. Specifically with the sort of the macro headwinds (clears throat) the economies of the world are facing right now, if you accept that. What does the ROI timeline look like when you're talking about moving towards ORAN, adopting VRAN, an amazing, you know, a plethora of new services that can be delivered, but will these operators have the appetite to take that, make that investment and take on that risk based upon the ROI time horizon? Any thoughts on that? >> Yeah. So if you look at the early days or ORAN introduction in particular, most of the entrepreneurs of ORAN and Virtual RAN ran into the challenges of not only the complexity of open ecosystem, but the integration, is like the redos of the work. And that's where we are trying to address it via pre-engineered system or building an engineer system proactively before getting it to the customers. Per our result or outcomes we get, we are talking about 30 to 50% savings on the optics. We are talking 110 ROI for our customers, simply because we are reducing the redos, the time spent to discover and explore. Because we've done that rework ahead of time, we found the optimization issues. Just for example, any customer can buy the same components from any multiple vendors, but how I can bring them together and give, deliver for me the best performance that I can fully utilize, that's, that's where it brings the value for our customer, and accelerate the deployment and the operation of the network. >> Do you have anything to add before we close in the next 30 seconds? >> Yeah. Yeah. (laughs) >> Absolutely. I would say, we start to see the data coming from two years of operation at scale. And the data supports performance. It's the same or better than traditional system. And the cost of operation, it's as good or better than traditional. Unfortunately, I can't provide more specific data. But the point is, when something is unknown in the beginning, of course you're more afraid, you take more conservative approach. Now the data starts to flow. And from here, the intention needs to go even better. So more efficiency, so cost less than traditional system, both to operate as well as to build up. But it's definitely the data that we have today says, the, ORAN system is at part, at the minimum. >> So, definite ROI there. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about how you're helping organizations not just address the complexities of moving from close to open, but to your point, eliminating them. We appreciate your time and, and your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. Live from MWC23. We'll be back after a short break. (outro music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (light airy music) >> Hi, everybody, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is in the house. John Furrier is pounding the news from our Palo Alto studio. We are super excited to be talking about cloud at the edge, what that means. Charles Tsai is here. He's the Senior Director of product management at Dell Technologies and Peter Fetterolf is the Chief Technology Officer at ACG Business Analytics, a firm that goes deep into the TCO and the telco space, among other things. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah, good to be here. >> So I've been in search all week of the elusive next wave of monetization for the telcos. We know they make great money on connectivity, they're really good at that. But they're all talking about how they can't let this happen again. Meaning we can't let the over the top vendors yet again, basically steal our cookies. So we're going to not mess it up this time. We're going to win in the monetization. Charles, where are those monetization opportunities? Obviously at the edge, the telco cloud at the edge. What is that all about and where's the money? >> Well, Dave, I think from a Dell's perspective, what we want to be able to enable operators is a solution that enable them to roll out services much quicker, right? We know there's a lot of innovation around IoT, MEG and so on and so forth, but they continue to rely on traditional technology and way of operations is going to take them years to enable new services. So what Dell is doing is now, creating the entire vertical stack from the hardware through CAST and automation that enable them, not only to push out services very quickly, but operating them using cloud principles. >> So it's when you say the entire vertical stack, it's the integrated hardware components with like, for example, Red Hat on top- >> Right. >> Or a Wind River? >> That's correct. >> Okay, and then open API, so the developers can create workloads, I presume data companies. We just had a data conversation 'cause that was part of the original stack- >> That's correct. >> So through an open ecosystem, you can actually sort of recreate that value, correct? >> That's correct. >> Okay. >> So one thing Dell is doing, is we are offering an infrastructure block where we are taking over the overhead of certifying every release coming from the Red Hat or the Wind River of the world, right? We want telcos to spend their resources on what is going to generate them revenue. Not the overhead of creating this cloud stack. >> Dave, I remember when we went through this in the enterprise and you had companies like, you know, IBM with the AS400 and the mainframe saying it's easier to manage, which it was, but it's still, you know, it was subsumed by the open systems trend. >> Yeah, yeah. And I think that's an important thing to probe on, is this idea of what is, what exactly does it mean to be cloud at the edge in the telecom space? Because it's a much used term. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about cloud and edge, in sort of generalized IT, but what specifically does it mean? >> Yeah, so when we talk about telco cloud, first of all it's kind of different from what you're thinking about public cloud today. And there's a couple differences. One, if you look at the big hyperscaler public cloud today, they tend to be centralized in huge data centers. Okay, telco cloud, there are big data centers, but then there's also regional data centers. There are edge data centers, which are your typical like access central offices that have turned data centers, and then now even cell sites are becoming mini data centers. So it's distributed. I mean like you could have like, even in a country like say Germany, you'd have 30,000 soul sites, each one of them being a data center. So it's a very different model. Now the other thing I want to go back to the question of monetization, okay? So how do you do monetization? The only way to do that, is to be able to offer new services, like Charles said. How do you offer new services? You have to have an open ecosystem that's going to be very, very flexible. And if we look at where telcos are coming from today, they tend to be very inflexible 'cause they're all kind of single vendor solutions. And even as we've moved to virtualization, you know, if you look at packet core for instance, a lot of them are these vertical stacks of say a Nokia or Ericson or Huawei where you know, you can't really put any other vendors or any other solutions into that. So basically the idea is this kind of horizontal architecture, right? Where now across, not just my central data centers, but across my edge data centers, which would be traditionally my access COs, as well as my cell sites. I have an open environment. And we're kind of starting with, you know, packet core obviously with, and UPFs being distributed, but now open ran or virtual ran, where I can have CUs and DUs and I can split CUs, they could be at the soul site, they could be in edge data centers. But then moving forward, we're going to have like MEG, which are, you know, which are new kinds of services, you know, could be, you know, remote cars it could be gaming, it could be the Metaverse. And these are going to be a multi-vendor environment. So one of the things you need to do is you need to have you know, this cloud layer, and that's what Charles was talking about with the infrastructure blocks is helping the service providers do that, but they still own their infrastructure. >> Yeah, so it's still not clear to me how the service providers win that game but we can maybe come back to that because I want to dig into TCO a little bit. >> Sure. >> Because I have a lot of friends at Dell. I don't have a lot of friends at HPE. I've always been critical when they take an X86 server put a name on it that implies edge and they throw it over the fence to the edge, that's not going to work, okay? We're now seeing, you know we were just at the Dell booth yesterday, you did the booth crawl, which was awesome. Purpose-built servers for this environment. >> Charles: That's right. >> So there's two factors here that I want to explore in TCO. One is, how those next gen servers compare to the previous gen, especially in terms of power consumption but other factors and then how these sort of open ran, open ecosystem stacks compared to proprietary stacks. Peter, can you help us understand those? >> Yeah, sure. And Charles can comment on this as well. But I mean there, there's a couple areas. One is just moving the next generation. So especially on the Intel side, moving from Ice Lake to the Sapphire Rapids is a big deal, especially when it comes to the DU. And you know, with the radios, right? There's the radio unit, the RU, and then there's the DU the distributed unit, and the CU. The DU is really like part of the radio, but it's virtualized. When we moved from Ice lake to Sapphire Rapids, which is third generation intel to fourth generation intel, we're literally almost doubling the performance in the DU. And that's really important 'cause it means like almost half the number of servers and we're talking like 30, 40, 50,000 servers in some cases. So, you know, being able to divide that by two, that's really big, right? In terms of not only the the cost but all the TCO and the OpEx. Now another area that's really important, when I was talking moving from these vertical silos to the horizontal, the issue with the vertical silos is, you can't place any other workloads into those silos. So it's kind of inefficient, right? Whereas when we have the horizontal architecture, now you can place workloads wherever you want, which basically also means less servers but also more flexibility, more service agility. And then, you know, I think Charles can comment more, specifically on the XR8000, some things Dell's doing, 'cause it's really exciting relative to- >> Sure. >> What's happening in there. >> So, you know, when we start looking at putting compute at the edge, right? We recognize the first thing we have to do is understand the environment we are going into. So we spend with a lot of time with telcos going to the south side, going to the edge data center, looking at operation, how do the engineer today deal with maintenance replacement at those locations? Then based on understanding the operation constraints at those sites, we create innovation and take a traditional server, remodel it to make sure that we minimize the disruption to the operations, right? Just because we are helping them going from appliances to open compute, we do not want to disrupt what is have been a very efficient operation on the remote sites. So we created a lot of new ideas and develop them on general compute, where we believe we can save a lot of headache and disruptions and still provide the same level of availability, resiliency, and redundancy on an open compute platform. >> So when we talk about open, we don't mean generic? Fair? See what I mean? >> Open is more from the software workload perspective, right? A Dell server can run any type of workload that customer intend. >> But it's engineered for this? >> Environment. >> Environment. >> That's correct. >> And so what are some of the environmental issues that are dealt with in the telecom space that are different than the average data center? >> The most basic one, is in most of the traditional cell tower, they are deployed within cabinets instead of racks. So they are depth constraints that you just have no access to the rear of the chassis. So that means on a server, is everything you need to access, need to be in the front, nothing should be in the back. Then you need to consider how labor union come into play, right? There's a lot of constraint on who can go to a cell tower and touch power, who can go there and touch compute, right? So we minimize all that disruption through a modular design and make it very efficient. >> So when we took a look at XR8000, literally right here, sitting on the desk. >> Uh-huh. >> Took it apart, don't panic, just pulled out some sleds and things. >> Right, right. >> One of the interesting demonstrations was how it compared to the size of a shoe. Now apparently you hired someone at Dell specifically because they wear a size 14 shoe, (Charles laughs) so it was even more dramatic. >> That's right. >> But when you see it, and I would suggest that viewers go back and take a look at that segment, specifically on the hardware. You can see exactly what you just referenced. This idea that everything is accessible from the front. Yeah. >> So I want to dig in a couple things. So I want to push back a little bit on what you were saying about the horizontal 'cause there's the benefit, if you've got the horizontal infrastructure, you can run a lot more workloads. But I compare it to the enterprise 'cause I, that was the argument, I've made that argument with converged infrastructure versus say an Oracle vertical stack, but it turned out that actually Oracle ran Oracle better, okay? Is there an analog in telco or is this new open architecture going to be able to not only service the wide range of emerging apps but also be as resilient as the proprietary infrastructure? >> Yeah and you know, before I answer that, I also want to say that we've been writing a number of white papers. So we have actually three white papers we've just done with Dell looking at infrastructure blocks and looking at vertical versus horizontal and also looking at moving from the previous generation hardware to the next generation hardware. So all those details, you can find the white papers, and you can find them either in the Dell website or at the ACG research website >> ACGresearch.com? >> ACG research. Yeah, if you just search ACG research, you'll find- >> Yeah. >> Lots of white papers on TCO. So you know, what I want to say, relative to the vertical versus horizontal. Yeah, obviously in the vertical side, some of those things will run well, I mean it won't have issues. However, that being said, as we move to cloud native, you know, it's very high performance, okay? In terms of the stack, whether it be a Red Hat or a VMware or other cloud layers, that's really become much more mature. It now it's all CNF base, which is really containerized, very high performance. And so I don't think really performance is an issue. However, my feeling is that, if you want to offer new services and generate new revenue, you're not going to do it in vertical stacks, period. You're going to be able to do a packet core, you'll be able to do a ran over here. But now what if I want to offer a gaming service? What if I want to do metaverse? What if I want to do, you have to have an environment that's a multi-vendor environment that supports an ecosystem. Even in the RAN, when we look at the RIC, and the xApps and the rApps, these are multi-vendor environments that's going to create a lot of flexibility and you can't do that if you're restricted to, I can only have one vendor running on this hardware. >> Yeah, we're seeing these vendors work together and create RICs. That's obviously a key point, but what I'm hearing is that there may be trade offs, but the incremental value is going to overwhelm that. Second question I have, Peter is, TCO, I've been hearing a lot about 30%, you know, where's that 30% come from? Is it Op, is it from an OpEx standpoint? Is it labor, is it power? Is it, you mentioned, you know, cutting the number of servers in half. If I can unpack the granularity of that TCO, where's the benefit coming from? >> Yeah, the answer is yes. (Peter and Charles laugh) >> Okay, we'll do. >> Yeah, so- >> One side that, in terms of, where is the big bang for the bucks? >> So I mean, so you really need to look at the white paper to see details, but definitely power, definitely labor, definitely reducing the number of servers, you know, reducing the CapEx. The other thing is, is as you move to this really next generation horizontal telco cloud, there's the whole automation and orchestration, that is a key component as well. And it's enabled by what Dell is doing. It's enabled by the, because the thing is you're not going to have end-to-end automation if you have all this legacy stuff there or if you have these vertical stacks where you can't integrate. I mean you can automate that part and then you have separate automation here, you separate. you need to have integrated automation and orchestration across the whole thing. >> One other point I would add also, right, on the hardware perspective, right? With the customized hardware, what we allow operator to do is, take out the existing appliance and push a edge optimized server without reworking the entire infrastructure. There is a significant saving where you don't have to rethink about what is my power infrastructure, right? What is my security infrastructure? The server is designed to leverage the existing, what is already there. >> How should telco, Charles, plan for this transformation? Are there specific best practices that you would recommend in terms of the operational model? >> Great question. I think first thing is do an inventory of what you have. Understand what your constraints are and then come to Dell, we will love to consult with you, based on our experience on the best practices. We know how to minimize additional changes. We know how to help your support engineer, understand how to shift appliance based operation to a cloud-based operation. >> Is that a service you offer? Is that a pre-sales freebie? What is maybe both? >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> Guys- >> Just really quickly. >> We're going to wrap. >> The, yeah. Dave loves the TCO discussion. I'm always thinking in terms of, well how do you measure TCO when you're comparing something where you can't do something to an environment where you're going to be able to do something new? And I know that that's always the challenge in any kind of emerging market where things are changing, any? >> Well, I mean we also look at, not only TCO, but we look at overall business case. So there's basically service at GLD and revenue and then there's faster time to revenues. Well, and actually ACG, we actually have a platform called the BAE or Business Analytics Engine that's a very sophisticated simulation cloud-based platform, where we can actually look at revenue month by month. And we look at what's the impact of accelerating revenue by three months. By four months. >> So you're looking into- >> By six months- >> So you're forward looking. You're just not consistently- >> So we're not just looking at TCO, we're looking at the overall business case benefit. >> Yeah, exactly right. There's the TCO, which is the hard dollars. >> Right. >> CFO wants to see that, he or she needs to see that. But you got to, you can convince that individual, that there's a business case around it. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And then you're going to sign up for that number. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And they're going to be held to it. That's the story the world wants. >> At the end of the day, telcos have to be offered new services 'cause look at all the money that's been spent. >> Dave: Yeah, that's right. >> On investment on 5G and everything else. >> 0.5 trillion over the next seven years. All right, guys, we got to go. Sorry to cut you off. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> But we're wall to wall here. All right, thanks so much for coming on. >> Dave: Fantastic. >> All right, Dave Vellante, for Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin's in the house. John Furrier in Palo Alto Studios. Keep it right there. MWC 23 live from the Fira in Barcelona. (light airy music)

(soft corporate jingle) >> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat jingle intro) >> Welcome back to Barcelona. We're here live at the Fira. (laughs) Just amazing day two of MWC23. It's packed today. It was packed yesterday. It's even more packed today. All the news is flowing. Check out siliconangle.com. John Furrier is in the studio in Palo Alto breaking all the news. And, we are here live. Really excited to have Udayan Mukherjee who's the Senior Fellow and Chief Architect of wireless product at Network and Edge for Intel. And, Manish Singh is back. He's the CTO of Telecom Systems Business at Dell Jets. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you >> We're going to talk about greening the network. I wonder, Udayan, if you could just set up why that's so important. I mean, it's obvious that it's an important thing, great for the environment, but why is it extra important in Telco? >> Yeah, thank you. Actually, I'll tell you, this morning I had a discussion with an operator. The first thing he said, that the electricity consumption is more expensive nowadays that total real estate that he's spending money on. So, it's like that is the number one thing that if you can change that, bring that power consumption down. And, if you talk about sustainability, look what is happening in Europe, what's happening in all the electricity areas. That's the critical element that we need to address. Whether we are defining chip, platforms, storage systems, that's the number one mantra right now. You know, reduce the power. Electricity consumption, because it's a sustainable planet that we are living in. >> So, you got CapEx and OpEx. We're talking about the big piece of OpEx is now power consumption? >> Power Consumption >> That's the point. Okay, so in my experience, servers are the big culprit for power consumption, which is powered by core semiconductors and microprocessors. So, what's the strategy to reduce the power consumption? You're probably not going to reduce the bill overall. You maybe just can keep pace, but from a technical standpoint, how do you attack that? >> Yeah, there are multiple defined ways of adding. Obviously the process technology, that micro (indistinct) itself is evolving to make it more low-power systems. But, even within the silicon, the server that we develop, if you look in a CPU, there is a lot of power states. So, if you have a 32 code platform, as an example, every code you can vary the frequency and the C-states, power states. So, if you look into any traffic, whether it's a radio access network, packet code. At any given time the load is not peak. So, your power consumption, actual what we are drawing from the wall, it also needs to vary with that. So, that's how if you look into this there's a huge savings. If you go to Intel booth or Ericson booth or anyone, you will see right now every possible, the packet code, radio access network, everything network. They're talking about our energy consumption, how they're lowering this. These states, as we call it power states, C-state P-state they've built in intel chip for a long time. The cloud providers are taking advantage of it. But Telcos, with even two generation before they used to actually switch it off in the bios. I say no, we need peak. Now, that thing is changing. Now, it's all like, how do I take advantage of the built in technologies? >> I remember the enterprise virtualization, Manish, was a big play. I remember PG&E used to give rebates to customers that would install virtualized software, VMware. >> And SSDs. >> Yeah. And SSDs, you know, yes. Because, the spinning disc was, but, nowhere near with a server consumption. So, how virtualized is the telco network? And then, what I'm saying is there other things, other knobs, you can of course turn. So, what's your perspective on this as a server player? >> Yeah, absolutely. Let me just back up a little bit and start at the big picture to share what Udayan said. Here, day two, every conversation I've had yesterday and today morning with every operator, every CTO, they're coming in and first topic they're talking about is energy. And, the reason is, A, it's the right thing to do, sustainability, but, it's also becoming a P&L issue. And, the reason it's becoming a P&L issue is because we are in this energy inflationary environment where the energy costs are constantly going up. So, it's becoming really important for the service providers to really drive more efficiency onto their networks, onto their infrastructure. Number one. Two, then to your question on what all knobs need to be turned on, and what are the knobs? So, Udayan talked about within the intel, silicon, the C-states, P-states and all these capabilities that are being brought up, absolutely important. But again, if we take a macro view of it. First of all, there are opportunities to do infrastructure audit. What's on, why is it on, does it need to be on right now? Number two, there are opportunities to do infrastructure upgrade. And, what I mean by that is as you go from previous generation servers to next generation servers, better cooling, better performance. And through all of that you start to gain power usage efficiency inside a data center. And, you take that out more into the networks you start to achieve same outcomes on the network site. Think about from a cooling perspective, air cooling but for that matter, even liquid cooling, especially inside the data centers. All opportunities around PUE, because PUE, power usage efficiency and improvement on PUE is an opportunity. But, I'll take it even further. Workloads that are coming onto it, core, RAN, these workloads based on the dynamic traffic. Look, if you look at the traffic inside a network, it's not constant, it's varied. As the traffic patterns change, can you reduce the amount of infrastructure you're using? I.e. reduce the amount of power that you're using and when the traffic loads are going up. So, the workloads themselves need to become more smarter about that. And last, but not the least. From an orchestration layer if you think about it, where you are placing these workloads, and depending on what's available, you can start to again, drive better energy outcomes. And, not to forget acceleration. Where you need acceleration, can you have the right hardware infrastructures delivering the right kind of accelerations to again, improve those energy efficiency outcomes. So, it's a complex problem. But, there are a lot of levers, lot of tools that are in place that the service providers, the technology builders like us, are building the infrastructure, and then the workload providers all come together to really solve this problem. >> Yeah, Udayan, Manish mentioned this idea of moving from one generation to a new generation and gaining benefits. Out there on the street, if you will. Most of the time it's an N plus 2 migration. It's not just moving from last generation to this next generation, but it's really a generation ago. So, those significant changes in the dynamics around power density and cooling are meaningful? You talk about where performance should be? We start talking about the edge. It's hard to have a full-blown raised data center floor edge everywhere. Do these advances fundamentally change the kinds of things that you can do at the base of a tower? >> Yeah, absolutely. Manish talked about that, the dynamic nature of the workload. So, we are using a lot of this AIML to actually predict. Like for example, your multiple force in a systems. So, why is the 32 core as a system, why is all running? So, your traffic profile in the night times. So, you are in the office areas, in the night has gone home and nowadays everybody's working from remote anyway. So, why is this thing a full blown, spending the TDP, the total power and extreme powers. You bring it down, different power states, C-states. We talked about it. Deeper C-states or P-states, you bring the frequency down. So, lot of those automation, even at the base of the tower. Lot of our deployment right now, we are doing a whole bunch of massive MIMO deployment. Virtual RAN in Verizon network. All actually cell-site deployment. Those eight centers are very close to the cell-site. And, they're doing aggressive power management. So, you don't have to go to a huge data centers, even there's a small rack of systems, four to five, 10 systems, you can do aggressive power management. And, you built it up that way. >> Okay. >> If I may just build on what Udayan said. I mean if you look at the radio access network, right? And, let's start at the bottom of the tower itself. The infrastructure that's going in there, especially with Open RAN, if you think about it, there are opportunities now to do a centralized RAN where you could do more BBU pooling. And, with that, not only on a given tower but across a given given coverage area, depending on what the traffics are, you can again get the infrastructure to become more efficient in terms of what traffic, what needs are, and really start to benefit. The pooling gains which is obviously going to give you benefit on the CapEx side, but from an energy standpoint going to give you benefits on the OpEx side of things. So that's important. The second thing I will say is we cannot forget, especially on the radio access side of things, that it's not just the bottom of the tower what's happening there. What's happening on the top of the tower especially with the radio, that's super important. And, that goes into how do you drive better PA efficiency, how do you drive better DPD in there? This is where again, applying AI machine learning there is a significant amount of opportunity there to improve the PA performance itself. But then, not only that, looking at traffic patterns. Can you do sleep modes, micro sleep modes to deep sleep modes. Turning down the cells itself, depending on the traffic patterns. So, these are all areas that are now becoming more and more important. And, clearly with our ecosystem of partners we are continuing to work on these. >> So we hear from the operators, it's an OpEx issue. It's hitting the P&L. They're in search of PUE of one. And, they've historically been wasteful, they go full throttle. And now, you're saying with intelligence you can optimize that consumption. So, where does the intelligence live? Is it in the rig. Where is it all throughout the network? Is it in the silicon? Maybe you could paint a picture as to where those smarts exist. >> I can start. It's across the stack. It starts, we talked about the C-states, P-states. If you want to take advantage of that, that intelligence is in the workload, which has to understand when can I really start to clock things down or turn off the cores. If you really look at it from a traffic pattern perspective you start to really look at a rig level where you can have power. And, we are working with the ecosystem partners who are looking at applying machine learning on that to see what can we really start to turn on, turn off, throttle things down, depending on what the, so yes, it's across the stack. And lastly, again, I'll go back to cannot forget orchestration, where you again have the ability to move some of these workloads and look at where your workload placements are happening depending on what infrastructure is and what the traffic needs are at that point in time. So it's, again, there's no silver bullet. It has to be looked across the stack. >> And, this is where actually if I may, last two years a sea change has happened. People used to say, okay there are C-states and P-states, there's silicon every code. OS operating system has a governor built in. We rely on that. So, that used to be the way. Now that applications are getting smarter, if you look at a radio access network or the packet core on the control plane signaling application, they're more aware of the what is the underlying silicon power state sleep states are available. So, every time they find some of these areas there's no enough traffic there, they immediately goes to a transition. So, the workload has become more intelligent. The rig application we talked about. Every possible rig application right now are apps on xApps. Most of them are on energy efficiency. How are they using it? So, I think lot more even the last two years. >> Can I just say one more thing there right? >> Yeah. >> We cannot forget the infrastructure as well, right? I mean, that's the most important thing. That's where the energy is really getting drawn in. And, constant improvement on the infrastructure. And, I'll give you some data points, right? If you really look at the power at servers, right? From 2013 to 2023, like a decade. 85% energy intensity improvement, right? So, these gains are coming from performance with better cooling, better technology applications. So, that's super critical, that's important. And, also to just give you another data point. Apart from the infrastructure what cache layers we are running and how much CPU and compute requirements are there, that's also important. So, looking at it from a cache perspective are we optimizing the required infrastructure blocks for radio access versus core? And again, really taking that back to energy efficiency outcomes. So, some of the work we've been doing with Wind River and Red Hat and some of our ecosystem partners around that for radio access network versus core. Really again, optimizing for those different use cases and the outcomes of those start to come in from an energy utilization perspective >> So, 85% improvement in power consumption. Of course you're doing, I don't know, 2, 300% more work, right? So, let's say, and I'm just sort of spit balling numbers but, let's say that historically powers on the P&L has been, I don't know, single digits, maybe 10%. Now, it's popping up the much higher. >> Udayan: Huge >> Right? >> I mean, I don't know what the number is. Is it over 20% in some cases or is it, do you have a sense of that? Or let's say it is. The objective I presume is you're probably not going to lower the power bill overall, but you're going to be able to lower the percent of cost on the OpEx as you grow, right? I mean, we're talking about 5G networks. So much more data >> Capacity increasing. >> Yeah, and so is it, am I right about that the carriers, the best they can hope for is to sort of stay even on that percentage or maybe somewhat lower that percentage? Or, do you think they can actually cut the bill? What's the goal? What are they trying to do? >> The goal is to cut the bill. >> It is! >> And the way you get started to cut the bill is, as I said, first of all on the radio side. Start to see where the improvements are and look, there's not a whole lot there to be done. I mean, the PS are as efficient as they can be, but as I said, there are things in DPD and all that still can be improved. But then, sleep modes and all, yes there are efficiencies in there. But, I'll give you one important, another interesting data point. We did a work with ACG Research on our 16G platform. The power edge service that we have recently launched based on Intel's Sapphire Rapids. And, if you look at the study there. 30% TCR reduction, 10% in CapEx gains, 30% in OpEx gains from moving away from these legacy monolithic architectures to cloud native architectures. And, a large part of that OpEx gain really starts to come from energy to the point of 800 metric tonnes of carbon reduction to the point of you could have, and if you really translate that to around 160 homes electric use per year, right? So yes, I mean the opportunity there is to reduce the bill. >> Wow, that's big, big goal guys. We got to run. But, thank you for informing the audience on the importance and how you get there. So, appreciate that. >> One thing that bears mentioning really quickly before we wrap, a lot of these things we're talking about are happening in remote locations. >> Oh, back to that point of distributed nature of telecom. >> Yes, we talked about a BBU being at the base of a tower that could be up on a mountain somewhere. >> No, you made the point. You can't just say, oh, hey we're going to go find ambient air or going to go... >> They don't necessarily... >> Go next to a waterfall. >> We don't necessarily have the greatest hydro tower. >> All right, we got to go. Thanks you guys. Alright, keep it right there. Wall to wall coverage is day two of theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. Stay right there, we'll be right back. (corporate outro jingle)

>> Announcer: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Good evening, everyone. Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's "theCUBE". We are at Mobile World, MWC, excuse me, '23. New name this year. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, we have had some great conversations. This is only day one of four days of coverage from "theCUBE" but one of the things that we've been talking about is disaggregation. You've wrote about it in your breaking analysis. We've been talking about it. Today is a big thing that's happening. We're going to be talking about that next. >> Yeah, open ecosystems require integration. Integration requires certification. And so, you got to have labs. We're going to talk about that and what value that brings to the community. >> Right. Please welcome Tibor Fabry-Asztalos, senior vice president of telecom systems and product engineering at Dell. >> Hi. >> And back to "theCUBE" after a couple of hours, Gautam Bhagra, vice president of partnerships at Dell. Guys, great to have you here. >> I love to be here. Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So, day one, I'm sure lots of conversations, lots of meetings, lots of jet lag that we're all trying to get over. Talk about, Gautam, we'll start with you. Talk about the disaggregation era. What it is intended to support? What is it intended to enable? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think to be honest with you, Lisa, we spoke about this earlier also, like the whole vision with the disaggregation is to make sure our telco providers can take the benefits of having the innovation that comes along with it, right? So currently, we all know they're tied into like lock systems, which kind of constricts them in going after this whole innovative space. So, our hope is by working with our operators and our partners, we can help make that disaggregation journey a lot easier and work on some of these challenges, and make it easier for the telcos to innovate and consolidate going forward. So, we're working very closely and we talked about the community this morning. We're working very closely with Tibor and his team from an engineering perspective to help build those solutions with our partners and we're excited about the announcements we made this morning. >> When you hear challenges from this ecosystem, can you stack rank 'em? What are you hearing? Kind of what's top of mind? And so, the top three, if you would. >> Some of the challenges are just to define moving from a closed system and open system, just to making sure that the acceptance of that to see what's the value proposition is for an open system and then for the carriers to see the path going from a closed system to an open system. Of course, at the end, people realize the value at the end and speed of innovation that you're going to get all the new technologies and new features, functionality you get in an open system. But then the challenge comes with it, how you actually integrate those and then validate them, and you are to deploy them. So in a sense, that's the opportunity and also some of the challenge along the way. And that's where, as Gautam said, that's where we are also looking at playing the key role with the OTEL lab, the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, where we take these pieces of the open ecosystem and have combined them, validate them, and provide the pipeline to the customer. Pre-integration and then full integration into the production network. >> Those challenges, I presume, vary whether you're talking to a greenfield network operator versus somebody who's got a 40, 50 year history, a hundred-year history in the business, right? I mean migration is a big issue for them, right? Whereas the greenfield, we heard from DISH earlier, they want to drive innovation so they might be willing to sacrifice some other areas. So, is that a fair summarization and what are you hearing? >> [Tibor and Gautam] Yeah. >> Absolutely it is. I mean, that's where you see that DISH being kind of a leader in the space, as they were deploying in greenfield, they defined what the open ecosystem should look like, defined all the components of it, how you integrate them, validate them, and they were able to, well, go through it and deploy it. To your point, for an open, closed systems, as how you actually start transforming the existing network into the open one, that's going to go to a different process, right? You need to figure out how these new open systems can interrupt and work together with existing networks. So, that's one likely some of those carriers will start in an isolated area and grow from there. Deploy an open system in a rural area, for example, and then build from there. >> So, what a bank would do is they say, "Okay, we're going to write in our own abstraction layer." >> Gautam: Yeah. >> Right? "Using microservices, we're going to connect to the cloud. And we're going to, you know, put maybe some lower risk applications in the cloud first and then we're going to create our own cloud." Is there a similar dynamic here? >> Yeah, I mean, so I think you're spot on, right? Like, I think one of the things that we are seeing with the telco operators that we've spoken to is they're very risk averse. >> Yep. >> Right, they have very strong SLA requirements. They cannot go down even for a second. So, what that basically means is the innovation aspect is constrained by the risks that they perceive on any changes that you want to make on the architecture. So, the question that comes up is how do we make it easier for them to not worry about the bare minimum requirements of making sure the network's running and working while thinking about the new innovative technologies and solutions you want to build on the start. So, back to your bank example, nine years ago, no one in a bank even was thinking about like applications that will run on the cloud. Like for them, it was like a side project. They'll try and test something, see if it works, and then they'll think about cloud in the future, right? But now, core applications on banks are actually being built on public cloud. I think we see the same happening with the telco operators as well. Right now, they're understanding the move from a closed ecosystem to an open ecosystem. They understand the value proposition. On the core side, it's already happening a lot. And I think they are slowly moving there and that's where I think Tibor and team have been doing a great job working with our customers to make the transition happen. >> But there are so many permutations. >> Right. >> And integration points. How is Dell addressing that across the ecosystem? >> So, to give you an example, we talked about OTEL, which is our brand new, kind of 13,000 square feet lab that we kind of inaugurated last year based in Round Rock, Texas. >> Dave: Open Telecom. >> Dave and Tibor: Ecosystem Lab. >> Correct, great. And so, as part of that, that's a physical lab but more importantly, that's kind of a community where partners, customers come together to actually, and collaborate and work on these solutions. And as part of this, we also develop what we call the SIP, or Solution Integration Platform, to enable exactly what you just said. Making sure that we have a platform that actually can take all these various components, validate them individually, combine them, and then provide a DevOps and GitOps model, how you actually combine them, provide the BOM or SBOM, and then push that to pre-production and deployments for our customers. So, that's part of the challenge as we talked earlier. And that's how Dell and we are looking at actually enabling this basically, the validation of this disaggregated wall. >> Oh. >> Sorry, I just wanted to- >> Go ahead. >> just going to add one more point, right? So, when we look at the partners that we are working with as well in the OTEL and there are three ways we are working with them. At the bare minimum, we want to make sure that solution will run on the Dell infrastructure and the hardware, right? So, we have the self-certification process. We had a lot of good uptake on it and we are seeing a lot more come in. In fact, I had a check-in with "theCUBE" this morning in our side and it's more than a hundred plus partners already interested in going through that. Awesome. Then we have other places where we work on with partners to build reference architectures together, right? So, we want some sort of validated solution that will work together that we can take to the market. And then we also have engineered solutions that we are building with partners like the infrastructure block offering that we have taken where it's all pre-packaged, pre-built by Dell, working very closely with our partners. So, the telcos don't have to worry about deployment, integration, and everything else that comes along. >> And I presume the security supply chain is part of that- >> Yes. >> bill of materials- >> Absolutely. >> you just described. >> Yeah. >> Exactly. >> And that would include all those levels, the engineered systems, the reference architectures as well? And how do you decide like candidates, we can't do it all, right? So, it's the big markets get the engineered system, is that right? How do you adjudicate there? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think there are a couple of angles to look at it, right? I think the first and foremost is where we see the biggest demand is coming from the customers in terms of the stack they already have and where they have the pain points. >> Dave: Okay. >> Right, so this is why we are working with Red Hat and Wind River, as an example, because they are in most of the deployments that we are aware of with the customers and where we see an opportunity for Dell to partner with these partners. I think we are seeing a lot of new players also coming up the stack. And as they come up the stack and we find opportunities to co-build and co-innovate, absolutely we'll be building joint solutions with them as well. >> Where are you on, from a partnership perspective, on the strategic vision? You mentioned a number of things that have already been accomplished, quite a few. But from your journey perspective on that strategy, where are you? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question. I think we really want to be the partner of choice for all technology and services company within the telecom space. We're looking to drive the transformation in the network area, right? So, that's the vision that we have in the telecom system business from a partnership side. We have created some really good strategic partnerships with key providers, with independent software vendors, the network equipment providers. We're having some really good, strategic conversations with them. You've heard some of the announcement come out today, the work we are doing with Nokia, with Samsung, the Red Hat announcement, the Wind River, and so on and so forth. And there's a lot more in the pipeline. But more importantly, we want to grow the impact of the ecosystem. So, that's why we are launching the partner community today as well to make that happen. >> How does the lab work? Who has access to it? Can I self-certify? If I can self-certify, how do you make sure that I'm following the rules, all of the stuff- >> Sure. >> that you would- >> Absolutely. >> expect. >> So yes, you can self-certify, that's Gautam just mentioned. We already had quite a few ISVs go through that self-certification. And then there's also, there's reference architecture that's being done and other engineered solutions that we talked about earlier. And the lab is set up in a way that when needed, test lines can be isolated. So, only certain set of partners have access to it. So, it's made up in a way that enables collaborations. At the same times, it kind of enables a certain set of customers and partners working together without having challenges of having a completely open system. >> Okay, but so, if I want to do something with you guys and let's say, I am a candidate for an engineered system, so how does it work? Somebody's got to buy the equipment, right? He's got to ship it, right? There's a lot of Dell equipment involved. >> Tibor: That's correct. >> There's other third-party CapEx software, et cetera. So, you fund that, the partners fund that, it's a hybrid funding model, how does that all get done? >> So today, for obviously, we work closely with those partners. The engineered solutions we've developed so far, we've been funding it largely and as you said, is Dell infrastructure plus the cast layers and the cloud players we work with. So, we actually put those in place. We funded them, of course, with participation from them. And that's being done through those labs. >> Okay, great. So, you guys are providing that benefit to the ecosystem. Writing checks, bringing engineering talent to the table. >> Gautam: Yeah. >> Okay. >> And at the same time, I mean, it's a partnership at the end of the day, right? So, depending on the kind of partnership we are. So, if you're an ISV, it's fairly simple. Come into our labs. You don't have to worry about the infrastructure. >> Sure. >> Run it all in our labs and you're good. If you're a hardware vendor or a NEP, network equipment provider, that's where it gets interesting where they need to send us stuff, we need to send them stuff. And usually, like Tibor mentioned, it's a joint collaboration. We all put in our chips on the table and we work together. >> So, when you're having conversations with prospective partners, obviously different types of partners, Gautam, that you just talked about, what's in it for them? What's the value proposition? What does this community- >> Gautam: Yeah. >> give them from a competitive advantage standpoint? >> Yeah, so I mean there are, so the way I think about it, right? There are three things that Dell is bringing to the table. The first one is our experience and expertise on doing this transformation within the enterprise space and the learnings we have from there that we're bringing to telco now, right? So, Dell's been working with enterprises for many, many years. We are one of the big providers there. We all know what transformation enterprise went through. >> Tibor: Telco transformation, IT transformation. >> Exactly. And that's the experience we have, which we're bringing to telco. The second one is our investment, both from a go-to market side as well as the way we are working with our sales and marketing, and so on and so forth, with the engineering side. And finally, I think, and this for me is the best one, is Dell is a very partner-centric organization. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Our strategy is built around partnerships. So, that's the other piece that we bring to the table. >> Where are the labs? Oh, go ahead. >> And what's one more note on that, and also, we are talking about the engineered solutions. There's also the supply chain then because that's a basically appliance and then that goes to Dell's supply chain, which is best in class. >> Dave: And where are the labs? How many are there? >> So Round Rock, Texas is the biggest one, the 13,000 square feet. We also have extension to it. We just announced opening one in Cork for the EME market to making sure that we can cover any regulatory challenges. But also, basically any test lines that we need to cover that have latency challenges. That's why we want to make sure that we have labs in other areas as well. >> And the go-to market, is it an overlay organization, a dedicated organization? >> Yeah, so it's a bit of both as you know. But yeah, in the telecom business unit, we have a dedicated sales organization as well as an alliance organization working very closely with product and engineering to take it to market. >> Given the strength and the breadth of the partner program in the community, based on this is only day one of MWC but is there anything that you've heard today that excites you where telecom is going and where Dell and its ecosystem is going and really burgeoning? >> Oh, I've had I don't know how many meetings since 6:00 AM this morning. So, it's been an amazing event and we're just having so many great conversations with partners, our customers. And I think a lot of today is all about figuring out what our strategy and our vision is, where is each side going and what the overlap is. I think the end result's going to be follow up conversations with a lot of these partners that we are working with or will be working with soon. And then thinking about, do we build engineered solutions together? Do we go validated route? Like we going to figure that out. But I mean, for me, this is like the perfect place to come and share your vision and strategy and understand what we are trying to solve for. >> To me, what's been interesting that all the interactions and discussions are about how to get to or render open ecosystem. That's great to see that the focus is on how to make it work versus still questioning it and I think that's pretty good. >> Well, you guys launched this business I think during the pandemic, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So I mean, you could do a lot over Zoom, but as we were talking about earlier, having the face-to-face interaction, there's no replacement for it. The 6:00 AM meetings versus the 30 minute zoom calls and your body language, I mean, you learn so much that you can take away from these events. >> Absolutely. Seeing someone in 3D is so different and it's good to build that relationship and rapport as well with the folks. >> I agree. >> It is. There's so much value in the hallway conversations that you can't have over Zoom. So, I guess last question for you as we head into to day two, what are some of the things that we can be on the lookout for from Dell and its ecosystem? >> Hmm. >> Interesting. (Tibor chuckling) >> I mean, all our announcements are out. I think what you can look at for us to really be leading in this segment, taking a leadership role, and continuously looking at how we can really enable the open ecosystem and how we can provide more value there, and how we can see how we can lead in this space. >> How you can lead in this space. >> Yeah, I mean for me, I mean, day two is like, I have a lot more meetings in day two than day one so I don't know if it's like people flying in today or what, but it's amazing to just meet the partners and customers. >> So, that theme of velocity for you is going to keep going. >> Oh, it's not stopping. (Lisa laughing) That's for sure. We are excited about it. >> Well, thank you for carving out some time to talk to with us on "theCUBE" about the partner program, the open ecosystem and the commitment to growing that and enabling partners to really differentiate their services with Dell. We appreciate it. >> We appreciate it as well. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. Day one of our coverage. Be right back with our final guest of the day so stick around. (upbeat music continues)

(light music) >> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Spain everyone. Lisa Martin here with theCUBE Dave Vellante, my co-host for the next four days. We're live in Barcelona, covering MWC23. This is only day one, but I'll tell you the theme of this conference this year is velocity. And I don't know about you Dave, but this day is flying by already. This is ecosystem day. We're going to have a great discussion on the ecosystem next. >> Well we're seeing the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, and that necessitates an ecosystem open- we're going to talk about Open RAN, we've been talking about even leading up to the show. It's a critical technology enabler and it's compulsory to have an ecosystem to support that. >> Absolutely compulsory. We've got two guests here joining us, Gautam Bhagra, Vice President partnerships at Dell, and Scott Walker, Vice President of global Telco ecosystem at Wind River. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Nice to be here. >> Thanks For having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So you've got some news, this is day one of the conference, there's some news, Gautam, and let's start with you, unpack it. >> Yeah, well there's a lot of news, as you know, on Dell World. One of the things we are very excited to announce today is the launch of the Open Telecom Ecosystems Community. I think Dave, as you mentioned, getting into an Open RAN world is a challenge. And we know some of the challenges that our customers face. To help solve for those challenges, Dell wants to work with like-minded partners and customers to build innovative solutions, and join go-to-market. So we are launching that today. Wind River is one of our flagship partners for that, and I'm excited to be here to talk about that as well. >> Can you guys talk a little bit about the partnership, maybe a little bit about Wind River so the audience gets that context? >> Sure, absolutely, and the theme of the show, Velocity, is what this partnership is all about. We create velocity for operators if they want to adopt Open RAN, right? We simplify it. Wind River as a company has been around for 40 years. We were part of Intel at one point, and now we're independent, owned by a company called Aptiv. And with that we get another round of investment to help continue our acceleration into this market. So, the Dell partnership is about, like I said, velocity, accelerating the adoption. When we talk to operators, they have told us there are many roadblocks that they face, right? Like systems integration, operating at scale. 'Cause when you buy a traditional radio access network solution from a single supplier, it's very easy. It's works, it's been tested. When you break these components apart and disaggregate 'em, as we talked about David, it creates integration points and support issues, right? And what Dell and Wind River have done together is created a cloud infrastructure solution that could host a variety of RAN workloads, and essentially create a two layer cake. What we're, overall, what we're trying to do is create a traditional RAN experience, with the innovation agility and flexibility of Open RAN. And that's really what this partnership does. >> So these work, this workload innovation is interesting to me because you've got now developers, you know, the, you know, what's the telco developer look like, you know, is to be defined, right? I mean it's like this white sheet of paper that can create all this innovation. And to do that, you've got to have, as I said earlier, an ecosystem. But you've got now, I'm interested in your Open RAN agenda and how you see that sort of maturity model taking place. 'Cause today, you got disruptors that are going to lean right in say "Hey, yeah, that's great." The traditional carriers, they have to have a, you know, they have to migrate, they have to have a hybrid world. We know that takes time. So what's that look like in the marketplace today? >> Yeah, so I mean, I can start, right? So from a Dell's perspective, what we see in the market is yes, there is a drive towards, everyone understands the benefits of being open, right? There's the agility piece, the innovation piece. That's a no-brainer. The question is how do we get there? And I think that's where partnerships become critical to get there, right? So we've been working with partners like Wind River to build solutions that make it easier for customers to start adopting some of the foundational elements of an open network. The, one of the purposes in the agenda of building this community is to bring like-minded developers, like you said like we want those guys to come and work with the customers to create new solutions, and come up with something creative, which no one's even thought about, that accelerates your option even quicker, right? So that's exactly what we want to do as well. And that's one of the reasons why we launched the community. >> Yeah, and what we find with a lot of carriers, they are used to buying, like I said, traditional RAN solutions which are provided from a single provider like Erickson or Nokia and others, right? And we break this apart, and you cloudify that network infrastructure, there's usually a skills gap we see at the operator level, right? And so from a developer standpoint, they struggle with having the expertise in order to execute on that. Wind River helps them, working with companies like Dell, simplify that bottom portion of the stack, the infrastructure stack. So, and we lifecycle manage it, we test- we're continually testing it, and integrating it, so that the operator doesn't have to do that. In addition to that, wind River also has a history and legacy of working with different RAN vendors, both disruptors like Mavenir and Parallel Wireless, as well as traditional RAN providers like Samsung, Erickson, and others soon to be announced. So what we're doing on the northbound side is making it easy by integrating that, and on the southbound side with Dell, so that again, instead of four or five solutions that you need to put together, it's simply two. >> And you think about today how we- how you consume telco services are like there's these fixed blocks of services that you can buy, that has to change. It's more like the, the app stores. It's got to be an open marketplace, and that's where the innovation's going to come in, you know, from the developers, you know, top down maybe. I don't know, how do you see that maturity model evolving? People want to know how long it's going to take. So many questions, when will Open RAN be as reliable. Does it even have to be? You know, so many interesting dynamics going on. >> Yeah, and I think that's something we at Dell are also trying to find out, right? So we have been doing a lot of good work here to help our customers move in that direction. The work with Dish is an example of that. But I think we do understand the challenges as well in terms of getting, adopting the technologies, and adopting the innovation that's being driven by Open. So one of the agendas that we have as a company this year is to work with the community to drive this a lot further, right? We want to have customers adopt the technology more broadly with the tier one, tier two telcos globally. And our sales organizations are going to be working together with Wind Rivers to figure out who's the right set of customers to have these conversations with, so we can drop, drive, start driving this agenda a lot quicker than what we've seen historically. >> And where are you having those customer conversations? Is that at the operator level, is it higher, is it both? >> Well, all operators are deploying 5G in preparation for 6G, right? And we're all looking for those killer use cases which will drive top line revenue and not just make it a TCO discussion. And that starts at a very basic level today by doing things like integrating with Juniper, for their cloud router. So instead of at the far edge cell site, having a separate device that's doing the routing function, right? We take that and we cloudify that application, run it on the same server that's hosting the RAN applications, so you eliminate a device and reduce TCO. Now with Aptiv, which is primarily known as an automotive company, we're having lots of conversations, including with Dell and Intel and others about vehicle to vehicle communication, vehicle to anything communication. And although that's a little bit futuristic, there are shorter term use cases that, like, vehicle to vehicle accident avoidance, which are going to be much nearer term than autonomous driving, for example, which will help drive traffic and new revenue streams for operators. >> So, oh, that's, wow. So many other things (Scott laughs) that's just opened up there too. But I want to come back to, sort of, the Open RAN adoption. And I think you're right, there's a lot of questions that that still have to be determined. But my question is this, based on your knowledge so far does it have to be as hardened and reliable, obviously has to be low latency as existing networks, or can flexibility, like the cloud when it first came out, wasn't better than enterprise IT, it was just more flexible and faster, and you could rent it. And, is there a similar dynamic here where it doesn't have to replicate the hardened stack, it can bring in new benefits that drive adoption, what are your thoughts on that? >> Well there's a couple of things on that, because Wind River, as you know, where our legacy and history is in embedded devices like F-15 fighter jets, right? Or the Mars Rover or the James Web telescope, all run Wind River software. So, we know about can't fail ultra reliable systems, and operators are not letting us off the hook whatsoever. It has to be as hardened and locked down, as secure as a traditional RAN environment. Otherwise they will (indistinct). >> That's table stakes. >> That's table stakes that gets us there. And when River, with our legacy and history, and having operator experience running live commercial networks with a disaggregated stack in the tens of thousands of nodes, understand what this is like because they're running live commercial traffic with live customers. So we can't fail, right? And with that, they want their cake and eat it too, right? Which is, I want ultra reliable, I want what I have today, but I want the agility and flexibility to onboard third party apps. Like for example, this JCNR, this Juniper Cloud-Native Router. You cannot do something as simple as that on a traditional RAN Appliance. In an open ecosystem you can take that workload and onboard it because it is an open ecosystem, and that's really one of the true benefits. >> So they want the mainframe, but they want (Scott laughs) the flexibility of the developer cloud, right? >> That's right. >> They want their, have their cake eat it too and not gain weight. (group laughs) >> Yeah I mean David, I come from the public cloud world. >> We all don't want to do that. >> I used to work with a public cloud company, and nine years ago, public cloud was in the same stage, where you would go to a bank, and they would be like, we don't trust the cloud. It's not secure, it's not safe. It was the digital natives that adopted it, and that that drove the industry forward, right? And that's where the enterprises that realized that they're losing business because of all these innovative new companies that came out. That's what I saw over the last nine years in the cloud space. I think in the telco space also, something similar might happen, right? So a lot of this, I mean a lot of the new age telcos are understanding the value, are looking to innovate are adopting the open technologies, but there's still some inertia and hesitancy, for the reasons as Scott mentioned, to go there so quickly. So we just have to work through and balance between both sides. >> Yeah, well with that said, if there's still some inertia, but there's a theme of velocity, how do you help organizations balance that so they trust evolving? >> Yeah, and I think this is where our solution, like infrastructure block, is a foundational pillar to make that happen, right? So if we can take away the concerns that the organizations have in terms of security, reliability from the fundamental elements that build their infrastructure, by working with partners like Wind River, but Dell takes the ownership end-to-end to make sure that service works and we have those telco grade SLAs, then the telcos can start focusing on what's next. The applications and the customer services on the top. >> Customer service customer experience. >> You know, that's an interesting point Gautam brings up, too, because support is an issue too. We all talk about when you break these things apart, it creates integration points that you need to manage, right? But there's also, so the support aspect of it. So imagine if you will, you had one vendor, you have an outage, you call that one vendor, one necktie to choke, right, for accountability for the network. Now you have four or five vendors that you have to work. You get a lot of finger pointing. So at least at the infrastructure layer, right? Dell takes first call support for both the hardware infrastructure and the Wind River cloud infrastructure for both. And we are training and spinning them up to support, but we're always behind them of course as well. >> Can you give us a favorite customer example of- that really articulates the value of the partnership and the technologies that it's delivering to customers? >> Well, Infra Block- >> (indistinct) >> Is quite new, and we do have our first customer which is LG U plus, which was announced yesterday. Out of Korea, small customer, but a very important one. Okay, and I think they saw the value of the integrated system. They don't have the (indistinct) expertise and they're leveraging Dell and Wind River in order to make that happen. But I always also say historically before this new offering was Vodafone, right? Vodafone is a leader in Europe in terms of Open RAN, been very- Yago and Paco have been very vocal about what they're doing in Open RAN, and Dell and Wind River have been there with them every step of the way. And that's what I would say, kind of, led up to where we are today. We learned from engagements like Vodafone and I think KDDI as well. And it got us where we are today and understanding what the operators need and what the impediments are. And this directly addresses that. >> Those are two very different examples. You were talking about TCO before. I mean, so the earlier example is, that's an example to me of a disruptor. They'll take some chances, you know, maybe not as focused on TCO, of course they're concerned about it. Vodafone I would think very concerned about TCO. But I'm inferring from your comments that you're trying to get the industry, you're trying to check the TCO box, get there. And then move on to higher levels of value monetization. The TCO is going to come down to how many humans it takes to run the network, is it not, is that- >> Well a lot of, okay- >> Or is it devices- >> So the big one now, particularly with Vodafone, is energy cost, right? >> Of course, greening the network. >> Two-thirds of the energy consumption in RAN is the the Radio Access Network. Okay, the OPEX, right? So any reductions, even if they're 5% or 10%, can save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So we do things creatively with Dell to understand if there's a lot of traffic at the cell site and if it's not, we will change the C state or P state of the server, which basically spins it down, so it's not consuming power. But that's just at the infrastructure layer. Where this gets really powerful is working with the RAN vendors like Samsung and Ericson and others, and taking data from the traffic information there, applying algorithms to that in AI to shut it down and spin it back up as needed. 'Cause the idea is you don't want that thing powered up if there's no traffic on it. >> Well there's a sustainability, ESG, benefit to that, right? >> Yes. >> And, and it's very compute intensive. >> A hundred percent. >> Which is great for Dell. But at the same time, if you're not able to manage that power consumption, the whole thing fails. I mean it's, because there's going to be so much data, and such a intense requirement. So this is a huge issue. Okay, so Scott, you're saying that in the TCO equation, a big chunk is energy consumption? >> On the OPEX piece. Now there's also the CapEx, right? And Open RAN solutions are now, what we've heard from our customers today, are they're roughly at parity. 'Cause you can do things like repurpose servers after the useful life for a lower demand application which helps the TCO, right? Then you have situations like Juniper, where you can take, now software that runs on the same device, eliminating at a whole other device at the cell site. So we're not just taking a server and software point of view, we're taking a whole cell site point of view as it relates to both CapEx and OPEX. >> And then once that infrastructure it really gets adopted, that's when the innovation occurs. The ecosystem comes in. Developers now start to think of new applications that we haven't thought of yet. >> Gautam: Exactly. >> And that's where, that's going to force the traditional carriers to respond. They're responding, but they're doing so very carefully right now, it's understandable why. >> Yeah, and I think you're already seeing some news in the, I mean Nokia's announcement yesterday with the rebranding, et cetera. That's all positive momentum in my opinion, right? >> What'd you think of the logo? >> I love the logo. >> I liked it too. (group laughs) >> It was beautiful. >> I thought it was good. You had the connectivity down below, You need pipes, right? >> Exactly. >> But you had this sort of cool letters, and then the the pink horizon or pinkish, it was like (Scott laughs) endless opportunity. It was good, I thought it was well thought out. >> Exactly. >> Well, you pick up on an interesting point there, and what we're seeing, like advanced carriers like Dish, who has one of the true Open RAN networks, publishing APIs for programmers to build in their 5G network as part of the application. But we're also seeing the network equipment providers also enable carriers do that, 'cause carriers historically have not been advanced in that way. So there is a real recognition that in order for these networks to monetize new use cases, they need to be programmable, and they need to publish standard APIs, so you can access the 5G network capabilities through software. >> Yeah, and the problem from the carriers, there's not enough APIs that the carriers have produced yet. So that's where the ecosystem comes in, is going to >> A hundred percent >> I think there's eight APIs that are published out of the traditional carriers, which is, I mean there's got to be 8,000 for a marketplace. So that's where the open ecosystem really has the advantage. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> So it all makes sense on paper, now you just, you got a lot of work to do. >> We got to deliver. Yeah, we launched it today. We got to get some like-minded partners and customers to come together. You'll start seeing results coming out of this hopefully soon, and we'll talk more about it over time. >> Dave: Great Awesome, thanks for sharing with us. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you for sharing, stopping by, sharing what's going on with Dell and Wind River, and why the opportunity's in it for customers and the technological evolution. We appreciate it, you'll have to come back, give us an update. >> Our pleasure, thanks for having us. (Group talks over each other) >> All right, thanks guys >> Appreciate it. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, Live from MWC23 in Barcelona. theCUBE is the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> 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)

>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from The Cube and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The world's leading telcos are trying to shed the stigma of being monopolies lacking innovation. Telcos have been great at operational efficiency and connectivity and living off of transmission, and the costs and expenses or revenue associated with that transmission. But in a world beyond telephone poles and basic wireless and mobile services, how will telcos modernize and become more agile and monetize new opportunities brought about by 5G and private wireless and a spate of new innovations and infrastructure, cloud data and apps? Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Mobile World Congress or now, MWC23, we explore the evolution of the telco business and how the industry is in many ways, mimicking transformations that took place decades ago in enterprise IT. We'll model some of the traditional enterprise vendors using ETR data and investigate how they're faring in the telecommunications sector, and we'll pose some of the key issues facing the industry this decade. First, let's take a look at what the GSMA has in store for MWC23. GSMA is the host of what used to be called Mobile World Congress. They've set the theme for this year's event as "Velocity" and they've rebranded MWC to reflect the fact that mobile technology is only one part of the story. MWC has become one of the world's premier events highlighting innovations not only in Telco, mobile and 5G, but the collision between cloud, infrastructure, apps, private networks, smart industries, machine intelligence, and AI, and more. MWC comprises an enormous ecosystem of service providers, technology companies, and firms from virtually every industry including sports and entertainment. And as well, GSMA, along with its venue partner at the Fira Barcelona, have placed a major emphasis on sustainability and public and private partnerships. Virtually every industry will be represented at the event because every industry is impacted by the trends and opportunities in this space. GSMA has said it expects 80,000 attendees at MWC this year, not quite back to 2019 levels, but trending in that direction. Of course, attendance from Chinese participants has historically been very high at the show, and obviously the continued travel issues from that region are affecting the overall attendance, but still very strong. And despite these concerns, Huawei, the giant Chinese technology company. has the largest physical presence of any exhibitor at the show. And finally, GSMA estimates that more than $300 million in economic benefit will result from the event which takes place at the end of February and early March. And The Cube will be back at MWC this year with a major presence thanks to our anchor sponsor, Dell Technologies and other supporters of our content program, including Enterprise Web, ArcaOS, VMware, Snowflake, Cisco, AWS, and others. And one of the areas we're interested in exploring is the evolution of the telco stack. It's a topic that's often talked about and one that we've observed taking place in the 1990s when the vertically integrated IBM mainframe monopoly gave way to a disintegrated and horizontal industry structure. And in many ways, the same thing is happening today in telecommunications, which is shown on the left-hand side of this diagram. Historically, telcos have relied on a hardened, integrated, and incredibly reliable, and secure set of hardware and software services that have been fully vetted and tested, and certified, and relied upon for decades. And at the top of that stack on the left are the crown jewels of the telco stack, the operational support systems and the business support systems. For the OSS, we're talking about things like network management, network operations, service delivery, quality of service, fulfillment assurance, and things like that. For the BSS systems, these refer to customer-facing elements of the stack, like revenue, order management, what products they sell, billing, and customer service. And what we're seeing is telcos have been really good at operational efficiency and making money off of transport and connectivity, but they've lacked the innovation in services and applications. They own the pipes and that works well, but others, be the over-the-top content companies, or private network providers and increasingly, cloud providers have been able to bypass the telcos, reach around them, if you will, and drive innovation. And so, the right-most diagram speaks to the need to disaggregate pieces of the stack. And while the similarities to the 1990s in enterprise IT are greater than the differences, there are things that are different. For example, the granularity of hardware infrastructure will not likely be as high where competition occurred back in the 90s at every layer of the value chain with very little infrastructure integration. That of course changed in the 2010s with converged infrastructure and hyper-converged and also software defined. So, that's one difference. And the advent of cloud, containers, microservices, and AI, none of that was really a major factor in the disintegration of legacy IT. And that probably means that disruptors can move even faster than did the likes of Intel and Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and the Seagates of the 1990s. As well, while many of the products and services will come from traditional enterprise IT names like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, VMware, AWS, Microsoft, Google, et cetera, many of the names are going to be different and come from traditional network equipment providers. These are names like Ericsson and Huawei, and Nokia, and other names, like Wind River, and Rakuten, and Dish Networks. And there are enormous opportunities in data to help telecom companies and their competitors go beyond telemetry data into more advanced analytics and data monetization. There's also going to be an entirely new set of apps based on the workloads and use cases ranging from hospitals, sports arenas, race tracks, shipping ports, you name it. Virtually every vertical will participate in this transformation as the industry evolves its focus toward innovation, agility, and open ecosystems. Now remember, this is not a binary state. There are going to be greenfield companies disrupting the apple cart, but the incumbent telcos are going to have to continue to ensure newer systems work with their legacy infrastructure, in their OSS and BSS existing systems. And as we know, this is not going to be an overnight task. Integration is a difficult thing, transformations, migrations. So that's what makes this all so interesting because others can come in with Greenfield and potentially disrupt. There'll be interesting partnerships and ecosystems will form and coalitions will also form. Now, we mentioned that several traditional enterprise companies are or will be playing in this space. Now, ETR doesn't have a ton of data on specific telecom equipment and software providers, but it does have some interesting data that we cut for this breaking analysis. What we're showing here in this graphic is some of the names that we've followed over the years and how they're faring. Specifically, we did the cut within the telco sector. So the Y-axis here shows net score or spending velocity. And the horizontal axis, that shows the presence or pervasiveness in the data set. And that table insert in the upper left, that informs as to how the dots are plotted. You know, the two columns there, net score and the ends. And that red-dotted line, that horizontal line at 40%, that is an indicator of a highly elevated level. Anything above that, we consider quite outstanding. And what we'll do now is we'll comment on some of the cohorts and share with you how they're doing in telecommunications, and that sector, that vertical relative to their position overall in the data set. Let's start with the public cloud players. They're prominent in every industry. Telcos, telecommunications is no exception and it's quite an interesting cohort here. On the one hand, they can help telecommunication firms modernize and become more agile by eliminating the heavy lifting and you know, all the cloud, you know, value prop, data center costs, and the cloud benefits. At the same time, public cloud players are bringing their services to the edge, building out their own global networks and are a disruptive force to traditional telcos. All right, let's talk about Azure first. Their net score is basically identical to telco relative to its overall average. AWS's net score is higher in telco by just a few percentage points. Google Cloud platform is eight percentage points higher in telco with a 53% net score. So all three hyperscalers have an equal or stronger presence in telco than their average overall. Okay, let's look at the traditional enterprise hardware and software infrastructure cohort. Dell, Cisco, HPE, Red Hat, VMware, and Oracle. We've highlighted in this chart just as sort of indicators or proxies. Dell's net score's 10 percentage points higher in telco than its overall average. Interesting. Cisco's is a bit higher. HPE's is actually lower by about nine percentage points in the ETR survey, and VMware's is lower by about four percentage points. Now, Red Hat is really interesting. OpenStack, as we've previously reported is popular with telcos who want to build out their own private cloud. And the data shows that Red Hat OpenStack's net score is 15 percentage points higher in the telco sector than its overall average. OpenShift, on the other hand, has a net score that's four percentage points lower in telco than its overall average. So this to us talks to the pace of adoption of microservices and containers. You know, it's going to happen, but it's going to happen more slowly. Finally, Oracle's spending momentum is somewhat lower in the sector than its average, despite the firm having a decent telco business. IBM and Accenture, heavy services companies are both lower in this sector than their average. And real quickly, snowflake's net score is much lower by about 12 percentage points relative to its very high average net score of 62%. But we look for them to be a player in this space as telcos need to modernize their analytics stack and share data in a governed manner. Databricks' net score is also much lower than its average by about 13 points. And same, I would expect them to be a player as open architectures and cloud gains steam in telco. All right, let's close out now on what we're going to be talking about at MWC23 and some of the key issues that we'll be unpacking. We've talked about stack disaggregation in this breaking analysis, but the key here will be the pace at which it will reach the operational efficiency and reliability of closed stacks. Telcos, you know, in a large part, they're engineering heavy firms and much of their work takes place, kind of in the basement, in the dark. It's not really a big public hype machine, and they tend to move slowly and cautiously. While they understand the importance of agility, they're going to be careful because, you know, it's in their DNA. And so at the same time, if they don't move fast enough, they're going to get hurt and disrupted by competitors. So that's going to be a topic of conversation, and we'll be looking for proof points. And the other comment I'll make is around integration. Telcos because of their conservatism will benefit from better testing and those firms that can innovate on the testing front and have labs and certifications and innovate at that level, with an ecosystem are going to be in a better position. Because open sometimes means wild west. So the more players like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, et cetera, that do that and align with their ecosystems and provide those resources, the faster adoption is going to go. So we'll be looking for, you know, who's actually doing that, Open RAN or Radio Access Networks. That fits in this discussion because O-RAN is an emerging network architecture. It essentially enables the use of open technologies from an ecosystem and over time, look at O-RAN is going to be open, but the questions, you know, a lot of questions remain as to when it will be able to deliver the operational efficiency of traditional RAN. Got some interesting dynamics going on. Rakuten is a company that's working hard on this problem, really focusing on operational efficiency. Then you got Dish Networks. They're also embracing O-RAN. They're coming at it more from service innovation. So that's something that we'll be monitoring and unpacking. We're going to look at cloud as a disruptor. On the one hand, cloud can help drive agility, as we said earlier and optionality, and innovation for incumbent telcos. But the flip side is going to also do the same for startups trying to disrupt and cloud attracts startups. While some of the telcos are actually embracing the cloud, many are being cautious. So that's going to be an interesting topic of discussion. And there's private wireless networks and 5G, and hyperlocal private networks, they're being deployed, you know, at the edge. This idea of open edge is also a really hot topic and this trend is going to accelerate. You know, the importance here is that the use cases are going to be widely varied. The needs of a hospital are going to be different than those of a sports venue are different from a remote drilling location, and energy or a concert venue. Things like real-time AI inference and data flows are going to bring new services and monetization opportunities. And many firms are going to be bypassing traditional telecommunications networks to build these out. Satellites as well, we're going to see, you know, in this decade, you're going to have, you're going to look down at Google Earth and you're going to see real-time. You know, today you see snapshots and so, lots of innovations going in that space. So how is this going to disrupt industries and traditional industry structures? Now, as always, we'll be looking at data angles, right? 'Cause it's in The Cube's DNA to follow the data and what opportunities and risks data brings. The Cube is going to be on location at MWC23 at the end of the month. We got a great set. We're in the walkway between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, it's booths CS60. So we'll have a full, they're called Stan CS60. We have a full schedule. I'm going to be there with Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson and the entire Cube crew, so don't forget to stop by. All right, that's a wrap. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle, does some great stuff for us. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search "Breaking Analysis" podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and silicon angle.com. And all the video content is available on demand at thecube.net. You can email me directly at david.vellante@silicon angle.com. You can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn post. Please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you at Mobile World Congress, and/or at next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music) (bright music fades)

(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)

(upbeat music) >> Telecommunic^ations 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, their 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 MWC 23, 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, in a large part, because their purpose-built infrastructure can been somewhat of a barrier to respondent to 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. You know, 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, you know, 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, well, 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, I have known you for a number of years. I've watched you. You are a trend spotter, and you're a strategic thinker, and I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze, and now you got 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, you know, 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 been 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're 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. You know, 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 VNFs and CNFs 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, you know, 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 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, you know, another major trend which we're seeing, is the cloud, and I'm talking about, not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. You know, telecom providers are looking 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, you know, 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, 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 a, 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, you know, 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 and designed for the telecom environments. Recently we announced our, our Infra 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 a 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 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. You know, 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 seen 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's historically very strong at, being able to provide compute, being 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 way over to the top guys, you know, had the field day with the data and the customer relationships, and now it's almost like the revenge of the telcos. (chuckles) Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell, if you, you know, 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 you know, 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. You know, 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 here into Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got industry 4.0. You've got, you know, 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 for 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 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 it 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 kick off for the year. You know, we're looking at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be looking to have across the industry with our customers and partners and 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, you know, 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, you know, the network and what we're looking 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 Fira. As you say, Dell's big presence in Hall three. Orange is in there, Deutsche Telekom. Intel's in Hall three. VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone. You got 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. >> All right, 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, as Aaron said, all week, Monday through Thursday, on the show floor. Check that out at thecube.net. Siliconangle.com has all the written coverage, and go to dell.com, see what's happening there. Have all the action from the event. Don't miss us. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone Welcome to the cubes coverage of cubic on cloud native come here in person in L A 2021. I'm john ferrier, host of the Cuban Dave Nicholson host cloud host for the cube and of course former host of the cube steve minutemen. Now at red hat stew, we do our normal keynote reviews. We had to have you come back first while hazard and red hat >>john it's phenomenal. Great to see you nice to have Dave be on the program here too. It's been awesome. So yeah, a year and a day since I joined Red hat and uh, I do miss you guys always enjoyed doing the interviews in the cube. But you know, we're still in the community and still interacting lots, >>but we love you too. And Davis, your new replacement and covering the cloud angles. He's gonna bring little stew mo jokes of the interview but still, we've always done the wrap up has always been our favorite interviews to do an analysis of the keynote because let's face it, that's where all the action is. Of course we bring the commentary, but this year it's important because it's the first time we've had an event in two years too. So a lot of people, you know, aren't saying this on camera a lot, but they're kind of nervous. They're worried they're weirded out. We're back in person again. What do I feel? I haven't seen people, I've been working with people online. This is the top story. >>Yeah, john I thought they did a really good job in the keynote this morning. Normally, I mean this community in general is good with inclusion. Part of that inclusion is hey, what are you comfortable with if your remote? We still love you and it's okay. And if you're here in person, you might see there's wrist bands of green, yellow, red as in like, hey, you okay with a handshake. You want to do there or stay the f away from me because I'm not really that comfortable yet being here and it's whatever you're comfortable with. That's okay. >>I think the inclusion and the whole respect for the individual code of conduct, C N C. F and limits Foundation has been on the front end of all those trends. I love how they're taking it to a whole nother level. David, I want to get your take because now with multi cloud, we heard the same message over and over again that hey, open winds, okay. Open winds and still changing fast. What's your take? >>Open absolutely wins. It's uh, it's the present. It's the future. I know in some of the conversations we've had with folks looking back over the last seven years, a lot of things have changed. Um, whenever I think of open source anything, I go back to the foundations of Lennox and I remember a time when you had to reboot a Linux server to re scan a scuzzy bus to add a new storage device and we all sort of put our penguin hats on and kind of ignored that for a while. And uh, and, and as things are developed, we keep coming into these new situations. Multi cluster management was a big, big point of conversation in the keynote today. It's fascinating when you start thinking about something that was once sort of a back room science experiment. Absolutely. It's the center of the enterprise now from a software >>from an open tour standpoint security has been one of those front and center things. One of the day, zero events that got a lot of buzz coming at the beginning of the week was secure supply chain. So with the Solar Wind act going in there, you know, we remember cloud, wait, can I trust it with the security? Open source right now. Open source and security go together. Open source and the security in the cloud all go together. So you know that that wave of open source, obviously one of the things that brought me to red hat, I'd had a couple of decades, you know, working within the enterprise and open source and that that adoption curve which went through a few bumps in the road over time and it took time. But today, I mean open sources have given this show in this ecosystem are such proof >>points of a couple things. I noticed one, I want to do a shout out for the folks who put a nice tribute for dan Kaminsky who has passed away and we miss him. We saw on the Cube 2019, I believe he's on the Cube that year with Adam on big influence, but the inclusiveness do and the community is changing. I think security has changed a lot and I want to get your guys take on this. Security has forced a lot of things happen faster data, open data. Okay. And kubernetes to get hardened faster stew. I know your team's working on it. We know what Azure and amazon is working on it. What do you guys think about how security's been forcing the advances in kubernetes and making that stable? >>Yeah. So john security, you know, is job one, it is everyone's responsibility. We talk about it from a container and kubernetes standpoint. We think we have a relatively good handle on what's happening in the kubernetes space red hat, we made an acquisition earlier this year of stack rocks, which was one of the leading kubernetes native security pieces. But you know, john we know security isn't just a moat anymore in a wall that you put up every single piece. You need to think about it. Um, I've got a person from the stack rocks acquisition actually on my team now and have told him like hey, you need to cross train all of us. We need to understand this more from a marketing standpoint, we need to talk about it from a developer standpoint. We need to have consideration of it. It's no longer, hey, it works okay on my machine. Come on, It needs to go to production. We all know this shift left is something we've been talking about for many years. So yes, security, security, security, we cannot overemphasize how important is um, you know, when it comes to cooper, I think, you know, were relatively mature, we're crossing the chasm, the adoption numbers are there, so it's not an impediment anymore. >>It's totally next level. I don't agree with this too. David, get your thoughts on this whole adoption um, roadmap that put it together, one of the working groups that we interviewed has got that kind of navigate, kinda like trailheads for salesforce, but that speaks to the adoption by mainstream enterprises, not the hard core, >>you know, >>us devops guys, but like it goes into mainstream main main street enterprise had I. T. Department and security groups there, like we got a program faster. How do you see the cloud guys in this ecosystem competing and making that go faster. >>So it's been interesting over the last decade or more often, technology has been ahead of people's comfort level with that technology for obvious reasons, it's not just something went wrong, it's something went wrong. I lost my job. Really, really bad things happened. So we tend to be conservative. Rightfully so in the sometimes there are these seminal moments where a shift happens go back sort of analogous go back to a time when people's main concern with VM ware was how can I get support from Microsoft and all of a sudden it went from that within weeks to how can I deploy this in my enterprise very, very quickly. And I'm fascinated by this concept of locking down the supply chain of code, uh sort of analogous to https, secure, http. It's the idea of making sure that these blocks of code are validated and secure as they get implemented. You mentioned, you mentioned things like cluster and pad's security and infrastructure security. >>Well, David, you brought up a really good point. So get off is the instance creation of that. How can I have my infrastructure as code? How can I make sure that I don't have drift? It's because I could just, it'll live and get hub and therefore it's version controlled. If I try to do something, it will validate that it's there and keep me on version because we know john we talked about it for years on the cube, we've gone beyond human scale if I don't build automation into it, if I don't have the guard rails in place because humans will mess things up so we need to make sure that we have the processes and the automation in place and kubernetes was built for that automation at its core, putting in, we've seen get up the Argosy, D was only went graduated, you know, the one dato was supported as coupon europe. Earlier this year, we already had a number of our customers deploying it using it. Talking publicly >>about it too. I want to get the kid apps angle and that's a good call out there and, and mainly because when we were on the cute, when you work, you post with with us, we were always cheerleading for Cuban. It we love because we've been here every single coupon. We were one saying this is gonna be big trust us and it is, it happens to so, but now we've been kind of, we don't have to sell it anymore. We don't, I mean not that we're selling it, but like we don't have to be a proponent of something we knew was going to happen, it happened. You're now work for a vendor red hat you talk to customers. What is that next level conversation look like now that they know it's real, they have to do it. How is the tops and then modern applications development, changing. What are your observations? Can you share with us from a redhead perspective as someone who's talking to customers, you know, what does real look like? >>Yeah. So get off is a great example of that. So, you know, certain of our government agencies that we work with, you know, obviously very secured about, you know, we want zero trust who do we put in charge of things. So if they can have, you know that that source of truth and know that that is maintained and lockdown and not await some admin is gonna mess something up on us either maliciously or oops, by accident or anything in between. That's why they were pushing that adoption of that kind of technology. So absolutely they, for the most part john they don't want to have to think about the infrastructure piece anymore. What if developers want the old past days was I want to be able to, you know, write once deploy anywhere, live anywhere, containers helps that a little bit. We even have in the container space. Now you can, you can use a service deployment model with Okay. Natives, the big open source project that, you know, VM ware ourselves are working on google's involved in it. So, you know, having us be able to focus on the business and not, you know, running the plumbing anymore. >>That's exactly, that's exactly, that's what we're so psyched for. Okay guys, let's wrap this up and and review the keynote day will start with you. What do you think of the keynote? What were the highlights? What do you take away from the taste keynote? >>So you touched on a couple of things, uh inclusion from all sorts of different angles. Really impressive. This sort of easing back into the world of being face to face. I think they're doing a fantastic job at that. The thing that struck me was something I mentioned earlier. Um moving into multi cluster management in a way that really speaks to enterprise deployments and the complexity of enterprise deployments moving forward? It's not just, it's not just, I'm a developer, I'm using resources in the cloud. I'm doing things this way, the rest of the enterprises doing it a legacy way. It's really an acknowledgement that these things are coming together increasingly. That's what really struck me >>to do. What's your takeaway from the end? >>So there's been a discussion in the industry, you know, what do the next million cloud customers look like we've crossed the chasm on kubernetes. One of the things they announced the keynote is they have a new associate level certification because I tell you before the keynote, I stopped by the breakfast area, saturday table, talk to a couple people. One guy was like, hey, I'm been on amazon for a bunch of years, but I'm a kubernetes newbie, I'm here to learn about that. It's not the same person that five years ago was like, I'm gonna grab all these projects and pull them down from getting, build my stack and you know, have a platform team to manage it from a red hat standpoint, we're delivering our biggest growth areas in cloud services where hey, I've got an SRE team, they can manage all that because can you do it? Sure you got people maybe you'll hire him, but wouldn't you rather have them work on, you know, that security initiative or that new application or some of these pieces, you know, what can you shift to your vendor? What can you offload from your team because we know the only constant is that things are gonna there's gonna be gonna be new pieces and I don't want to have to look at, oh there's another 20 new projects and how does that fit? Can I have a partner or consultant in sc that can help me integrate that into my environment when it makes sense for me because otherwise, oh my God, cloud, So much innovation. How do I grasp what I want? >>Great stuff guys, I would just say my summary is that okay? I'm excited this community has broken through the pandemic and survived and thrived people were working together during the pandemic. It's like a V. I. P. Event here. So that my keynote epiphany was this is like the who's who some big players are here. I saw Bill Vaz from amazon on the on the ground floor on monday night, He's number two at a W. S. I saw some top Vcs here. Microsoft IBM red hat the whole way tracks back. Whole track is back and it's a hybrid event. So I think we're here for the long haul with hybrid events where you can see a lot more in person, V. I. P. Like vibe people are doing deals. It feels alive too and it's all open. So it's all cool. And again, the team at C. N. C. F. They do an exceptional job of inclusion and making people feel safe and cool. So, great job. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. Good stuff. Okay. The keynote review from the cube Stupid Man shot for Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching >>mm mm mm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to our industry drill-down. This is from manufacturing. I'm here with Michael Ger who is the managing director for automotive and manufacturing solutions at Cloudera, and in this first session, we're going to discuss how to drive transportation efficiencies and improve sustainability with data. Connected trucks are fundamental to optimizing fleet performance, costs, and delivering new services to fleet operators, and what's going to happen here is Michael's going to present some data and information, and we're going to come back and have a little conversation about what we just heard. Michael, great to see you. Over to you. >> Oh, thank you, Dave, and I appreciate having this conversation today. Hey, this is actually an area, connected trucks. This is an area that we have seen a lot of action here at Cloudera, and I think the reason is kind of important because first of all, you can see that this change is happening very, very quickly. 150% growth is forecast by 2022, and I think this is why we're seeing a lot of action and a lot of growth is that there are a lot of benefits. We're talking about a B2B type of situation here. So this is truck makers providing benefits to fleet operators, and if you look at the top benefits that fleet operators expect, you see this in the graph over here. Almost 80% of them expect improved productivity, things like improved routing, so route efficiencies and improved customer service, decrease in fuel consumption, but better be, this isn't technology for technology's sake. These connected trucks are coming onto the marketplace because hey, they can provide tremendous value to the business, and in this case, we're talking about fleet operators and fleet efficiencies. So, one of the things that's really important to be able to enable this, trucks are becoming connected because at the end of the day, we want to be able to provide fleet efficiencies through connected truck analytics and machine learning. Let me explain to you a little bit about what we mean by that because how this happens is by creating a connected vehicle analytics machine learning lifecycle, and to do that, you need to do a few different things. You start off, of course, with connected trucks in the field, and you could have many of these trucks 'cause typically, you're dealing at a truck level and at a fleet level. We want to be able to do analytics and machine learning to improve performance. So you start off with these trucks, and the first you need to be able to do is connect to those trucks. You have to have an intelligent edge where you can collect that information from the trucks, and by the way, once you've conducted this information from the trucks, you want to be able to analyze that data in real-time and take real-time actions. Now, what I'm going to show you, the ability to take this real-time action is actually the result of a machine learning life cycle. Let me explain to you what I mean by that. So we have this truck, so we start to collect data from it. At the end of the day, what we'd like to be able to do is pull that data into either your data center or into the cloud where we can start to do more advanced analytics, and we start with being able to ingest that data into the cloud, into the enterprise data lake. We store that data. We want to enrich it with other data sources, so for example, if you're doing truck predictive maintenance, you want to take that sensor data that you've collected from those trucks, and you want to augment that with your dealership service information. Now, you have sensor data and the resulting repair orders. You're now equipped to do things like predict when maintenance will occur. You've got all the data sets that you need to be able to do that. So what do you do here? Like I said, you ingest it, you're storing it, you're enriching it with data. You're processing that data. You're aligning, say, the sensor data to that transactional system data from your repair maintenance systems. You're bringing it together so that you can do two things. First of all, you could do self-service BI on that data. You can do things like fleet analytics, but more importantly, what I was talking to you about before is you now have the data sets to be able to create machine learning models. So if you have the sensor values and the need, for example, for a dealership repair order so you could start to correlate which sensor values predicted the need for maintenance, and you could build out those machine learning models, and then, as I mentioned to you, you could push those machine learning models back out to the edge which is how you would then take those real-time actions I mentioned earlier. As that data that then comes through in real-time, you're running it against that model, and you can take some real-time actions. This analytics and machine learning model, machine learning life cycle, is exactly what Cloudera enables. This end-to-end ability to ingest data, store it, put a query lay over it, create machine learning models, and then run those machine learning models in real-time. Now, that's what we do as a business. Now, one such customer, and I just wanted to give you one example of a customer that we have worked with to provide these types of results is Navistar, and Navistar was kind of an early adopter of connected-truck analytics, and they provided these capabilities to their fleet operators. And they started off by connecting 475,000 trucks, up to well over a million now, and the point here is that they were centralizing data from their telematics service providers, from their trucks' telematics service providers. They're bringing in things like weather data and all those types of things, and what they started to do was to build out machine learning models aimed at predictive maintenance, and what's really interesting is that you see that Navistar made tremendous strides in reducing the expense associated with maintenance. So rather than waiting for a truck to break, and then fixing it, they would predict when that truck needs service, condition-based monitoring, and service it before it broke down so that you can do that in a much more cost-effective manner. And if you see the benefits, they reduced maintenance costs 3 cents a mile down from the industry average of 15 cents a mile down to 12 cents cents a mile. So this was a tremendous success for Navistar, and we're seeing this across many of our truck manufacturers. We're working with many of the truck OEMs, and they are all working to achieve very, very similar types of benefits to their customers. So just a little bit about Navistar. Now, we're going to turn to Q&A. Dave's got some questions for me in a second, but before we do that, if you want to learn more about how we work with connected vehicles and autonomous vehicles, please go to our website, what you see up on the screen. There's the URLs, cloudera.com/solutions/manufacturing, and you'll see a whole slew of lateral and information in much more detail in terms of how we connect trucks to fleet operators who provide analytics, use cases that drive dramatically improved performance. So with that being said, I'm going to turn it over to Dave for questions. >> Thank you, Michael. That's a great example. I love the lifecycle. We can visualize that very well. You've got an edge-use case. You're doing both real time inference, really, at the edge, and then you're blending that sensor data with other data sources to enrich your models, and you can push that back to the edge. That's that life cycle, so really appreciate that info. Let me ask you, what are you seeing as the most common connected vehicle when you think about analytics and machine learning, the use cases that you see customers really leaning into? >> Yeah, that's a great question, Dave 'cause everybody always thinks about machine learning, like this is the first thing you go to. Well, actually it's not. The first thing you really want to be able to do, and many of our customers are doing, is look, let's simply connect our trucks or our vehicles or whatever our IOT asset is, and then you can do very simple things like just performance monitoring of the piece of equipment. In the truck industry, a lot of performance monitoring of the truck, but also performance monitoring of the driver. So how is the driver performing? Is there a lot of idle time spent? What's route efficiencies looking like? By connecting the vehicles, you get insights, as I said, into the truck and into the driver, and that's not machine learning any more, but that monitoring piece is really, really important. So the first thing that we see is monitoring types of use cases. Then you start to see companies move towards more of the, what I call, the machine learning and AI models where you're using inference on the edge, and there you start to see things like predictive maintenance happening, kind of real-time route optimization and things like that, and you start to see that evolution again to those smarter, more intelligent, dynamic types of decision-making. But let's not minimize the value of good old-fashioned monitoring to give you that kind of visibility first, then moving to smarter use cases as you go forward. >> You know, it's interesting. I'm envisioning, when you talked about the monitoring, I'm envisioning you see the bumper sticker how am I driving? The only time somebody ever probably calls is when they get cut off, and many people might think, oh, it's about Big Brother, but it's not. I mean, that's yeah, okay, fine, but it's really about improvement and training and continuous improvement, and then of course the route optimization. I mean, that's bottom-line business value. I love those examples. >> Great. >> What are the big hurdles that people should think about when they want to jump into those use cases that you just talked about? What are they going to run into, the blind spots they're going to get hit with? >> There's a few different things. So first of all, a lot of times, your IT folks aren't familiar with kind of the more operational IOT types of data. So just connecting to that type of data can be a new skill set. There's very specialized hardware in the car and things like that and protocols. That's number one. That's the classic IT-OT kind of conundrum that many of our customers struggle with, but then more fundamentally is if you look at the way these types of connected truck or IOT solutions started, oftentimes the first generation were very custom built, so they were brittle. They were kind of hardwired. Then as you move towards more commercial solutions, you had what I call the silo problem. You had fragmentation in terms of this capability from this vendor, this capability from another vendor. You get the idea. One of the things that we really think that needs to be brought to the table is first of all, having an end-to-end data management platform that's kind of integrated, it's all tested together. You have a data lineage across the entire stack, but then also importantly, to be realistic, you have to be able to integrate to industry kind of best practices as well in terms of solution components in the car, the hardware, and all those types of things. So I think there's, it's just stepping back for a second, I think that there has been fragmentation and complexity in the past. We're moving towards more standards and more standard types of offerings. Our job as a software maker is to make that easier and connect those dots so customers don't have to do it all and all on their own. >> And you mentioned specialized hardware. One of the things we heard earlier in the main stage was your partnership with Nvidia. We're talking about new types of hardware coming in. You guys are optimizing for that. We see the IT and the OT worlds blending together, no question, and then that end-to-end management piece. This is different from, you're right, from IT. Normally everything's controlled, you're the data center, and this is a metadata rethinking, kind of how you manage metadata. So in the spirit of what we talked about earlier today, other technology partners, are you working with other partners to sort of accelerate these solutions, move them forward faster? >> Yeah, I'm really glad you're asking that Dave because we actually embarked on a project called Project Fusion which really was about integrating with, when you look at that connected vehicle lifecycle, there are some core vendors out there that are providing some very important capabilities. So what we did is we joined forces with them to build an end-to-end demonstration and reference architecture to enable the complete data management life cycle. Now, Cloudera's piece of this was ingesting data and all the things I talked about being storing and the machine learning. So we provide that end-to-end, but what we wanted to do is we wanted to partner with some key partners, and the partners that we did integrate with were NXP. NXP provides the service-oriented gateways in the cars. That's the hardware in the car. Wind River provides an in-car operating system that's Linux, that's hardened and tested. We then ran our Apache MiNiFi which is part of Cloudera Dataflow in the vehicle, on that operating system, on that hardware. We pumped the data over into the cloud where we did all the data analytics and machine learning and built out these very specialized models, and then we used a company called Airbiquity once we built those models to do. They specialize in automotive over-the-air updates, so they can then take those models and update those models back to the vehicle very rapidly. So what we said is, look, there's an established ecosystem, if you will, of leaders in this space. What we wanted to do is make sure that Cloudera was part and parcel of this ecosystem, and by the way, you mentioned Nvidia as well. We're working close with Nvidia now so when we're doing the machine learning, we can leverage some of their hardware to get some still further acceleration in the machine learning side of things. So yeah, one of the things I always say about these types of use cases, it does take a village, and what we've really tried to do is build out an ecosystem that provides that village so that we can speed that analytics and machine learning life cycle just as fast as it can be. >> This is, again, another great example of data-intensive workloads. It's not your grandfather's ERP that's running on traditional systems. These are really purpose built. Maybe they're customizable for certain edge-use cases. They're low cost, low power. They can't be bloated, and you're right, it does take an ecosystem. You've got to have APIs that connect, and that takes a lot of work and a lot of thought. So that leads me to the technologies that are sort of underpinning this. We talked a lot on theCUBE about semiconductor technology, and now that's changing, and the advancements we're seeing there. What do you see as some of the key technology areas that are advancing this connected vehicle machine learning? >> You know, it's interesting. I'm seeing it in a few places, just a few notable ones. I think, first of all, we see that the vehicle itself is getting smarter. So when you look at that NXP-type of gateway that we talked about, that used to be kind of a dumb gateway that was really, all it was doing was pushing data up and down and provided isolation as a gateway down from the lower level subsystems, so it was really security and just basic communication. That gateway now is becoming what they call a service oriented gateway, so it can run. It's got discs, it's got memory, it's got all this stuff. So now you could run serious compute in the car. So now, all of these things like running machine learning inference models, you have a lot more power in the car. At the same time, 5G is making it so that you can push data fast enough making low-latency computing available even on the cloud. So now you've got incredible compute both at the edge in the vehicle and on the cloud. And then on the cloud, you've got partners like Nvidia who are accelerating it still further through better GPU-based compute. So I mean the whole stack, if you look at that machine learning life cycle we talked about, no Dave, it seems like there's improvements in every step along the way. We're starting to see technology optimization just pervasive throughout the cycle. >> And then, real quick. It's not a quick topic, but you mentioned security. I mean, we've seen a whole new security model emerge. There is no perimeter anymore in a use case like this, is there? >> No, there isn't, and one of the things that we're- Remember, we're the data management platform, and the thing we have to provide is provide end-to-end lineage of where that data came from, who can see it, how it changed, and that's something that we have integrated into from the beginning of when that data is ingested through when it's stored through when it's kind of processed, and people are doing machine learning. We will provide that lineage so that security and governance is assured throughout the data learning life cycle. >> And federated, in this example, across the fleet. So, all right, Michael, that's all the time we have right now. Thank you so much for that great information. Really appreciate it. >> Dave, thank you, and thanks for the audience for listening in today. >> Yes, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome to our industry drill down. This is for manufacturing. I'm here with Michael Ger, who is the managing director for automotive and manufacturing solutions at Cloudera. And in this first session, we're going to discuss how to drive transportation efficiencies and improve sustainability with data. Connected trucks are fundamental to optimizing fleet performance, costs, and delivering new services to fleet operators. And what's going to happen here is Michael's going to present some data and information, and we're going to come back and have a little conversation about what we just heard. Michael, great to see you! Over to you. >> Oh, thank you, Dave. And I appreciate having this conversation today. Hey, you know, this is actually an area, connected trucks, you know, this is an area that we have seen a lot of action here at Cloudera. And I think the reason is kind of important, right? Because you know, first of all, you can see that, you know, this change is happening very, very quickly, right? 150% growth is forecast by 2022 and the reasons, and I think this is why we're seeing a lot of action and a lot of growth, is that there are a lot of benefits, right? We're talking about a B2B type of situation here. So this is truck made, truck makers providing benefits to fleet operators. And if you look at the, the top fleet operator, the top benefits that fleet operators expect, you see this in, in the, in the graph over here, now almost 80% of them expect improved productivity, things like improved routing, right? So route efficiencies, improved customer service, decrease in fuel consumption, better better technology. This isn't technology for technology's sake, these connected trucks are coming onto the marketplace because, hey, it can provide tremendous value to the business. And in this case, we're talking about fleet operators and fleet efficiencies. So, you know, one of the things that's really important to be able to enable us, right, trucks are becoming connected because at the end of the day, we want to be able to provide fleet efficiencies through connected truck analytics and machine learning. Let me explain to you a little bit about what we mean by that, because what, you know, how this happens is by creating a connected vehicle, analytics, machine-learning life cycle, and to do that, you need to do a few different things, right? You start off, of course, with connected trucks in the field. And, you know, you could have many of these trucks because typically you're dealing at a truck level and at a fleet level, right? You want to be able to do analytics and machine learning to improve performance. So you start off with these trucks. And the first thing you need to be able to do is connect to those trucks, right? You have to have an intelligent edge where you can collect that information from the trucks. And by the way, once you collect the, this information from the trucks, you want to be able to analyze that data in real-time and take real-time actions. Now what I'm going to show you, the ability to take this real-time action, is actually the result of your machine-learning lifecycle. Let me explain to you what I mean by that. So we have these trucks, we start to collect data from it, right? At the end of the day what we'd like to be able to do is pull that data into either your data center or into the cloud, where we can start to do more advanced analytics. And we start with being able to ingest that data into the cloud, into that enterprise data lake. We store that data. We want to enrich it with other data sources. So for example, if you're doing truck predictive maintenance, you want to take that sensor data that you've connected, collected from those trucks. And you want to augment that with your dealership, say, service information. Now you have, you know, you have sensor data and the resulting repair orders. You're now equipped to do things like predict when maintenance will work, all right. You've got all the data sets that you need to be able to do that. So what do you do? Like I said, you're ingested, you're storing, you're enriching it with data, right? You're processing that data. You're aligning, say, the sensor data to that transactional system data from your, from your your repair maintenance systems; you're, you're bringing it together so that you can do two things. You can do, first of all, you could do self-service BI on that data, right? You can do things like fleet analytics, but more importantly, what I was talking to you about before is you now have the data sets to be able to do create machine learning models. So if you have the sensor values and the need, for example, for, for a dealership repair, or is, you could start to correlate which sensor values predicted the need for maintenance, and you could build out those machine learning models. And then as I mentioned to you, you could push those machine learning models back out to the edge, which is how you would then take those real-time actions I mentioned earlier. As that data that then comes through in real-time, you're running it again against that model. And you can take some real-time actions. This is what we, this is this, this, this analytics and machine learning model, machine learning life cycle is exactly what Cloudera enables. This end-to-end ability to ingest data; store, you know, store it, put a query lay over it, create machine learning models, and then run those machine learning models in real time. Now that's what we, that's what we do as a business. Now one such customer, and I just want to give you one example of a customer that we have worked with to provide these types of results is Navistar. And Navistar was kind of an early, early adopter of connected truck analytics, and they provided these capabilities to their fleet operators, right? And they started off by, by, you know, connecting 475,000 trucks to up to well over a million now. And you know, the point here is that they were centralizing data from their telematics service providers, from their trucks' telematics service providers. They're bringing in things like weather data and all those types of things. And what they started to do was to build out machine learning models aimed at predictive maintenance. And what's really interesting is that you see that Navistar made tremendous strides in reducing the need, or the expense associated with maintenance, right? So rather than waiting for a truck to break and then fixing it, they would predict when that truck needs service, condition-based monitoring, and service it before it broke down, so that you can do that in a much more cost-effective manner. And if you see the benefits, right, they reduce maintenance costs 3 cents a mile from the, you know, down from the industry average of 15 cents a mile down to 12 cents cents a mile. So this was a tremendous success for Navistar. And we're seeing this across many of our, you know, truck manufacturers. We're, we're working with many of the truck OEMs, and they are all working to achieve very, very similar types of benefits to their customers. So just a little bit about Navistar. Now, we're going to turn to Q and A. Dave's got some questions for me in a second, but before we do that, if you want to learn more about our, how we work with connected vehicles and autonomous vehicles, please go to our web, to our website. What you see up, up on the screen. There's the URL. It's cloudera.com forward slash solutions, forward slash manufacturing. And you'll see a whole slew of collateral and information in much more detail in terms of how we connect trucks to fleet operators who provide analytics. Use cases that drive dramatically improved performance. So with that being said, I'm going to turn it over to Dave for questions. >> Thank you, Michael. That's a great example you've got. I love the life cycle. You can visualize that very well. You've got an edge use case you do in both real time inference, really, at the edge. And then you're blending that sensor data with other data sources to enrich your models. And you can push that back to the edge. That's that life cycle. So really appreciate that, that info. Let me ask you, what are you seeing as the most common connected vehicle when you think about analytics and machine learning, the use cases that you see customers really leaning into? >> Yeah, that's really, that's a great question, Dave, you know, cause, you know, everybody always thinks about machine learning like this is the first thing you go to. Well, actually it's not, right? For the first thing you really want to be able to go down, many of our customers are doing, is look, let's simply connect our trucks or our vehicles or whatever our IOT asset is, and then you can do very simple things like just performance monitoring of the, of the piece of equipment. In the truck industry, a lot of performance monitoring of the truck, but also performance monitoring of the driver. So how is the, how is the driver performing? Is there a lot of idle time spent? You know, what's, what's route efficiency looking like? You know, by connecting the vehicles, right? You get insights, as I said, into the truck and into the driver and that's not machine learning even, right? But, but that, that monitoring piece is really, really important. So the first thing that we see is monitoring types of use cases. Then you start to see companies move towards more of the, what I call the machine learning and AI models, where you're using inference on the edge. And then you start to see things like predictive maintenance happening, kind of route real-time, route optimization and things like that. And you start to see that evolution again, to those smarter, more intelligent dynamic types of decision-making. But let's not, let's not minimize the value of good old fashioned monitoring, that's to give you that kind of visibility first, then moving to smarter use cases as you, as you go forward. >> You know, it's interesting, I'm I'm envisioning, when you talked about the monitoring, I'm envisioning, you see the bumper sticker, you know, "How am I driving?" The only time somebody ever probably calls is when they get cut off it's and you know, I mean, people might think, "Oh, it's about big brother," but it's not. I mean, that's yeah okay, fine. But it's really about improvement and training and continuous improvement. And then of course the, the route optimization. I mean, that's, that's bottom line business value. So, so that's, I love those, those examples. >> Great! >> I wonder, I mean, what are the big hurdles that people should think about when they want to jump into those use cases that you just talked about, what are they going to run into? You know, the blind spots they're, they're going to, they're going to to get hit with. >> There's a few different things, right? So first of all, a lot of times your IT folks aren't familiar with the kind of the more operational IOT types of data. So just connecting to that type of data can be a new skill set, right? There's very specialized hardware in the car and things like, like that and protocols. That's number one. That's the classic IT OT kind of conundrum that, you know, many of our customers struggle with. But then, more fundamentally, is, you know, if you look at the way these types of connected truck or IOT solutions started, you know, oftentimes they were, the first generation were very custom built, right? So they were brittle, right? They were kind of hardwired. Then as you move towards more commercial solutions, you had what I call the silo problem, right? You had fragmentation in terms of this capability from this vendor, this capability from another vendor. You get the idea. You know, one of the things that we really think that we need that we, that needs to be brought to the table, is, first of all, having an end to end data management platform. It's kind of an integrated, it's all tested together, you have a data lineage across the entire stack. But then also importantly, to be realistic, we have to be able to integrate to industry kind of best practices as well in terms of solution components in the car, the hardware and all those types of things. So I think there's, you know, it's just stepping back for a second, I think that there is, has been fragmentation and complexity in the past. We're moving towards more standards and more standard types of offerings. Our job as a software maker is to make that easier and connect those dots, so customers don't have to do it all on all on their own. >> And you mentioned specialized hardware. One of the things we heard earlier in the main stage was your partnership with Nvidia. We're talking about new types of hardware coming in. You guys are optimizing for that. We see the IT and the OT worlds blending together, no question. And then that end-to-end management piece, you know, this is different from, your right, from IT, normally everything's controlled, you're in the data center. And this is a metadata, you know, rethinking kind of how you manage metadata. So in the spirit of, of what we talked about earlier today, other technology partners, are you working with other partners to sort of accelerate these solutions, move them forward faster? >> Yeah, I'm really glad you're asking that, Dave, because we actually embarked on a product on a project called Project Fusion, which really was about integrating with, you know, when you look at that connected vehicle lifecycle, there are some core vendors out there that are providing some very important capabilities. So what we did is we joined forces with them to build an end-to-end demonstration and reference architecture to enable the complete data management life cycle. Now Cloudera's piece of this was ingesting data and all the things I talked about in storing and the machine learning, right? And so we provide that end to end. But what we wanted to do is we wanted to partner with some key partners. And the partners that we did integrate with were NXP. NXP provides the service-oriented gateways in the car, so that's the hardware in the car. Wind River provides an in-car operating system. That's Linux, right? That's hardened and tested. We then ran ours, our, our Apache MiNiFi, which is part of Cloudera data flow, in the vehicle, right on that operating system, on that hardware. We pumped the data over into the cloud where we did the, all the data analytics and machine learning, and built out these very specialized models. And then we used a company called Airbiquity, once we built those models, to do, you know, they specialize in automotive over-the-air updates, right? So they can then take those models, and update those models back to the vehicle very rapidly. So what we said is, look, there's, there's an established, you know, ecosystem, if you will, of leaders in this space. What we wanted to do is make sure that Cloudera was part and parcel of this ecosystem. And by the way, you mentioned Nvidia as well. We're working close with Nvidia now. So when we're doing the machine learning, we can leverage some of their hardware to get some still further acceleration in the machine learning side of things. So yeah, you know, one of the things I, I, I always say about these types of use cases, it does take a village. And what we've really tried to do is build out that, that, that an ecosystem that provides that village so that we can speed that analytics and machine learning lifecycle just as fast as it can be. >> This is, again, another great example of data intensive workloads. It's not your, it's not your grandfather's ERP that's running on, you know, traditional, you know, systems, it's, these are really purpose built, maybe they're customizable for certain edge-use cases. They're low cost, low, low power. They can't be bloated. And you're right, it does take an ecosystem. You've got to have, you know, APIs that connect and, and that's that, that takes a lot of work and a lot of thought. So that, that leads me to the technologies that are sort of underpinning this. We've talked, we've talked a lot on The Cube about semiconductor technology, and now that's changing, and the advancements we're seeing there. What, what do you see as some of the key technology areas that are advancing this connected vehicle machine learning? >> You know, it's interesting, I'm seeing it in, in a few places, just a few notable ones. I think, first of all, you know, we see that the vehicle itself is getting smarter, right? So when you look at, we look at that NXP type of gateway that we talked about. That used to be kind of a, a dumb gateway that was, really all it was doing was pushing data up and down, and provided isolation as a gateway down to the, down from the lower level subsystems. So it was really security and just basic, you know, basic communication. That gateway now is becoming what they call a service oriented gateway. So it can run. It's not, it's got disc, it's got memory, it's got all this. So now you could run serious compute in the car, right? So now all of these things like running machine-learning inference models, you have a lot more power in the car. At the same time, 5G is making it so that you can push data fast enough, making low latency computing available, even on the cloud. So now, now you've got incredible compute both at the edge in the vehicle and on the cloud, right? And, you know, and then on the, you know, on the cloud, you've got partners like Nvidia, who are accelerating it still further through better GPU-based computing. So, I mean the whole stack, if you look at that, that machine learning life cycle we talked about, you know, Dave, it seems like there's improvements in every, in every step along the way, we're starting to see technology optim, optimization just pervasive throughout the cycle. >> And then, you know, real quick, it's not a quick topic, but you mentioned security. I mean, we've seen a whole new security model emerge. There is no perimeter anymore in this, in a use case like this is there? >> No, there isn't. And one of the things that we're, you know, remember we're the data management plat, platform, and the thing we have to provide is provide end-to-end, you know, end-to-end lineage of where that data came from, who can see it, you know, how it changed, right? And that's something that we have integrated into, from the beginning of when that data is ingested, through when it's stored, through when it's kind of processed and people are doing machine learning; we provide, we will provide that lineage so that, you know, that security and governance is assured throughout the, throughout that data learning life's level. >> And federated across, in this example, across the fleet, so. All right, Michael, that's all the time we have right now. Thank you so much for that great information. Really appreciate it. >> Dave, thank you. And thanks for the audience for listening in today. >> Yes, thank you for watching. Keep it right there.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 live I'm Lisa Martin. Really exciting topic coming up for you next, please. Welcome Blake shoulda, founder and CEO of boom supersonic Blake. It's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having me, Lisa, and your background gives me all the way with what we're going to talk about in the next few minutes or so, but supersonic flight has existed for quite a long time, like 50 or so years. I think those of us in certain generations remember the Concorde for example, but the technology to make it efficient and mainstream is only recently been approved by or accepted by regulators. Tell us a little bit about boom, your mission to make the world more accessible with supersonic commercial flight. Well, a supersonic flight has >> actually been around since 1949 when Chuck Yeager broke the speed barrier or sorry, the sound barrier. >>And as, as many of you know, he actually passed yesterday, uh, 97. So very, very sad to see one of the supersonic pioneers behind us. Uh, but, uh, but as I say goodbye to Jaeger, a new era of supersonic flight is here. And if you look at the history of progress and transportation, since the Dawn of the industrial revolution, uh, we used to make regular progress and speed. As we went from, uh, the horse to the iron horse, to the, the boats, to the, the early propeller airplanes that have the jet age. And what happened was every time we made transportation faster, instead of spending less time traveling, we actually spent more time traveling because there were more places to go, more people to meet. Uh, we haven't had a world war since the Dawn of the jet age. Uh, places like Hawaii have become, uh, a major tourist destination. >>Uh, but today, uh, today it's been 60 years since we've had a mainstream re uh, step forward and speed. So what we're doing here at boom is picking up where Concord left off building an aircraft that flies faster by factor to the, anything you can get a ticket on today. And yet is 75% more affordable than Concorde was. So we want to make Australia as accessible as a why yesterday. We want to enable you to cross the Atlantic, do business, be home in time, detect your kids into bed, or take a three-day business trip to Asia and let you do it in just 24 >> hours. I like the sound of all of that. Even getting on a plane right now in general. I think we all do so, so interesting that you, you want to make this more accessible. And I did see the news about Chuck Yeager last night. >>Um, designing though the first supersonic airliner overture, it's called in decades, as you said, this dates back 60 years, rolling it out goal is to roll it out in 2025 and flying more than 500 trans oceanic routes. Talk to me about how you're leveraging technology and AWS to help facilitate that. Right. Well, so one of the really fascinating things is the new generation of airplanes, uh, are getting born in the cloud and then they're going to go fly through actual clouds. And so there are, there are a bunch of revolutions in technology that have happened since Concord's time that are enabling what we're doing now, their breakthroughs and materials. We've gone from aluminum to carbon fiber they're breakthroughs and engines. We've gone from after burning turbo jets that are loud and inefficient to quiet, clean, efficient turbo fans. But one of the most interesting breakthroughs has been in a available to do design digitally and iteration digitally versus, uh, versus physically. >>So when conquer was designed as an example, they were only able to do about a dozen wind tunnel tests because they were so expensive. And so time consuming and on, uh, on our XP one aircraft, which is our prototype that rolled out in October. Um, uh, we did hundreds of iterations of the design in virtual wind tunnels, where we could spin up a, uh, a simulation and HPC cluster in AWS, often more than 500 cores. And then we'd have our airplanes flying through virtual wind tunnels, thousands of flights scenarios you can figure out which were the losers, which were the winners keep iterating on the winners. And you arrive at an aerodynamic design that is more efficient at high speed. We're going very safely, very quickly in a straight line, but also a very smooth controllable for safe takeoff and landing. And the part of the artist supersonic airplane design is to accomplish both of those things. One, one airplane, and, uh, being able to design in the cloud, the cloud allows us to start up to do what previously only governments and militaries could do. I mentioned we rolled out our XP one prototype in October. That's the first time anyone has rolled out a supersonic civil aircraft since the Soviet union did it in 1968. And we're able to do as a startup because of computing. >>That's incredible born in the cloud to fly in the cloud. So talk to me about a lot of, of opportunity that technology has really accelerated. And we've seen a lot of acceleration this year in particular digital transformation businesses that if they haven't pivoted are probably in some challenging waters. So talk to us about how you're going all in with AWS to facilitate all these things that you just mentioned, which has dramatic change over 12, uh, when tone test for the Concord and how many times did it, >>Uh, I mean for 27 years, but not that many flights, never, it never changed the way mainstream, uh, never, never district some of you and I fly. Right. Um, so, so how, how are we going all in? So we've, you know, we've been using AWS for, uh, you know, basically since the founding of the company. Uh, but what we, what we're doing now is taking things that we were doing outside of the cloud and cloud. Uh, as an example, uh, we have 525 terabytes of XP one design and test data that what used to be backed up offsite. Um, and, and what we're doing is migrating into the cloud. And then your data is next. Your compute, you can start to do these really interesting things as an example, uh, you can run machine learning models to calibrate your simulations to your wind tunnel results, which accelerates convergence allows you to run more iterations even faster, and ultimately come up with a more efficient airplane, which means it's going to be more affordable for all of us to go to go break the sound barrier. >>And that sounds like kind of one of the biggest differences that you just said is that it wasn't built for mainstream before. Now, it's going to be accessibility affordability as well. So how are you going to be leveraging the cloud, you know, design manufacturing, but also other areas like the beyond onboard experience, which I'm already really excited to be participating in in the next few years. >>Yeah. So there's so many, so many examples. We've talked about design a little bit already. Uh, it's going to manifest in the manufacturing process, uh, where the, the, the, the, the supply chain, uh, will be totally digital. The factory operations will be run out of the cloud. You know, so what that means concretely is, uh, you know, literally there'll be like a million parts of this airplane. And for any given unit goes through their production line, you'll instantly know where they all are. Um, you'll know which serial numbers went on, which airplanes, uh, you'll understand, uh, if there was a problem with one of it, how you fixed it. And as you continue to iterate and refine the airplane, this, this is one of things that's actually a big deal, uh, with, with digital in the cloud is, you know, exactly what design iteration went into, exactly which airplane and, uh, and that allows you to actually iterate faster and any given airline with any given airplane will actually know exactly what, what airplane they have, but the next one that rolls off the line might be even a little bit better. >>And so it allows you to keep track of all of that. It allows you to iterate faster, uh, it allows you to spot bottlenecks in your supply chain before they impact production. Um, and then it allows you to, uh, to do preventive maintenance later. So there's to be digital interpretation all over the airplane, it's going to update the cloud on, you know, uh, are the engines running expected temperature. So I'm gonna run a little bit hot, is something vibrating more than it should vibrate. And so you catch these things way before there's any kind of real maintenance issue. You flag it in the cloud. The next time the airplane lands, there's a tech waiting for the airplane with whatever the part is and able to install it. And you don't have any downtime, and you're never anywhere close to a safety issue. You're able to do a lot more preventively versus what you can do today. >>Wow. So you have to say that you're going to be able to, to have a hundred percent visibility into manufacturing design, everything is kind of an understatement, but you launched XQ on your prototype in October. So during the pandemic, as I mentioned, we've been talking for months now on the virtual cube about the acceleration of digital transformation. Andy, Jassy talked about it in his keynote at AWS reinventing, reinventing this year, virtual, what were some of the, the, the advantages that you got, being able to stay on track and imagine if you were on track to launch in October during a time that has been so chaotic, uh, everywhere else, including air travel. >>Well, some of it's very analog, uh, and some of it's very digital. So to start with the analog, uh, we took COVID really seriously at Bo. Uh, we went into that, the pandemic first hit, we shut the company down for a couple of weeks, so we'd kind of get our feet underneath of us. And then we sort of testing, uh, everyone who had to work on the airplane every 14 days, we were religious about wearing masks. And as a result, we haven't had anyone catch COVID within the office. Um, and I'm super proud that we're able to stay productive and stay safe during the pandemic. Um, and you do that, but kind of taking it seriously, doing common sense things. And then there's the digital effort. And, uh, and so, you know, part of the company runs digitally. What we're able to do is when there's kind of a higher alert level, we go a little bit more digital when there's a lower alert level. >>Uh, we have more people in the office cause we, we still really do value that in-person collaboration and which brings it back through to a bigger point. It's been predicted for a long time, that the advent of digital communication is going to cause us not to need to travel. And, uh, what we've seen, you know, since the Dawn of the telephone is that it's actually been the opposite. The more you can know, somebody even a little bit, uh, at distance, the hungry you are to go see them in person, whether it's a business contact or someone you're in love with, um, no matter what it is, there's still that appetite to be there in person. And so I think what we're seeing with the digitization of communication is ultimately going to be very, um, uh, it's very complimentary with supersonic because you can get to know somebody a little bit over a long distance. You can have some kinds of exchanges and then you're, and then the friction for be able to see them in person is going to drop. And that is, uh, that's a wonderful combination. >>I think everybody on the planet welcomes that for sure, given what we've all experienced in the last year, you can have a lot of conversations by zoom. Obviously this was one of them, but there is to your point, something about that in-person collaboration that really takes things can anyway, to the next level. I am curious. So you launched XB one in October, as I mentioned a minute ago, and I think I read from one of your press releases planning to launch in 2025, the overture with over 500 trans oceanic routes. What can we expect from boom and the next year or two, are you on track for that 2025? >>Yeah. Things are going, things are going great. Uh, so to give a sense of what the next few years hold. So we rolled out the assembled XB one aircraft this year, uh, next year that's going to fly. And so that will be the first civil supersonic, uh, flying aircraft ever built by an independent company. Uh, and along the way, we are building the foundation of overture. So that design efforts happening now as XB one is breaking the sound barrier. We'll be finalizing the overture design in 22, we'll break ground in the factory in 23, we'll start building the first airplane and 25, we'll roll it out. And 26 we'll start flight tests. And, uh, and then we'll go through the flight test methodically, uh, systematically as carefully as we can, uh, and then be ready to carry passengers as soon as we are convinced that safe, which will be right around the end of the decade, most likely. >>Okay. Exciting. And so it sounds like you talked about the safety protocols that you guys put in place in the office, which is great. It's great to hear that, but also that this, this time hasn't derailed because you have the massive capabilities of, to be able to do all of the work that's necessary, way more than was done with before with the Concorde. And that you can do that remotely with cloud is a big facilitator of that communication. >>Yeah. You're able to do the cloud enables a lot of computational efficiencies. And I think about the, um, many times projects are not measured in how many months or years exactly does it take you to get done, but it's actually much easier to think about in terms of number of iterations. And so every time we do an airplane iteration, we look at the aerodynamics high speed. We look at the low speed. We look at the engine, uh, we look at the, the weights. Uh, we look at stability and control. We look at pilots, light aside, et cetera, et cetera. And every time you do an iteration, you're kind of looking around all of those and saying, what can I make better? But each one of those, uh, lines up a little bit differently with the rest now, for example, uh, uh, to get the best airplane aerodynamically, doesn't have a good view for the pilot. >>And that's why Concord had that droop nose famously get the nose out of the way so we can see the runway. And so we're able to do digital systems for virtual vision to let the pilot kind of look through the nose of the runway. But even then they're, trade-offs like, how, how good of an actual window do you need? And so your ability to make progress in all of this is proportional to how quickly you can make it around that, that iteration loop, that design cycle loop. And that's, that's part of where the cloud helps us. And we've, we've got some, uh, uh, some stuff we've built in house that runs on the cloud that lets you basically press a button with a whole set of airplane parameters. And bam, it gives you a, it gives you an instant report. I'm like, Oh, was it that this is a good change or bad change, uh, based on running some pretty high fidelity simulations with a very high degree of automation. And you can actually do many of those in parallel. And so it's about, you know, at this stage of the program, it's about accelerating, accelerating your design iterations, uh, giving everyone of the team visibility into those. And then, uh, I think you get together in person as it makes sense to now we're actually hitting a major design milestone with over-treat this week and we're, COVID testing everybody and get them all in the same room. Cause sometimes that in-person collaboration, uh, is really significant, even though you can still do so much digitally. >>I totally agree. There's there's certain things that you just can't replicate. Last question since my brother is a pilot for Southwest and retired Lieutenant Colonel from the air force, any special training that pilots will have to have, or are there certain pilots that are going to be maybe lower hanging fruit, if they have military experience versus commercial flight? Just curious. >>Yeah. So our XB one aircraft is being flown by test pilots. There's one ex Navy one ex air force on our crew, but, uh, overture, uh, will be accessible to any commercial pilot. So, uh, think about it as if you're, if you're used to flying Boeing, it'd be like switching to Airbus, uh, or vice versa. So the, uh, Concord is a complicated aircraft to fly because they didn't have computers. And all the complexity, the soup of supersonic flight was right there and the pilots and an overture, all that gets extracted by software. And, uh, you know, the, the, the ways the flight controls change over speed regimes. You don't have to worry about it, but the airplane is handled beautifully, no matter what you're doing. And so, uh, and so there are many, many places to innovate, but actually pilot experience, not one of them, >>Because the more conventional you can make it for people like your brother, the easier it's going to be for them to learn the aircraft. And therefore the safer it's going to be to fly. I'll let them know, like this has been fantastic, really exciting to see what boom supersonic is doing and the opportunities to make supersonic travel accessible. And I think at a time when everybody wants the world to open up, so by 20, 26, I'm going to be looking for my ticket. Awesome. Can't wait to have you on board. Likewise for Blake shul, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the QS live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.