(intro music) >> Hi, everybody, we're back. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. We're covering Fal.Con 22. This is CrowdStrike's big user conference. CrowdStrike is a very hot company, as you probably know started on endpoint security, expanding into another, a number of other areas trying to build the next great generational company in cybersecurity. Michael Sherwood is here. He's the chief innovation and technology officer for the city of Las Vegas. >> Got to love that. >> Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Welcome! >> Yeah, we got to love that. I mean, if it weren't for Las Vegas, I'm not sure where we would have our CUBE events, but so thank you for hosting us. >> Thank you for being here. This is awesome. It's a great day and a lot of people, and it's exciting to see everything that's going on here. >> Yeah, the city is booming. Obviously the convention, the conference business is booming. Tech is a big part of that but there's so many other industries that come to Las Vegas. Talk about your role, really interesting, chief innovation, technology officer, CTO. Tell us about what you do day to day. >> Kind of all over the place. But a lot of it has to do with day to day technology within the organization. So managing all the different technology components. When you start looking at any city, it's a lot of different companies inside of it. Think of fire service as a different company. They all have different missions. And so our technology needs are expansive. So while we have operational IT, we also have our innovation unit. Innovation unit works on next generation technology. So Las Vegas was one of the first cities in the United States to have a autonomous vehicle drive in mix-flow traffic, meaning it was out there with, driving along cars. We're also the first city to have an accident in a autonomous vehicle. That happened on day two. (Vellante laughing) So, there's always a lot of firsts in Las Vegas, but. >> Despite the grid. >> Despite the grid, you know. But even today, so that was in 2017, when we first started working with autonomous vehicles. Up until today, where you have the ability, anybody in Las Vegas, including yourselves right after the show can go ahead and use Lyft, go outside and hail an autonomous taxi to come pick you up and drive you up and down the strip. Those vehicles actually communicate with our infrastructure. So the innovation is, how do cities work with private companies to start building next generation amenities, next generation technologies? And so that happens a lot of times. People don't realize. They come to Las Vegas for entertainment, and now we're known for sports but we do have a lot of technology here that permeates through the entire community. >> So I'm from Boston. We're trying to get the smart traffic lights, we're not quite there yet. But I was at a session, Dave you'll appreciate it, it was John Rose, who was the CTO. He was the CTO of, he's a CTO of Dell Technologies now. And the mayor of Boston, we were talking about the vision for a smart city. But Boston and I mean talk about, a challenge for building a smart city. So when I come out here, it's like amazing to me to see the technology that's there. So as a CTO and innovation officer, you've got a playground where... Now, of course you have legacy infrastructure, you've got technical debt, but you also have, in certain cases, an opportunity and more latitude to get creative. So what are some of the cool things that you're working on that you're really excited about? >> There's a lot of things I'm excited about. It's just great being in this city. But a lot of the things that we're excited about here in the next year to two years, we have an innovation district. So not a lot of cities have this but Downtown around the Fremont Street Experience, there's a corridor there that covers government, covers entertainment, medical. And so this innovation district is where we test out new technologies. So some of the things we're testing out, computer vision. So we're, our smart parks program is how do we provide better security and enjoyment of those amenities without providing physical labor to constantly patrol. And so we're using cameras and vision and different types of AI algorithms to kind of manage the park. And while we're doing that, we're also getting data back on how often is the park used? Are the facilities, are the sprinklers going on during the day? Water's a big deal here. And so those type of projects. Again, autonomy is still huge, vehicle autonomy, still working on driving those next generation changes where you'll actually have a driverless vehicle. Right now, there's a safety driver in a lot of the autonomous vehicles. Even the one I talked about earlier, you have the, while the vehicles driving itself, for safety reasons, there's still a human driver in the seat. But as we go forward in the next year to two, that >> That's soon. >> is getting ready to change. I believe that's soon. You can quote it here, you heard it here first. >> Wow. >> But that would be coming up. You got drones as well. We've already started looking at a few types of drone delivery systems. It may not be too far away. Your pizza or maybe some other item that you want is delivered in the general area. Probably not in the hotel corridor but in the outside areas of the city. I just think there's a lot of, again, we're building amenities for the future. We really want people to understand that Las Vegas is not just a place to come visit, but it's a place to live and have fun and be part of a community. >> So from an academic perspective, what you just described is a highly ambidextrous organization, right? >> Yes. >> Because you're not just worried about keeping the lights on, but you're also looking at innovation. How did your organization get to this place? What you're describing is sort of the gold standard that any organization public or private would seek to implement. How did you get there? >> Baby steps, small steps. It all started back when there was the Smart Cities Challenge. So we were not selected as the finalist. We were in the, I think top 15 at the time but we didn't give up on it. And we continued to move forward. The pandemic helped us do things. When you ask, what do I do? Well, my normal job is running the day to day infrastructure. I also see my role as economic development to help bring companies here and bring new ideas. We have a great community, diverse and ready to do things. But when you take, talk about the innovation and the technology and what we're doing. Like I said, during a pandemic, we came up with the idea of, Hey, we don't want to send our building inspectors or our inspectors in the people's homes, one for the inspector's health and one for the citizen's health. So we used normal tools. We took an iPhone and made it a virtual inspector. So now if you get a new water heater, you can actually do your inspection via like a FaceTime. And you hold your phone up around the water heater. We can view it, we record the video, save it, and boom give you an inspection remotely. And so you build on it. So how do you get, I wouldn't quite say we're the gold. I appreciate, we're moving there, that's the bar. You've laid out the bar for us, but we're moving in that direction. But it's building on one win and not all of our things that we've deployed. We can talk about those as well. Some of the things like trash can sensors, we looked at doing, which would monitor when the trash can was full or empty, just didn't pan out. So a lot of the times I talk about the wins a lot not as much about the things that didn't pan out. >> So what're the big challenges, generally of building out a smart city and then specifically around cyber? >> So there's, community acceptance number one. Las Vegas, I'm very lucky cameras are everywhere. So there's not as much resistance to using video technology. But a lot of times it's just getting the constituents, getting people to understand the value of what we're trying to do. Not everybody is interested in autonomous vehicles or believes they're ready for that. But when you start looking at the increments, more than any other city I know, the community here is so robust and so supportive of bringing on these technologies. Look, what other city do you know that builds new buildings and knocks them down five years later to build something new again? Or, who has a volcano in the middle of their downtown? So different things like that. But when you start looking at all the advancements we're making, you brought up one of the biggest concerns. When people ask me, what keeps you up at night? It's not the autonomous vehicle not performing, its the cyber, it's the cyber issues that go along with becoming more advanced. And as you bring innovation in, you start bleeding the lines of what's government, what's private. And then how do you continue to have the data transmission between these multiple entities? How do you keep the endpoint secure? And that is something that you learn as you go, but it's always out there. And endpoint security and security in general is a huge, huge area. >> And how about the data? You were talking before about you can get actually approval for an inspection. That's data, it's video data. How have you changed the way in which you're using data? What are you doing with that data? How do you leverage it? How do you secure it? >> It's all great questions. One of the things we've undertaken is called an open data initiative. So we have an open data portal. It's opendata.lasvegasnevada.gov, where we publish a lot of the data sets that we collect. If it's air quality, if it's ambulance runs, and we make that data available. A lot of that is, one for the public for transparency, two though, it's, we hope enables the private sector to build apps off of the data that we have. A lot of times, you either you have the data but you don't have the app or you have the app, but no data. So in our way, it's trying to help the community build up new ideas. Our push has been moving to the cloud a lot. So we're pushing a lot more data into the cloud where before I think a lot of governments keep a lot of that internal, but obviously look, the cloud's here to stay and it's not going anywhere. And so now it's more about as we migrate, using our partners, our relationship with CrowdStrike, to start securing not only our endpoints but start looking at the cloud space as well. And then we have this new technology. It's not really new, but edge compute. You've heard a lot of, there's different people talking about it. When you start talking about autonomous vehicles, autonomous delivery, drones. We own a large private wireless network. A lot of data now is computed at the edge and we're only taking the metadata and sending it up to the cloud. So it becomes rather complicated with security being at the forefront. >> Yeah, so that very small portion of the actual amount of data that's created goes back but it's such a massive amount of data. It's not to trivialize it, it's still a lot. And some of it is probably ephemeral. Do you persist at all? Or probably not. >> Not always, I mean. A lot of it, what we're learning is, it's a learning process as you go through this smart city or what we call just basically emerging into, 'cause I believe all cities are smart. Not one city smarter than another necessarily. So I'm not really a fan of the term smart city. It's more in line with me as we're building amenities for the future and building amenities for people. And a lot of that is built upon data and then built upon providing things that citizens want. And we all know, we all live somewhere and we live there because it's safe community, it has good education, good infrastructure whatever it might be. And so we're trying to build out that smart community to be as many things as we can to as many people. >> Yeah, that's fair. And there's automation, there's certainly machine intelligence that's heavily involved. Of course, you talking autonomous. Now I understand your work transcends the city of Las Vegas into the broader state of Nevada helping make Nevada a safer state. What's that all about? >> So we have a great partnership. One of the great things, I come from California, so a rather large state. Here in Nevada, it's a very close knit state. So we have a lot of communications with the state. We get to work with them very closely. One of the initiatives we've been working on is how do we, a lot of organizations spend a lot of time doing cybersecurity for just their organization. So it's focused internal on the employees that might work in that organization. We're kind of now looking outwards and saying, how do we not only do that for our internal government employees but how do we involve the entire community? One of the things is, is Las Vegas over 40,000 conventions per year. You're here a lot. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and a lot of people bring malware with them and it stays here. We're trying to educate people. We do a lot in government to help people with police and fire and services. What is local government doing to help the community prepare for the next generation of cyber threats and issues? So our initiative is really working with the community, bringing in CrowdStrike and other partners to help us not only work with small business, but work with those entrepreneurs as well as the midsize businesses. >> So what do you do with Crowd? You got the cool little CrowdStrike, not CrowdStrike, but you got the red splash in your lapel. Very cool cuff links, I noticed that you have there. I love the red. >> Little poker chips there. >> They're Very nice, very nice. >> They're very cool. So what do you do with CrowdStrike? >> So CrowdStrike is one of our major components in our security posture. We use them as endpoint protection. I can tell you a quick story. I know my CISO's listening probably was going to cringe now when I tell this story, but our journey with CrowdStrike has been amazing. We deployed the product and when that first week of deployment, we had a malicious actor and CrowdStrike was able to catch it. I would probably would not be here today with you two gentlemen if it wasn't for CrowdStrike. That's not an endorsement it's just a, that's a fact of how things rolled out. But we depend on CrowdStrike and their capabilities to ensure the safety of our digital assets. >> You wouldn't be here 'cause we, it used to be failure means fire. Is that what you mean? >> That's what I mean. I'm not going to, I don't like to use that word in my terminology, but basically failure is not an option in my job. It's just not there. >> Well, it's funny, we had Kevin Mandy on early, he was like, look I started my company in 2004 with the assumption that breaches will happen, you are going to get breached. >> Yes >> So that's why I say, I think there was a day when, if you got breached, oh, you're fired. Well that, then everybody got breached. So I think that that sentiment changing 'cause CrowdStrike saying that the unstoppable breach is a myth. Well, we're not there yet, but. >> I'd say damage control now. At least we have a little bit more control but, again, look, government is about trust. And so when you have that trust level, from my perspective, I keep a high standard and try to prevent any loss of data or any type of malicious activity from happening. I hope the mayor's listening and she doesn't fire me if anything would happen, but you know. >> You got a fun job. How'd you get into this? >> It was a great opportunity. I worked in law enforcement prior to here. I was a Deputy Police Chief in city of Irvine. I oversaw technology as part of that role. I've always loved Las Vegas, always liked the energy of the city and I had a great opportunity to apply and I applied and was lucky enough to be selected. I have a great team that supports me. >> Deputy Police Chief, it sounds like, what you just described, the technology role. You had an operations role essentially, is that right? >> Correct. And so kind of gave me a lot of insights and really helped me, as you progress in government, having different roles in your portfolio makes you a little bit more adaptive and it's kind of, it helps in, especially now with so much video and cameras prevalent in cities, having that law enforcement role, understanding a little of the legal aspects and understanding some of the, what law enforcement wants kind of makes that bridge from technology to the actual end user. >> A really interesting story, Michael. Thanks so much for sharing on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me here. >> You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante will be back from Las Vegas at the Aria from Fal.Con 22. You're watching theCUBE. (outro music)

>>Yeah. Hello. Welcome to the Cubes International Women's Showcase, featuring International Women's Day. I'm John for your host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California. And we have three great guests videoing in from Kuala Lumpur as well as Bangkok. Johann Kwa, group CEO of K s K Group. It's just a Christina Equal, co founder and head of K s, K C Labs and Cindy, co founder of Sunday Insurance in Bangkok. Ladies. Thanks for coming on the cue. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks for Thanks for joining me on this special day. >>Thank you. Thank you so much. You >>guys are three sisters, trailblazing and the insurance and real estate through digital transformation in the cloud taking a three decade old family business to the next level raising the bar, as they say in the cloud business. Congratulations. Tell us how it all started. What's going on now? What does it look like? Where did it come from? Tell the Storey. >>Okay, so maybe I'll start, Uh, you know, since I'm at the group CEO level. So, um, as a quick introduction, you know? Okay. SK group, uh, were about 30 years old now, as a group three decades. Um, we started off as an insurance, uh, nonlife insurance company. Um, and then over the years, um, you know, we we operate in in South East Asia, So we are based in the US and markets. That message is also sitting in, um, and very quickly over the years, you know, we decided to actually venture into property development as well. Um, and really across the journey. Um, you know, we we've always been very, um, obsessed over the customers. You know, uh, and, you know, during this time and age, you know, all the customers are really digital natives now, and and, you know, the tech is very, very interesting. And so So starting in the year of 2017, we decided, um, to actually venture. Cindy and I at least we decided to start up our own, uh, tech, uh, called Sunday. Uh, Cindy is now the full time CEO and co founders. Um, and, you know, uh, it's an exciting journey from then on, uh, where now The first full stack ensure attack in in the whole of of the Asian market, uh, starting off in Thailand. Um, And then when Christine came back, to join the business. You know, since we were already in real estate, we decided, taking on from the inspiration of what we did with Sunday, how about we do the same in in in property? Because we obviously saw, you know, there was super loads of opportunities that we could we could we could do. And and a year ago, we gave birth to cast a city lapse. Um, now a prop tech company based in Malaysia. >>Christine and Cindy tell the storey here because this is actually fascinating. Storey, your sisters, your entrepreneurial. So you know each other? You're related and you've got ups and downs with the startups and growing companies changing landscape. A lot of challenges. You all gotta get along all the time. How's it going? What's it like? Mm. >>Maybe I'll start. I think I think for me I'm probably the newest addition to the trio in the, you know, working together kind of space. So for me, I think it's all about really learning how to, you know, separate your professional and personal life. And like you mentioned, you know, we live together. But we also work together. So for me, I think I took a >>lot of advice >>and direction. Um, both from Johann and, >>uh, help >>me a lot. Um, so So I think that's been my experience. Been great So far, Um, they've been really, really supportive. And I think going through this journey of, you know, like, founding a company together, it's obviously very challenging. And so I feel very fortunate to have two sisters who have already gone through it once, you know? >>So for the other guests is trying to get on the cube here. Over there. Um, sounds like fun. Uh, Christine. So on the city labs, you gotta cheque side of it there in the in the property tech. That's exciting. How's it going over there? >>Uh, super, Super cool. Super fun. Uh, has been one heck of a journey building a company from scratch, let alone in tech. I think you know, we created K s K C d lives because we really wanted to modernise the real estate industry, uh, and create, like, super transformative solutions, uh, many for two reasons. You know, one is to improve the quality of life, um, of the community around us. Uh, and secondly, really to harness all the technology and this unused data right in the real estate industry. And try and say, how can we use that to make more intelligent business decisions? Yeah, so So really, Um, I guess for us, it's been really exciting because we've launched two products. Uh, you know, one of which is Ai driven, dynamic pricing engine. And we realised that actually, the way that homes are priced today, uh, in real estate is super RK right? You only use a few basic variables. Like, how big is your house? What views do you have? But then we realised that, actually hey, with a I where you suddenly can use, like, hundreds of variables, um, and even, you know, consisting of wellness variables, for example. Um, and you can really customise pricing all the way down to a single unit level. Uh, and we realise that by doing this, we could actually unlock, um, ferret prices for our customers while also constantly kind of tracking the financial health of the company. >>Awesome. Cindy, I wanna get you in here. A co founder, Sunday Insurance. That was the origination. But a lot of change data drives everything machine learning. You gotta have the state of the art. What's going on with you? >>Yeah, I think for us, essentially, uh, we're operating in a very old industry. Um, it's one of the oldest industries globally. And if you look at the entire insurance value chain, um, every part of the process can actually, it's all about data. You can. It can be disrupted. Um, but yet every inch of the value chain is also regulated. So I think essentially what we're trying to do is, um, we're trying to really innovate the customer journey. So imagine if, um, even in the States now and even coming back to Asia, a lot of how people buy insurance is still very face to face agency. But I think in the future is going to be remote online on your app, through any partners as well. So I think, uh, we're trying to adopt any machine learning to really scale and automate, uh, the journey of anyone who's trying to buy insurance. But at the same time for insurance companies were also trying to help them automate that function itself. So imagine if banks are trying to dish out loans and you're trying to predict. What's the credit risk of every, um, single customer? That's exactly what insurance company needs to do as well. Um, And I guess insurance is all about buying a service as well. >>It's unlike you >>know, I'm gonna buy an apple. It comes to the hardware, >>right? So we're >>selling a service. So essentially you're service has to also dramatically changed. And I think these days, especially when we're operating in, uh, Thailand, Indonesia is one of the highest adoption rates for mobile these days. Everyone does. Everything lives on on the apps. So, um, insurance companies also needs to really on board their journey on that as well as increased engagement. So I don't just want to be an insurance company where, um, I speak to you and I have an issue with my claim. I want to really build a relationship with you and engage you differently. So I think it's actually that's the mission for a Sunday. So I think Imagine if imagine an insurance company 50 years in the future. How would it be? Uh, that's our mission. >>This is a great example. You guys, First of all, you're very dynamic. Thanks for sharing your storey. But when you get into the tech here, if industries that are transforming because of the digital transformation, the consumers expect the apps. You guys, as co founders and entrepreneurs now running this big business have to meet the demands and leverage the technology. How have you done that? How are you guys manage that? What kinds of decisions have you made? And you share some either experiences or observations of how to navigate and how you're riding that wave. >>Yeah. So I think if you hear from what Cindy and Christine has just mentioned, I mean, uh, we were playing in, you know, two of the oldest and largest industries in the world. Real estate and insurance. And, uh, you know, in both industries, as I said earlier, you know, it's really all about the customers, right? Um you know, in in the past, we used to think of of businesses as you know, what's your vertical and the horizontal today? Um, at least four k s k and and and all the all these, um, you know, tech ventures that we are now venture building. We're really thinking about it from the customer land. So really thinking about it from a customer ecosystem perspective. So instead of, you know, creating products and and having that push out to the customers, you know, we use tech and data and and especially data today and the right amount of data and what type of data that we want understanding that and really, um, building that product and really the services, uh, for the customers. So once you know the customer enters our ecosystem, whether you know, in your real estate, um, ecosystem or whether it's in your insurance ecosystem, we want you to to continue to stay with us, um, and to trust us. Um, and so it's not just about selling you a product, but really, you know, like, what Cindy says building a relationship with you because we think that, you know, obviously you know when insurance is something you really need when when when things go wrong in your life, we don't only want to be there. When things go wrong in your life and for real estate, you know everybody needs a shelter. So so so that's why we think that building relationships are very important and from really true, that lands is when you really think about the ecosystem and you think about data. I think Cindy Increasing gave some examples of how we're approaching it. Um, a lot of people start from from from a, you know, from a traditional business and from within. But for us, um, we decided to actually take it outside. Um, and, you know, take the approach of venture building from a startup, um, but really have, on the back end, really have that Connexion to the core businesses. Because what the core businesses understand is, you know, lifetime and experience of how customers feel and and, you know, um, in insurance, it's really about how to run a financial institution in real estate is really how to build buildings, and that is something that we can't take away. But, you know, you use technology to enable and to power. But what venture and start ups do extremely well is really the way we are extremely nimble and the way you use tech and data to navigate the quick changes of customer demands. And and you know, one thing an app and it's all about quick iterations. Right? When you build a super app, how do you incorporate all the features that are coming in, you have to keep on, you know, iterating changing, innovating, um, and innovating small with quick wins and then taking on a larger scale. And so the way we position ourselves is when you have to start up and you combine that with the core. Um, and putting the two together is how, how, how we look at things and that four minutes, the whole ecosystem >>that's awesome and being agile as fast and speed is key if you want to be there. Startup. But at the core business, that's going kind of slow. You got to kind of make everything go faster. That's a great, great insight. Let's talk about the disruption of the property industry again. That's real estate now with the Internet of things, technologies and also people expect technology. They wanna have access. I don't wanna have all these passwords and, you know they want to have easy in and out. They want good efficiency, save money. What's the disruption angle on? Um, the property neck. Christine, what's your How do you see that? The big disruption going? >>Yeah. So I think as Johann already mentioned before, you know um I think our customers we know are becoming, um, digital natives. Right? And they expect very convenient lifestyles. And we're all about our customers. So, actually, that's why we launched also another product, right where we're taking all of these things that you just mentioned, you know, about Iot into account. So what we found is, um, that actually, today, um, you know, the village about real estate is that we all live through that life as well, so we can experience that. Uh, we found that residents today, um, they find it quite challenging to request, you know, basic services like housekeeping managing, um, their defects, their tenants. Um, you know, even the financial planning and even getting into the building, right, they want more convenience. Um, but we realised that actually, all these services in the real estate industry right now and even in the prop tech space, they are very, very segmented. They're all discussed across multiple different apps. So what we really try to do is hey, let's try and consolidate all of this into one single app, which we have done, which is really cool, And it helps our residents really stay engaged and connected with our property. Um, what we did also was on the Iot front. We we were actually the first developer in Malaysia to also integrate, You know, future proof solutions like remote lift calling as well, um, into the mobile app. And that's to really go like, push on the Iot front. For us as well. >>Must be great for retention. It's all the gadgets are built into the of course. You have good WiFi fibre in their everyone's got good band with >>for sure >>It's like water and plumbing. Uh, I'd like to get everyone everyone loves that. I gotta ask Now, on the on the on the on The disruption is great. Now you've got the clouds, the clouds here for actually Amazon. You guys are big customer because you guys can move fast and they do all the heavy lifting. How are you guys seeing that helped modernise in the industry of insurance? Because that's a big vertical for a W s and you guys are doing is Cindy. What is the What is the modernisation? Um, half that you guys have taken with a W s. >>Yeah, sure. So I think essentially, for insurance, it's a product development. And when we talk about product development means, um how do you price, um, every certain individual or company very differently, right, Because everyone has very different risks surrounding them. Uh, currently, what we face is that it's a flat pricing fixed pricing. Um, and it's not really personalised to you. If you are a very good behaviour and safe kind of customer, it doesn't translate to any premium savings for you. Um, so I think, uh, part of insurance is to give, for example, affordable access to health care. But if your premiums isn't sustainable for health insurance, then it doesn't really need the point. So, uh, for Sunday, like, how we're trying to trying to do it differently is, for example, we use some AWS cloud solutions and AWS Lambda too, really power our machine learning Savalas and Cloud infrastructure. So, for example, uh, Sunday we are a serious bee companies sober and the growth stage. So at any point in time, we need to ensure that our infrastructure is able to support a huge spike in transaction volume, and we're working with large scale partners like telcos, e commerce companies, or even within our organic channels. So our AI machine learning risk prediction model, which is basically, um, powering our premium pricing engines whenever there's any requests coming in front of the Web for foreign quotation. For example, if someone wants to buy health insurance, um, it can go up and spike. But also, the data model is actually pricing, uh, processing billions of calculations, ingesting a lot of data points. Uh, it needs to do that within seconds, so yeah, I think a w s. We've been using it from day one since we launched. It's been, uh, helping us on >>that and make it go faster. That's the big thing. I gotta ask you when you guys have this family business now, three decades, you got a lot going on extending that legacy and sustaining the family legacy. I love the Storey. So who decides whether to do the startup and you guys draw straws? Is that you guys flip a coin? You gotta who runs the big business? How do you guys decide that? Mm. >>Um, maybe I'll >>I >>would say maybe it came very naturally to us. Really? I guess Here we don't have to disclose. Our age is a little bit, so I mean, I mean, we all actually the background and really all three of us. Before we came into the family business, we were all working professionals in very different fields. I was a I was in banking. Cindy was a lawyer, and Christine was a a doctor, actually, Um um, but, you know, I came back first. I'm the eldest, so after, you know, walking outside and looking into the family business. So I came back first, and and And from there, I took over the insurance business and looking at it, it was a very lonely place to be. So, um, you know, after a couple of years of Cindy being a professional life, you know, we said, Hey, would you like to come back? And let's, uh, take a different journey with insurance and see how we can build something different? Uh, since we know a lot about insurance, but let's make make make a difference and and and, you know, be sustainable, but also evolve over time and show the world that insurance is actually pretty sexy, actually. Um, and then, you know, Christine saw the fund that the two of us were having, uh, already started building a real estate on on my end. Uh, and then, uh, she came back. And, you know, we have a conversation, and we said, Look, looking at you know what we're doing in Sunday? You know, building pricing engines and being able to price to a single customer level. Um, we saw that opportunity in real estate, and, uh so I asked her. I said, Look, would you like to do this? You know, because I think there is something cool. Um, the three of us can band together and still inspire each other share ideas across each other. That's an opportunity that a lot of people don't get right. I mean, to all these industries in the world being able to cross share ideas. Uh, and sometimes inspirations and ideas don't come from the same industry. Uh, and so I think. And that's how we started. Really, John, it's not. Maybe we're lucky, and we should be grateful for >>that. You're all power women. I love the storey, and it is good that you come together, and I think the entrepreneurial kind of twist makes it more fun. But not everyone is cut out with the entrepreneurship, but it also gives you more risk management. You can. You can go after opportunities I love. I love the strategy there. You guys are great leaders. Any advice for other aspiring women leaders and entrepreneurs out there who want to make a difference? Make an impact? The world is. Change is getting better for everyone. And and again, entrepreneurial could be in big companies and also big companies doing startups. There's a whole new world. What advice would you guys give other aspiring women leaders? Okay, >>I'll keep it short from my end. I think for me it's about really following your passion following your ambition. And lastly, I think not to try and not feel like you need to conform to any gender stereotypes because I think in male dominated industries such as real estate, our are attack. I think people might have some ideas about you know what a what a tech leader or what a real estate leader might have to look like. But you don't have to conform to that. So that's probably my advice. Uh, >>yeah, I I fully agree with Chris right there. I think, um, gender isn't an issue here. If you have a passion and you identify, there is a market opportunity that you can, you know, you can really do something about it. Just just pursue it. I think most importantly, if you ever want to be an entrepreneur and start your own business or your own, start up. Uh, so long as you have the confidence, I think you're you're good to go. Um, there's a lot of talk out that that or, you know, um, women led start ups are not >>attracting >>funds, but we haven't faced that anyway. In this part of Asia, I think there's a lot of, um, I think it attracts even more attention. If you're a woman in a male dominated that industry like, hey, then you know it's it's quite unique. So I think you have a strength there, and I think there's a lot of diverse talent out there. Um, post pandemic. A lot of people are looking for changes as well, so I think it is a lot of a lot of opportunity out there. >>Yeah, Joanne, you know, you know, the thing is with cloud computing, it's a level centre. It really because if you can come together, whether it's sisters like you guys, powerful sisters and professional experience coming together leverage technology to re factor old industries. It's all about the numbers and the performance. At the end of the day, you know, you move faster and you take territory and beat the competition. >>Ultimate >>the ultimate uh, leveller. Well, congratulations. You guys are great. Thanks for coming on The Cube Sisters. You guys are amazing. Great Storey Love it. Thanks for coming out and celebrating International Women's Day feature today as part of our international women's showcase here in the Cube. Thank you so much. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>Okay. The Cubes International Women's showcase Going on all year, this time featuring International Women's Day The big celebration. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching. Mm mm

(upbeat music) >> Thanks Adam from the studio. Dave, with the next interview, I had a great chance to sit down with Pete, from Microsoft Azure. Talk about 5G and all the advances in the innovation around Silicon and what's coming around under the hood. Obviously Microsoft big hyperscaler, top three cloud player. Let's hear from Pete my conversation and we'll come right back. (upbeat music) Well, we'll come back to the cubes coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021, we're onsite in-person and virtual. It's a hybrid event this year. It's in-person for the first time, since the winter of 2019 lots been passed, a lot's happened and theCube's got to cover it. Our next guest is Pete Bernard, senior director, Silicon and telecom at Azure edge devices, platform and services at Microsoft. Pete, thanks for coming on theCube for our remote coverage. Thanks for coming on. We'll be there live and as well as with the remote community. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, no, that's great to be here. I'm coming here from sunny Bellevue, Washington. I wish a wish I was going to be in Barcelona this year, but like, as you mentioned, I think the last time I was in Barcelona was 2019. So a lot has happened since then. Right? >> Well, let's get into it. First of all, we'll see you on the interwebs and the community, but let, let's get the content storyline after the number one story at mobile world. Congress is the rise of the modern developer overlay on top of this new infrastructure, 5g, what is the edge, super edge, AI edge, whatever we want to call it. It is an enabler. Okay. And it's also leveraging the assets of, of these telecom infrastructures and certainly the pandemic we've had great success, nothing crashed. It saved us. So what's your, what's your view on this? This is the big story. It's the most important story? What's your take? >> Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, a lot has happened and there's been a lot of advancements in this area and I think, you know, the part of what's happened with the pandemic is companies have really accelerated their strategies in this area. In terms of, you know, we have tons of commercial customers that are trying to solve really difficult problems using AI and edge and, and 5g now. So the demand is tremendous and the technology has really advanced quite a bit. And you know, we're, my team is specifically focused on sort of the intersection of 5g edge and AI, and it's sort of bringing together these kinds of existing credible technology advances and it's unlocking some amazing new scenarios and business models for, for customers and partners. For sure. >> So let's get it under the hood a little bit and talk about some of the technical issues. Obviously 5g is enabling a lot of commercial benefits cloud providers like Microsoft Azure is having great edge capabilities now with, with bringing the cloud to the edge, which opens up the obvious gamers Mehta versus AI, AR VR kind of things, low latency, applications, cars, and all that good stuff, all the data coming in and then new use cases. So it's a data problem. It's a typology challenge. It's a new architecture, unpack that for us. What, where are we in this? So. >> So I mean, as you mentioned, I mean, it was kind of an infinite set of problems to be solved. And one of the things that we found was that there was actually a lot of friction out there. It's almost like so many different partners and typologies and ways to put things together. Quite often, we get with a commercial customer and they're like, look, we just need to solve this particular problem in retail or healthcare energy. And so one of the things that we introduced as part of our kind of Azure portfolio is something called Azure percept, which is an end to end system for edge AI development and deployment that now works over 5g and L PWA as well. And so a lot of what we're trying to do as a platform company is help customers and partners kind of expedite and speed that development and deployment of solutions. Because like I said, there's no shortage of demand, but they're quite complex. And as you mentioned, you could have, you know, on-prem solutions, you could have hybrid solutions that talk to on-prem hardware and then go to the cloud. You can go direct to the cloud. But the question is like, how do you put these things together in a secure way? And it get an ROI quickly out of your edge AI deployments. And that's been kind of an interesting challenge. And I think when I talked to a lot of partners, telco partners, especially Silicon partners, were all struggling with how do we expedite, expedite? Because you know, the sooner we can get people to deploy and solve their problems, obviously, you know, the sooner they're happy, the sooner we all get paid. Right? And so that's one of the things we have to be careful of is with all the new technology, how do we really sort of titrate down to, you know, what does it take to actually get things from a POC to deployment as quickly as possible? >> And one of the big things is happening is not seeing the developer ecosystem is coming hardcore into the telco cloud, whatever you want to call it. And it's interesting, you know, the word operators is used a lot, the carriers, the operators, you don't hear that in it and say, you don't say that's the operator, the operators writes it department. So you have cloud native and this operating cultures coming together, dev ops dev sec ops coming to what is a carrier grade operating model, which is like a steady build solid foundation. That's what they expect. So you kind of have this classic OT it collision. And this has been talked about in the edge. What's different though, because now you've got to move faster. You got to have a lot of it like cloud scale with automation and AI at the same time I need full Bulletproof operations. Yeah. >> And so it's, you know, we're trying to expose a consistent developer fabric, you know, to our community. I mean, Microsoft's got millions of developers around the world using lots of, lots of tool, tool chains, and frameworks. And we want to sort of harness the power of that whole developer community to bring workloads and applications onto the telco network, right. In, in environments that they're familiar with. And we're seeing also sort of, you mentioned sort of colliding worlds in the edge world. There's kind of traditional embedded developers that are building cameras and devices and gateways. And then there's a lot of data science, AI developers as well. And what we're trying to do is sort of help both communities sort of learn these skills so that, you know, you have developers that are enabled to do, you know, AI workloads and scenarios and all of the business logic around those things and develop it in an environment, whether it's cloud-based or edge based that they're familiar with. And, you know, so therefore a lot of the complexities of the teleco network itself get sort of obfuscated or abstracted for them. So the developer doesn't have to become a telco expert, right. To build a 5g based camera system for their retail stores. Right. And so that's, that's exciting when we start to merge some of these communities together. >> Yeah. So what would be your message to the operators this year? I mean, obviously the edge is not something you need to educate people on, but they are trying to figure out how to, you know, swap the engine of the airplane out at 35,000 feet, as I say, they got, they want to innovate and this year what's your message. Yeah. >> I mean, there's kind of two things going on. One is yes. I think we're, we are deeply involved helping telcos Cloudify their network and take advantage of 5g and virtualization. And, you know, we have recent acquisitions as a metal switching affirmed and hold that whole thing. So that's, that's that chunk of work that's ongoing. I think the other thing that's happening is really thinking about telcos. We're seeing as a hunger for solutions. And so telcos thinking of themselves as solution providers, not just connectivity providers and, you know, getting into that mindset of saying, we're going to come in and work with this city or this, you know, big retailer and we're going to help solve the problems for them. And we love working with partners like that, that are actually delivering solutions as opposed to pieces of technology. >> What solutions do you think Pete are showing the most promise for helping the telco industry digitally transformed? >> Well, I think on the NGI space, there's a couple of big verticals. I mean, you know, obviously places like agriculture are huge, you know, where you need a wide deployments. We're seeing a lot of areas in around retail, you know, retail environments when I would have leveraged like low latency 5g. One of the pieces of feedback we heard was a lot of retailers actually want less hardware in their physical store and they want to leverage 5g more to get back to the cloud. And then we're seeing, you know, energy sectors, you know, and mining and other kind of difficult to reach areas where you can leverage ciliary networks. So a lot of these verticals are, you know, turning onto the fact that they could get some of their conductivity and edge AI solutions combined together and do some amazing things. >> Right. You just made me think of a question while I got you. I got to ask this because you know, you've brought up 5g and back haul, you know, and people in the, in this business always know backhaul is always the problem. We all know we've been to a concert or a game where we've got multiple bars on wifi, but nothing's loading. Right. So we all know, right. We've seen that that's back haul. That's a choke point. If 5g is going to give me more back haul to essentially another exchange, how has the core of the internet evolved? Because as I started poking around and research and there's more direct connects now, there's not many exchanges. It used to be, we had my west and my east, those are now gone. I'm like, what's going on in the backbone? Does that simple? Is it better or worse? Is that still a good thing? >> Well, yeah. One of the exciting things around kind of the virtualization of what's going on with networking is that we're able to partner with telcos to sort of extend the Azure footprint to help with some of those congestion points, right? So we can, we can bring heavy edge equipment, pretty darn close to where the action is, and actually have direct connections into teleco networks to help them sort of expand their footprint, you know, even farther out to the edge and they can leverage our hyperscaler to, to do that. So that that's a benefit of one of the architectural improvements of 5G around virtualization. >> That's awesome. And I'm looking forward to following up on that great point. And I think it's, it sells a digital divide problem. That's been going on for over a decade, 15, 20 years, this digital divide. Now you got city revitalizations going on. You have, I mean, just the, just the, the digital revitalization in global communities is everywhere. And I think, I think this is going to be an influx point. That's not yet written about in the press now, but I think it's going to be very clear. So, so with all that, I got to ask you the importance of how you guys see an ecosystem for this transformation, because it used to be the telcos ruled the world, and now it's not going that way. They still have a footprint. I mean, everyone, the rising tide helps everybody, as they say, what's the importance of a strong ecosystem in order to drive this nutrient? >> Well, you know, it's definitely a team sport. It's definitely a team sport. And, and you know, Microsoft's been a big partner company for decades, and I think it's something like $8, a part of revenue for every dollar of revenue from the Microsoft generate. So we're heavily invested in our device, builder partners, our telco partners, the ISV community. And, you know, I think what we're trying to do is work with telcos to sort of bring those communities together, to solve these kinds of problems that customers are having. So yeah, it's definitely a team sport. And like I said, the new entrance with some really innovative software platforms, it's an opportunity for telcos, I think, to sort of reinvent and to kind of rethink about how they want to be more agile and more competitive. Again, this will be businesses. >> Okay, great. And have you on, I got it. I got ask you, we've talked about the most important story, obviously 5g edge in AI. I think you nailed it. You're you're in this cross hairs of probably one of the most exciting areas in the tech industry as distributed computing goes that last mile, so to speak pun intended, what, but what's, in your opinion, the most important story that not many people are talking about that should be talking about, what do you think is something that's being written about, but to talk about, but it's super important that that needs to be true. >> Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, a lot of the marketing and talk about 5g is around phones, people talking about their speed on phones. And I think we're finally getting past the discussion of 5g on phones and talking about 5g for like more MTM communications and more, more kind of connecting really trillions of things together. And then that enabled me to is going to be a big, big deal moving forward. And I think that's, we'll start to see probably more coverage of that moving forward. We're on the inside of the industry. So we kind of know it, but I think on the outside of the industry, when people think 5g, they still think phones. And then hopefully that becomes, there's more of a story around all the other pieces being connected with 5g. >> Yeah. And I got to ask you about two quick things before we go open source, openness, interoperability, and security. What, how would you, what's your opinion on those two pillars? >> So I think security is kind of foundational for what we're we've been doing at Microsoft for a long time, whether it's Azure sphere that we're doing for end to end, you know, edge security or any of our security offerings that we have from services perspective. So we're trying to like with Azure percept, we actually build in like TPM encryption of AI models from edge to cloud, as an example of that. So security really is foundational to all of the stuff that we need to do. It cannot be something that you do later or add on it has to be designed in. And I think from an open source perspective, I mean, whether it's our, you know, stewardship of GitHub or the involvement in open source communities, you know, we're, we're totally excited about all the innovation that's happening there and you know, you got to let people participate. And in fact, one of the cool things that's been happening is the amount of developer reach in areas where maybe there isn't, you know, like we've had our build conferences and other Microsoft events. It enables everyone to participate virtually no matter where they are in the world, even if they can't get a ticket to Redmond Washington, and you can still be part of the developer community and learn online and be part of that. >> I think this whole embed developer market's going to come back in and massive volumes of new people as Silicon becomes important. And of course, I can't leave you without asking the Silicon angle question for our team. Silicon is becoming a competitive advantage for whether it's acceleration, offload and or core things, whether it's instance related or use case related, what's the future of Silicon and the telecom and cloud in general. >> For mine. Yeah. So I mean, the advances happening in the Silicon space are fantastic. Whether it's like process advances down to like five nanometers and below. So you're talking about, you know, much lower power consumption, much higher density, you know, packaging and, you know, AI acceleration built in as well as all these other, you know, containerized security things. So that's being driven by a lot by consumer markets, right? So more powerful PCs and phones. And that's also translating into the cloud and for some of the heavy infrastructure. So the leaps and bounds we're seeing even between now and the last MWC in person in 2019 in Silicon has been amazing. And that's going to unblock, you know, all kinds of workloads that could be done at the edge as well as incredible high-performance stuff to be done in the cloud. That's pretty exciting. >> Peter Love that word unblocked, because I think it's going to unblock them that big, you know, rock in the river. It's holding the water back. I think it's going to unleash creativity, innovation, computer science engineering down from Silicon to the modern application developer. Amazing opportunity. I think the edge is going to be the, an awesome area to innovate on. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Sounds good. Thanks for having me. >> People in our senior director, silica telecom as your edge devices for platform services at Microsoft, a lot going on big cloud player, hyperscaler at the edge. This is the final area. In my opinion, that's called the accident habits going to be great innovation. It's part of the cloud cloud is creating massive change in telecom. We've got to cover here in the queue. Thanks for watching. Okay, Dave, that was a great interview with Pete Bernard, senior director, Silicon telecom, Azure edge devices, platform, and services. Microsoft's got all those long titles in the, in the thing, but Silicon is a key thing. You heard my interview wide ranging conversation, obviously with that kind of pedigree and expertise. He's pretty strong, but he, at the end there a little gym on the Silicon. Yeah. Okay. Because that is going to be a power source. You you've been reporting on this. You've been doing a lot of breaking analysis. Microsoft's a hyperscaler they're they're the second player in cloud, Amazon. Number one, Microsoft number two, Google number three, Microsoft. They didn't really say anything. They have something Amazon has got grab a ton, but big directional signal shift there. >> Well, I think it was interesting. It was a great interview by the way, and the things that struck me pizza, and they're focused on the intersection of 5g edge and AI. So AI is all about data-driven workloads. If you look at AI today, most of the AI in the enterprise is done in the cloud and it's modeling, but the future of AI is going to be inferencing at the edge in real time. That's where the real expenses today. And that's where you need new computing architectures. And you're right. I've written about this one of my last breaking analysis on AWS, a secret weapon, and that secret weapon is a new computing architecture. That's not based on traditional x86 architectures. It's based on their own design, but based on arm, because arm is higher performance, lower cost, better price, performance, and way cheaper. And so I guarantee you based on what you just said that, well, Amazon clearly has set the direction with nitro and graviton and, and, and, you know, gravitate on to Microsoft is I think following that playbook. And it's interesting that Pete has Silicon in his title and telecom and an edge they're going after that because it doesn't require new low powered architectures that are going to blow away anything we've ever seen on x86. >> Yeah. I mean, I think that's a killer point. You and I have been covering the enterprise, the old guard rack and stack the boxes. Amazon was early on that clearly winning low power, high density looks like a consumer, like feel in cloud scale, changes the game on economics. And then he also teased out if you squint, there's a lot of stuff to decode. We're going to unpack that video and write probably six or five blog posts there, but he said, 5g is going to change the direct connect. They're already doing it. Microsoft's putting that to the edge, that right in the same playbook as AWS, right on the almost right on the number, put the edge, make it powerful, direct connects connectivity. >> We've seen this before. The consumer piece is key. The consumer leads, we know this and the consumer apple is leading in things like AI and, and Tesla is leading at the edge. That's where you have to look for the innovation. That's going to trickle into the enterprise. And so in the cloud guys, I kicked the hyperscale. You and Sergeant Joe Hall talked about this at the startup showcase that we did was that the cloud guys, the hyperscalers, and a really strong position for the edge. >> I got to tell you, we are on this go to the siliconangle.com. Obviously that's our website, the cube.net. We are reporting on this. It's very nuanced point. But if you look at the cloud players, you can see the telco digital revolution telco. Dr. Is a digital revolution back to you, Adam, in the studio for more coverage, we'll be back at the desk shortly.

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

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "theCube's" coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. We're here in person and remote. This is a physical and virtual. It's a hybrid event, and "theCube's" got wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCube." We've got a great guest here, Adolfo Hernandez, Vice-President, Global Telco Business Unit for Amazon Web Services, AWS. Adolfo, thank you for coming on remotely for this virtual hybrid Mobile World Congress. >> Thanks for having me, John, exciting. >> You have an impressive background in telecom industry. Over the years the technology industry has been great innovation. We've seen, I mean, how many Gs have been we've gone through, but I remember the days when wifi wasn't even around. So (laughing) You got a complete change in the past couple decades. This year, more than ever with the pandemic coming through this, you're starting to see some clear visibility on the trends, and also, this is the first Mobile World Congress in person since 2019, so a lot has changed. What is your view on the marketplace, and what is your message you're telling the telecom industry from Amazon's and your perspective? What do you see? >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, John. This is a fascinating time to be on the cloud, to be at Mobile World Congress. I remember Mobile World Congress 2020 was the first event that actually got canceled. So that was the beginning of the pandemic. And now, here we are, a year and a bit later, working with the leading telecommunications operators with the leading telecommunication sides based on solution providers and what better place that would be in doing that with AWS in this very transformational time in this space. We are supporting telecom operators around the world, as they reinvent communications in many different ways. This is not just one more G, we are definitely transforming the industry. Like any industry, we see telecom operators having to get simplification on their operations and transforming the IT side of the house. So they've go the internal IT, that needs a big transformation, they also got the network IT, everything related with OSS and BSS, and they need to migrate that to the cloud. And we've got a lot of experience by doing that with telcos around the world, to really help them accelerate that journey to the cloud. And we can help them with data center consolidation, migrations and a number of things. So we've got examples like GiffGaff, which is one of the largest MVNOs, and one of the first ones in Europe to go all in on the AWS cloud and they move all the data and the heart of the business there. So once you're sort of dealing with the network, the IT transformation, then you've got to go and look at how do you reinvent and accelerate the delivery of 5G connectivity? Well, that's very current as we're doing now. And we really want to help them because when they accelerate to the cloud, they get more flexibility, they get more agility, they get more cost effectiveness. And if you think about how traditional telco networks were built, where you have to provision a lot of systems you have to provision a lot on the base stations, and then you needed to provision a lot of systems on the Ram side, and then you needed to put aggregation centers, traffic centers, and then you would have the headquarters, and then you would have all the network functions, going from the radio all the way into the center. All of the systems needed to be provision for peak capacity. They sort of famous Mother's Day moment. As you move to the cloud, you can provision on the different parts of the cloud, you can provision on the AWS Outpost, you can provision on locals phone, you can provision on regions, and you leverage right away the experience that we've got on all of our infrastructure, reducing costs, getting a lot of flexibility and being able to embark, just and consume what you need. And, an example of that, it's been a Telefonica Vivo in Brazil. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago, and they've accelerated their move by deploying a 5G standalone cloud native platform. And that gives them a lot of automation capabilities. It gives them faster CI/CD/CT. So really cool stuff that you couldn't do in the old ways of building networks- >> It's interesting you mentioned CI/CD pipeline and developers. To me that's what comes to my mind when I think of AWS, the enablement of developers, now the enterprise. Now you've got the telco cloud and Amazon is not known for being a 5G player, but you guys are enabling a lot of 5G. Could you address that question? How is Amazon web services enabling 5G? What's your answer to that? >> So first of all, I have to say that 5G is an absolutely great example that this is a lot about moving to the cloud. 5G is cloud native, it's cloud friendly. You can virtualize pretty much every function. You can separate every function from the hardware and the software move everything to the cloud. And that is really lending itself to move to a cloud delivery model. As we were talking about earlier, we are enabling people to go and take the AWS infrastructure like AWS Outpost and bringing all the AWS infrastructure, all the services, all the APIs and all the tools that you have on AWS, virtually to any single location. And that allows you to really deploy themes like thousands of cell sites across a run, you couldn't do that before. On the AWS local zones, you can take everything that compute storage databases and a lot of different services. And those are perfect for large metro areas where you need to do a lot of network traffic aggregation, and this makes them really good to deploy in parts of the network core. Again, that's another re-innovation. And then you can look at then the regions and the regions have everything that you need from a compute storage and services perspective. And that those are really well suited for BSS for OSS to keeping the network running and to do all of that. And you can do that today, leveraging existing infrastructure. You don't have to acquire that, you don't have to provision, that you don't have to provision for the peak capacity and then you don't have to install and manage, and I think that's a serious breakthrough for the industry. >> Okay, so let me just capture that, 'cause I heard a bunch of things that I really like, cloud native 5G. What does cloud native 5G mean for the telco industry specifically? >> Well, I think if I had to put it down to one thing, it's just about making it really easy to roll out. And it's about being able to deploy easily to automate easily, so you can free up investment and you can free up resources and you can free up overhead. You can really start taking advantage of all that flexibility and scalability and automation that you get with the cloud and you apply that to a network, and that is the very first time we're able to do that in wireless. And it's just going to give you a lot of advantages. Look at Dish. We made this announcement with Dish that they are moving with one of the industry first 5G cloud native networks out there. Look at the example I talked about earlier, Telefonica Vivo, we're doing that 5G standalone solution. So you're going to be seeing, this is just the beginning, but this is going to be not the end because there's a lot of interest in getting these benefits. >> I saw the Dave Brown announcement with Dish a while back just recently. So I want to ask you, does Graviton processors play a role on the Dish deal? Do you mind answering that? If you comment on that? >> Yeah, I think you might remember Dave Brown being very proud of everything that Graviton2 processors can do in terms of increase in the price performance, helping telco operators, not only with the price performance factor, but also with the energy equation. So it's just really exciting to have that differentiation and being able to deliver that innovation and that value to telco operators in a cloud native 5G network. >> I got to ask you about some of the open source and cloud scale things coming together. That's a big trend I'm seeing here at Mobile World Congress. Openness, multi-vendor, scaling up quickly, provisioning stuff fast and easy, leveraging existing technologies and of course, developer friendly. So with that, I got to ask you, what's all the big deal about with this Open RAN. Obviously radios are key and wireless. What does Open RAN mean? Can you take us through, what's the importance of this? >> Yeah, Open RAN is an industry wide or mostly industry-wide initiative to look into effectively trying to apply some of these open and sharing models to the RAN. You've got vendors and you've got telco operators participating. But what we do and you know as well John, 'cause you've been working with AWS for a while, you know, that we're very customer focused, and 90% of what we do is what we hear that they are trying to solve because it's the things that matter to them. So what we engage with them, what we engage with somebody like Dish, and they tell us that they are interested in Open RAN, we will go and partner with the right partners who can provide the right solution to deliver on that Open RAN. And you've seen we signed agreements with the likes of Nokia to do research and solutions on cloud RAN. You also saw a couple of weeks ago, we did another collaboration announcement with Mavenir, to deliver not only cloud run, but I said of 5G solutions like IMS, the 4G 5G converge packet, or messaging and others. So we are engaging with the complete ecosystem on our customer's behalf to deliver whatever thereafter, and Open RAN is one of these topics and that we're delivering to operators like Deutsche and others in the market. >> Do you think that this new shift with cloud is going to increase the surface area? 'Cause that to me is the big theme I'm seeing what this new shift, as we look at, even telco cloud and the Edge, it's the classic surface area. And this is well known in the security world, but the there's no perimeter anymore. The surface area for security is everywhere. So things have changed. But telco just seems like the edge is expanding, you got satellite, you got space, you got more 5G, more commercial, so much more surface area. What's the impact going to be to the industry and to applications? >> Well, I think what we're seeing is 5G comes out there because there is a need for more data, more bandwidth obviously increased security, new standards, but there is also about latency, latency reduction. And I think that's really going to change the paradigm as we inject these increased responsiveness, these low latency, closer to the edge, and we bring the applications and we bring the compute and we bring storage as we do with wavelength right through to the edge as we are doing with Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI, SK Telecom and operators around the world. This is going to enable a number of transformational use cases for society, whether they are in virtual reality, whether they are with autonomous driving, whether it's about automating and getting more intelligence into manufacturing processes, there is just so much potential to transform society. And it all comes back with these sort of new 5G and some of the themes that enables moving closer to the edge. So as I said, really interesting times. >> Adolfo Hernandez, Vice President of Global Telco Business Unit with Amazon Web Services. Thanks for the great insight here on "theCube" for our Mobile World Congress coverage. Really, really great insight. Thanks so much. >> Thanks, John, delighted to be here. >> If you don't mind, I'd like to just quickly shift gears to something while I got you here on the industry. Adolfo you're very well known in the industry for someone who knows how to turn things around. You've done that in the past. You've been part of growth companies, you've been part of companies that have refocused. Telco has been a big change over people looking at this new opportunity as a growth opportunity. And people are looking at divesting some non-critical divisions and looking at acquisitions. I mean the private equity's on fire right now, and you're starting to see a lot more formation because there's more visibility into territory to take, there's more opportunities to be had. So there's more potential revenue than there is you can do on the cost cutting side. So everyone I talked to who's been in the industry has got their eyes are really popping out of their head, they're saying there's more opportunities if we can reconfigure our resources to take advantage of cloud. You're an expert in this area. For the folks out there who are in the boardrooms, cranking away thinking through how to organize for the cloud scale, what would be your advice to those teams? >> Well, I mean, there's a lot of insight to be had from the experience that AWS we've gained through the years, of doing this IT. And you definitely have to get a top down vision. Obviously it's really got to start at the C-suite, is moving to the cloud for what it bring. Either faster pace of innovation, the cost reduction, the agility. And that's you've got to be thinking about going to the cloud top down. Then the next thing you've got to go and say, "Okay, what are the parts of my operation "that I can go after with cloud? "Where do I start? "Do I start with the IT applications? "Do I start with some new go-to market initiatives? "Do I start by infusing some machine learning capabilities "into existing operations? "Do I start by building a data links "that I can go and monetize, "or I can go on and use to generate "best at customer service, "or I can go and fundamentally transform my networks?" Now, every telco's going to start in in different place, but I would say is you've got to start looking at that agility, that faster innovation, that better use of resources that cloud brings to telco for the very first time in a time in, in decades. And then if you're going to do that, I would strongly recommend people to talk to the provider that's got the capabilities, the broader set of services, the deepest set of services, and the most relevant experience to do that, 'cause we've been doing that in IT, and we've been working on telcos now for five plus years. And we've got pretty much every relationship. And as you know, John, this is really important. In telco you depend on collaborations on ISBs on software vendors, and every vendor out there, every software company out there will develop certainly on AWS. So we would be delighted to engage with them and help them move forward. >> Yeah, and Andy Jassy the CEO of AWS last year at re:Invent really made that the hallmark of his keynote around get those teams together, the executives top-down be a builder, think like a builder. McKinsey just put out a report, trillion dollar opportunities that no one sees yet that's coming. So a lot of emphasis on revenue, new revenue opportunities that are coming. And certainly this has been something that telcos been looking for for a long time. So great opportunity and thank you for sharing your insight. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay this is "theCube's" coverage of ABS Mobile World Congress, 2021, I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

>>Um, okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it. We're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have who's the managing director. Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave. We want to bring him in and get commentary while we end up Dave too. Honestly, the story here is cloud city. We are in the cloud city and all, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming >>On. Thank you, John. And very excited to be here. What Juliet. >>Well, we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert in the year. The only thing standing between bunch of LV and all the great stuff. So a lot of people watching. Thanks for coming on, sir. So you guys got some big news, um, first Erickson partners with you guys on 5g platform, deal with Anthem, as well as, uh, open ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge, a Testament to the industry. I see Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you no stranger to large scale. What's the news. Let's tell us why this Erickson news is so important. Let's start with the Erickson announcement. >>Sure. So John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Erickson for the last few months, uh, the partnership to recent retreat, which is very important to the industry is you're actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not been in isolation. You are in fact in the press release that we have already launched something to get the big telecom Italia in Italy, because you will see that also in the past. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSBs monetize 5g and edge, which is the real team at the moment using Google clouds solutions like the edge computing platform and, and POS, and Erikson's cutting edge 5g components, 5g solutions. And if we can onboard these together at the CSP, such as telecom Italia, that creates massive pain to market efficiency. So that's 0.1 because speed and agility is key John, but then point to it also unlocks a lot of edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, so on, which are already starting to launch together with that. Excellent. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuously cloud native innovation that you just highlighted. John, we are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really time created this cloud native application suite or 5g or whatever. >>Talk about the innovations around cloud, because the message we're hearing him this year at mobile world Congress, is that the public cloud is driving the innovation. And, you know, I can be a little bit over the top. So the telcos are slow. They're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there. They're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept cloud native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that encapsulate that older technology and integrated in. So this is not a rip and replace. Someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the tellers. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >>Smart Antone's photo? We believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is when you talk about that containerization and right once and deploy everywhere type architecture that we are trying to do, that's where the cloud native really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5g solutions with the operators, adjust telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to kick it back again and again, but every deployment, as long as your mantra, genetics and working, you shouldn't be able to have the same experience. >>Yeah, I'm John. I talk all the time in the cube about how developers are really going to drive the edge. You're clearly doing that with your distributed cloud, building out a telco cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving. A lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >>So I think David, first of all, it's a fan best six Sigma in how we are looked in at analytics at the edge, right? So we, uh, we have realized that is a very, very, uh, uh, uh, data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned is there something that we can offer to the edge? Why is that so important in the pandemic era, think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously meeting zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products in manufacturing, that's very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Erickson and a Google cloud carrier gives you that edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to our factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run that AI influence thing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >>Great. Thank you for that. And now the other piece of the announcement of course, is the open, open ran. We've been talking about that all weekend and you know, you well, remember when cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. Of course. Now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component, maybe first talk about the open ran piece, why that's important and how security fits? >>Sure. So first of all, open trend is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple. Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time in the radio layer. We believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and dis-aggregating that radio layer. And why is it so important? 80% of the operators spend globally is on radio. 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that. And if the internet synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware standard for software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in VCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and become still really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution. That's about to get larger in 5g and the capital clarity that 5g needs. >>You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware software with openings of Essex is an extremely important cost dimension to every new site finished that the reason we got to exact open brand was you can now run for a lot of API APIs on the radio net, cetera, that then certainly brings a whole developer community on the radio later. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing, yours and mine experiences at the waist level from the self-doubt. And so that really is what is driving us towards this open grind paper. Come on, we go and >>Got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on open source and the innovation. Um, Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of telco, Dr. She's at a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone 14 years ago was launched. Okay. And you think about open and you mentioned proprietary with the 5g and having Iran be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs increase the surface here of infrastructure. Everyone wins because everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry. And open source is driving. That is Android. The playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with the smart phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at telecom? >>Absolutely. John and the parallel and analogy that you raised is photon. Be believed in the telco world and tossed multi cloud as a unifying software development layer. The app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation, whether it's radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the side of pups, same software planning, everywhere that really allows you that whole development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for systems to come on board. >>That's great stuff. And I was just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at mobile world Congress. I'm all. Thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news and Google regulations on the Erickson Anthem platform, a deal as well as the open Ranton Alliance. Uh, congratulations. Good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on the cube featured segment. So >>Watch that in there. Thank you, John. Thank you. Glad >>To be here. Benching director telecom, industry, solicitor, Google, obviously player. He's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology. They got the chops, Dave, and we're going to now bring this Daniel. Russia says here when to bring up on the stage, Bon Jovi is about to go on behind us Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in cloud city. Dave Bon. Jovi's right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of telco. Dr. And yeah, it was great to see she's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you to Mike. Great to see you. Oh, it's great to be there. We're going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote, but thanks for coming by and closing, >>Swinging by. I never closed down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day-to-day at MWC and in cloud city, really starting to get packed. I mean, everyone's coming in the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. Um, I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening all the buzz about cloud city out there in the hallway. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited with how it's going. >>Well, this is awesome. While we got you here, we want to put you to work being the cube analyst for the segment. You just heard Google. Uh, we broke them in for a breaking news segment. So hard news Erickson partnership. We're in the factory, former Erickson booth. They're not even here, it's now the Calco VR booth, but that's a relation. And then open ran again, open source, you got five G you got open source all happening. What's your take on this? >>You see, you know, there's two big. And I, I talked about it, my keynote this morning, and there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it MWC 21. I certainly wanted to make it about the public cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is open ramp, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and, um, I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, >>Well I loved your keynote. We were here, live. Chloe was here filling in for Dave while David was going to do some research and some breaking stories to you are on stage. And we were talking well, he's like, there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, the money is at the middle of the table and it's changing hands if people don't watch it. And then you onstage that this trillions of dollars, this is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You got operators and builders trying to figure out it feels like dev ops is coming in here. Yeah. I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's >>The, yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the public cloud to double your ARPU without massive cap X expenditure. And I think the CSPs is always viewed to get the increase in ARPU. I got to build out the network. I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our poo, why not? We should do that. Absolutely. >>You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave that arrived the way you're going to become driftwood. As John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they were entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the edge. And that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. It's obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have going to have to embrace cloud native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on it. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. Well, I >>Think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And I think we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to now, historically they haven't had this opportunity historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented. It's available. There's developers out there that know it. Um, and so I think that's the big opportunity and this might be the big use case that they've been looking for with 5g and looking forward to 16th. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSS. >>I think that's an important point because you got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay. Those are pretty safe bets, right. Those guys are going to be around. >>I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. I'm like, um, are you guys nuts? If they're safe, right. Safe >>Bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you got to move fast. Yeah. That's the other piece of it. You've got to change your business model. >>Well, you gotta be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? The snowflake trust Amazon, it sure did to get them where they are. Um, but now that's a >>Great example, John. It really is because there's a company that can move fast, but at the same time they compete with the same time they add incremental value. And so yeah, >>Here, the, you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering telcos. Aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new containers. Do we'll help them manage that operational legacy. But if they don't move, they're going to have an asset. That'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building cap backs and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle Love to get your thoughts on this because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, yeah. Then you can, don't have to try and extract the rents out of the cap ex >>Yeah. I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in telco, right there. I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right. Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their, their investment and uh, for your own benefit, it starts to focus. And we heard, um, all talking about it starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us. Right? Yeah. Well, you're >>Talking about that many times they can do, but you're right. If the conversation hasn't has to go beyond, okay, we're just conductivity. It's gotta be ongoing and be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges. Ah, great. Yeah. Tick that box, right? It's those value added services that you're talking about and it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in a creativity in the industry. It's just >>A blank piece of paper for, well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right. We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving of ads and you're like, how did you write Facebook? But you know, who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother, even your telco, you take your phone with you everywhere. Right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide >>A really great, by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Toby and the investment a hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing. And there's a good, there's a whole new chain, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I don't hold that. We're going and we're going to meet tomorrow. I want, I wanna want to leave that to stay >>In the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That it's, that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that apple, Amazon, Google Facebook now trillion dollar evaluations. It's all about the data and the telcos have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >>There's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them and they certainly can't do without. And we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight it's useless. Right? And so to Togi we announced the launch to Togi, I'll get a little to Tokyo plug in there, right. To Toby is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve and would have been solved already. >>But I think the key is leveraging the public cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provides to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue. Right. And you know, we heard some keynotes from GSA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep. It's not fair. That's like right. South complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they are, they're happy to give you more. >>Yeah. And I think that's the message about the assets do, um, well, one thing I will say is this mobile world Congress is that we've been having a lot of fun here in cloud city. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote of spring to your staff, cloud cities. Beautiful. Spectacular here. Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip. So far, >>Number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered and, and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a blind, um, you know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and, and that was really fun, but yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes. The attendance has reduced, um, you know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups and yeah, the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right. The senior leadership teams are in the booth or having meetings, running amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the public cloud. I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off, I think I'm right in the right moment. Awesome. Do you think that, >>Do you think that they'd think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line struggled and then winners. Yeah. Big time tailwind booming. Obviously the zooms of the world telcos did well. They were up and running. Uh, this, this was good. You think we might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >>Yeah. I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation where digital telco we're digitally enabled, but I think the pandemic really tested this. Right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM or do you need to go to a store in person to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver Sims, all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot right. Agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big telemedicine booming. So >>If you were in a digital business during the pandemic in general, you're out of business maybe unless you were telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh, if >>We don't, I mean, I am not kidding. Right. As an ex CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, right. In some country once a month on Tuesday between 10 and two. And I'm like, how are you doing business? Like that? That's like the dark ages. >>Yeah. This is where the crypto guys got it right. With know your customer. Right. >>Because they have the data. Well, there's a lot of things that come in wrong. We don't want to get the whole show on that, but then you have great to have you drop biopsy Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy Patriots fan. We'd love it. Well, >>Yeah. I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi. Right. Um, we knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. Um, that, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging. Like the way things have been done in telco kind of just shattering the glass ceiling and lots of different ways. Right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me. Right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl? Oh, we're punk >>Rock. They're rock and roll. Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten the clash >>Right. Black flag. Right. I'm a little bit old. >>Accessible. Still >>Edgy. Yeah. So really excited to get them here. Um, I've met him before. Um, and so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk. So >>Yeah, it could be inspiration off after you've talked to space, space X and kind to star lake. >>Right. I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites. And >>I think that's really interesting for >>Rural right. In telco. Right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, um, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower. I think, I mean, that's an interesting idea right there. It's exciting. It's exciting. >>He's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming into this issue. Why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, Hey, you're a B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. Yeah. I think eventually the generation shifts >>It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it. Yeah. Great, >>Great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >>Awesome team. I'm psyched to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership has said. Yeah. >>Cuba's keep us rocking inside the cloud city. The streets of the city are packed in here. All stuff. Great stuff. Thanks for coming on. Thanks. Bon Jovi is here. We've got a shot. A bunch of we do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? Yup. There it is. Okay. He's about to come on stage and uh, we're gonna take a break here. We're gonna take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

(upbeat music) >> Thanks so much, and we're back here live. Live, I love saying that, at cloud city, at Mobile World Congress. Barcelona at the Fira. It's just been crazy here all week. We've been going wall to wall coverage. Am really excited to have John Savill here, as a principal cloud solutions architect at Microsoft. John, welcome to Barcelona, man. Come on in the cube. >> Oh yeah, thank you for having me. I'm not quite getting that Barcelona vibe here, but seems great. >> Well, you were just tell you look great. You just did an iron man up in Idaho, so awesome. Congratulations on completing that and many more in your future, I'm sure. You have a really interesting background. You know, in addition to your amazing cardiovascular capabilities. As a cloud architect, you've got a long history, 20 plus year history, you know, digging in at Microsoft. In your spare time you write books on architecture and you've got a great YouTube channel, a lot of subscribers. Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so it really started out 25 years ago. I was playing around with windows and technology and I just tried to share information. So I created a website artifact.com and I wrote magazine articles. And then people asked me to write some books and it's really evolved from there. And the most recent thing is actually the YouTube and I really enjoy doing the videos. It's a lot more rapid in terms of creating the content and sharing it, whereas the book takes six months. You'd write the book and then with technology moving as fast as it is, especially the cloud, you write a book on the cloud and then it's published and it's out on date. And so now this ability to create the content and get it to people a few minutes later, it's just phenomenal. So it's my hobby and my passion. And it's the best of both worlds for me. >> I love a CICD of books. Okay, Let's get into it. We've been talking all week about and actually drawing a lot of parallels with the traditional enterprise IT business and what's happening in Telco In one stop I just talking about the shifts in responsibilities for architects and the organizational roles, when you go from, you know, on-prem, everything's inside of a virtual machine, when you go to the cloud, there's a lot more optionality. As you just pointed out, things are a lot faster. What have you seen in your experience what's different? What should we be thinking about? >> Yeah, so exactly, as you said, it on premise really everything is a virtual machine. It's an OS that you have to manage, like the thing about the patching, the security, the policy. And then I have to put things inside this virtual machine, but that's my unit of work. Some coming to the site and look at containers on premises. And then they struggle with managing one even orchestrator. So I'm managing Kuberneters and ITs and there's work there. When you move to the cloud, you have all these other types of service. You think about serverless kind of at an end of a spectrum where, hey, I just have some code. I want to run based on some event, maybe a schedule, maybe a web hook, some trigger, some event happens. And I only pay for when it's doing work. But what I care about is my code or my focus is this is my code. I don't care about any of the other stuff that makes it work. I just can focus on my code, but you still have the options. I can do containers. I can do virtual machines if that's what I want to do. But my responsibility can really laser focus just on the business value. Generally as a company, I don't really care about managing an OS or patching, I want to see what differentiates my business from someone else. And when I moved to the cloud, I can shift my focus to just that business value and let the cloud vendor take care of the responsibility of keeping the things running, enables me to shift and just focus on value, which is key. >> And as a cloud vendor, that allows you to price by consumption in a very transparent way, and as a customer, now I know what I'm paying for and I can align that investment as you were just pointing out with the business value. >> Oh, absolutely. Right, so again, on premises, we have bits of equipment. We have this server, with memory and CPU, and generally we have different usage. We have peaks and we have lows. We have the same bit of hardware I'm paying for all of the time, we have disaster recovery. I'm paying for that all of the time. If I have customers all over the world, well, speed of light is speed of light. I have to wrap boxes all over the world in the cloud. I can have services dynamically scale based on the need, based on the work coming in. I can scale the amount of resource% I have available to meet that. So I'm optimizing my costs to only pay for what I actually need at any given moment. And of course we have regions all over the world. So suddenly now I can be super close to my customers. So its right, it completely changes how the companies can think about spending the money to only spend what they have to spend on what they want to spend it on. >> Yeah so the last decade clearly the aha moment for enterprise tech, just in terms of really understanding those benefits. And we saw it, you know, it actually first hit right around the financial crisis. When you know, all the CFOs said, "hey, shift your CapEx to OPEX immediately. And then we came out of that downturn and people said, "hey, this stuff, this cloud stuff actually is really good. Let's start to really change our business models around it." And, and there's a lot of relevance for Telco here. And you've talked about cloud as a, a flat layer, three network, what do you mean by that? >> Yes, if you think about on premises, you have bits of wire. Now that might be copper wire, it might be fiber, but you have these bits of wire that connects stuff. And I can think about connecting different bits of staff, to different network cards to enable me to separate systems and how they can communicate to each other and segregate. So that's how I've always thought about on premise is that why I separate stuff. A little bits of wire connecting different bits of network card. Well in the cloud, you don't have that. It's all software defined networking. If I think about a construct where I put my resources like a virtual network, it's just an IP of the layer three network there are no bits of wire. I can plug into different places. There are no different physical network cards. So we have to shift our thinking, and it can be very difficult. If I'm used to being an on-prem network admin, I'm used to the idea of the lines and cables and multiple nicks with different bits of copper plugged into them. When I go to the cloud, I have to shift that and think it is this flat layer three network. And when I want to segment things, now it's software defined networking walls, networks security groups, maybe botched appliances that can inspect the traffic. But it's a huge shift in thinking to how we now segregate and control how that networking actually functions. And of course, if you then want to extend that to hybrid connectivity, well, how does that then map to why my on-prem network? And I want to extend that to make it completely seamless into the cloud. >> Yeah, I don't want to come back to that, but I want to ask you about some of the organizational roles. 'Cause you've been at this for a couple of decades. So you've seen, you know, you remember the days of when you know, the expertise in managing a LAN a report was, you know, highly valued. It's not anymore. And so your colleagues, your peers in the industry, the architects that are your customers, they have to reinvent themselves. And that that's really now beginning to happen in Telco. So I wonder if you could talk about your thoughts, how you're thinking about cloud in telecom. >> Yeah, so I think what's happening is you still need skills. What shifts is, what is the type of skills you talked about LANs and managing storage. Well, you don't manage LANs anymore, but in the cloud, there's different types of storage service. There's different performance characteristics. IOPS throughput capacity. So we have to shift how we actually think about those skillings so I still need to architect accordingly. It's only to make sure I have the right characteristics, that it's just a different unit of work. I'm working with different tools now. And I think from a kind of telco perspective, they're really looking now, well, how can we leverage the cloud, Telcos in particular, have a huge pressure around very low latency. They have to be close to their customers. They deliver critical services. You can think about emergency services. They have to have super high availability. That's when you start moving to the cloud, they can now embrace the fact that well cloud has these various constructs like different physical structures within independent power calling communications. They have different regions, so I can be close my customers and kind of replicate between them. Through the Telco, you have to kind of firstly think about, well, okay, I still need to adhere to all of these core requirements. That quality of service, giving my customers a great experience, but now we have these different tools available in how we can actually deliver that. I think also a big shift is from a security perspective. I think especially Telcos love the idea of the network. The network is the be all and end all of security. When you start using the cloud network is still super important, but identity becomes this huge factor as well, because now I don't have this moat around my physical box. That copper wire doesn't have this disconnect. I'm in the cloud as so now we think about, well, how does the identity play into actually securing our resources? Because now we're going to have all these different cloud services that are going to talk to each other. We need to do that in a secure way. So the identity becomes this much bigger part of my architecture networks still super important, but now identity bumps up there as well. And I think that that's a key thing for Telcos is that there's a shift there. >> Yeah, well on speaking of shifts, a big conversation and Theme CubeCon this year was the shift left with security and designing security in. And really when you think about infrastructure as code, the programmable network, and you combine that with the cloud, I mean, Microsoft has gone through the greatest transformation of any tech company in the history of tech. And it did so with a cloud first mentality. And now you see that cloud expanding. It's clearly on prem you're bringing that you're connecting those, but now the edge. 5g networks and the it's very, you know, super exciting, you know, new compute architectures and new programming models. So this you're essentially building this abstraction layer that developers can really take advantage of having consistency across all those physical locations, really hiding the underlying complexity. I wonder if you could comment on that. >> Not, exactly. You're a 100% correct. So right Azure was a cloud service. So we had this cloud and we had services operating in that cloud, app services, data services, machine learning but you still have requirements for on-premises components. You talk about the edge. Well, hey, I may be, I'm using a private wireless network. I have my RAD, I have the core kind of packet switching components. Well, I still want things on premises then I need compute, I need workers running on my edge, close to where the data's being generated IOT sensors. What Azure has is yes, it has the public cloud services. Then it has things like Azure like edge, Azure stack hub, Azure like HCI that let me actually have things on premises in different form factors. But the can now run consistently like Azure services. I can manage them through Azure services, policy, security constructs, identity constructs, and then with things like if I have Kubernetes any kind of Kubernetes CNCF-compliant, I can actually now sync Azure arc, manage it through the cloud and I can deploy SQL manage instance, Postgres hyper-scale, machine learning, app services, serverless functions now running on-prem. So as a developer, as an architect, I create my solution, but now I can run it in the cloud, I can run it on premises. I don't have to make that conscious decision and do things differently. If my requirements change, I can move or do hybrid. So it really is a game changer. The customer gets the choice. I can leverage these technologies. I can write code and architect solutions and then run it where makes the most sense for me. >> Yeah, and we just got a couple of minutes here, just as we saw new applications emerge in the cloud, we're going to see new applications emerge at the edge. The developers will win the edge, I've said it many times. I'll give you the last thoughts, John. >> No, I just think it's a, it's an amazing, exciting time. I mean, you talked about kind of the whole shift left more and more companies are moving into kind of the whole infrastructures code and the dev ops models. And now we see security embedded all the way at the start of our pipeline. But I really just think this is the time now as a customer, as a Telco, you do have this fantastic set of capabilities available to you in the cloud, but you're always going to have, I think that on-premise is component as well. So you don't have to compromise. I don't have to say, well, I'd love to use this service, but wow, I had this anchor or I had this requirement on prem. I can use the same services. You have that complete choice. You can operate in the same way, the same pipelines, the same dev ops, the same security and one where it makes the most sense for you. I mean, it's a fantastic time. >> Well, John, thanks so much for virtually coming into Barcelona. We've got this great hybrid event, good luck in your career and in your Ironman competitions, all the best to you. Thank you. >> Thank you for having me, the pleasure. >> It's been our pleasure. So we're here, live at the, the Fira in Barcelona. We're in Cloud City. I'll tell you, I'll set it up. It's not like jammed packed where you can't move, you know, good thing we're in, still in the COVID, but it's like the post isolation economy here, but we're really excited to be sharing with you. We're going to go back to the studio to Adam Burns right now.

(light music) >> Okay, we're back here in theCube On The Floor. We're at Cloud City thanks to everyone in the studio. We're here and we bring all the action from the floor. Danielle Royston is about to walk on. We got a great remote interview. Also it's a physical event but it's virtual, so it's a hybrid event with people coming in remotely we've got Mark Collins, Senior Vice President of Commercial Product Management ZephyrTel. Mark, thanks for coming on. You're head of the Product Management, you're responsible for product vision. Calling in, or remote-in in from Ireland great to see you, wish you were here. >> Thank you, John, I wish I was there, too. >> We had a great chat yesterday with Michael a CEO of the company. Public Cloud is a big driver what you guys are part of, it's a sea change. For some of the world, it's an obvious shift it's been going on for a long time, in Telco it's new. What's the story give us the vision of the product. >> So, ZephyrTel are actually a provider of multiple products within the Telco space, and one of our visions is very much about bringing those products into a marketplace capability that Telco's can start engaging in and interacting with them much more simply than they would've been with their vendor suppliers in the past. >> What's the difference between Cloud on premises and in the Public Cloud for Telco, what's the psychology right now of Telco? Most people have lifted and shifted and re-platformed with the cloud in the enterprise side, certainly that's been going on for many many years, now you're seeing people re-factor their business in the cloud and get really neat new advantages. Not just cost optimization and benefits with the re-platforming, or lift and shift, but they got new capabilities. Where's the Telco adoption on this spectrum of re-platforming and re-factoring the public cloud? Early, are they toe in the water? Are they jumping in? What's happening? >> I think very very early like, I've worked in the Telco space for the last 20 years, and certainly for the last five, all of the buzz has been about moving to cloud native solutions (applause in the background) But a lot of the Telco vendors that are right there are still very much looking ahead in supplying solutions (dialogue drowned out by thunderous applause) >> Okay, DR just walked in, sorry to interrupt, letting the folks know that we've got the big entourage here in Cloud City, Danielle Royston, is the CEO of TelcoDR and the CEO of Totogi. And we've started to see TelcoDR, DR being digital revolution or Danielle Royston, however you want to look at the DR part of it. But really a game changer in the Telco industry put a real dent in the universe here with Cloud City, Danielle Royston, just a little entourage there and a cheer for her coming back to her home base here, MWC, see where the Cube is, and where the main stage is Mark, sorry to interrupt you there, continue. So, are they there? Are they jumping in? Is there fear? Are they building? Are they just still operating? We just had a little segment discussing like, the difference between being a builder versus an operator like the confluence of war time and peace time. >> I actually think there's a lot of fear, like I think if you look at the way Telco look at clouds, one of the biggest blockers that I think a lot of them face is that they have this perception that their network, and what they provide as a solution to customers is a stable business model. Like there's been very little input as from the outside to force them into replacing some of their outdated core technologies and they have some very very legacy views on how they model TCO in the future cost to their business which, unless they change those attitudes, some of what they can benefit from the public cloud is going to be lost on them. >> You mentioned legacy, one of the things I want to get your thoughts on quickly is that, the notion of it's always been a customized game, I call it the OT world, you know, operating technologies versus IT, information technology. Different mindsets, you know, one's very IP driven write software, open source now, drives that but you have a lot of legacy, and they build custom solutions when the world seems to be spinning towards open and standardized. What's your take? >> Yeah, I see that as a huge challenge when you look at what Telcos want from a software perspective. Like, they want products, but they still have this huge expectation that their specific needs are going to be addressed, right? And the challenge I see there is that when you talk about customization, most of the time that drives a divergence away from what a product is, to a bespoke solution, which creates a huge number of issues for service providers when it comes to how they do upgrades in the future, or for that matter, what they ultimately have to pay the vendors for the professional services to build those customizations. >> Talk about the Telco's consideration for interfaces, how they should handle interfaces and other standards because, it's an EPI economy, we know that, but now as things start to get more interconnected integration is going to be a big thing, especially with the Edge becoming a much more of a competitive and dynamic, and people care about the Edge cause it's consumer, it's education, it's healthcare it's not just some device on a network it's actually, societal impact, social change, real value. >> Yeah, no, I 100% agree, like I mean, you could probably credit Telcos for what been the way of the normal for network in the last 20 years with regards to all the standardization that's happened in bodies like 3GPP, but I guess in the IT world or in the domain of how you actually deliver capabilities to your end customer, or even in the experiences that you develop for your consumers. A lot of that has been bespoke development, software plugged together, built on premise and not necessarily taking advantage of the openings that you see on the RAM and on the network side of things >> Mark, I want to ask you while I have you here I know we've got a couple of minutes left, but I want to get your thoughts on this since it's been since February 2019 since Mobile World Congress had an event so in dog years or internet years, whatever metaphor you want to use, it's been a long time and a lot of time has passed. What's your assessment of where the industry is? >> I think all you have to do is look back at the last year and a half and see the sea change that has happened in a huge amount of industries around how they've reacted to the ability to deliver new capabilities very quickly on the back of what happened to us with COVID. And I think Telco has in a lot of cases, have been at the forefront of providing network experiences for people as they move to working from home, but they haven't necessarily had the same agility or the same ability to make change when it comes to the customer experiences in the products and services that they build on top. And I think they need to take advantage of what everybody else has been able to do with public clouds in the last year. >> Yep, and I think infrastructures code changes everything DevOps, which is a cloud term, is development and operations, they have to work together, now it's DevSecOps, so I think the same thing is going to happen to Telcos and I'm a big fan and bullish on the Telcos business model because if you embrace the change, if you ride that wave, and, right, you're not going to be driftwood and that is all about keeping the change going and keeping it real relative to the value, because Telco saved us during COVID. Right? So the operational aspect of the network didn't crash, we had some bad zoom meetings here and there but for the most part, people lived and they survived. So, got to give props to that, and that's the purpose now it's next level. Edge applications have to come on board faster, we need more software. How does that happen in your mind? >> I think a lot of that has to come from vendors like ourselves who start providing a different way and a different approach for how operators can consume the software that they purchase, right? Like, if they keep working with the same vendors that they have today, they'll spec their requirements they'll write down what they need and they'll ask somebody to build it for them and that'll take a long time. By the time they've actually got it built, it'll probably be the wrong thing, or likely will have moved on if you look at the pace of change that we have seen in the last year with COVID and everything else. And I think a cloud specialist vendor like ourselves can come and provide a huge amount of value to an operator when we're building a solution that many operators can consume within our marketplace products. >> Awesome. Mark, great to have you on, 30 seconds left, put a plug in for ZephyrTel what are you working on, you hiring? You've got 30 seconds, go. >> We're hiring, we're growing, we're presenting a number of different solutions in Mobile World Congress, looking at both customer experience in IOT and a number of different areas where we're heavily involved. Absolutely come seek out the people from ZephyrTel that are there and look at the demos and meet with the guys on the ground they've got a huge amount of information to share. >> Awesome. Mark Collins CEO Vice President of Commercial Product Management, really changing the game, making service providers get the value from the network and making it easy for having meaningful exchange that's positive impact, changing the world, and really making it happen. Of course, let's send it back to the studio, Adam and the team.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back here at theCUBE on this floor in CLOUD CITY, the center of all the action at Mobile World Congress. I'm John Brown your host. Michael current CTO of Virta San is here with me remote because this is a virtual event as well, this is a hybrid event. The first industry hybrid event, Greg would be back in real life on the floor, Michael, you coming in remotely. Thanks for joining us here in the cube in cloud city. >> Thanks for having me and said the beer. >> We were just talking on camera about. He went to Michigan and football, all that good time while we were waiting from Adam to pseudo great stuff, but let's get into what you guys are doing. You've got a great cloud news, we're going to get to, but take a minute to explain what you guys do first. >> So Virtasant helps organizations of any size thrive in the cloud. So we have a unique combination of proprietary technologies, such as our cloud optimization platform that we'll talk about in a minute and a global team of experts that helps companies make the most of the cloud from getting to the cloud and building the cloud to optimizing the cloud all the way to managing the cloud at scale. >> Well, you got a lot of experience dealing with the enterprise, a lot of customer growth over the years, great leader. The cloud dynamic here is the big story at mobile world congress, this year, the change over, I won't say change over per se, but certainly the shift or growth of cloud on top of telco, you guys have some news here at mobile world congress. Let's share the news, what's the big scoop? >> So we have an automated cloud optimization platform that helps companies automatically understand your usage patterns and do spend fully, automatically. And we focus first on AWS is the biggest cloud provider, but starting this week, we wanted announces we're actually going live with our GCP product, which means people who are on the GCP cloud platform can now leverage our platform to constantly understand usage patterns and spend and automatically take action to reduce spend. So we typically see customers save over 50% when they use our platform. So now GCP customers can take advantage of the same capabilities that our AWS customers take advantage of every day. >> Talk about the relationships as you get deeper. And this seems to be the pattern I want to just unpack it. You don't mind a little bit the relationship with Google and this announcement and Amazon you're tightly coupled with them, is it more integration? Talk about what makes these deals different and special for your customers? What's what's, what's about them. What's the big deal? >> Well, I think for us, obviously we think that, you know, the public cloud's the future, right? And obviously cloud city and all the different companies there agree with us, and we think that much like, you know, you don't, you don't generate your own electricity. We don't think you're going to generate you're to you're going to build your own technology infrastructure. For the most part, we think that pretty much all compute will be in the public cloud. And obviously AWS is the market leader in the largest cloud provider in the, but you know, GCP, especially with telecom has some compelling offerings. And we think that, you know, organizations are going to want choice. Many will go multicloud, meaning they'll have 1, 2, 3 of the big providers and move workloads across those. But even those who choose one cloud provider, you know, each cloud provider has their strengths and different companies will choose different providers. And they're all, you know, they've all got strong capabilities and their uniqueness. So we want to make sure that whether, you know, an organization goes across all cloud providers or they choose one that we can support them no matter what the workloads look like, and so for us, you know, developing deep relationships with each of the public cloud providers, but also, you know, expanding our full set of capabilities to support all of them is critically important because we do think that there's going to be, you know, a handful of large public cloud providers and obviously AWS and GCP are among them. >> Yeah, I mean, I talk to people all the time and even, you know, we're an Amazon customer, pretty robust cloud in the bills out of control is what's, what's this charge for it. There's more services to tap into, you know, it's like first one's on me, you know? And then next thing you know, you're, you're consuming a hell of a lot of new services, but there's value there and there's breaths a minute for the cloud, we all love that. But just as a random aside here, I want to get your thoughts real quick, if you don't mind, this idea of a cloud economist has become part of a new role in an organization, certainly SRS is DevOps. Then you starting to get into people who actually can squint through the data and understand the consumption and be more on the economics side, because people are changing how they report their earnings. They're changing how they report their KPIs based upon the usage and costs, and... What, is this real? what's your thoughts on that? I know that's a little random, but I want to get your, get your thoughts on that. >> Well, yeah, it's interesting that that's been a development. What I will say is, you know, the economics of cloud are complicated and they're still changing and still emerging, so I think that's probably more of a reaction to how dynamic the environment is then kind of a long-term trend. I mean, admittedly for us we hope that, you know, a lot of that analysis and the data that's required and will be provided by our platform. So you can think about it as, you know, a digital or AI powered cloud economist. So I don't, I don't know, hopefully our customers can use the platform and get everything they need and they won't need to go out and hire a cloud economist. That sounds expensive. >> Well, I think one of the things that sounds like great opportunities to make that go away, where you don't have to waste a resource to go through the cost side. I want to get your thoughts on this. This comes up all the time, certainly on Twitter, I'm always riffing on it. It comes up on a lot of my interviews and private chats with people about their, their cloud architecture, spend can get out of control pretty quickly. And data is a big part of it. Moving data is always going to be... Especially Amazon and Google, moving data in and out of the cloud is great. Now with the edge, I just talked to Bill Vass at a Amazon web service. He's the VP of engineering. You can literally bring the cloud to the edge and all the clouds are going to be doing this, these edge hubs. So that's going to process data at the edge, but it's also going to open up more services, right? So, you know, it's complicated enough as it is, spend is getting out of control. And it's only seems to be getting out of control even more. How do you talk to customers? I'd want to not be afraid they want to jump in, but they also want to have a hedge. Yeah, what's your, what's your take on your story? >> I think there's a lot of debate right now as to whether or not, you know, moving to the cloud from a cost perspective is cost-effective or more costly. And there's a pretty healthy debate going on at the moment. I think that the reality is, you know, yes, the cloud makes it easier for you to take on new services and bring on new things, and that of course drives spend, but it also unlocks incredible possibilities. What we try to do is help organizations take advantage of those possibilities and kind of the capabilities of the cloud while managing spend, and it's a complex problem, but it's a solvable problem. So for us, we think that, you know the job of the cloud providers is to, you know, continue to innovate and continue to bring more and more capability to bear so that organizations can transform through technology, the job of the teams using that technologies is to really leverage those capabilities, to build and to innovate and to serve their customers. And what we want to do is enable them to do that in a cost-effective manner, and we believe, and we have data to prove that if you do public cloud, right, it's cheaper because you know, those, those organizations, you know, much like, you know, at the turn of the industrial revolution, factories used to have their own power plants because you couldn't effectively reliably and kind of cost-effectively generate power at scale. Obviously no one does that now. And I think with the cloud providers, that's the same thing. I mean, they're investing in proprietary hardware, tons of software, tons of automation. They're highly secure. You know, at the end of the day, they're going to always be able to provide a given capability at a lower cost point. Like, of course they need to make profit. So there's a bit of margin in there, but, you know, at the end of the day, we think that both the flexibility and capability of it combined with their ability to operate at scale gives you a better value proposition, especially if you do it right. And that's what we want to focus on is, you know, the answer is there. You just need the right data and the right intelligence to find it. >> Totally, I totally agree with you. In fact, I had a big debate with Martine Casada at Andreessen Horowitz about cloud repatriation, and he was calling his paradigm. Do you focus on the cost or the revenue? And obviously they have Dropbox, which is a big example of that, and I even interviewed the Zynga guys and they actually went back to Amazon, although they didn't report that, but I'm a big believer that if you can't get the new revenue, then you're in cosmos then, and there are the issues, but again, I don't want to go there right now. I'll talk about that another time, but I want to get your, I want to get the playbook, so first of all, I love what you do, I think it's an opportunity to take that heavy lifting away from customers around understanding cost optimization. A lot of people don't know how to do it. So take us through a playbook. What are some best practices that you guys have seen to help people figure this out? What do you say to somebody, help me, Michael, I'm in a world of hurt, what do I do? What's the playbook? Can you give some examples of day in the life? >> Sure, so I think, I think the first thing is know what you're spending money on which sounds obvious, but you know, there's cloud environments are complicated, especially at scale. There's hundreds of thousands of skews and lots of different usage patterns. And I think the first thing is understand what you're spending money on. Number two is understand what you're getting for that spend. So, you know, what value are you driving with that spend? And then number three is put the information in the hands of the people who can do something about it. And I think that is, is one of the things that we really focus on is, you know, we built our product from an engineering focus first. It was engineers solving the problem of understanding how to keep cloud costs in control. And so our whole principle is give the people, working with the technology, the data to make good decisions and give them the power to act on it. And so, you know, a lot of companies say, "Oh, we're spending more over here. Or maybe we should look at that." But, but what we believe is actually be specific, where are you spending money? Where exactly are you spending too much? And what should you do about that? And give that information to the people who can take action, which are the engineers. And then lastly make it important in the organization because there's a ton of competing priorities. And what we've found is that, you know, where there's leadership support there's results. And so I think if you do those four things, you know, results will follow. Now, obviously, you know, you need to understand specific utilization patterns and know what to do with different kinds of resources and all of that stuff is complicated, but there are certainly solutions out there. Ours included who helped you with that. So if you get the other four things, right, plus you have some help, you can keep it under control and actually not just keep it under control, but operate in an environment that's much cheaper than hosting all this technology yourself and much more flexible. >> That's a great point, I mean, the fact that you mentioned earlier, the engineering piece that is so true people I've talked to, you mean our experiences and it's pretty common. The DevOps team tends to get involved in things like making sure you're buying reserve instances or all kinds of ways to optimize patterns, and that's also an issue, right? I mean, first of all, it makes sense that they're doing it, but also engineering time is being spent on essentially accounting at that point. Demonstrates the shift, I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying that got to be realistic. It's a time sink for the engineering when they're not engineering accounting, or should they, this is a legit question, it's not so much they should or shouldn't, I mean, if you say to someone, "Hey, you're paid to build and write software and you're spending your time solving accounting problems." That's obviously a mismatch. But when you talk about SREs and DevOps, Michael, it's kind of what might not be a bad thing, right? I mean, so how do people react to that? Are they kind of scratching their head on the same way? Or are you guys the solution to that? >> Well, I think that at first they are, but for us, at least it's, you know, we don't want them trying to understand the intricacies of a savings plan or understanding kind of the different options for compute instances. What we want them to do is we give them all the information. So our approach is give them all the information. They need to quickly make a decision, let them make a decision, like push a button and then let the change happen automatically. So if you think about it, you know, the amount of time they spend is, is a minute. That's the goal because then we can use their expertise. So it's not a finance person or an accountant doing research and making decisions that may or may not make technical sense and then looping in a bunch of people and they all talk, and then all that, that kind of whole process it's now here is a data-driven observation and recommendation. You have context to say yes or no, if you push the button and then you say, yes, then, you know, the change happens. If you say, no, the system learns. >> It's building right into the pipeline and they're shifting left to security, it's the same concept. It's really a great thing. I really think you're onto something big.,I love this story. It's kind of one of those things where reality's there. Michael, we've got 30 seconds left. I want to get your thoughts to share what put a plug in for the company, what you guys are doing, what are you looking at higher? You got a 30 second plug, go plug the company, what do you got? >> Well, you know, we think that, you know, for any organization, big or small, trying to make the most of the public cloud and be cloud first, you know, we, we bring a unique set of expertise, automation, and technology capabilities to bear, to help them thrive in the cloud and make the most of it. So, you know, obviously we would love to work with any company that, that wants to be cloud first and fully embrace the public cloud. I think we've got all the tools to help them thrive. >> Yeah, and I think, I think the confluence of business logic technology engineering working together is a home run. It's only going to get more stronger, so congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Adam, back to you in the studio for more action, theCUBE is out, we'll see you later.

>> Okay. We're back here. theCube and all the action here in Mobile World Congress, cloud city, I'm John ferry, host of the cube. We've got a great remote interviews. Of course, it's a hybrid event here in the cube. And of course, cloud city's bringing all the physical face-to-face and we're going to get the remote interviews. Peter Adderton, founder, chairman, CEO of Mobile X Global. Nicholas Gerrard, founder and CEO of OxyGo. Gentlemen, thank you for coming in remotely onto the cube here in the middle of cloud city. You missed Bon Jovi last night, he was awesome. The little acoustic unplugged and all the action. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right, Peter and Nicholas, if you don't mind, just take a quick 30 seconds to set the table on what you guys do, your business and your focus here at Mobile World Congress. >> So I'll jump in quickly. Being the Australian, I'll go first, but just quick by way of background, I founded a company called Boost Mobile, which is one of the, is now the fourth largest mobile brand in, in America. And I spent a lot of time managing effort in that, in that space and now launching Mobile X, which is kind of the first cloud AI platform that we're going to build for mobile. >> Awesome. Nicholas. >> So I'm a founder of a company called, Ox Fuel where we do is basically a telecommunity service platform for brands to basically incorporate telecom as part of their services and learn from their customers through what we call a telecom business intelligence. So basically making sense of the telecom data to improve their business across retail, financial services or in-demand economy. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for the setup. Peter, I want to ask you first, if you don't mind, the business models in the telecom area is really becoming, not just operate, but build and build new software enabled software defined just cloud-based software. And this has been a change in mindset, not so much a change so much in the actual topologies per se, or the actual investments, but as a change in personnel. What's your take on this whole cloud powering the change in the future of telco? >> Well, I think you've got to look at where the telcos have come from in order to understand where they're going in the future. And where they've come from is basically using other people's technology to try to create a differentiation. And I think that that's the struggle that they're going to have. They talk about wanting to convert themselves from telcos into techcos. I just think it's a leap too far for the carriers to do that. So I think we're going to see, you know, them pushing 5G, which you see they're doing out there right now. Then they start talking about open rand and cloud and, and at the end of the day, all they want to do is basically sell you a plan, give you a phone attached to that and try to make as much money out of you as they possibly can. And they disguise that basically in the whole technology 5G open rand discussion, but they really, I don't think care. And at the end of the day, I don't think the consumers care, their model isn't built around technology. The model is built around selling your data and, and that's their fundamental principle and how they do that. And I've seen them go through from 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. Every G we see come out has a promise of something new and incredible. But what we basically get is a data plan with the minutes. Right? >> Yeah, yeah I totally right on. And I think we're going to get into the whole edge piece of what that's going to open up when you start thinking about what, what the capabilities are and this new stakeholders who are going to have an interest in the trillions of dollars on the table right now, up for grabs. But Nicholas wanted to get to you on this whole digital-first thing, because one of the things we've been saying on theCube and interviewing folks and riffing on is: If digital drives more value and there's new use cases that are going to bring on, that's going to enabled by software. There's now new stakeholders coming and saying, Hey, you know what? I need more than just a pipe. I need more than just the network. I need to actually run healthcare. I need to run education on the edge. These are now industrial and consumer related use cases. I mean, this is software. This is where software and apps shine. So cloud native can enable that. So what's your take on the industry as they start to wake up and say, holy shit, this is going to be pretty massive when you look at what's coming. Not so much what's going to be replatformed, but what's coming. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's where I kind join Peter on this. There's been pretty significant, heavy innovation on the carrier side for, you know, if you think about it 30 years or so of like just reselling plans effectively, which is a virtual slice of the network that built. And all of a sudden they started competing against, you know, the heavyweights on the internet. We had, putting the bar really high in terms of, you know, latency in terms of expectation, in terms of APIs, right? We've we've heard about telecom APIs for 15 years, right? It's- nothing comes close to what you could get if you start building on top of a Stripe or a Google. So I think, it's going to be hard for a lot of those companies. What we do with our show is we try to bridge that gap. Right, we try to build on top of their infrastructure to be able to expose modern APIs, to be able to open up a programmatic interface so that innovators like Peter's are able to actually really take the user experience forward and start, building those specialized businesses across healthcare, financial services, and whatnot. >> Yeah, David Blanca and I were on the, on theCube yesterday talking about how Snowflake, a company that basically sits on top of Amazon built almost nothing on the infrastructure. Built on top of it and was successful. Peter, this is a growth thing. One of the things I want to get your thoughts on is you've had experiences in growing companies. How do you look at the growth coming into this market, Peter, because you know, you got to have new opportunities coming in. It's a growth play too. It's not just take share from someone. It's net new capabilities. >> Yeah. Here's the issue you've got with the wireless industry is that there's only a very few amount of them that actually have that last mile covered. So if you're going to build something on top of it, you're going to have to deal with the carrier, and the carrier as out of like a duopoly slash monopoly, because without their access to their network, you're not going to be able to do these incredible things. So I think we've got a real challenge there where you're going to have to get the carriers to innovate. Now you've got the CEO of Deutsche Telekom coming out yesterday saying that the OTT players aren't paying their fair share. Right, and I sit back and go, well, hang on. You're selling data to customers who basically are using that data to use apps and OTT. And now he's saying, well, they should pay as well. So not only the consumer pay, but now the OTT players should pay. It's a mixed message. So what you're going to have to do, and what we're going to have to do as a, as a growth industry is we're going to have to allow it to grow. And the only way to do that is that the carriers are going to have to have better access, allow more access to their networks, as Nico said, let the APIs has become more available. I just think that that's a leap too far. So I think we're going to be handicapped in our growth based on these carriers. And it's going to take regulators and it's going to take innovation and consumers demanding carriers, do it, otherwise, you know, you're still going to deal with the three carriers in your world. >> Yeah, That's interesting about- I was just talking to Danielle Royce, the DR here at TelcoDR. And she said, I was talking about ORAN and there's more infrastructure than needed. She said, oh, it's more software. I don't disagree with her. I do agree with it. But I also think that the ORAN points to, Nicholas, kind of this idea that there's more surface area to be had on the scale side. So standardizing hardware creates a lower fixed cost, so you can get some cost reduction. And then with standardized software, you get more enablement for hardened openness. I mean, open source is already proven. You can still be secure. And obviously Cloud was once said, could never be secure and most, is probably more secure than anything. What's your take on this whole ORAN commodity standardization mission- efforts? >> I think it's a, I mean, it goes along to the second phase, right? Of what the differentiation in telecom was, you know. Early on, specialized boxes that are very expensive. You know, that you, you, you, you get from a few vendors, then you have the transition over to a software. We lower the price, as you were mentioning. It can run on off the shelf hardware. And then we're in the transition, which is what Danielle is, is evangelizing, right. Transition towards the cloud and specifically the public cloud, because there's no such thing as a private cloud really. And, and so up and running is just another, another piece where you can make the Legos connect better effectively and just have more flexibility. And generally the, the, the game here is to also break the agenda when you- from, from the vendors, right? Because now you have a standard, so you don't necessarily need to buy the entire stack from, from the same vendors. You have a lot more flexibility. You know, you've probably followed the same debate that we've all seen, right. With a push against Huawei, for instance. Th-this is extremely hard for an operator, to start ripping out an entire vendor, because most of the time, they, they own the entire stack. But something like ORAN, now you can start mixing and matching with different vendors, but generally this is also a trend that's going to accelerate the move towards the public cloud. >> That's awesome. Peter, I want to get your thoughts because you're basically building on the cloud. And if you don't mind chime it in to kind of end the segment on this one point. People are trying to really get their minds around what refactoring means. And we've been saying, and talking about, you know, the three phases of, of waking up to the world. Reset your business, or reboot. Replatform to the cloud, and then refactor, which means take advantage of cloud enabled things, whether it's AI and other things. But first get on the platform, understand the economics, and then replatform. So the question, Peter, we'll start with you. What does refactoring actually mean and look like in a successful future execution or playbook? Can you share your thoughts, because this is what people want to get to because that's where the value will come from. That's where the iteration gets you. What's your take on this refactoring? >> Yeah, yeah. So I always, I mean, we're in the consumer business, so I'm always about what is the difference going to make for the consumer? So, whether you're, and when you look at refactoring and you look at what's happening in the space. Is what is the difference that's going to, what are the consumers going to see that's different and are they willing to pay for that? And so we can strip away the technical layers and we all get caught up in the industry with these buzzwords and terms, and we get, and at the end of the day, when it moves to the consumer, the consumer just sits there and says, so what's the value? How much am I paying? And so what we're trying to do at MobileX is, we're trying to use the cloud and we're trying to use kind of innovation into create a better experience for the consumer. One way to do that is to basically help the customer, understand their usage patents. You know, right now today, they don't understand that. Right if I asked you how much you paid for your mobile bill, you will tell me my cell phone bill is $150, but I'm going to ask you the next question How much data do you use? You go, I don't know, right? >> John: unlimited. >> And then I'd say why am I started- well you'd say limited, right. I will go. I'd go, I don't know. So I sit back and go, most customers are like you. You're basically paying for a service that you have no clear, no idea what you're getting. And it's designed by the carriers to scare you into thinking you need it. So I think we've got to get away from the buzzwords that we use as an industry and just dumb that down to what, what does that mean for a consumer? And I think that the cloud is going to allow us to create some very unique ways for consumers to interact with their device and their usage of that device. And I think that that's the holy grail for me. >> Yeah. That's a great point. And it's worth calling out because I think if the cloud can get you a 10X value at, at a reduction in costs compared to the competition, that's one benefit that people will pay for. And the other one is just, Hey, that's really cool. I want I'll, I value that, that's a valuable thing. I'll pay for it. So it's interesting that the cloud scale there, it's just a good mindset. >> Yeah. So it's always, I always like say to people, you know, I've spoken a lot to the Dish guys about what open rand is going to do and I keep saying to them, so what's the value that I'm going to get from a consumer. And they'll say, oh it's flexible pricing plans. They're now starting to talk about, okay, what the end product is of this technology. You look at ECM, right? ECM has been around for a long time. It's only now that we're to see ECM technology, get enabled. The carriers fought that for a long, long time. So there's a monumental shift that needs to take place. And it's in the four or five carriers in our counties. >> Awesome. Nicholas, what's your take on refactoring? Obviously, you know, you've got APIs, you've got all this cool software enabled. How do you get to refactoring and how do you execute through that? >> I mean, it's a little bit of a, what Peter was saying as well, right? There's the, the advantage of that point is to be, you know, all our stuff basically lives in the cloud, right. So it's opportunity to, to get that closer, you know, just having better latency, making sure that, you know, you're not losing your, your photos and your data as you lose your phone and yep. Just bet- better access in general. I, I think ultimately like the, the push to the cloud right now is it's mostly just a cost reduction. The back tick, as far as the carriers are concerned, right. They don't necessarily see how they can build that break. And then from there start interacting with the rest of the OTT world and, and, you know, Netflix is built on Amazon and companies like that, right? Like, so as you're able to get closer as a carrier to that cloud where the data lives, this is also just empowering better digital experience. >> Yeah I think that's where the that's, the proof point will be there, as they say, that's where the rubber will meet the road or proof is in the pudding, whatever expression. Once they get to that cost reduction, if they can wake up to that, whoa we can actually do something better here and make m- or if they don't someone else will. Right. That's the whole point. So, final question as we wrap up, ecosystem changeover. Lot more ecosystem action. I mean, there's a lot of vendors here at Mobile Congress, but real quick, Peter, Nicholas, your take on the future of ecosystem around this new telco. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I look, I mean, it, it, again, it keeps coming back to, to, to where I say that consumers have driven all the ecosystems that have ever existed. And when I say consumers also to IOT as well, right? So it's not just the B to C it's also B to B. So look to the consumer and look to the business to see what pain points you can solve. And that will create the ecosystems. None of us bet on Uber, none of us bet on Airbnb. Otherwise we'd all be a lot richer than we are today. So none of us took that platform- and by the way, we've been in mobile and wireless and any kind of that space smartphone space for a long time. And we will miss those applications. And if you ask a CEO today of a telco, what's the 5G killer application, that's going to send 5G into the next atmosphere, they can't answer the question. They'll talk about drones and robotic surgeries and all things that basically will never have any value to a consumer at the end of the day. So I think we've got to go back to the consumer and that's where my focus is and say, how do we make their lives better? And that will create the ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, they go for the low hanging fruit. Low latency and, and whatnot. But yeah, let's, it's going to be, it's going to be, we'll see what happens. Nicolas your take on ecosystems as they develop. A lot more integrations and not customization. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I think going back to, you know, again like 20- 20 years ago, the network was the product conductivity to the product. Today it's a, it's a building block, right? Something that you integrate that's part of your experience. So the same way we're seeing like conversions between telecom and financial services. Right? You see a lot of telcos trying to be banks. Banks and fintechs trying to be telcos. It's, it's a blending of that, right? So it, at the end of the day, it's like, why, what is the experience? What is the above and beyond the conductivity? Because customers, at this point, it's just not differentiated based on conductivity, kind of become just a busy commodity. So even as you look at what Peter is building, right, this, what is the experience above and beyond just buying a plan that I get out of it, or if you are a media company, you know, how do I pair my content or resolve real problems? Like for instance, we work a lot to the NBA and TikTok. They get into markets where, you know, having a video product at the end and people not being well-connected, that's a problem, right? So it's an opportunity for them to bring the building block into their ecosystem and start offering solutions that are a different shape. >> Awesome. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Both of you, both experienced entrepreneurs and executives riding the wave on the right side of history, I believe. Thanks for coming on theCube, I appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> If you're not riding the wave the right way, you're driftwood. And we're going to toss it back to the studio. Adam and the team, take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back. We're here in the main stage in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Normally, we're over there on theCUBE set, but here we've got a special presentation. We'll talk about Totogi and the new CEO of Totogi is Danielle, who is also the CEO of TelcoDR, Digital Revolution. Great to see you. And of course, Robin Langley, we interviewed you in theCUBE, CTO of Totogi. This is a main stage conversation because this is the big news. >> Yeah. >> You guys launched there with a hundred million dollar investment. We covered that news a couple weeks ago and you as the CEO. What's the story. Tell us what is happening with Totogi? Why such a big focus? What's the big push? >> Yeah, I'm really excited about Totogi because I really think this team is working to build public cloud tools for Telco the right way. It's everything I've been talking about. I talked about it yesterday in my keynote and this is really the execution of that vision. So, I'm super excited about that. A couple of days ago, Rob and I were talking about the charging system, but there's another product that Totogi introduced to the world and that's the webscale BSS system. So I think we're going to talk about that today. It's going to be great. >> Let's get into actually the charging system, which was great processing here. What is this focus? What is BSS about with cloud? How does the public cloud innovation change the game with this? >> Well, a little bit like charging. I mean, there are maybe, you know, a hundred plus BSS systems out there, why does the world need yet another BSS? And I think one thing is we're coupling up with public cloud, which gives it that webscale element. Right? We can have a platform. Never do another upgrade again, which I think is really exciting. But I think the really key thing that we're working on is we're building on top of an open API standard. And a lot of vendors talk about their APIs, why is this different? These are standards developed by TM forum, right? It's an independent body in our industry. They've been working on these, sorry, open APIs, and all the different vendors signed a manifesto that say, "I pledge. I pledge to support the open API", but if you look at the leaderboard and everyone is Sub10, Sub5, right? And so it's kind of like, going through the actions and not falling, you know, saying it, but not following it up and we're doing it. >> Wow, so... >> Yeah. >> Dave: Robin, you guys just popped up on the leaderboard. You went from a standing start to, I think more than 10. >> Yeah. >> I don't think that's ever been done before, has it? >> No, so we were out there. We published 12 APIs and we've got a quote from, you know, TM forums saying, essentially I've never seen anyone move so fast and to publish. And it's our intent to publish, you know, 50 plus, all of their APIs by the end of the year. >> So, how were you able to do that? I mean, like, were you holding them back? Just kind of dumping them on one day? This is the nature of the new business, isn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely and then you think about BSS. It's just, you know, been known for years to be a spaghetti of, you know, applications, you know, disparate data, data being duplicated, systems not talking to each other, lots of different interface types. And it was crying out to be just, you know, sold properly in the cloud. And the public cloud is perfect for this. You know, we can build a model and start, rather than looking at the applications first, you know, let's look at the model, the unified model and build on those open APIs and then start to, you know, allow people to come in and create an ecosystem of applications all using that same model. >> If you don't mind me asking you, if you can explain. 'Cause we talked before we weren't on camera, but we talked about the cloud and you were explaining to me how this is perfect for the challenges that you guys are trying to solve. What about the public cloud dynamic or innovation component that you guys are leveraging? Take us through a little bit on that, because I think that's a big story here that's under the covers is... >> Yeah. >> What you're capable of doing here. Do you mind explaining? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. So the cloud gives us this true scalability across everything. You know, we can scale to billions of records. So we can hook in, you know, to suck in data from, you know, our on-premise systems anywhere. We have, you know, a product called Devflow, so we used to do that. And it can really allow us to bring that data in, scale-out, use standard term cloud innovations, like Lambda functions and AWS, you know, DynamoDB, and present that, you know, through that open API. So we can use, you know graphQL, you know, present that with rest on top. And so you can then build on top of that. You can take any low code, no code application building tool you like, put that on top and then start building your own ecosystem. You can build inventory systems, CRM, anything you like. >> Well one thing that's really interesting about these projects is they usually take months, years to deploy, right? And what we're doing is we're providing, almost BSS as a service, right? It's an API layer that anyone can go to. Maybe you need to use it for five minutes, five months, five years, right? With the open standard and your own developers can learn how to use this text stack and code to it doesn't require us. And so we're really trying to get away from being an SI, you know, systems integrator or heavy services revenue, and instead build the product that enables the telcos to use their own people, to build the applications that they, they know what they want, and so, here you go. >> It's a platform. >> Yeah. >> It's a platform. >> So, how do you connect to systems on the ground? Like what's the modern approach to doing that? >> Yeah, go for it. >> Yeah so, telcos have, you know, a huge amount of data on premise. They have difficulties you can get to it. So, as I mentioned before, we had this Devflows product and it has connectors. We have like 30 plus connectors to all the standard sort of, billing systems, CRM systems, you know, we can hook into things like Salesforce. And we can create either, you know, couple of a real-time interface in there, or we can start to suck data into the cloud and then make it available. So, if they want to start with a nice, easy step and just build slowly, we can just hook in and pull that information out. If there may be, you know, an attribute that you want to, you know, use in some of that application, you can easily get to it. And then, you know, over time you start to build your data into the cloud and then you've got the scale, you know, and all the innovations of that brings with it. >> So is Devflow an on-ramp, if you will, for the public cloud, is that the way you were thinking about it? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I call it the slurper. (group chuckles) Right. I mean, these telcos have, like Robin was saying, spaghetti systems that have been, you know, customized and connected and integrated. I mean, it is a jungle out there of data. They're not going to be able to move this in one step. We just think of like a pile of spaghetti, like the whole bowl. >> Overcooked spaghetti. >> Right overcooked, the whole bowl comes out and it's really hard to just pull out one noodle and the rest is there and what are you going to do? And so the slurper, right, Devflows, allows you to select which data you want to pull out. It could be one time, you could have it sync. You don't have to do the whole thing and it doesn't disrupt the production environment that's on-premise. But now you're starting to move your data into the public cloud and then like Robin was saying, you can throw it up against quick sites. You can throw it up against different Amazon services. You can create new applications. And so it's not this like, you know, big bang kind of approach. You can start to do it in pieces and I think that's what the industry needs. >> I'm talking about this the other day, when we're talk about charging. What a lot of vendors will do is they'll put a wrapper around it, containerize it and then shove it into the public cloud and say, "Okay". >> Check mark. >> Yeah a checkbox. And it affects how they price, if they price the same way. But we talked a lot about pricing the other day, really pricing like cloud, consumption pricing. How are you pricing in this case? >> Same with the charging system. The BSS system is paid by the use, paid by the API call. So, really excited to introduce yet, again, a free tier. We think we're doing 500 million API calls per month for free. We think this is great for a smaller telco where like, you're experimenting and just getting to know the system and before you like, go all in and buy. And I think that API pricing is going to go right at the heart of some of these vendors that love to charge by the subscriber or a perpetual license agreement, right? They're not quite moving as a service. And so, yeah. >> Are you saying, they're going to be disruptive in the pricing in terms of lower cost or more, consumable. >> And I think it's also an easier on ramp, right? It's easier to start paying by the use and experimenting. And it's really easy, just like I was talking about with charging, where you're going to get the same great product that you would sell to a tier one at a price that you can afford. And now those smaller two or three guys aren't having to make a trade off between great technology, but I'm paying through the nose or sacrifice on the tech, but I can afford it. And so, I think you're going to see this ecosystem of people starting to learn how to code and think in this way. Telcos have already decided that they want to adopt the TM forum, open APIs. They're on all the RFPs. Do you support it? Everyone says they support it, but we don't see anyone really doing it. They're not on the leaderboard. >> And there's transparency, because you're pricing by API call, right? Versus the spaghetti, you guys call it, the hairball of what am I paying for? >> Right, you're getting, all of this. It's by the subscriber. It's millions and millions of dollars. Oh, and you know, you're going to need to buy a bunch of consulting revenue to make it all work and talk to each other. Pay up, right? And that's what we're living in today. And I'm taking us to the, you know, public cloud future by the API. >> This is the big cloud revolution. It's unbundling has been a really big part of the consumption of technology paid by the usage, get in, get some value, get some data, understand what it is, double down on it, iterate. >> Put it up with different services that are available that we don't have, but Amazon uses, right? They have call centers up there, they have ML that you may want to use like, start using it, start coding, start learning about the AWS tech stack. >> So is it available now? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, it's available now. We've already published the swagger for the BSS APIs. So, you know, they can come on board, they can go to access to all the API straight away and start using it. They can load up their favorite REST clients and then start developing. >> So you got a dozen APIs today. Where are we headed? What can we expect? >> All by the end of the year. There's over 50 APIs. You know, the number one guy on the board is at like 22, 21, 22 APIs covered. We'll be 50 plus by the end of the year. And we're just going to blow doors. >> The API economy has come to telco. >> Yeah, I mean, it's really BSS' Lego pieces, right. Assembling these different components and really opening it up. And I think there's been a lot of power by the vendors to keep it locked down, keep it close. Yes, we have an API, but you got to use our people to do it. Here's the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that you're going to pay us and keep us in business, and fat and happy, and I'm coming right in on the low end. Right, dropping that price, opening it up. I think telcos are going to love it. >> Well, Mike, you said too, you'll allow the smaller telcos to have the same, actually, better capabilities than the larger telcos, right? Maybe the stack's not as mature or whatever, but they'll get there and they'll get there with a simpler, easier to understand pricing model and way, way faster. >> Yeah. >> All right and that's where the disruption comes. >> And I Think this is where AWS has really done well as a hyper scaler against their competition, is that they've really gotten to market very quickly with their services. Maybe they're not perfect, but they ship 'em. And they get them out there and they get people using them. They use them internally and they get them out. And I think this is where maybe some of the other hyperscalers, they hold them back and they wait until they're a little bit more mature. And AWS is one because they've been fast. And I want to sort of copy that feat. >> I think your idea of subscriber love in your keynote, and I think applies here because Amazon web services has done such a great job of working backwards from the customer. So they'd ship it fast on used cases that they know have been proven through customer interactions. >> Yep. >> They don't just make up new features. And then they iterate. They go, "Okay". >> Start simple, grow on that, learn from the market. What are people using? What are they not using? Iterate, iterate, iterate. >> Okay, so with that in mind, working backwards from your customer, how do you see the feature set evolving for this functionality? How do you see it evolving as a product? >> Yeah, I mean, I think all of the BSS systems today have been designed with manual people on the other side of the screen, right? And we've seen chat bots take off, we've seen, you know, using chat as support. I think we need to start getting into more automation right? Which is really going to change up telco, right? They have thousands of customer support agents and you're like, "Dude, I just want a SIM, that's all I need". >> Yeah. >> Just like, where do I push a button and send an Uber to my house and drop it off or eSim. And so, speeding up business, empowering the subscriber. We know how to interact, we just went through COVID where we learned about different apps that overnight, you can like order all of your groceries and order all of your food and there it is, and it was contactless and... >> It's funny, you said future of work, which we love that term, "work". Workloads, work force, you got all these kind of new dynamics going on with cloud enablement and the changes is radical. And the value is there. There's value opportunities. >> I mean like, you know, where are the ARVR applications, right? Where your agent pops. I saw the demo. There's a strife in Austin and they're going to kill me 'cause I can't remember their name. But they had a little on your mobile phone, a little holographic customer support. Like, "How can I help you"? Right. And I'm like, "Where's that", like, imagine you're like, ATT, you're not like on the phone for like an hour and a half trying to like, figure out what's wrong. And it's like, you know, it knows what's wrong. It understands my needs and so, no one's working on that. We're still working on, keyboards. >> Right, that and chat bot is a great example because it's all AI, and where's the best AI? It's in the cloud because that's where the data is. That's where the best of modeling has been. (chuckles) >> I think your point, it's the scale of data. >> Absolutely. >> And machine learning and AI needs a lot of data points to get really good. I mean, I'm old, I'm 50. I graduated in 1993. I took an AI class from Niels Nielsen, like the godfather of AI, right? Okay, like that AI, even 10 years ago AI, it's just moving so quickly and it's now super affordable. >> Well, I really want to thank you guys for coming up and sharing that knowledge and insight, congratulations on the product and open APIs. Love open API's open source with some new revolution. Danielle and Robin. Thank you so much. >> Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations. Thank you everyone for coming. (crowd applauding) (people whooping) Okay, back to you in the studio at Cloud City.

(bright, upbeat music) >> Thank you, Adam, you're looking great in the studio. Those clouds going behind you in that beautiful blue sky. Okay. We're excited here at the Fira in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 21. Yes, it's on. Yes, it's alive and I'd say it's pretty well. Andriy Zhylenko is here as the CEO of Porta One and Roman Khalenkov is joining us as well He's the Chief Commercial Officer of Porta One. Gents, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> You're very welcome. You guys are local Barcelonans now. That's awesome. You've came in from Russia. You had this great idea for a company. Tell us about Porta One. >> Well, Porta One exists for over 20 years and we focus on helping Telco operators to deliver services more efficiently or create something new by providing an open architecture platform. And we mostly focus on tier two and three operator. So, I think about us as this weapon they can use to fight the Goliath; the large telecom operators because they need flexibility and the ability to get there faster. >> I mean, I love that, right. And we're going to talk about the cloud is a key part of that because you're now giving the smaller operators the capabilities that the big guys have had but actually doing it a way that may be cleaner and more agile, it's cloud based, they can price differently. It's a whole new ball game, right? I mean, what are you seeing when you talk to customers? What's that? What's the initial conversation like? >> Well, people still, to some extent, are afraid of the cloud but we try to give them different options on premises or in the cloud. It's a software after all. >> Dave: What, what are they afraid of with the cloud? >> They're afraid of not having the full control and usually people are afraid of things, which they don't completely understand and I guess having us here helps them to overcome that fear. >> Well, we saw this with the traditional enterprise IT when we used to have financial services executives on the cube. 10 years ago, they go, we will never put our data in the cloud. It's never going to happen. It was financial services, one of the fastest growing and largest customer segments for the cloud. But you're focusing on, you say, the tier two and tier three, I would think they have a greater motivation, right? Because they see the opportunity to disrupt. Right? >> That's true. I see cloud and other technologies such as SDN as this great equalizer because now it doesn't matter that much how much of the fiber optics you have in the ground or how many base towers you have. The true advantage will come from your platform, from the application and the service you can create. And if there's a company, they can create a great service, if it's in the cloud, it can scale to millions of subscribers easily, they just to find that product market fit. >> And Roman, you've got almost 500 customers, I believe. >> Yes. All around the globe. >> Well, that's the interesting thing, you got like 90 customers or more and so, >> 90 countries >> 90 countries, I meant 500 customers in 90 countries. So you've got local laws, you've got local politics, public policy, different across those countries, you know, provenance etc. etc. How do you see - what's the spectrum like are they open to the tier two and tier three disrupting? I mean, I would imagine some countries are trying to protect, you know, their relationships with the big Telcos because it's such critical infrastructure. What's that spectrum look like? Paint a picture of that diversity. >> It all depends on the specific country. In some countries like South Africa, the market is totally liberalized. You want to become a Telco. Here you go. In other countries like China, for example, it's only for a very small group of national carriers. So we basically follow the lead of the customers. If there are an opportunity in the specific countries, they will pop up like mushrooms. If there is no market liberation, what can you do? >> Right. Okay. So now talk more about what you guys sell to these customers. You're talking about the BSS systems and what exactly am I buying from you? And how is that all working? >> We sell the ability to manage your subscribers, create new services, and then provision and deliver those services to a variety of network elements, equipment and through integrations, and through connections to various types of apps. And right now with the cloud move, I see this as an- it's a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. If Telco has existing infrastructure that's our chance to rethink the architecture and approach. Because if they just think we have a cloud, it's some kind of computer where I'm going to run the applications a bit cheaper, they're missing the point. We were born in Soviet Union and one of my treasures is the jokes from Soviet Union times is one of them is a lady writes to the Central Committee of Communist Party and she says, I work at the Moscow Teapot Factory. And I like my job, I like my colleagues, I'm employee of the month, but, what bothers me; I can never buy a teapot in my store. I go there but they never have teapots. Can you do something? And she receives a reply saying, well, we can not change the way how we distribute goods in the whole country but there's an exception that will allow you to take one part of teapot, bring it home, and you can assemble teapot for yourself. And then two months later, there's now a letter from the same lady saying, Dear comrades, I did as you told me and now in my backyard, I have an intercontinental ballistic missile SS20 but I still don't have a teapot. So you cannot replicate what already had to just bring it piece by piece into the cloud and expect it's going to be something different, it's going to be better. >> Dave: We call it the Lunar Landing Module, very complex. Okay! Let's talk about the move from and the journey from on-prem maybe through hybrid but to the cloud, ultimately, and it starts with the customer conversation. First of all, they got to be willing. Right? Okay. But what's that journey look like? What are the phases that we should- how should we think about that? >> Over the last 20 years we've been offering our platform on premises and usually with unlimited license. So, whatever you can squeeze out of your physical machines is all yours. We don't count that. And that was a pretty straightforward model because you own your servers. We give you the license to the product, and it's fully separated. In the cloud it's not possible by default. You will provide both the physical infrastructure and software infrastructure. So, we need to change that model and we need to explain to our customers first of all. The next step; no Telco is the same. So, they provide different set of services. They offer their products to different audiences of the end-users. So it can be hosted PPBX or IP Centrics environments. So, we would then price our platform based on the number of active seats or it can be a mobile operator, a full mobile network operator or virtual mobile operator MVNO, or even enabler MVNE. So in that case, we would price our platform based on number of active sims. Many manual customers prefer to diversify. They want to choose different models, serve different market segments and not only deliver voice, but also data, messaging, value added services. We have a huge customer in Brazil, for example, they don't have a single end-user customer because everything what they do is pure IOT. So how do we price the platform? Because the variety of business models is so huge. We use the idea of billable events. So any call, any message, any data session, subscription, or anything which can produce a rate-able file can counter against the capacity of what the customer uses. So it gives a full transparency for the customer and it's easy to predict the future costs >> And you're able to charge accordingly and transparently because you've written software to do that. >> Roman: Absolutely. >> Its in the cloud, I presume. And so, you're able to show your customers exactly what you're paying for and the seat in that instance is somebody who's creating those services or somebody who's administering those services, or it's a developer? >> It's an extension >> Somebody who's using the service. So the end user. >> Ah, right. Yeah, okay. >> And actually we use our own software to charge our customers for using our software. >> Okay so you eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne as people like to say, right? How about from an engineering standpoint? Going from on-prem to the cloud, how should we think about architecting that? What are some of the roadblocks that we potentially see? >> The biggest roadblock we see in the developing countries is data centers not being available yet. That customer in Brazil, they were like knocking on the doors of the data center >> 9: 00 AM when it just opened, because they've been waiting for so long. We have about 15 customers in South Africa. They still are waiting for proper cloud at the center to be open there. But that's just the question of time. We just have to wait a little bit and this will get improved. And then that's a big thing. that you have your data center, you have your cloud software, and then you have your existing operations. You have your systems. So how do you move there? And I'm a proponent of gradual migration and gradual movement because every Telco, if they were in business for at least a few years, they have accumulated the variety of different systems, legacy, different products, different departments. It's difficult to jump in the cloud in one jump. So let's build a ladder. And with our customers, we use a technology called Dual-Version with RADIUS. It's a gradual migration. You don't move it at once You first with the pilot batch of customers, observe them, then add more customers, add more customers, and you keep going until everybody's on the new version. And it helps tremendously with new technology, or just with different user experience, because maybe some things which were improved in our perspective from some users, they don't like the change or they need some adjustments. So we see a way to the cloud. It's starting the small steps and then get them to the cloud and the process doesn't start there because once you get to version one of Clio cloud software, it's going to be version two and version three and version four. So the first is a general change in the mentality of telco, all this constant gradual improvements. >> You call it radio? Gradual? >> Gradual. >> Okay, so, gradual migration. So when you do a migration and it's gradual what, do you create some kind of abstraction layer so they don't have to freeze everything, right? Or, maybe I do freeze it but I can still operate with the pieces that have moved. >> Exactly. >> So I'm not shutting down my business. >> No, no way. >> That's the problem with migrations, right? I got to, I got to freeze it. And then, so I say, forget it. I don't ever do a migration, but technology allows you to hide that. >> Right. Some freeze may be required because maybe you should not add a new product or change one, which is currently being immigrated. >> Right. >> But to try to minimize the amount of those freezes from a product catalog perspective and the amount of potential inconveniences for the end user while they be integrated. >> Let's talk about the business value. We know that before, we know what it's like, it's a hairball. You described that spaghetti code. It's slow. It's not transparent. It's expensive. What are you seeing in the after state with some of your tier two and tier three customers, in particular, the ones that are disrupting the Telcos, what do you see? Roman. >> It Brings value, first of all. Because the scalability is no longer an issue. Their ability to migrate, ability to update the system to the new releases is also, much more easier in the cloud. So, the industry's changing fast. The consumers are instantly moving from one preferred way of communicating to another. So the Telcos need to change as well, pretty rapidly. So we are trying to give them that set of tools so they are not being dragged behind by the changes. So update faster, scale faster, introduce new products faster, configure new subscription, and get more customers. >> And then that leads to compress time to monetization. >> Roman: Exactly >> Better customer satisfaction. If we talked in this industry about NPS and how it's so negative. Usually people talk about "my NPS is better than Apple's". When they, in this industry, it's like we need to improve the NPS. Unique approach. Okay! Guys, we're almost out of time. Andriy, I'll give you the last word, put a bow on Mobile World Congress 2021 and how poor to seize it. >> Well, I think it's very symbolic, this place we are in right now, it's a space which used to belong to a large telecom software vendor. And now there's a variety of smaller disruptive companies. And I think that's the future. So the days when Telco would shop for a single huge RFP to solve all of their problems, are gone for good. Because now with the cloud, with integration, with API, You, the Telcos, have the power to build what they need, peak the solutions to integrate and create something which will deliver value and allow them to have it (indistinct) >> Fantastic. We are tracking the transformation of Telco and it just coincides with the exit of the post isolation economy. We're really excited to be here in cloud city. Adam, back to you in the studio.

(gentle music) >> Okay, thank you Adam. Thank you everyone for joining us on the main stage here, folks watching, appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante co-hosts of theCube. We're here in the main stage to talk to the two main players of Totogi, Danielle Royston, CEO as of today, the big news. Congratulations. >> Danielle: Yeah. Thank you. >> And Robin Langdon the CTO, Totogi. >> Robin: Thanks. So big news, CEO news today and $100 million investment. Every wants to know where's all the action? Why is this so popular right now? (Danielle chuckles) What's going on? Give us the quick update. >> Yeah, I met the Totogi guys and they have this great product I was really excited about. They're focused purely on telco software and bringing, coupling that with the Public Cloud, which is everything that I talk about, what I've been about for so long. And I really wanted to give them enough funding so they could focus on building great products. A lot of times, telcos, startups, you know they try to get a quick win. They kind of chase the big guys and I really wanted to make sure they were focused on building a great product. #2, I really wanted to show the industry, they had the funding they needed to be a real player. This wasn't like $5 million or a couple million dollars, so that was really important. And then #3, I want to make sure that we could hire great talent and you need money for compensation. And so $100 million it is. >> $100 million is a lot of fresh fat financing as they say. I got to ask you, what's different? Because I've been researching on the refactoring aspect of with the Cloud, obviously public cloud with AWS, a big deal. What's different about the charging aspect of this? >> Yeah I mean, charging hasn't been exciting, maybe ever. I mean, it's kind of like this really sort of sleepy area, but I think what the Totogi guys are doing is they're really coupling the idea of charging and network data to bring hyper-personalization to subscribers. And I think that's where it changes from being a charging engine to become an engagement engine. Telcos know more about us than Google, which is kind of crazy to think about it. They know when we wake up, they know what apps we use. If we call or text, if we game or stream and it's time to start using that data to drive a better experience to us. And I think to Totogi is enabling that. I'm super excited to do that. >> So Robin, I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. I mean, maybe we get into the plumbing and I don't want to go too deep in it, but I think it's important because we've seen this movie before where people take their on-prem stacks, they wrap it in containers and they shove it into the Public Cloud and they say, "Hey, we're cloud too." If reading a press release, you guys are taking advantage of things like Amazon Nitro of course, but also Graviton and Graviton2 and eventually 3, which is the underlying capabilities, give you a cloud native advantage. Can you explain that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we wanted to build this in the Cloud using all of those great cloud innovations. So Graviton2, DynamoDB and using their infrastructure, just allowing us to be able to scale out. These all available to us to use and essentially free for us to use. And it's great, so as you say, we're not shoehorning something in that's decade's old technology, wrapping it in some kind of container and pushing it in. Which is just then, you just can't use any of those great innovations. >> And you've selected DynamoDB as the database. Okay, that's fine. We don't have to get so much into why, but maybe you could explain the advantage because I saw some benchmark numbers which were, like an order of magnitude greater than the competition, like share with us, why? How you were able to get there? And maybe share those numbers. >> Yeah, no, we do. So we just launched our benchmark. So, a million transactions per second. So we just blew away everyone else out there. And that's really because we could take advantage of all that great AWS technology in there and the database side we're using DynamoDB, where we had a huge debate about using what kind of database to go and use? There's a lot of people out there probably get very religious about the kind of database technology that you should be using. And whether it should it be SQL in-memory object database type technology, but really a single table design, gives you that true scalability. You can just horizontally scale that easily, across the whole planet. >> You know, Danielle. Again, I said that we've seen this movie before. There are a lot of parallels in telco with the enterprise. And if you look at enterprise SAS pricing, a lot of it is very static, kind of lock you in, per seat pricing, kind of an old model. And you're seeing a lot of the modern SAS companies who are emerging with a consumption pricing models. How are you guys thinking about pricing? >> Yeah, I don't know of any other company in telco that's starting to price by usage. And that is a very standard offering with the cloud providers, right? Google we know, Amazon, all those guys have a price by the API, price by the transaction. So we're really excited to offer that to telcos. They've been asking for it for awhile, right? Pay for what you need, when you need it, by the use. And so we're really excited to offer that, but I think what's really cool is the idea of a free tier, right? And so I think it's smaller telcos have a trade-off to make, whether, am I going to buy the best technology and pay through the nose and maybe at an unaffordable level, or do I compromise and buy something more affordable, but not as great. And what's so great about Totogi, it's the same product just priced for what you need. And so I think a CSP it'll, below 250,000 subscribers should be able to use the Totogi absolutely for free. And that is, and it's the same product that the big guy would get. So it's not a junior version or scaled back. And so I think that's really exciting. I think we're the only ones that do it. So here we go. >> Love the freemium model. So Robin, maybe you could explain why that's so much, so important in the charging space, because you've got a lot of different options that you want to configure for the consumer. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about sort of how the old world does that, the old guard and how long it takes and how you're approaching this. >> Yeah so it's, I mean traditionally, charging design, there's as you say, there's lots of different pricing leavers you want to be able to move and change to charge different people. And these systems, even if they say they're configurable, if they normally turn into an IT project where it takes weeks, months, even years to build out the system, you know, marketing can't just go in there and configure the dials and push out your new plans and tariffs. They have to go and create a requirement specification. They hand it down to IT. Those guys go and create a big change project. And by the time they're finished, the market's moved on. They're on to their next plan, their next tariff to go and build. So we wanted to create something that was truly configurable from a marketing standpoint. You know, user-friendly, they can go in there, configure it and be live in minutes, not even days or weeks. >> No, IT necessary. >> Robin: No IT necessary. >> So you know, I've been thinking about, John and I talk about this all the time, It's that there's a data play here. And what I think you're doing is actually building a data product. I think there's a new metric emerging in the industry, which is how long does it take me to go from idea to monetization with a data product. And that's what this is. This is a data product >> Yeah. >> for your customers. >> Absolutely, what Robin was talking about is totally the way the industry works. It's weeks before you have an idea and get it out to the market. And like Robin was mentioning, the market's changed by the time you get it out there, the data's stale. And so we researched every single plan in the world from every single CSP. There is about 30,000 plans in the world, right? The bigger you are, the more plans you have. On average, a tier one telco has 40 to 50 plans. And so how many offers, I mean think about, that's how many phones to buy, plans to buy. And so we're like, let's get some insight on the plans. Let's drive it into a standardization, right? Let's make them, which ones work, which ones don't. And that's, I think you're right. I think it's a data play and putting the power back into the marketer's hands and not with IT. >> So there's a lot of data on-prem. Explain why I can't do this with my on-prem data. >> Oh, well today that, I mean, sorry if you want to jump in. Feel free to jump in, right. But today, the products are designed in a way where they're, perpetually licensed, by the subscriber, rigid systems, not API based. I mean, there might be an API, but you got to pay through the nose to use it or you got to use the provider's people to code against it. They're inflexible. They were written when voice was the primary revenue driver, not data, right? And so they've been shoehorned, right? Like Robin was saying, shoehorned to be able to move into the world that we are now. I mean, when the iPhone came about that introduced apps and data went through the roof and the systems were written for voice, not written for data. >> And that's a good point, if you think about the telco industry, it seems like it could be a glacier that just needs to just break and just like, just get modern because we all have phones. We have apps. We can delete them. And the billing plans, like either nonexistent or it has to be all free. >> Well I mean, I'll ask you. Do you know what your billing plan is? Do you know how much data you use on a monthly basis? No one knows. >> I have no clue. >> A lot. >> No one. And so what you do is you buy unlimited. >> Dave: Right. >> You overpay. And so what we're seeing in the plans is that if you actually knew how much you used, you would be able to maybe pay less, which I remember the telcos are not excited to hear that message, but it's a win for the subscriber. And if you could >> I mean it's only >> accurately predict that. >> get lower and lower. I having a conversation last night at dinner with industry analysts, we're talking about a vehicle e-commerce, commerce in your car as you're driving. You can get that kind of with a 5G. The trend is transactions everywhere, ad-hoc, ephemeral... >> Yeah. >> The new apps are going to demand this kind of subscriber billing. >> Yeah >> Do people get this? Are you guys the only ones kind of like on this? >> No I think people have been talking about it for years. I think there's vendors out there that have been trying to offer this idea of like, build your own plan and all that other stuff but I think it's more than just minutes, text and data. It's starting to really understand what subscribers are using, right? Are you a football fan? Are you a golf fan? Are you a shopper? Are you a concert goer? And couple that with how you use your phone and putting out offers that are really exciting to subscribers so that we love our telco. Like we should be loving our telco. And I don't... I don't know that people talk >> They saved us >> about loving their telco. >> from the pandemic >> They saved us during the pandemic. The internet didn't crash, we got our zoom meetings. We got everything going on. What's the technical issue on solving these problems? Is it just legacy? Is it just mindset? Robin, what's your take on that? >> I'll keep talking as long as Robin will let me. (Daniel laughing) >> So the big technical issues, you're trying to build in this flexibility so that you can have, we don't know what people are going to configure in the future. It's minutes and text messages are given away for free. They're unlimited. Data is where it's at, about charging for apps and about using all that data in the network the telcos have, which is extremely valuable and there's a wealth of information in there that can be used to be monetized and push that out. And they need a charging system on top that can manage that and we have the flexibility that you don't have to go off and then start creating programs and IT projects that are going to do that. >> Well it's funny Danielle, you say that the telcos might not like that, right? 'Cause you might pay less. But in fact, that is the kind of on-prem mindset because when you have a fixed resource, you say, okay, don't use too much because we have to buy more. Or you overbuy to your point. The cloud mindset is, I'll try it. I'll try some more, I'll try some more. I'm aligning it with business value. Oh, I'm making money. Oh, great. I'm going to keep buying more. And it's very clear. It's transparent where the business value is. So my question is when you think about your charging engine and all this data conversation, is there more than just a charging engine in this platform? >> Well, I think just going back to what Robin was talking about. I think what Totogi is doing differently is by building it on the Public Cloud gives you virtually unlimited resources, right? In a couple of different directions, certainly hardware and capacity and scalability and all those other things, right? But also as Amazon is putting out more and more product, when you build it in this new way, you can take advantage of these new services very, very easily. And that is a different mindset. It's a different way to deploy applications. And I think that's what makes Totogi really different. You couldn't build Totogi on-premise because you need the infinite scalability. You need the machine learning, you need the AI of Amazon, which they have been investing in for decades, if they now charge you by the API call. And you get to use it like you were saying. Just give it a try, don't like it, stop. And it's just a completely different way of thinking, yeah. >> If I have to ask you a question about the Public Cloud, because the theme here in Cloud City is the Public Cloud is driving innovation, which is also includes disruption. And the new brands are coming in, old brands are either reinventing themselves or falling away. What is the Public Cloud truly enabling? Is it the scale? Is it the data? Is it the refactoring capability? What is the real driver of the Public Cloud innovation? >> I think the insight that CSPs are going to have is what Jamie Dimon had in banking. Like I think he was pretty famously saying, "I'm never going to use the Public Cloud. Our data is too precious, you know, regulations and all that stuff." But I think the insight they're going to have, and I hopefully, I do a keynote and I mentioned this, which is feature velocity. The ability to put out features in a day or two. Our feature velocity in telco is months. Months, months. >> Seriously? >> Yeah, sometimes years. It's just so slow between big iterations of new capability and to be able to put out new features in minutes or days and be able to outmaneuver your competition is unheard of. So the CSPs that starts to get this, it's going to be a real big get, and then they're going to start to.. (Danielle makes swishing sound) >> We just interviewed (Dave speaking indistinctly) a venture capitalist, Dave and I last month. And he's a big investor in Snowflake, on the big deals. He said that the new strategy that's working is you go to be agile with feature acceleration. We just talked about this at lunch and you get data. And you can dismantle the bad features quickly and double down >> Yup. >> on the winners. >> Ones that are working. So what used to be feature creep now is a benefit if you play it right? >> Danielle: It's feature experimentation. >> That's essentially what you- >> It's experimentation, right? And you're like, that one worked, this one didn't, kill that one, double down on this one, go faster and faster and so feature experimentation, which you can't do in telco, because every time we ask for a feature from your current vendor, it's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. So you don't experiment. And so yeah- >> You can make features disposable. >> Correct. And I think that we just discovered that on this stage just now. (group chuckling) >> Hey look at this. Digital revolution, DR. Telco DR. >> Yeah. >> Great to have you guys. >> This is super awesome. Thanks so much. >> You guys are amazing. Congratulations. And we're looking forward to the more innovation stories again, get out there, get the momentum. Great stuff. >> Danielle: It's going to be great. >> And awesome. >> Feature experimentation. >> Yeah. >> Hashtag. >> And Dave and I are going to head back over to our Cube set here, here on the main stage. We'll toss it back to the Adam in the studio. Adam, back to you and take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE's back on day three here in Cloud City Mobile World Congress. This is where all the action is, and this is theCUBE set. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're here with DR, Danielle Royston, who is the CEO of TelcoDR, as well as the CEO of Totogi. Great to see you again. >> Hey. >> Hey, how are you guys? >> Good. >> Great time, great boat last night, good industry executives. A lot of intimate high player, big players here in the industry, even though not a lot of attendance, but the right people are here and events are back. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think, MWC was the first event to cancel with COVID in February, end of February 2020. So first big event to come back. It's such a nice symmetry. Yeah. Typically you have big delegations, hundreds of people from the big groups coming to the show. We're seeing the executives are coming, smaller delegations, but they're all in the booth and that we're having great conversations and it's awesome. >> Yeah, and the thing I will say is that theCUBE's back too. We'd like them to be, be in here in the action, because one of the things that's happened with this hybrid events is that people are watching. And so there's a virtual space and the physical space and Cloud City has built out paradise. It's beautiful and spectacular behind us. If you look around, for the people who can't see, it's really made for the combination of on-site and virtual experience, the content, the people, Bon Jovi last night, it's just the top of Mobile World Congress and it's translating to the industry. This has been amazing. So congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Well. I got to say, you have a lot to say as we all know. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But I think it was easy for the big guys. >> Danielle: Can't shut me up. (laughing) >> That's why we love you in theCUBE. But I think it was easy for the big guys to tap out and say, hey, we can save a bunch more money. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> We don't really have much to talk about. We're going to talk about it again. Hey, let's talk about 5G. >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. >> 5G's coming. >> It's the revolution. >> And I told you about 5G though. >> Whereas the narrative here is all about the future. And it's not about the future of blah blah blah, it's about the future of, this is the journey that we're taking and here's where it's starting and with the meat in the bone. >> Yeah. And I think what's really interesting about Cloud City is the fact that we've brought these different players together that are all focused, as you said, on the future. And I'm starting to see these connections where they're collaborating. Vendors that didn't know each other probably would never have partnered before. Totally different areas. I'm hearing the conversation in the booth about like, hey, I talked to P1 security, or I went and talked to LMX and we're putting deals together 'cause we're complimentary. And it's amazing and so that's really good. >> And the integration partnership, heard that from Google yesterday on our news exclusive break in there. They see integration and they're talking about Android, with what Android did for mobile. They're seeing a whole new software paradigm coming into telco. Its partnership, its ecosystem and open. These are new kind of dynamics. >> And I think for you guys, when you say integration and open, I think those things are really paired and they're important. A lot of times Telco people will hear integration, and they'll think customization. Coding it up and customizing it so that they talk to each other. But I think the open part of that is really important where we're connecting via APIs. And I think that's bringing the hyperscalers. That's what they do. They provide these systems and the software that's all API based and you can use it very quickly and you can unravel it if you need to. And it's that feature velocity, we talked about a couple days ago. >> And automation is the underpinning. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean, that's really the theme, right? >> Right. >> It's not like a one-off hardcore custom integration that's going to be frozen. >> One time to upgrade it every 18 months or whatever it is. Yeah, it's a life. >> Dave: How about Musk yesterday? >> John: I mean, he's always a crowd pleaser. First of all, my kids love him. He's crazy. >> Who doesn't love Elon Musk? >> I mean, he is amazing. He's a builder and he takes no prisoners. He's just, you know what, my goal was not to go bankrupt. That's what he said a couple of years ago. >> Dave: Which was brilliant because everybody's gone bankrupt in that business and he's just close it off. >> And he's just like, look, we're here, we're just going to chip away at it and we're just going to keep striving, not making up excuses. He takes the failures. He takes the phase plans. He gets back up and he keeps going. He's focused on building. >> He's focused on one thing. He's not focused on everything. He's focused on getting to Mars. And I think that's what I like to compare myself to Elon Musk. Not that I'm building rockets or getting to Mars, but that the hard problem that I'm solving is getting Telco to the public cloud and that's going to take a decade. It might have been accelerated because of COVID, it might've taken 20 years and now it might take 10. But you look at what he does, and that guy, he has haters on Twitter that are pew- pew. Always like, throw in their bars, but he's like, I got my rocket company. I got my communication and space company. We're going to need the bore holes, the Boring Company. I need batteries, I got my Tesla company. And so this guy focuses. >> He's got some haters, but he's got a lot more lovers on his other side because people might not know this, but he fired the entire PR department because he's like, I don't need PR. I'm just going to go do my own, his own PR. >> Obviously, the crypto stuff's always fun. Doge coins, always a laugh. >> Danielle: I think he just plays around with that. >> And it's just more of like playing. >> Yeah, that's a watch this. >> He just likes to see what he can do. >> Doge coins app. That Saturday Night Live was an interesting thing he did, but I think he illustrates the point of a new generation. And I think my young kids, not young, they're in their twenties now. They look at him and they say, that's aspirational because he's building and he's focused on that one thing. And again, the growth that you mentioned Telco to the cloud, getting back to that is that, I want to ask you this growth question. It used to be like, okay, growth was there, people expanded cell towers, networks were networks. Now it seems that the growth of Telco, with Telco is going into, with the edge and all the open-RAN stuff, which means we need more infrastructure. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> We need more stuff. There's more needed and there's growth behind them. What's your reaction? >> I think we need more software. Software eats the world. And it's, I mean, there's a lot of hardware to chomp in Telco and it's just going to keep eating it and that's just going to accelerate. I think that's where Telco needs to start to build that muscle. They don't have great software capability. They don't have public cloud building capability. And so that's a big up-skilling. That's a new hiring. And I think it's an executive conversation. It's not just an IT thing or just a marketing thing or networking thing. >> I got to chime in here for a second because there are a lot of parallels with how the data center transition has occurred. And what's happening here. We talk about all the time. It was a mainframe, et cetera. There are parallels. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> And what happened when the data center went to software-defined a whole bunch of hardware was allocated to run all the software-defined stuff. It wasn't built for that. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But the cloud, what you guys are doing with Totogi and taking advantage of AWS's is Nitro and Graviton. That's built to be software-defined. >> Correct. >> And so the Telcos are going to go through the same thing. If they just virtualize, they're going to say, oh wow, we're wasting 30% of our power, our compute power on just supporting all this software-defined stuff, because it wasn't built for that, but the cloud is built for that. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And that is going to be a huge difference. >> And I keep trying to make this distinction. And I think people in Telco still don't get this about the public cloud. They think of it as a place. It's a place to run a workload. And that tells me, they think of it as infrastructure. They think of it as servers still like, well, I'm going to run into my closet or AWS's closet. I'm like, and I was just having a conversation about this with this senior person from GSMA. I'm like, it's actually about the software that's there. It's about the databases they're building and the analytics and the AI and the ML but they let you buy by the minutes or by the API call. And that is my, like you need to think about that because it's mind-blowing. It's a totally different way to think. >> And you're totally right. I'm just going to, again, give you props on this. I've had many one-on-one with Andy Jassy for the past seven years for exclusives, but over the years it's been consistent. Each platform lifting and shift wasn't the end game. Okay. Replatforming in the cloud, certainly a great advantage, a great starting point. It was the refactoring. And that's why you see Amazon Web Services, for instance, keep adding more services 'cause that's the model. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> They keep offering more goodness so that the businesses could refactor, not just replatform. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And that's what you're getting at. I think with the AI and machine learning, where you start getting into these new use cases, but why I couldn't do that before. >> Danielle: Right, right. >> This is going to be a huge game changer. >> Well, Forrest Brazeal. A great guy, a cloud guru wrote a great blog called a lift-and-shift is a ticking time bomb. And it's a great start to get your stuff over there. It forces your team to start to interact with like an AWS or GCP in a real way. Like now they, they got to use it. You take it away and I'm like, but once you move it, you got to re-factor. You got to rewrite. And then that's why it's a ticking time bomb. You got to get, move it over and get going. >> Danielle Royston, DR, Digital Revolution of you are one. You got it here, Telco DR. And this has been a great experience for theCUBE, as we get back to business with real life events and virtual. For the folks who couldn't make it here, Barcelona is still a great city. Obviously a great place to come and the events will be back. They'll be hybrid. They'll be different. Certainly, theCUBE will wait double them down, but, we've got a great video. I want to share for the group, the Barcelona and Cloud City. This is a montage of what it's like here and a little experiential video. So take it away and run that video. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi, I'm Katie Goldfinch, here in Barcelona for an action packed Day Two at TelcoDR's Cloud City. This morning, the focus was firmly on DR. and her MWC keynote, which told Telco execs in no uncertain terms that now is the time to act on embracing public cloud. Back in Cloud City content ruled the day with both theCUBE and Cloud City live stages, hosting public cloud, thought-leaders covering a wide range of topics to educate and inspire attendees. And in the beautiful space of Cloud City, the excitement grew throughout the day as we streamed MWC's exclusive keynotes from Elon Musk and preparations got underway for tonight's star performer, Jon Bon Jovi. (upbeat techno music) Wow! What an amazing day from groundbreaking keynotes into space and back to a star studded performance. Don't forget, you can catch up on anything you missed and join us for the rest of the week at cloudcity.telcodr.com or following #cloudcity. (upbeat techno music) >> Okay, we're back. That was great look at what's going on here in Cloud City. This next video, DR, you're going to love this. Your keynote highlights and some Bon Jovi highlights, which by the way, was the most epic thing. People were packed. >> Dave: It was exciting. >> Place was packed. It had the security clicking people, counting all the people, people are standing back. All the people from their booths are all coming in to watch. >> Dave: He was pumped. >> Let's take a look at this awesome highlight video from yesterday. (upbeat techno music) (upbeat techno music) >> Okay, we're back at theCUBE. Dave, that was a highlight reel yesterday. DR has got some action on stage, great messaging, revolution, digital revolution. >> You know your comment about how you think like Elon Musk. That's an inspiration from it. I mean, what a lot of people don't know is when you look at autonomous vehicles, remember you're driving down Palo Alto, you see one of those lidar things. He's doing away with lidars, it's too expensive. It's $7,000. He's taking it with cheap cameras and software down to a couple of hundred bucks per vehicle. >> Danielle: Wow. >> That's the way he thinks. And you're doing the same thing to Telco. >> Danielle: I am. I am I'm trying to change Telco. I mean, he's changing the world. He might be one of the most important humans on Earth right now. I don't think I'm exactly that level, but I'm trying to become a really important person in Telco. We have this great message. I think it's going to help Telcos to get better businesses. And I think it's a great idea. >> For the folks out there watching, what is that big change? If you're going to drive down this Cloud City street, main street of Cloud City and just all about Cloud. Because public clouds here, it's going to become hybrid, dynamics, operating models are changing. What is the key message that you'd like to send? >> I think all of the software in Telco needs to be rewritten. And that's how many millions of lines of code is that? And it's going to be shrunk down and put out on public cloud and rewritten using the software Legos of the public cloud. That is a big undertaking. No one's working on it. I'm working on it. I'm doing it. Let's go do it. >> Let's do it. And if you look out a couple of years, what would be a successful, what does checkmate look like in this chess game? >> I'm winning? #winning >> You're opening move is pretty good as we say in chess. >> I mean, I think it, it takes, again, it takes singular focus like Elon Musk on Mars. Someone needs to singularly focus on getting the public cloud and you can't sit there and protect your old business models, your CR revenue, if you're Amdocs. Give that up. When they start to give up their CR revenue to focus on public cloud, then they'll be, okay, there's a worthy adversary out there really focusing on it. >> I mean the late Clayton Christensen had all the same things. Innovator's dilemma. You get stuck here, what do you do? >> Danielle: What do you do? >> You kill your own, you eat your own to bring in the new, I mean, all these things are going on. This is a huge test. >> And to be willing to burn some boats. >> I think it's transparency, simplicity, and the consumer saying, hey, this is a great experience. That's the Tel sign. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And that's what we're going to see over this next decade. >> Plus consumers love their Telco. I can't wait for that. I want to love my Telco. >> Dave: Like you love Netflix. >> Yes, exactly. >> DR, we love you because you've got a bold vision. You're putting it out there and you're driving it. You're walking the talk. Congratulations. And again, Cloud City's a home run. >> Awesome. >> Great success. Thanks for having theCUBE. >> Thank you guys. As always super fun. Great day. >> Okay. >> CUBE's coverage here. And remember, we're here getting all the action and it's all going to go online after a synchronous consumption. But right now, it's all about Mobile World Congress and Cloud City. This is the action. And of course, Adam in Cloud City Studio is waiting for us and he's going to take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the Cubes coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. We are here in person in Barcelona, as well as remote. It's a hybrid event. You're going to have the physical space in Barcelona for the first time, since 2019 and virtual worlds connecting. I've got a great guest here from Google, Shailesh Shukla, Vice President General Manager of the networking team, Google Cloud. Shailesh, great to see you. Thank you for coming on the Cube for the special presentation for Mobile World Congress. As the edge networking core edge human devices, all coming together, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, John. It's great to see you again. And it's always a pleasure talking to "theCUBE" and I wanted to say hello to everybody from, you know, in mobile world Congress. >> Yeah, and people don't know your background. You've got a great history in networking. You've been there, many ways of innovation. You've been part of directly a big companies that were now known big names are all there, but now we haven't had a Mobile World Congress 2019. Think about that, that's, you know, many months, 27 months gone by, since the world has changed in TelcoOR I got to ask you, what is the disruption happening? Because think about that since 2019, a lot's changed in TelcoOR cloud is scale has happened. You've got the edge developing. It's IT like now, what's your take Shailesh tell us? >> Yeah John, as you correctly pointed out, you know, last 18 months have been very difficult and you know, I'll acknowledge that right upfront for a number of people around the world. Empathize with that now in the TelcoOR and kind of the broader edge world. I would say that the last 18, 24 months have actually been transformative COVID it turns out was a very interesting sort of, driver of completely new ways of both living as well as working right, as we all have experienced. I don't think that I've had a chance to see you live in 24 months. So what we are seeing is the following, number one, number of TelcoORs carriers around the world have started the investment process for 5g right? And deployment process. And that actually changes the game as you know, due to latency, due to all of the capabilities around kind of incredible bandwidth, right? Much lower latency, as well as much higher kind of enterprise oriented capabilities, right? So network slicing as an example, quality of service, you know, by a traffic type and for a given enterprise. So that's number one. Number two, I would say that the cloud is becoming a lot more kind of mainstream in the world, broader world of telecom. What we are seeing is a incredible amount of partnerships between telecom carriers and cloud providers, right? So instead of thinking of those two as separate universes, those are starting to come together. So I believe that over a period of time, you will see the notion of kind of cloud native capability for both the IT side of the house, as well as the network side of the house is becoming, you know, kind of mainstream, right. And then the third thing is that increasingly it's, a lot more about enabling new markets, new applications in the enterprise world, right? So certainly it opens up a new kind of revenue stream for service providers and carriers around the world. But it also does something unique, which is brings together the cloud capabilities, right around elasticity, flexibility, intelligence, and so on with the enterprise customer base that most of the cloud providers already have. And with the combination of 5g brings it to the telecom world. And those, you know, I started to call it as a, kind of the triad, right? The triad of an enterprise, the telecom service provider and the cloud provider, all working together to solve real business problems. >> And it's totally a great call out there on the pandemic. I think the pandemic has shown us coming out of it now that cloud scale matters. And you look at all its successes between work play and how we've all kind of adjusted the cloud technologies. We're a big part of that, those solutions that, that got us through it. Now you've got the edge developing with 5g. And I got to ask this question because when we have CUBE interviews with all the leaders of engineering teams, whether it's in the industry or at customers in the enterprise, and even in the telcos, the modern application teams have end to end visibility into the workload. You start to see more and more of that. You starting to see more open source in everything, right? And so, okay. I buy that. You've got an SRE on the team. You've got some modern developers you're shifting left, you've got Develops, all good, all cloud. However, you're a networking guy. You know this, routing packets across multiple networks is difficult. So if you're going to have end to end visibility, you got to have an end to end intelligence on the networking. How is that being solved? Because this is a critical discussion at here at mobile world Congress. Okay, I buy cloud native, I buy observability, I buy open source, but I got to have end-to-end visibility for security and workload management and managing all the data. What's the answer on the network side? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. And the simple way to think about this is first and foremost you need kind of global infrastructure, right? So that's a given and of course, you know, Google with its kind of global infrastructure and some of the largest networks in the world, we have that presence, right. So that's important. Second is to be able to abstract away that underlying infrastructure and make it available to applications through an set of APIs, right? So I'll give an analogy here just as you know, say 10 years ago, around 10 years ago, Android came into the market from Google in the following way. What it did was that it abstracted away the underlying devices with a simple kind of layer on top of operating system, which exposed APIs not bound. So that application developers can write new applications. And that actually unleashed, you know, it ton of kind of creativity right around the world. And that's precisely what we believe is kind of the next step, as you said, on an end to end observability basis, right? What if you can do an abstraction away from all of the underlying kind of core infrastructure provide the right API the right kind of information around observability around telemetric instead of making, cloud and infrastructure, the black box, make it open, make it kind of visible to the applications, bring that to the applications and let the let a thousand flowers bloom, right? The creativity in each vertical area is so significant because there are independent software vendors. There are systems integrators, they're individual developers. So one of the things that we are doing right now is utilizing open source technologies, such as Kubernetes, right? Which is something that Google actually brought into the market. And it has become kind of the de facto standard for all of the container and modernization of applications. So by leveraging those open technologies, creating this common control plane, exposing APIs, right? For everything from application development to observability, you certainly have the ability to solve business problems through a large number of entities in the systems integrator and the ISV and the developer community. So that's the approach that we're taking John >> I love the Android analogy of this obstruction layer, because at that time the iPhone was closed. It still is. And they got their own little strategy there. Android went the other way. They went open when open abstraction now obstruction layers are good. And now I want to get your thoughts on this because anyone in operating systems knows abstractions are great for innovation. How does that apply to the real world on telco? Because I get how it could add some programmability in there. I get the control plane piece, putting it into the operator's hands. How do you guys see and how do you guys talk about the edge service offering? What does it mean for the telco? Because well, they get this, right. This is going to be in telco cloud developer play. It's going to be a cloud ecosystem play. It's an opportunity for a new kind of telco system. How do you see that rolling out in the real world? >> Great question, John. So the way I look at it, actually even we should take a step back, right? So the confluence of 5g, the kind of cloud capabilities and the edge is, you know, very clear to me that it's going to unleash and significant amount of innovation. We are in early stages. No question, but it's going to drive innovation. So one almost has to start by saying what exactly is edge, right? So the way I look at it is that the edge can be a continuum all the way from kind of an IOT device, an automobile, or an enterprise edge, like a factory location or a retail store, or kind of a bank branch to the telecom edge, which is where the service providers have. Not only their points of presence and central offices, but increasingly a very large amount of intelligent land sites as well, right? And then the kind of the public cloud edge, right? Where, for example, Google has, you know, twenty-five plus kind of regions around the world, 144, you know, pops, lots of CDN locations. We have, you know, a few thousand nodes deployed deep inside service provider networks for caching of content and so on. So if you think about these as different places in the network that you can deploy compute storage and intelligence act, right. And do that in a smart way, right? For example, if you were to run the learning algorithms in the cloud with its flexibility and elasticity and run the inferencing at the edge, very edge at the point of sort of a sale or a point a very consumer standing. Now you suddenly have the ability to create a variety of edge applications. So going back to the new question, what have we seen? So what we are seeing is depending on the vertical, there are different types of edge applications, okay. So let's take a few examples and I'll give you some, a favorite example of mine, which is in the sports arena. So in baseball, right, when you are in a stadium and soon there are people sort of starting to be in stadiums, right. And if pitcher is throwing the pitch, right, the trajectory of the ball, the speed of the pitch, where the batter is, you know, what the strike zone is and all of these things, if they can be in a stadium in real time, analyzed and presented to the consumer as additional intelligence and additional insight, suddenly it actually creates kind of a immersive experience even though you may be in the stadium, looking at the real thing, you are also seeing an immersive experience. And of course at home, you get a completely different experience, right? So the idea is that in sports, in media and entertainment, the power of edge compute and the power of AI ML, right, can be utilized to create completely new immersive experiences. Similarly, in a factory or an automotive environment, you have the ability to use AI ML and the power of the edge and 5g coming together to find where the defects are in a manufacturing environment, right? So every vertical, what we're finding is there are very specific applications, which you can call us kind of killer apps, right in the edge world, that over time will become prevalent and mainstream and they will drive the innovation. They will drive deployment, and they also will drive ultimately kind of the economics of all of this. >> You're laying out, essentially the role of the public cloud and the telco market. I'd love to get your thoughts because a lot of people are saying, "Oh, the cloud, it's all edge now it's still going back to a on premises." This is not the case. I mean, I've been really vocal on this. The public cloud and cloud operations is now the new normal. So developers are there. So I want you to explain real quick, the role of the public cloud in the telecom market and the telecom edge, because now they're working together, you got a distraction, you mentioned that Android leg environment coming, it's going to be an Android, like effect that eked abstraction, you got old ran out there creating these connection points for interoperability, for radio signals and the in transceivers or the edge of the radios. All of this is happening. How is Google powering this? What is the role of public cloud in this? >> Yeah, so let me first talk about generically, the role of public cloud. Then I'll talk about Google, okay. In this, in particular. So if at the end of the day, the goal here is to create applications in a very simple and efficient manner, right? So what do you like if you look put that as the goal, then the public cloud brings, you know, three fundamental things. Number one is what I would call as elasticity and flexibility, right? So why is this important? Because as we discussed earlier, edge is not one place. It's a variety of kind of different locations. If there is a mechanism to create this common control plane and have the ability to kind of have elastic compute, elastic networking, elastic storage, and have this deployed in a flexible manner. Literally if you think about it like an effortless edge is what we are starting to call it. You can move workload and capability and run it precisely where it makes sense, right? Like I said, earlier, training and learning algorithms in the deep cloud, inferencing at the very edge, right? So if you can make that decision, then it becomes very powerful. So that's the first point, elasticity and flexibility that the cloud can bring. Second is intelligence, the whole notion of leveraging the power of data and the power of AI and ML is extremely crucial for creation of new services. So that's something that the public cloud brings. And the third is this notion of right once deploy anywhere, right? This notion of kind of a full stack capability that open kind of developer ecosystem can be brought in. Like we talked about Kubernetes earlier. So if there's a way in which you can bring in those developer and ISV ecosystem, which is already present in the world of public cloud, that's something that is the third thing that public law brings. And Google strategy very simply is to play on all of these. Because Google has incredibly rich deployment experience around the world for some of the largest services on the planet, right? With some of the biggest infrastructure in the networking world. Second is we have a very open and flexible approach, right? So open, as you know, we not only leverage kind of the Kubernetes environment, but also there are many other areas, Guinea native, and so on where Google has brought a lot of open kind of capabilities to the broader market. And the third is the enablement of the ecosystem. So last year, we actually announced 200 applications, from 30 ISV in multiple verticals that we're now going to be deployed on Google cloud in order to solve specific business pain points, right. And building out that ecosystem, working with telecom service providers with systems integrators with equipment players is the way that we believe Google cloud can make a difference in this world of developing edge applications. We are seeing great traction, John, you know, whether it is in the carrier world, you know, carrier such as orange telecom Italia, telus SK Telekom, Vodafone. These have all publicly announced their work with Google cloud, leveraging the power of data analytics, AIML, and our very flexible infrastructure. And then a variety of kind of partners and OEM players in the industry, as an example, Nokia, right. Am docs and Net cracker and many others. So we are really excited in the traction that we are getting, and we believe that public cloud is going to be a key part of the evolution of the telecom industry. >> Shukla it's great to have you on Shailesh Shukla VP and GM of networking at Google cloud. And I would just add to that final point there that open and this Android like open environment is going to create a thousand flowers to bloom those, a new applications, new modern applications, new companies, a new ecosystem in the telco cloud. So, congratulations, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights on Google cloud, you guys are about the data and being open. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Great to talk to you, okay. >> It keeps coverage of mobile Congress, Google cloud featured interview here on theCUBE. Really a big part of the public cloud is going to be a big driver. Call it public cloud, hybrid cloud. Whatever you want to call it, it's the cloud cloud and edge with 5g making a big difference and changing the landscape in front of innovation for the telco space. I'm John Farrow, your CUBE host, thanks for watching.