>> Hi, I'm Peter Birds. And welcome to another Cube conversation from the Cube studios here in Beautiful >> Powell to California. >> Today, we're going to talk about network assurance that problem that's becoming increasingly important to large organizations as they envisioned greater distribution of their digital capabilities and have that conversation you've got. David Ericsson is the CEO and co founder of Forward Networks David. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Pleasure to be here. >> So let's start by getting a sense of what forward networks is. Tell us a little bit about four networks, and then we'll jump into it. >> Yeah, four networks is ah, startup company here in Silicon Valley. Were based out of Palo Alto. Been in business for about five years now. Our background was four of us is co founders were in the networking group at Stanford under Nick McEwen. We graduated with PhDs in computer science and working in twenty thirteen, saw major problem and network operations and in the network Assurance space, and decided to go after it. Big hairy problem which will dig into. But it's been about two years since we've been in market. And >> all right, so let's talk about the big hairy problem. Aiken. Remember the days when network administration and operations was about finding a device plugging something into it, making sure that you had electrical circuit in place and then going back and telling everybody you've done your job? That was Those were very simple network, so it took a long time. Some of them are pretty complex as we move to increasingly complex physical networks, but even more complex software to find networks that assurance that that certainty that we have the network that we think we have kind of has gone away. So talk a little bit about this notion of network assurance. What is thie enterprise problem that we're trying to solve? >> Yeah, I mean, you're you're dead on If you look at the history of networking, we started very simple. We could manage this with humans. We only had so many changes we had to make on a day to day week. Do we basis but over time were now operating networks with thousands, even tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of network devices in them. And that's as you indicated on ly growing with software to find. Networking is we're bringing and dropping software elements. They're also doing forwarding to bear on this, but unfortunately, well at the same time, we also had a huge increase in applications and mission critical day today, business operations and infrastructure that depend on this network to stay up and working. But if you look at what actually has done to ensure they're working properly and what the change process looks like, it's it's somewhat depressing. To be completely honest, we make an awful lot of changes in production with minimal, if any, pre testing. Our post testing is, you know, our customers calling us or our internal customers calling us, telling us it works or not if they're not, you know, maybe we'll do a couple of peeing and simple trace route tests and and and move on. And of course, this is tremendously risky to the business, let alone security, which is a whole nother topic we can dig into. But we need to bring in. And this is what part of what for Knox has focused on is helping our customers understand and ensure that their network is always up in stable, achieving what they want to achieve that they've changed what they wanted to change and that it's as secure as they expect it to be. >> Now let me let me let me build on this notion over network assurance because we could think about it. Don't just say three levels right now. There's a lot of folks who do some sort of network device assurance. Have you updated that device? Have you updated that software construct? We got answer, but we've got a number of other tools. You could do some of those things. We also have tooling that Khun tell you. Generally speaking, you know, in a knock whether or not the network is up available, but I think what you're talking about is something that's in between where we're talking about the network being, ah, logical organization of resources that communicate with each other and assuring that as we make changes that context, that notion of things in a relationship working together is not lost. If I got that right, >> perfectly right. So today it's reasonably straightforward to with answerable or N S o R T a laugh. You know, whatever. Like some some system today to go out, make a change to the network, and then you come along behind and maybe with some other scripts ensure that that actually went out. But what's really hard is to paint the holistic picture that even though I made these changes, all of my critical applications are actually still functioning. And so this is what we would bucket in a higher level term called intent based networking. This is a reason, you know, reasonably recent entrant into how we think about networking. But it's very simple. From a high level, it's I need to. I need to holistically paint a picture for what my network should deliver to me on an end in basis. And I need to assure that this is always happening. And this Khun B from a connectivity perspective. You know, imagine, imagine I'm ah Web company that has a bunch of customers that need to come in from the Internet and hit my critical application. That's that's underpinning everything my business does, right? So I need to know that my network has paths in it that are enabling that to occur one hundred percent of the time. And so that's that's kind of the crux of of intent based networking. Butt's thinking in high level Indian actions as opposed to the very nitty gritty nuances of what's going on in any of these guys, >> actually give you know, the use case. So I can imagine a Tell Cohen operator that used to have physical devices and cordon off some of those physical devices by customers to provide their network. But as they try to, you know, gain flexibility, gain speed, game profitability. They're using a software based network approached to do a better job of ministering changes and management of those resources. It's whether customers so they want to be able to assure a customer that the network that the customer thinks it has in the context of the telcos overall network is assured it's there. The customer can weaken, validate for the customer that even though he made a change, their network is still in place, right? >> Absolutely. Multi tendency is a great use case for this, where you've got a bunch of different, even isolated networks that maybe sharing underlying physical infrastructure that are also being spun up with software software elements that are really, you know, sucking the software out of existing hardware but making it more flexible on demand. All of those capabilities, and we see that for sure, in telcos and and in that space. But we also see it in the cloud is people are moving applications up to the cloud. The same type of software elements are being controlled and set up there and have all the same pain and suffering that you see on premise. And I think you know, there's certainly not enough people that have set those up that understand that today. But as soon as they dive in and and realize all of the configuration permutations that exist in cloud networking, they can pattern majin sale. This is the same difficulty that I've had for years in my own Prem environment. >> Well, let's talk a bit about that security thing because we can dive into it because there is a close relationship between being able to say being able state categorically that this network contractually is in place on assured and that we now have an understanding of what security is required on that set of resources. How does network assurance, intent based network and security come together? Especially for you guys? >> Absolutely. So I think this to talk about this is good to talk a little bit about how the software works. So underneath the covers, we go and collect all of the data from the individual network elements without agents without actually needing packets. We build a digital twin or a model of the underlying network in software, and then we run analytics that air, based on research that came out of years and years of phD study by one of my colleagues, plus US production izing that as an organization that using an actual mathematical model we can trace where every packet could ever go in that entire environment and why this is important is to be able to prove security properties of a network. You have to know where everything could ever go to conclusively prove it right. And more often than not today we're using very small sampling methods to try toe, prove properties with humans and doing port scans and things of that nature that just aren't comprehensive. And so this is This is part of our core technology that we bring to bear on. This problem is knowing everything the network is capable of and then being able to mathematically prove security problems to your to your previous case. Imagine you've got a service provider that's offering and a network to two competitors, right? You want to make sure that those networks air actually completely isolated and that there's no possible cross talk that could occur between there. So with our software, we can analyze that we can prove the disc, you know that they're completely disconnected. And in the event that there not show you exactly why they're not when it began occurring and then quickly help you get that corrected and prove that you fixed it. >> You know it's interesting because increasingly digital business is going to mean that very, very complex partnerships are engaged through digital mechanisms. And in the world of contracting, there's a notion of a secured facility where I put something in there and you can take it out. You can look at it, but you can't take it out. And I could imagine you're your tool could also be used to set up those kinds of, you know, we used to come to Militarize owns all these types of things, but at a business level, a facility where we can assure that we know who gets in when they get in and how to get in and when they don't >> absolutely on obvious use case that occurs all the time is guest WiFi. Every company on this planet has no right. You want to make sure, though, that when people are coming and consuming your guest WiFi that they're not able to get back into your database and cause you a privacy or security incident, And this is this is something we can assist with. >> So we're talking about moving from a probabilistic approach to assurance to a categorical mathematical approach to insurance and being able to start to layer on some of those intent based networking things. Let's talk about how the prom is going to get worse. Five. G for folks who might be saying, Oh, yeah, well, I got this issue. It's going to get even richer and more complex as we put out networks out there that can have greater densities of devices within them. Higher band with, you know, even less time to assure that the networks behaving the way we expect it to. How is that going to fold into this whole story? >> Yeah, absolutely. In almost every dimension, networking is growing in complexity every single year five g is a perfect example. We talked about cloud earlier U. C S D When is another one is we kind of shift from MP lest overlays over the Internet? Um, and in the pace, the pace of that is just increasing. So if we don't, if we don't catch up to that from an operational capabilities perspective, it was going to lose control of it, frankly, and the amount of outages, security incidents, time to deliver product internally in my business. If that all continues to increase, we're going to be in a really bad place. And so that's why four networks has focused on trying to solve that and to bring up the capabilities of the operational teams to match that growing complexity and tow. Level it out, frankly, and so that it becomes something that we can consistently bring into our environmental want to transform our networks to bring in these technologies. But if we can't get ahead of the operational aspect of it, we can't do it >> way failed to adopt them. So you know, you raise something interesting, so just really quickly. How does network assurance tooling like what four Network provides change the mindset of the network administrator from I used to do it this way. And now I'm going to do it that way. >> Yeah, we think of it, Really, as Net Dev ops. It's bringing the devil ops mindset that we have in software development of all the way to test driven development where you write the test, then you write your code and then when the test passes, you know that you did what you need to do. You push that into production, you tested again and you just continue. You know, the continuous integration cadenas deployment cycle, that is the type. And we've refined that over thirty to forty years in software development. That's what enables us to have all the amazing services that we get on the broader Internet today. We believe that that same sort of mentality and the characteristics of that pipeline need to be brought to networking, to be able to give us confidence before we make changes. What the outcome of that's going to be into my network as we deploy them out to the network, that it's doing exactly what we expected to dio and then to continue to monitor that because networks are living, breathing things that have humans that are out there on keyboards, touching and changing things. If you don't keep an eye on it, it can run away from your really quickly. And so >> which one is one makes a knox such an exciting place your hand out of your All right. So very quickly. Last couple minutes here, uh, where do you see four networks going with the tooling? What's next? >> Yeah, we think that we think of it very holistically, as we would like for networks to be the single source of truth for everything about your networking environment today. This is, you know, layer two through layer for switching, routing, load balancers, firewalls, allowing you to get the visibility that you've craved across all of that to get that across the cloud, to get that across all of the leading technologies, from the various vendors and and toe layer in additional data over time. But ultimately, it's to help you have up time confidence in what you're doing to be ableto speed through the roadblocks and hurdles that you deal with internally and delivering product, delivering network applications into your network, and then just evolving that into the future. I think that this is the enabling technology to get us to the place that we have scalable five G services that we have. You know, these planet wide networks that are being put into space shortly, right, Tio, help reach every corner of the planet. And to enable the next generation of overlay services that change our lives, we need the network needs to be as reliable as power delivery and deliver the bandwidth and all of these things that we need. But to do that, we have to have scaleable network operations. Otherwise, the companies that deliver the services to us can't pay for it. >> Yeah, so it's it's Ah, it's a major challenge for and I digital business Transformation on DH. Quite frankly. Good guys versus bad guys. Yeah, Alright. David Erickson, CEO and co founder of Forward Networks. Thanks for B again for being on the Cube. Thank you very much. And I'm Peterborough's. Thanks for listening about talking about network assurance. So until next time

>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona. We're here at the Fira Live, theCUBE's ongoing coverage of day two of MWC 23. Back in 2021 was my first Mobile World Congress. And you know what? It was actually quite an experience because there was nobody there. I talked to my friend, who's now my co-host, Chris Lewis about what to expect. He said, Dave, I don't think a lot of people are going to be there, but Danielle Royston is here and she's the CEO of Totoge. And that year when Erickson tapped out of its space she took out 60,000 square feet and built out Cloud City. If it weren't for Cloud City, there would've been no Mobile World Congress in June and July of 2021. DR is back. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> It's great to see you. >> Chris. Awesome to see you. >> Yeah, Chris. Yep. >> Good to be back. Yep. >> You guys remember the narrative back then. There was this lady running around this crazy lady that I met at at Google Cloud next saying >> Yeah. Yeah. >> the cloud's going to take over Telco. And everybody's like, well, this lady's nuts. The cloud's been leaning in, you know? >> Yeah. >> So what do you think, I mean, what's changed since since you first caused all those ripples? >> I mean, I have to say that I think that I caused a lot of change in the industry. I was talking to leaders over at AWS yesterday and they were like, we've never seen someone push like you have and change so much in a short period of time. And Telco moves slow. It's known for that. And they're like, you are pushing buttons and you're getting people to change and thank you and keep going. And so it's been great. It's awesome. >> Yeah. I mean, it was interesting, Chris, we heard on the keynotes we had Microsoft, Satya came in, Thomas Curian came in. There was no AWS. And now I asked CMO of GSMA about that. She goes, hey, we got a great relationship with it, AWS. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But why do you think they weren't here? >> Well, they, I mean, they are here. >> Mean, not here. Why do you think they weren't profiled? >> They weren't on the keynote stage. >> But, you know, at AWS, a lot of the times they want to be the main thing. They want to be the main part of the show. They don't like sharing the limelight. I think they just didn't want be on the stage with the Google CLoud guys and the these other guys, what they're doing they're building out, they're doing so much stuff. As Danielle said, with Telcos change in the ecosystem which is what's happening with cloud. Cloud's making the Telcos think about what the next move is, how they fit in with the way other people do business. Right? So Telcos never used to have to listen to anybody. They only listened to themselves and they dictated the way things were done. They're very successful and made a lot of money but they're now having to open up they're having to leverage the cloud they're having to leverage the services that (indistinct words) and people out provide and they're changing the way they work. >> So, okay in 2021, we talked a lot about the cloud as a potential disruptor, and your whole premise was, look you got to lean into the cloud, or you're screwed. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But the flip side of that is, if they lean into the cloud too much, they might be screwed. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> So what's that equilibrium? Have they been able to find it? Are you working with just the disruptors or how's that? >> No I think they're finding it right. So my talk at MWC 21 was all about the cloud is a double-edged sword, right? There's two sides to it, and you definitely need to proceed through it with caution, but also I don't know that you have a choice, right? I mean, the multicloud, you know is there another industry that spends more on CapEx than Telco? >> No. >> Right. The hyperscalers are doing it right. They spend, you know, easily approaching over a $100 billion in CapEx that rivals this industry. And so when you have a player like that an industry driving, you know and investing so much Telco, you're always complaining how everyone's riding your coattails. This is the opportunity to write someone else's coattails. So jump on, right? I think you don't have a choice especially if other Telco competitors are using hyperscalers and you don't, they're going to be left behind. >> So you advise these companies all the time, but >> I mean, the issue is they're all they're all using all the hyperscalers, right? So they're the multi, the multiple relationships. And as Danielle said, the multi-layer of relationship they're using the hyperscalers to change their own internal operational environments to become more IT-centric to move to that software centric Telco. And they're also then with the hyperscalers going to market in different ways sometimes with them, sometimes competing with them. What what it means from an analyst point of view is you're suddenly changing the dynamic of a market where we used to have nicely well defined markets previously. Now they're, everyone's in it together, you know, it's great. And, and it's making people change the way they think about services. What I, what I really hope it changes more than anything else is the way the customers at the end of the, at the end of the supply, the value chain think this is what we can get hold of this stuff. Now we can go into the network through the cloud and we can get those APIs. We can draw on the mechanisms we need to to run our personal lives, to run our business lives. And frankly, society as a whole. It's really exciting. >> Then your premise is basically you were saying they should ride on the top over the top of the cloud vendor. >> Yeah. Right? >> No. Okay. But don't they lose the, all the data if they do that? >> I don't know. I mean, I think the hyperscalers are not going to take their data, right? I mean, that would be a really really bad business move if Google Cloud and Azure and and AWS start to take over that, that data. >> But they can't take it. >> They can't. >> From regulate, from sovereignty and regulation. >> They can't because of regulation, but also just like business, right? If they started taking their data and like no enterprises would use them. So I think, I think the data is safe. I think you, obviously every country is different. You got to understand the different rules and regulations for data privacy and, and how you keep it. But I think as we look at the long term, right and we always talk about 10 and 20 years there's going to be a hyperscaler region in every country right? And there will be a way for every Telco to use it. I think their data will be safe. And I think it just, you're going to be able to stand on on the shoulders of someone else for once and use the building blocks of software that these guys provide to make better experiences for subscribers. >> You guys got to explain this to me because when I say data I'm not talking about, you know, personal information. I'm talking about all the telemetry, you know, all the all the, you know the plumbing. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Data, which is- >> It will increasingly be shared because you need to share it in order to deliver the services in the streamline efficient way that needs to be deliver. >> Did I hear the CEO of Ericsson Wright where basically he said, we're going to charge developers for access to that data through APIs. >> What the Ericsson have done, obviously with the Vage acquisition is they want to get into APIs. So the idea is you're exposing features, quality policy on demand type features for example, or even pulling we still use that a lot of SMS, right? So pulling those out using those APIs. So it will be charged in some way. Whether- >> Man: Like Twitter's charging me for APIs, now I API calls, you >> Know what it is? I think it's Twilio. >> Man: Oh, okay. >> Right. >> Man: No, no, that's sure. >> There's no reason why telcos couldn't provide a Twilio like service itself. >> It's a horizontal play though right? >> Danielle: Correct because developers need to be charged by the API. >> But doesn't there need to be an industry standard to do that as- >> Well. I think that's what they just announced. >> Industry standard. >> Danielle: I think they just announced that. Yeah. Right now I haven't looked at that API set, right? >> There's like eight of them. >> There's eight of them. Twilio has, it's a start you got to start somewhere Dave. (crosstalk) >> And there's all, the TM forum is all the other standard >> Right? Eight is better than zero- >> Right? >> Haven't got plenty. >> I mean for an industry that didn't really understand APIs as a feature, as a product as a service, right? For Mats Granryd, the deputy general of GSMA to stand on the keynote stage and say we partnered and we're unveiling, right. Pay by the use APIs. I was for it. I was like, that is insane. >> I liked his keynote actually, because I thought he was going to talk about how many attendees and how much economic benefiting >> Danielle: We're super diverse. >> He said, I would usually talk about that and you know greening in the network by what you did talk about a little bit. But, but that's, that surprised me. >> Yeah. >> But I've seen in the enterprise this is not my space as, you know, you guys don't live this but I've seen Oracle try to get developers. IBM had to pay $35 billion trying to get for Red Hat to get developers, right? EMC used to have a thing called EMC code, failed. >> I mean they got to do something, right? So 4G they didn't really make the business case the ROI on the investment in the network. Here we are with 5G, same discussion is having where's the use case? How are we going to monetize and make the ROI on this massive investment? And now they're starting to talk about 6G. Same fricking problem is going to happen again. And so I think they need to start experimenting with new ideas. I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if this new a API network gateway theme that Mats talked about yesterday will work. But they need to start unbundling that unlimited plan. They need to start charging people who are using the network more, more money. Those who are using it less, less. They need to figure this out. This is a crisis for them. >> Yeah our own CEO, I mean she basically said, Hey, I'm for net neutrality, but I want to be able to charge the people that are using it more and more >> To make a return on, on a capital. >> I mean it costs billions of dollars to build these networks, right? And they're valuable. We use them and we talked about this in Cloud City 21, right? The ability to start building better metaverses. And I know that's a buzzword and everyone hates it, but it's true. Like we're working from home. We need- there's got to be a better experience in Zoom in 2D, right? And you need a great network for that metaverse to be awesome. >> You do. But Danielle, you don't need cellular for doing that, do you? So the fixed network is as important. >> Sure. >> And we're at mobile worlds. But actually what we beginning to hear and Crystal Bren did say this exactly, it's about the comp the access is sort of irrelevant. Fixed is better because it's more the cost the return on investment is better from fiber. Mobile we're going to change every so many years because we're a new generation. But we need to get the mechanism in place to deliver that. I actually don't agree that we should everyone should pay differently for what they use. It's a universal service. We need it as individuals. We need to make it sustainable for every user. Let's just not go for the biggest user. It's not, it's not the way to build it. It won't work if you do that you'll crash the system if you do that. And, and the other thing which I disagree on it's not about standing on the shoulders and benefiting from what- It's about cooperating across all levels. The hyperscalers want to work with the telcos as much as the telcos want to work with the hyperscalers. There's a lot of synergy there. There's a lot of ways they can work together. It's not one or the other. >> But I think you're saying let the cloud guys do the heavy lifting and I'm - >> Yeah. >> Not at all. >> And so you don't think so because I feel like the telcos are really good at pipes. They've always been good at pipes. They're engineers. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Are they hanging on to the to the connectivity or should they let that go and well and go toward the developer. >> I mean AWS had two announcements on the 21st a week before MWC. And one was that telco network builder. This is literally being able to deploy a network capability at AWS with keystrokes. >> As a managed service. >> Danielle: Correct. >> Yeah. >> And so I don't know how the telco world I felt the shock waves, right? I was like, whoa, that seems really big. Because they're taking something that previously was like bread and butter. This is what differentiates each telco and now they've standardized it and made it super easy so anyone can do it. Now do I think the five nines of super crazy hardcore network criteria will be built on AWS this way? Probably not, but no >> It's not, it's not end twin. So you can't, no. >> Right. But private networks could be built with this pretty easily, right? And so telcos that don't have as much funding, right. Smaller, more experiments. I think it's going to change the way we think about building networks in telcos >> And those smaller telcos I think are going to be more developer friendly. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> They're going to have business models that invite those developers in. And that's, it's the disruption's going to come from the ISVs and the workloads that are on top of that. >> Well certainly what Dish is trying to do, right? Dish is trying to build a- they launched it reinvent a developer experience. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Right. Built around their network and you know, again I don't know, they were not part of this group that designed these eight APIs but I'm sure they're looking with great intent on what does this mean for them. They'll probably adopt them because they want people to consume the network as APIs. That's their whole thing that Mark Roanne is trying to do. >> Okay, and then they're doing open ran. But is it- they're not really cons- They're not as concerned as Rakuten with the reliability and is that the right play? >> In this discussion? Open RAN is not an issue. It really is irrelevant. It's relevant for the longer term future of the industry by dis aggregating and being able to share, especially ran sharing, for example, in the short term in rural environments. But we'll see some of that happening and it will change, but it will also influence the way the other, the existing ran providers build their services and offer their value. Look you got to remember in the relationship between the equipment providers and the telcos are very dramatically. Whether it's Ericson, NOKIA, Samsung, Huawei, whoever. So those relations really, and the managed services element to that depends on what skills people have in-house within the telco and what service they're trying to deliver. So there's never one size fits all in this industry. >> You're very balanced in your analysis and I appreciate that. >> I try to be. >> But I am not. (chuckles) >> So when Dr went off, this is my question. When Dr went off a couple years ago on the cloud's going to take over the world, you were skeptical. You gave a approach. Have you? >> I still am. >> Have you moderated your thoughts on that or- >> I believe the telecom industry is is a very strong industry. It's my industry of course I love it. But the relationship it is developing much different relationships with the ecosystem players around it. You mentioned developers, you mentioned the cloud players the equipment guys are changing there's so many moving parts to build the telco of the future that every country needs a very strong telco environment to be able to support the site as a whole. People individuals so- >> Well I think two years ago we were talking about should they or shouldn't they, and now it's an inevitability. >> I don't think we were Danielle. >> All using the hyperscalers. >> We were always going to need to transform the telcos from the conservative environments in which they developed. And they've had control of everything in order to reduce if they get no extra revenue at all, reducing the cost they've got to go on a cloud migration path to do that. >> Amenable. >> Has it been harder than you thought? >> It's been easier than I thought. >> You think it's gone faster than >> It's gone way faster than I thought. I mean pushing on this flywheel I thought for sure it would take five to 10 years it is moving. I mean the maths comp thing the AWS announcements last week they're putting in hyperscalers in Saudi Arabia which is probably one of the most sort of data private places in the world. It's happening really fast. >> What Azure's doing? >> I feel like I can't even go to sleep. Because I got to keep up with it. It's crazy. >> Guys. >> This is awesome. >> So awesome having you back on. >> Yeah. >> Chris, thanks for co-hosting. Appreciate you stay here. >> Yep. >> Danielle, amazing. We'll see you. >> See you soon. >> A lot of action here. We're going to come out >> Great. >> Check out your venue. >> Yeah the Togi buses that are outside. >> The big buses. You got a great setup there. We're going to see you on Wednesday. Thanks again. >> Awesome. Thanks. >> All right. Keep it right there. We'll be back to wrap up day two from MWC 23 on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

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

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While never really meant to be a consumer tech event, the rapid ascendancy of smartphones sucked much of the air out of Mobile World Congress over the years, now MWC. And while the device manufacturers continue to have a major presence at the show, the maturity of intelligent devices, longer life cycles, and the disaggregation of the network stack, have put enterprise technologies front and center in the telco business. Semiconductor manufacturers, network equipment players, infrastructure companies, cloud vendors, software providers, and a spate of startups are eyeing the trillion dollar plus communications industry as one of the next big things to watch this decade. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we bring you part two of our ongoing coverage of MWC '23, with some new data on enterprise players specifically in large telco environments, a brief glimpse at some of the pre-announcement news and corresponding themes ahead of MWC, and some of the key announcement areas we'll be watching at the show on theCUBE. Now, last week we shared some ETR data that showed how traditional enterprise tech players were performing, specifically within the telecoms vertical. Here's a new look at that data from ETR, which isolates the same companies, but cuts the data for what ETR calls large telco. The N in this cut is 196, down from 288 last week when we included all company sizes in the dataset. Now remember the two dimensions here, on the y-axis is net score, or spending momentum, and on the x-axis is pervasiveness in the data set. The table insert in the upper left informs how the dots and companies are plotted, and that red dotted line, the horizontal line at 40%, that indicates a highly elevated net score. Now while the data are not dramatically different in terms of relative positioning, there are a couple of changes at the margin. So just going down the list and focusing on net score. Azure is comparable, but slightly lower in this sector in the large telco than it was overall. Google Cloud comes in at number two, and basically swapped places with AWS, which drops slightly in the large telco relative to overall telco. Snowflake is also slightly down by one percentage point, but maintains its position. Remember Snowflake, overall, its net score is much, much higher when measuring across all verticals. Snowflake comes down in telco, and relative to overall, a little bit down in large telco, but it's making some moves to attack this market that we'll talk about in a moment. Next are Red Hat OpenStack and Databricks. About the same in large tech telco as they were an overall telco. Then there's Dell next that has a big presence at MWC and is getting serious about driving 16G adoption, and new servers, and edge servers, and other partnerships. Cisco and Red Hat OpenShift basically swapped spots when moving from all telco to large telco, as Cisco drops and Red Hat bumps up a bit. And VMware dropped about four percentage points in large telco. Accenture moved up dramatically, about nine percentage points in big telco, large telco relative to all telco. HPE dropped a couple of percentage points. Oracle stayed about the same. And IBM surprisingly dropped by about five points. So look, I understand not a ton of change in terms of spending momentum in the large sector versus telco overall, but some deltas. The bottom line for enterprise players is one, they're just getting started in this new disruption journey that they're on as the stack disaggregates. Two, all these players have experience in delivering horizontal solutions, but now working with partners and identifying big problems to be solved, and three, many of these companies are generally not the fastest moving firms relative to smaller disruptive disruptors. Now, cloud has been an exception in fairness. But the good news for the legacy infrastructure and IT companies is that the telco transformation and the 5G buildout is going to take years. So it's moving at a pace that is very favorable to many of these companies. Okay, so looking at just some of the pre-announcement highlights that have hit the wire this week, I want to give you a glimpse of the diversity of innovation that is occurring in the telecommunication space. You got semiconductor manufacturers, device makers, network equipment players, carriers, cloud vendors, enterprise tech companies, software companies, startups. Now we've included, you'll see in this list, we've included OpeRAN, that logo, because there's so much buzz around the topic and we're going to come back to that. But suffice it to say, there's no way we can cover all the announcements from the 2000 plus exhibitors at the show. So we're going to cherry pick here and make a few call outs. Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced an acquisition of an Italian private cellular network company called AthoNet. Zeus Kerravala wrote about it on SiliconANGLE if you want more details. Now interestingly, HPE has a partnership with Solana, which also does private 5G. But according to Zeus, Solona is more of an out-of-the-box solution, whereas AthoNet is designed for the core and requires more integration. And as you'll see in a moment, there's going to be a lot of talk at the show about private network. There's going to be a lot of news there from other competitors, and we're going to be watching that closely. And while many are concerned about the P5G, private 5G, encroaching on wifi, Kerravala doesn't see it that way. Rather, he feels that these private networks are really designed for more industrial, and you know mission critical environments, like factories, and warehouses that are run by robots, et cetera. 'Cause these can justify the increased expense of private networks. Whereas wifi remains a very low cost and flexible option for, you know, whatever offices and homes. Now, over to Dell. Dell announced its intent to go hard after opening up the telco network with the announcement that in the second half of this year it's going to begin shipping its infrastructure blocks for Red Hat. Remember it's like kind of the converged infrastructure for telco with a more open ecosystem and sort of more flexible, you know, more mature engineered system. Dell has also announced a range of PowerEdge servers for a variety of use cases. A big wide line bringing forth its 16G portfolio and aiming squarely at the telco space. Dell also announced, here we go, a private wireless offering with airspan, and Expedo, and a solution with AthoNet, the company HPE announced it was purchasing. So I guess Dell and HPE are now partnering up in the private wireless space, and yes, hell is freezing over folks. We'll see where that relationship goes in the mid- to long-term. Dell also announced new lab and certification capabilities, which we said last week was going to be critical for the further adoption of open ecosystem technology. So props to Dell for, you know, putting real emphasis and investment in that. AWS also made a number of announcements in this space including private wireless solutions and associated managed services. AWS named Deutsche Telekom, Orange, T-Mobile, Telefonica, and some others as partners. And AWS announced the stepped up partnership, specifically with T-Mobile, to bring AWS services to T-Mobile's network portfolio. Snowflake, back to Snowflake, announced its telecom data cloud. Remember we showed the data earlier, it's Snowflake not as strong in the telco sector, but they're continuing to move toward this go-to market alignment within key industries, realigning their go-to market by vertical. It also announced that AT&T, and a number of other partners, are collaborating to break down data silos specifically in telco. Look, essentially, this is Snowflake taking its core value prop to the telco vertical and forming key partnerships that resonate in the space. So think simplification, breaking down silos, data sharing, eventually data monetization. Samsung previewed its future capability to allow smartphones to access satellite services, something Apple has previously done. AMD, Intel, Marvell, Qualcomm, are all in the act, all the semiconductor players. Qualcomm for example, announced along with Telefonica, and Erickson, a 5G millimeter network that will be showcased in Spain at the event this coming week using Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset platform, based on none other than Arm technology. Of course, Arm we said is going to dominate the edge, and is is clearly doing so. It's got the volume advantage over, you know, traditional Intel, you know, X86 architectures. And it's no surprise that Microsoft is touting its open AI relationship. You're going to hear a lot of AI talk at this conference as is AI is now, you know, is the now topic. All right, we could go on and on and on. There's just so much going on at Mobile World Congress or MWC, that we just wanted to give you a glimpse of some of the highlights that we've been watching. Which brings us to the key topics and issues that we'll be exploring at MWC next week. We touched on some of this last week. A big topic of conversation will of course be, you know, 5G. Is it ever going to become real? Is it, is anybody ever going to make money at 5G? There's so much excitement around and anticipation around 5G. It has not lived up to the hype, but that's because the rollout, as we've previous reported, is going to take years. And part of that rollout is going to rely on the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, as we reported last week and in previous Breaking Analysis episodes. OpenRAN is a big component of that evolution. You know, as our RAN intelligent controllers, RICs, which essentially the brain of OpenRAN, if you will. Now as we build out 5G networks at massive scale and accommodate unprecedented volumes of data and apply compute-hungry AI to all this data, the issue of energy efficiency is going to be front and center. It has to be. Not only is it a, you know, hot political issue, the reality is that improving power efficiency is compulsory or the whole vision of telco's future is going to come crashing down. So chip manufacturers, equipment makers, cloud providers, everybody is going to be doubling down and clicking on this topic. Let's talk about AI. AI as we said, it is the hot topic right now, but it is happening not only in consumer, with things like ChatGPT. And think about the theme of this Breaking Analysis in the enterprise, AI in the enterprise cannot be ChatGPT. It cannot be error prone the way ChatGPT is. It has to be clean, reliable, governed, accurate. It's got to be ethical. It's got to be trusted. Okay, we're going to have Zeus Kerravala on the show next week and definitely want to get his take on private networks and how they're going to impact wifi. You know, will private networks cannibalize wifi? If not, why not? He wrote about this again on SiliconANGLE if you want more details, and we're going to unpack that on theCUBE this week. And finally, as always we'll be following the data flows to understand where and how telcos, cloud players, startups, software companies, disruptors, legacy companies, end customers, how are they going to make money from new data opportunities? 'Cause we often say in theCUBE, don't ever bet against data. All right, that's a wrap for today. Remember theCUBE is going to be on location at MWC 2023 next week. We got a great set. We're in the walkway in between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, stand CS-60. Look for us, we got a full schedule. If you got a great story or you have news, stop by. We're going to try to get you on the program. I'll be there with Lisa Martin, co-hosting, David Nicholson as well, and the entire CUBE crew, so don't forget to come by and see us. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, and Ken Schiffman, as well, in our Boston studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE.com. He does some great editing. Thank you. All right, remember all these episodes they are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. I publish each week on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. All the video content is available on demand at theCUBE.net, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Mobile World Congress '23, MWC '23, or next time on Breaking Analysis. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi, today I'm going to talk about network analytics and what that means for telecommunications as we go forward, thinking about 5G, what the impact that's likely to have on network analytics and the data requirement, not just to run the network and to understand the network a little bit better, but also to inform the rest of the operation of the telecommunications business. So as we think about where we are in terms of network analytics and what that is over the last 20 years, the telecommunications industry has evolved its management infrastructure to abstract away from some of the specific technologies in the network. So what do we mean by that? Well, in the, when initial telecommunications networks were designed there were management systems that were built in. Eventually fault management systems, assurance systems, provisioning systems, and so on, were abstracted away. So it didn't matter what network technology had, whether it was a Nokia technology or Erickson technology or Huawei technology or whoever it happened to be. You could just look at your fault management system and understand where faults were happened. As we got into the last sort of 10, 15 years or so telecommunication service providers become, became more sophisticated in terms of their approach to data analytics and specifically network analytics and started asking questions about why and what if in relation to their network performance and network behavior. And so network analytics as a sort of an independent functioning was born and over time more and more data began to get loaded into the network analytics function. So today just about every carrier in the world has a network analytics function that deals with vast quantities of data in big data environments that are now being migrated to the cloud. As all telecommunications carriers are migrating as many IT workloads as possible to the cloud. So what are the things that are happening as we migrate to the cloud that drive enhancements in use cases and enhancements in scale in telecommunications network analytics? Well, 5G is the big thing, right? So 5G, it's not just another G in that sense. I mean, in some cases, in some senses it is 5G means greater bandwidth and lower latency and all those good things. So, you know, we can watch YouTube videos with less interference and, and less sluggish bandwidth and so on and so forth. But 5G is really about the enterprise and enterprise services transformation. 5G is a more secure kind of a network, but 5G is also a more pervasive network. 5G has a fundamentally different network topology than previous generations. So there's going to be more masts. And that means that you can have more pervasive connectivity. So things like IOT and edge applications, autonomous car, current smart cities, these kinds of things are all much better served because you've got more masts, that of course means that you're going to have a lot more data as well and we'll get to that. The second piece is immersive digital services. So with more masts, with more connectivity, with lower latency, with higher bandwidth with the potential is immense for services innovation. And we don't know what those services are going to be. We know that technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, things like this have great potential, but we have yet to see where those commercial applications are going to be, but the innovation and the innovation potential for 5G is phenomenal. It certainly means that we're going to have a lot more edge devices. And that again is going to lead to an increase in the amount of data that we have available. And then the idea of pervasive connectivity when it comes to smart cities, autonomous cars, integrated traffic management systems, all of this kind of stuff, those kind of smart environments thrive where you've got this kind of pervasive connectivity, this persistent connection to the network. Again, that's going to drive more innovation. And again, because you've got these new connected devices, you're going to get even more data. So this rise, this exponential rise in data is really what's driving the change in network analytics. And there are four major vectors that are driving this increase in data in terms of both volume and in terms of speed. So the first thing is more physical elements. So we said already that 5G networks are going to have a different topology. 5G networks will have more devices, more masts. And so with more physical elements in the network, you're going to get more physical data coming off those physical networks. And so that needs to be aggregated and collected and managed and stored and analyzed and understood so that we can have a better understanding as to, you know, why things happened the way they do, why the network behaves in which they do in ways that it does and why devices that are connected to the network and ultimately of course, consumers, whether they be enterprises or retail customers behave in the way they do in relation to their interaction with the network. Edge nodes and devices. We're going to have an explosion in terms of the number of devices. We've already seen IOT devices with your different kinds of trackers and sensors that are hanging off the edge of the network, whether it's to make buildings smarter or car smart or people smarter in terms of having the measurements and the connectivity and all that sort of stuff. So the numbers of devices on the edge and beyond the edge are going to be phenomenal. One of the things that we've been trying to wrestle with as an industry over the last few years is where does a telco network end and where does the enterprise, or even the consumer network begin? It used to be very clear that, you know, the telco network ended at the router but now it's not that clear anymore because in the enterprise space, particularly with virtualized networking, which we're going to talk about in a second, you start to see end to end network services being deployed. And so are they being those services in some instances that are being managed by the service provider themselves, and in some cases by the enterprise client. Again, the line between where the telco network ends and where the enterprise or the consumer network begins is not clear. So those edge, the proliferation of devices at the edge, in terms of, you know, what those devices are, what the data yield is and what the policies are that need to govern those devices in terms of security and privacy and things like that, that's all going to be really, really important. Virtualized services, we just touched on that briefly. One of the big, big trends that's happening right now is not just the shift of IT operations onto the cloud, but the shift of the network onto the cloud, the virtualization of network infrastructure. And that has two major impacts. First of all, it means that you've got the agility and all of the scale benefits that you get from migrating workloads to the cloud, the elasticity and the growth and all that sort of stuff, but arguably more importantly for the telco it means that with a virtualized network infrastructure, you can offer entire networks to enterprise clients. So, you know, selling to a government department, for example, who's looking to stand up a system for, you know, certification of, you know, export certification, something like that. You can not just sell them the connectivity, but you can sell them the networking and the infrastructure in order to serve that entire end to end application. You could send, you could offer them in theory, an entire end-to-end communications network. And with 5G network slicing, they can even have their own little piece of the 5G bandwidth that's been allocated to gets a carrier and have a complete end to end environment. So the kinds of services that can be offered by telcos given virtualize network infrastructure are many and varied and it's an outstanding opportunity. But what it also means is that the number of network elements virtualized in this case is also exploding. And that means the amount of data that we're getting on, informing us as to how those network elements are behaving, how they're performing is going to go up as well. And then finally, AI complexity. So on the demand inside while historically network analytics, big data has been driven by returns in terms of data monetization, whether that's through cost avoidance or service assurance, or even revenue generation through data monetization and things like that. AI is transforming telecommunications and every other industry. The potential for autonomous operations is extremely attractive. And so understanding how the end-to-end telecommunication service delivery infrastructure works is essential as a training ground for AI models that can help to automate a huge amount of telecommunications operating processes. So the AI demand for data is just going through the roof. And so all of these things combined to mean that big data is getting explosive. It is absolutely going through the roof. So that's a huge thing that's happening. So as telecommunications companies around the world are looking at their network analytics infrastructure, which was initially designed for service insurance primarily and how they migrate that to the cloud. These things are impacting on those decisions because you're not just looking at migrating a workload to operate in the cloud that used to work in the data center. Now you're looking at migrating a workload but also expanding the use cases in that workload. And bear in mind many of those workloads are going to need to remain on-prem. So they'll need to be within a private cloud or at best a hybrid cloud environment in order to satisfy regulatory jurisdiction requirements. So let's talk about an example. So LG Uplus is fantastic service provider in Korea, huge growth in that business over the last, over the last 10, 15 years or so. And obviously most people would be familiar with LG, the electronics brand, maybe less so with, with LG Uplus, but they've been doing phenomenal work and were the first business in the world to launch commercial 5G in 2019. And so a huge milestone that they achieved. And at the same time they deployed the Network Real-time Analytics Platform or NRAP from a combination of Cloudera and our partner Caremark . Now, there were a number of things that were driving the requirement for the analytics platform at the time. Clearly the 5G launch was the big thing that they had in mind, but there were other things that were at play as well. So within the 5G launch, they were looking for a visibility of services and service assurance and service quality. So, you know, what services have been launched? How are they being taken up? What are the issues that are arising? Where the faults happening? Where are the problems? Because clearly when you launch a new service like that you want to understand and be on top of the issues as they arise. So that was really, really important. A second piece was and, you know, this is not a new story to any telco in the world, right? But there are silos in operation. And so it taking advantage of, or eliminating redundancies through the process of digital transformation it was really important. And so particular, the two silos between wired and the wireless sides of the business needed to come together so that there would be an integrated network management system for LG Uplus as they rolled out 5G. So eliminating redundancy and driving cost savings through the integration of the silos was really, really important. And that's a process and the people think every bit, as much as it is a systems and a data thing so another big driver. And the fourth one, you know, we've talked a little bit about some of these things, right? 5G brings huge opportunity for enterprise services innovation. So industry 4.0, digital experience, these kinds of use cases were very important in the South Korean market and in the business of LG Uplus And so looking at AI and how can you apply AI to network management? Again, there's a number of use cases, really, really exciting use cases that have gone live now in LG Uplus since we did this initial deployment and they're making fantastic strides there. Big data analytics for users across LG Uplus, right? So it's not just for, it's not just for the immediate application of 5G or the support or the 5G network, but also for other data analysts and data scientists across the LG Uplus business. Network analytics while primarily it's, it's primary use case is around network management. LG Uplus or network analytics has applications across the entire business, right? So, you know, for customer churn or next best offer for understanding customer experience and customer behavior really important there for digital advertising, for product innovation, all sorts of different use cases and departments within the business needed access to this information. So collaboration sharing across the network, the real-time network analytics platform it was very important. And then finally, as I mentioned, LG group is much bigger than just LG Uplus. It's got the electronics and other pieces, and they had launched a major group wide digital transformation program in 2019. And so being a part of that was important as well. Some of the seems that they were looking to address. So first of all, the integration of wired and wireless data sources, and so getting your assurance data sources, your network data sources and so on integration was really, really important. Scale was massive for them. You know, they're talking about billions of transactions in under a minute being processed and hundreds of terabytes per day. So, you know, phenomenal scale that needed to be, you know, available out of the box as it were. Real time indicators and alarms. And there was lots of KPIs and thresholds set that, you know, to make, made to meet certain criteria, certain standards. Customer specific real time analysis of 5G, services particularly for the launch, root cause analysis and AI based prediction on service anomalies and service issues was a core use case. As I talked about already the provision of service, of data services across the organization. And then support for 5G, served the business service impact was extremely important. So it's not just understand, well, you know, that you have an outreach in a particular network element, but what is the impact on the business of LG Uplus, but also what is the impact on the business of the customer from an outage or an anomaly or a problem on the network. So being able to answer those kinds of questions really, really important too. And as I said between Cloudera and Caremark and LG Uplus they have already, themselves an intrinsic part of the solution, this is what we ended up building. So a big, complicated architecture side. I really don't want to go into too much detail here. You can see these things for yourself, but let me skip through it really quickly. So, first of all, the key data sources. You have all of your wireless network information, other data sources, this is really important 'cause sometimes you kind of skip over this. There are other systems that are in place like the enterprise data warehouse that needed to be integrated as well. Southbound and northbound interfaces. So we get our data, yo know, from the network and so on and network management applications through both file interfaces, Kafka, NiFi are important technologies. And also the RDBMS systems that, you know, like the enterprise data warehouse that we're able to feed that into the system. And then northbound, you know, we spoke already about making network analytics services available across the enterprise. So, you know, having both a file and API interface available for other systems and other consumers across the enterprise is very important. Lots of stuff going on then in the platform itself. Two petabytes and persistent storage, Cloudera HDFS, 300 nodes for the raw data storage and then Kudu for real time storage for, you know, real-time indicator analysis around generation and other real time processes. So there was the core of the solution spark processes for ETL, key quality indicators and alarming, and also a bunch of work done around data preparation, data generation for transferal to, for party systems through the northbound interfaces. Impala API queries for real-time systems there on the right hand side and then a whole bunch of clustering classification, prediction jobs through the ML processes, the machine learning processes. Again, another key use case, and we've done a bunch of work on that, and I encourage you to have a look at the Cloudera website for more detail on some of the work that we did here. Some pretty cool stuff. And then finally, just the upstream services, some of these, there's lots more than simply these ones, but service assurance is really, really important so SQM, CEM and ACD right to the service quality management customer experience autonomous control is really, really important consumers of the real-time analytics platform and your conventional service assurance functions like faulted performance management. These things are as much consumers of the information and the network analytics platform as they are providers of data to the network analytics platform. So some of the specific use cases that have been stood up and that are delivering value to this day and there's lots of more besides, but these are just three that we pulled out. So, first of all, sort of specific monitoring and customer quality analysis care and response. So again, growing from the initial 5G launch, and then broadening into broader services, understanding where there are issues so that when people complain, when people have an issue that we can answer the concerns of the client in a substantive way. AI functions around root cause analysis understanding why things went wrong when they went wrong and also making recommendations as to how to avoid those occurrences in the future. So, you know, what preventative measures can be taken. And then finally, the collaboration function across LG Uplus extremely important and continues to be important to this day where data is shared throughout the enterprise, through the API Lira, through file interfaces and other things and through interface integrations with upstream systems. So that's kind of the real quick run through of LG Uplus. And the numbers are just staggering. You know, we've seen upwards of a billion transactions in under 40 seconds being tested. And we've gone through beyond those thresholds now already, and we're start, and this isn't just a theoretical sort of a benchmarking test or something like that. We're seeing these kinds of volumes of data and not too far down the track. So with those things that I mentioned earlier or with the proliferation of network infrastructure in the 5G context with virtualized elements, with all of these other bits and pieces are driving massive volumes of data towards the network analytics platform. So phenomenal scale. This is just one example. We work with service providers all over the world is over 80% of the top 100 telecommunication service providers run on Cloudera. They use Cloudera in the network and we're seeing those customers all migrating Legacy Cloudera platforms now onto CDP onto the Cloudera Data Platform. They're increasing the jobs that they do. So it's not just warehousing, not just ingestion of ETL and moving into things like machine learning. And also looking at new data sources from places like NW DAF the network data analytics function in 5G or the management and orchestration layer in software defined network function virtualization. So, you know, new use cases coming in all the time, new data sources coming in all the time, growth in the application scope from, as we say, from edge to AI. And so it's really exciting to see how the footprint is growing and how the applications in telecommunications are really making a difference in facilitating network transformation. And that's covering, that's me covered for today. I hope you found that helpful. By all means please reach out. There's a couple of links here. You can follow me on Twitter. You can connect to the telecommunications page. Reach out to me directly at Cloudera I'd love to answer your questions and talk to you about how big data is transforming networks and how network transformation is accelerating telcos throughout the world.

>>Hi today, I'm going to talk about network analytics and what that means for, for telecommunications as we go forward. Um, thinking about, uh, 5g, what the impact that's likely to have on, on network analytics and the data requirement, not just to run the network and to understand the network a little bit better. Um, but also to, to inform the rest of the operation of the telecommunications business. Um, so as we think about where we are in terms of network analytics and what that is over the last 20 years, the telecommunications industry has evolved its management infrastructure, uh, to abstract away from some of the specific technologies in the network. So what do we mean by that? Well, uh, in the, in the initial, uh, telecommunications networks were designed, there were management systems that were built in, um, eventually fault management systems, uh, assurance systems, provisioning systems, and so on were abstracted away. >>So it didn't matter what network technology had, whether it was a Nokia technology or Erickson technology or Huawei technology or whatever it happened to be. You could just look at your fault management system, understand where false, what happened as we got into the last sort of 10, 15 years or so. Telecommunication service providers become became more sophisticated in terms of their approach to data analytics and specifically network analytics, and started asking questions about why and what if in relation to their network performance and network behavior. And so network analytics as a, as a bit of an independent function was born and over time, more and more data began to get loaded into the network analytics function. So today just about every carrier in the world has a network analytics function that deals with vast quantities of data in big data environments that are now being migrated to the cloud. >>As all telecommunications carriers are migrating as many it workloads as possible, um, to the cloud. So what are the things that are happening as we migrate to the cloud that drive, uh, uh, enhancements in use cases and enhancements and scale, uh, in telecommunications network analytics? Well, 5g is the big thing, right? So 5g, uh, it's not just another G in that sense. I mean, in some cases, in some senses, it is 5g means greater bandwidth, lower latency and all those good things. So, you know, we can watch YouTube videos with less interference and, and less sluggish bandwidth and so on and so forth. But 5g is really about the enterprise and enterprise services. Transformation, 5g is more secure, kind of a network, but 5g is also a more pervasive network 5g, a fundamentally different network topology than previous generations. So there's going to be more masts and that means that you can have more pervasive connectivity. >>Uh, so things like IOT and edge applications, autonomous cars, smart cities, these kinds of things, um, are all much better served because you've got more masks that of course means that you're going to have a lot more data as well. And we'll get to that. The second piece is immersive digital services. So with more masks, with more connectivity, with lower latency with higher man, the potential, uh, is, is, is, is immense for services innovation. And we don't know what those services are going to be. We know that technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, things like this have great potential. Um, but we, we have yet to see where those commercial applications are going to be, but the innovation and the innovation potential for 5g is phenomenal. Um, it certainly means that we're going to have a lot more, uh, edge devices, um, uh, and that again is going to lead to an increase in the amount of data that we have available. >>And then the idea of pervasive connectivity when it comes to smart, smart cities, uh, autonomous, autonomous currents, um, uh, integrated traffic management systems, um, all of this kind of stuff, those of those kind of smart environments thrive where you've got this kind of pervasive connectivity, this persistent, uh, connection to the network. Um, again, that's going to drive, um, um, uh, more innovation. And again, because you've got these new connected devices, you're going to get even more data. So this rise, this exponential rise in data is really what's driving the change in, in network analytics. And there are four major vectors that are driving this increase in data in terms of both volume and in terms of speed. So the first is more physical elements. So we said already that 5g networks are going to have a different apology. 5g networks will have more devices, more and more masks. >>Um, and so with more physical elements in the network, you're going to get more physical data coming off those physical networks. And so that needs to be aggregated and collected and managed and stored and analyzed and understood when, so that we can, um, have a better understanding as to why things happened the way they do, why the network behaves in which they do in, in, in, in ways that it does and why devices that are connected to the network. And ultimately of course, consumers, whether they be enterprises or retail customers, um, behave in the way they do in relation to their interaction within our edge nodes and devices, we're going to have a, uh, an explosion in terms of the number of devices. We've already seen IOT devices with your different kinds of trackers and, uh, and, and sensors that are hanging off the edge of the network, whether it's to make buildings smarter car smarter, or people smarter, um, in, in terms of having the, the, the measurements and the connectivity and all that sort of stuff. >>So the numbers of devices on the agent beyond the age, um, are going to be phenomenal. One of the things that we've been trying to with as an industry over the last few years is where does the telco network end, and where does the enterprise, or even the consumer network begin. You used to be very clear that, you know, the telco network ended at the router. Um, but now it's not, it's not that clear anymore because in the enterprise space, particularly with virtualized networking, which we're going to talk about in a second, um, you start to see end to end network services being deployed. Um, uh, and so are they being those services in some instances are being managed by the service provider themselves, and in some cases by the enterprise client, um, again, the line between where the telco network ends and where the enterprise or the consumer network begins, uh, is not clear. >>Uh, so, so those edge, the, the, the proliferation of devices at the age, um, uh, in terms of, um, you know, what those devices are, what the data yield is and what the policies are, their need to govern those devices, um, in terms of security and privacy, things like that, um, that's all going to be really, really important virtualized services. We just touched on that briefly. One of the big, big trends that's happening right now is not just the shift of it operations onto the cloud, but the shift of the network onto the cloud, the virtualization of network infrastructure, and that has two major impacts. First of all, it means that you've got the agility and all of the scale, um, uh, benefits that you get from migrating workloads to the cloud, the elasticity and the growth and all that sort of stuff. But arguably more importantly for the telco, it means that with a virtualized network infrastructure, you can offer entire networks to enterprise clients. >>So if you're selling to a government department, for example, is looking to stand up a system for certification of, of, you know, export certification, something like that. Um, you can not just sell them the connectivity, but you can sell them the networking and the infrastructure in order to serve that entire end to end application. You could sentence, you could offer them in theory, an entire end-to-end communications network, um, and with 5g network slicing, they can even have their own little piece of the 5g bandwidth that's been allocated against the carrier, um, uh, and, and have a complete end to end environment. So the kinds of services that can be offered by telcos, um, given virtualize network infrastructure, uh, are, are many and varied. And it's a, it's a, it's a, um, uh, an outstanding opportunity. But what it also means is that the number of network elements virtualized in this case is also exploding. >>That means the amount of data that we're getting on, uh, informing us as to how those network elements are behaving, how they're performing, um, uh, is, is, is going to go up as well. And then finally, AI complexity. So on the demand side, um, while historically, uh, um, network analytics, big data, uh, has been, has been driven by, um, returns in terms of data monetization, uh, whether that's through cost avoidance, um, or service assurance, uh, or even revenue generation through data monetization and things like that. AI is transforming telecommunications and every other industry, the potential for autonomous operations, uh, is extremely attractive. And so understanding how the end-to-end telecommunication service delivering delivery infrastructure works, uh, is essential, uh, as a training ground for AI models that can help to automate a huge amount of telecommunications operating, um, processes. So the AI demand for data is just going through the roof. >>And so all of these things combined to mean big data is getting explosive. It is absolutely going through the roof. So that's a huge thing that's happening. So as telecommunications companies around the world are looking at their network analytics infrastructure, which was initially designed for service insurance primarily, um, and how they migrate that to the cloud. These things are impacting on those decisions because you're not just looking at migrating a workload to operate in the cloud that used to work in the, in the data center. Now you're looking at, um, uh, migrating a workload, but also expanding the use cases in that work and bear in mind, many of those, those are going to need to remain on prem. So they'll need to be within a private cloud or at best a hybrid cloud environment in order to satisfy a regulatory jurisdictional requirements. So let's talk about an example. >>So LGU plus is a Finastra fantastic service provider in Korea. Um, huge growth in that business over the last, uh, over the last 10, 15 years or so. Um, and obviously most people will be familiar with LG, the electronics brand, maybe less so with, uh, with LG plus, but they've been doing phenomenal work. And we're the first, uh, business in the world who launch commercial 5g in 2019. And so a huge milestone that they achieved. And at the same time they deploy the network real-time analytics platform or in rep, uh, from a combination of Cloudera and our partner calmer. Now, um, there were a number of things that were driving, uh, the requirement for it, for the, for the analytics platform at the time. Um, clearly the 5g launch was that was the big thing that they had in mind, but there were other things that re so within the 5g launch, um, uh, they were looking for, for visibility of services, um, and service assurance and service quality. >>So, you know, what services have been launched? How are they being taken up? What are the issues that are arising, where are the faults happening? Um, where are the problems? Because clearly when you launch a new service, but then you want to understand and be on top of the issues as they arise. Um, so that was really, really important. The second piece was, and, you know, this is not a new story to any telco in the world, right. But there are silos in operation. Uh, and so, um, taking advantage of, um, or eliminating redundancies through the process, um, of, of digital transformation, it was really important. And so particular, the two silos between wired and the wireless sides of the business come together so that there would be an integrated network management system, um, for, uh, for LGU plus, as they rolled out 5g. So eliminating redundancy and driving cost savings through the, the integration of the silos is really, really important. >>And that's a process and the people thing every bit, as much as it is a systems and a data thing. So, um, another big driver and the fourth one, you know, we've talked a little bit about some of these things, right? 5g brings huge opportunity for enterprise services, innovation. So industry 4.0 digital experience, these kinds of use cases, um, are very important in the south Korean marketing and in the, um, in the business of LGU plus. And so, uh, um, looking at AI and how can you apply AI to network management? Uh, again, there's a number of use cases, really, really exciting use cases that have gone live now, um, in LG plus since, uh, since we did this initial deployment and they're making fantastic strides there, um, big data analytics for users across LGU plus, right? So it's not just for, um, uh, it's not just for the immediate application of 5g or the support or the 5g network. >>Um, but also for other data analysts and data scientists across the LGU plus business network analytics, while primarily it's primary it's primary use case is around network management, um, LGU plus, or, or network analytics, um, has applications across the entire business, right? So, um, you know, for customer churn or next best offer for understanding customer experience and customer behavior really important there for digital advertising, for product innovation, all sorts of different use cases and departments within the business needed access to this information. So collaboration sharing across the network, the real-time network analytics platform, um, it was very important. And then finally, as I mentioned, LG group is much bigger than just LG plus it's because the electronics and other pieces, and they had launched a major group wide digital transformation program in 2019, and still being a part of that was, well, some of them, the problems that they were looking to address. >>Um, so first of all, the integration of wired and wireless data service data sources, and so getting your assurance data sources, your network, data sources, uh, and so on integrated with is really, really important scale was massive for them. Um, you know, they're talking about billions of transactions in under a minute, uh, being processed, um, and hundreds of terabytes per day. So, uh, you know, phenomenal scale, uh, that needed to be available out of the box as it were, um, real time indicators and alarms. And there was lots of KPIs and thresholds set that, you know, w to make, make it to meet certain criteria, certain standards, um, customer specific, real time analysis of 5g, particularly for the launch root cause analysis, an AI based prediction on service, uh, anomalies and service service issues was, was, was a core use case. Um, as I talked about already the provision of service of data services across the organization, and then support for 5g, uh, served the business service, uh, impact, uh, was extremely important. >>So it's not just understand well, you know, that you have an outage in a particular network element, but what is the impact on the business of LGU plus, but also what is the impact on the business of the customer, uh, from an outage or an anomaly or a problem on, on, on the network. So being able to answer those kinds of questions really, really important, too. And as I said, between Cloudera and Kamarck, uh, uh, and LGU plus, uh, really themselves an intrinsic part of the solution, um, uh, this is, this is what we, we ended up building. So a big complicated architecture space. I really don't want to go into too much detail here. Um, uh, you can see these things for yourself, but let me skip through it really quickly. So, first of all, the key data sources, um, you have all of your wireless network information, other data sources. >>This is really important because sometimes you kind of skip over this. There are other systems that are in place like the enterprise data warehouse that needed to be integrated as well, southbound and northbound interfaces. So we get our data from the network and so on, um, and network management applications through file interfaces. CAFCA no fire important technologies. And also the RDBMS systems that, uh, you know, like the enterprise data warehouse that we're able to feed that into the system. And then northbound, um, you know, we spoke already about me making network analytics services available across the enterprise. Um, so, uh, you know, uh, having both the file and the API interface available, um, for other systems and other consumers across the enterprise is very important. Um, lots of stuff going on then in the platform itself to petabytes and persistent storage, um, Cloudera HDFS, 300 nodes for the, the raw data storage, um, uh, and then, uh, could do for real time storage for real-time indicator analysis, alarm generation, um, uh, and other real time, um, processes. >>Uh, so there, that was the, the core of the solution, uh, spark processes for ETL key quality indicators and alarming, um, and also a bunch of work done around, um, data preparation, data generation for transferal to, to third party systems, um, through the northbound interfaces, um, uh, Impala, API queries, um, for real-time systems, uh, there on the right hand side, and then, um, a whole bunch of clustering classification, prediction jobs, um, through the, uh, the, the, the, the ML processes, the machine learning processes, uh, again, another key use case, and we've done a bunch of work on that. And, um, I encourage you to have a look at the Cloudera website for more detail on some of the work that we did here. Um, so this is some pretty cool stuff. Um, and then finally, just the upstream services, some of these there's lots more than, than, than simply these ones, but service assurance is really, really important. So SQM cm and SED grade. So the service quality management customer experience, autonomous controllers, uh, really, really important consumers of, of the, of the real-time analytics platform, uh, and your conventional service assurance, um, functions like faulted performance management. Uh, these things are as much consumers of the information and the network analytics platform as they are providers of data to the network, uh, analytics >>Platform. >>Um, so some of the specific use cases, uh, that, uh, have been, have been stood up and that are delivering value to this day and lots of more episodes, but these are just three that we pulled out. Um, so first of all, um, uh, sort of specific monitoring and customer quality analysis, Karen response. So again, growing from the initial 5g launch and then broadening into broader services, um, understanding where there are the, where there are issues so that when people complaining, when people have an issue, um, that, um, uh, that we can answer the, the concerns of the client, um, in a substantive way, um, uh, AI functions around root cause analysis or understanding why things went wrong when they went wrong. Um, uh, and also making recommendations as to how to avoid those occurrences in the future. Uh, so we know what preventative measures can be taken. Um, and then finally the, uh, the collaboration function across LGU plus extremely important and continues to be important to this day where data is shared throughout the enterprise, through the API Lira through file interfaces and other things, and through interface integrations with, uh, with upstream systems. >>So, um, that's kind of the, the, uh, real quick run through of LGU plus the numbers are just stave staggering. Um, you know, we've seen, uh, upwards of a billion transactions in under 40 seconds being, um, uh, being tested. Um, and, and we've gone beyond those thresholds now, already, um, and we're started and, and, and, and this isn't just a theoretical sort of a benchmarking test or something like that. We're seeing these kinds of volumes of data and not too far down the track. So, um, with those things that I mentioned earlier with the proliferation of, of, um, of network infrastructure, uh, in the 5g context with virtualized elements, with all of these other bits and pieces are driving massive volumes of data towards the, uh, the, the, the network analytics platform. So phenomenal scale. Um, this is just one example we work with, with service providers all over the world is over 80% of the top 100 telecommunication service providers run on Cloudera. >>They use Cloudera in the network, and we're seeing those customers, all migrating legacy cloud platforms now onto CDP onto the Cloudera data platform. Um, they're increasing the, the, the jobs that they do. So it's not just warehousing, not just ingestion ETL, and moving into things like machine learning. Um, and also looking at new data sources from places like NWTF the network data analytics function in 5g, or the management and orchestration layer in, in software defined networks, network, function, virtualization. So, you know, new use cases coming in all the time, new data sources coming in all the time growth in, in, in, in the application scope from, as we say, from edge to AI. Um, and so it's, it's really exciting to see how the, the, the, the footprint is growing and how, uh, the applications in telecommunications are really making a difference in, in facilitating, um, network transformation. And that's covering that. That's me covered for today. I hope you found that helpful, um, by all means, please reach out, uh, there's a couple of links here. You can follow me on Twitter. You can connect to the telecommunications page, reach out to me directly at Cloudera. I'd love to answer your questions, um, uh, and, uh, and talk to you about how big data is transforming networks, uh, and how network transformation is, is accelerating telcos, uh, throughout >>Jamie Sharath with Liga data, I'm primarily on the delivery side of the house, but I also support our new business teams. I'd like to spend a minute really just kind of telling you about the legal data, where basically a Silicon valley startup, uh, started in 2014, and, uh, our lead iron, our executive team, basically where the data officers at Yahoo before this, uh, we provide managed data services, and we provide products that are focused on telcos. So we have some experience in non telco industry, but our focus for the last seven years or so is specifically on telco. So again, something over 200 employees, we have a global presence in north America, middle east Africa, Asia, and Europe. And we have folks in all of those places, uh, I'd like to call your attention to the, uh, the middle really of the screen there. So here is where we have done some partnership with Cloudera. >>So if you look at that and you can see we're in Holland and Jamaica, and then a lot to throughout Africa as well. Now, the data fabric is the product that we're talking about. And the data fabric is basically a big data type of data warehouse with a lot of additional functionality involved. The data fabric is comprised of, uh, some something called a flare, which we'll talk about in a minute below there, and then the Cloudera data platform underneath. So this is how we're partnering together. We, uh, we, we have this tool and it's, uh, it's functioning and delivering in something over 10 up. So flare now, flare is a piece of that legal data IP. The rest is there. And what flare does is that basically pulls in data, integrates it to an event streaming platform. It's, uh, it is the engine behind the data fabric. >>Uh, it's also a decisioning platform. So in real time, we're able to pull in data. We're able to run analytics on it, and we're able to alert are, do whatever is needed in a real-time basis. Of course, a lot of clients at this point are still sending data in batch. So it handles that as well, but we call that a CA picture Sanchez. Now Sacho is a very interesting app. It's an AI analytics app for executives. What it is is it runs on your mobile phone. It ties into your data. Now this could be the data fabric, but it couldn't be a standalone product. And basically it allows you to ask, you know, human type questions to say, how are my gross ads last week? How are they comparing against same time last week before that? And even the same time 60 days ago. So as an executive or as an analyst, I can pull it up and I can look at it instantly in a meeting or anywhere else without having to think about queries or anything like that. >>So that's pretty much for us at legal data, not really to set the context of where we are. So this is a traditional telco environments. So you see the systems of record, you see the cloud, you see OSS and BSS data. So one of the things that the next step above which calls we call the system of intelligence of the data fabric does, is it mergers that BSS and OSS data. So the longer we have any silos or anything that's separated, it's all coming into one area to allow business, to go in or allow data scientists go in and do that. So if you look at the bottom line, excuse me, of the, uh, of the system of intelligence, you can see that flare is the tools that pulls in the data. So it provides even streaming capabilities. It preserves entity states, so that you can go back and look at it state at any time. >>It does stream analytics that is as the data is coming in, it can perform analytics on it. And it also allows real-time decisioning. So that's something that, uh, that's something that business users can go in and create a system of, uh, if them's, it looks very much like the graph database, where you can create a product that will allow the user to be notified if a certain condition happens. So for instance, a bundle, so a real-time offer or user is succinct to run out of is ongoing, and an offer can be sent to him right on the fly. And that's set up by the business user as opposed to programmers, uh, data infrastructure. So the fabric has really three areas. That data is persistent, obviously there's the data lake. So the data lake stores that level of granularity that is very deep years and years of history, data, scientists like that, uh, and, uh, you know, for a historical record keeping and requirements from the government, that data would be stored there. >>Then there's also something we call the business semantics layer and the business semantics layer contains something over 650 specific telco KPIs. These are initially from PM forum, but they also are included in, uh, various, uh, uh, mobile operators that we've delivered at. And we've, we've grown that. So that's there for business data lake is there for data scientists, analytical stores, uh, they can be used for many different reasons. There are a lot of times RDBMS is, are still there. So these, this, this basically platform, this cloud they're a platform can tie into analytical data stores as well via flair access and reporting. So graphic visualizations, API APIs are a very key part of it. A third-party query tools, any kind of grid tools can be used. And those are the, of course, the, uh, the ones that are highly optimized and allow, you know, search of billions of records. >>And then if you look at the top, it's the systems of engagement, then you might vote this use cases. So teleco reporting, hundreds of KPIs that are, that are generated for users, segmentation, basically micro to macro segmentation, segmentation will play a key role in a use case. We talked about in a minute monetization. So this helps teleco providers monetize their specific data, but monetize it in. Okay, how to, how do they make money off of it, but also how might you leverage this data to engage with another client? So for instance, in some where it's allowed a DPI is used, and the fabric tracks exactly where each person goes each, uh, we call it a subscriber, goes within his, uh, um, uh, internet browsing on the, on the four or 5g. And, uh, the, all that data is stored. Uh, whereas you can tell a lot of things where the segment, the profile that's being used and, you know, what are they propensity to buy? Do they spend a lot of time on the Coca-Cola page? There are buyers out there that find that information very valuable, and then there's signs of, and we spoke briefly about Sanchez before that sits on top of the fabric or it's it's alone. >>So, so the story really that we want to tell is, is one, this is, this is one case out of it. This is a CVM type of case. So there was a mobile operator out there that was really offering, you know, packages, whether it's a bundle or whether it's a particular tool to subscribers, they, they were offering kind of an abroad approach that it was not very focused. It was not depending on the segments that were created around the profiling earlier, uh, the subscriber usage was somewhat dated and this was causing a lot of those. A lot of those offers to be just basically not taken and, and not, not, uh, audited. Uh, there was limited segmentation capabilities really before the, uh, before the, uh, fabric came in. Now, one of the key things about the fabric is when you start building segments, you can build that history. >>So all of that data stored in the data lake can be used in terms of segmentation. So what did we do about that? The, the, the envy and, oh, the challenge this, uh, we basically put the data fabric in and the data fabric was running Cloudera data platform and that, uh, and that's how we team up. Uh, we facilitated the ability to personalize campaign. So what that means is, uh, the segments that were built and that user fell within that segment, we knew exactly what his behavior most likely was. So those recommendations, those offers could be created then, and we enable this in real time. So real-time ability to even go out to the CRM system and gather further information about that. All of these tools, again, we're running on top of the Cloudera data platform, uh, what was the outcome? Willie, uh, outcome was that there was a much more precise offer given to the client that is, that was accepted, no increase in cross sell and upsell subscriber retention. >>Uh, our clients came back to us and pointed out that, uh, it was 183% year on year revenue increase. Uh, so this is a, this is probably one of the key use cases. Now, one thing to really mention is there are hundreds and hundreds of use cases running on the fabric. And I would even say thousands. A lot of those have been migrated. So when the fabric is deployed, when they bring the Cloudera and the legal data solution in there's generally a legacy system that has many use cases. So many of those were, were migrated virtually all of them in pen, on put on the cloud. Uh, another issue is that new use cases are enabled again. So when you get this level of granularity and when you have campaigns that can now base their offers on years of history, as opposed to 30 days of history, the campaigns campaign management response systems, uh, are, are, uh, are enabled quite a bit to do all, uh, to be precise in their offers. Okay. >>Okay. So this is a technical slide. Uh, one of the things that we normally do when we're, when we're out there talking to folks, is we talk and give an overview and that last little while, and then we give a deep technical dive on all aspects of it. So sometimes that deep dive can go a couple of hours. I'm going to do this slide and a couple of minutes. So if you look at it, you can see over on the left, this is the, uh, the sources of the data. And they go through this tool called flare that runs on the cloud. They're a data platform, uh, that can either be via cues or real-time cues, or it can be via a landing zone, or it can be a data extraction. You can take a look at the data quality that's there. So those are built in one of the things that flare does is it has out of the box ability to ingest data sources and to apply the data quality and validation for telco type sources. >>But one of the reasons this is fast to market is because throughout those 10 or 12, uh, opcos that we've done with Cloudera, where we have already built models, so models for CCN, for air for, for most mediation systems. So there's not going to be a type of, uh, input that we haven't already seen are very rarely. So that actually speeds up deployment very quickly. Then a player does the transformations, the, uh, the metrics, continuous learning, we call it continuous decisioning, uh, API access. Uh, we, uh, you know, for, for faster response, we use distributed cash. I'm not going to go too deeply in there, but the layer in the business semantics layer again, are, are sitting on top of the Cloudera data platform. You see the Kafka CLU, uh, Q1, the right as well. >>And all of that, we're calling the fabric. So the fabric is Cloudera data platform and the cloud and flair and all of this runs together. And, and by the way, there've been many, many, many, many hundreds of hours testing flare with Cloudera and, uh, and the whole process, the results, what are the results? Well, uh, there are, there are four I'm going to talk about, uh, we saw the one for the, it was called my pocket pocket, but it's a CDM type, a use case. Uh, the subscribers of that mobile operator were 14 million plus there was a use case for 24 million plus that a year on year revenue was 130%, uh, 32 million plus for 38%. These are, um, these are different CVM pipe, uh, use cases, as well as network use cases. And then there were 44%, uh, telco with 76 million subscribers. So I think that there are a lot more use cases that we could talk about, but, but in this case, this is the ones we're looking at, uh, again, 183%. This is something that we find consistently. And these figures come from our, uh, our actual end client. How do we unlock the full potential of this? Well, I think to start is to arrange a meeting and, uh, it would be great to, to, uh, for you to reach out to me or to Anthony. Uh, we're working at the junction on this, and we can set up a, uh, we can set up a meeting and we can go through this initial meeting. And, uh, I think that's the very beginning. Uh, again, you can get additional information from Cloudera website and from the league of data website, Anthony, that's the story. Thank you. >>No, that's great. Jeremy, thank you so much. It's a, it's, it's wonderful to go deep. And I know that there are hundreds of use cases being deployed in MTN, um, but great to go deep on one. And like you said, it can, once you get that sort of architecture in place, you can do so many different things. The power of data is tremendous, but it's great to be able to see how you can, how you can track it end to end from collecting the data, processing it, understanding it, and then applying it in a commercial context and bringing actual revenue back into the business. So there is your ROI straight away. Now you've got a platform that you can transform your business on. That's, that's, it's a tremendous story, Jamie, and thank you for your part. Sure. Um, that's a, that's, that's our story for today. Like Jamie says, um, please do flee, uh, feel free to reach out to us. Um, the, the website addresses are there and our contact details, and we'd be delighted to talk to you a little bit more about some of the other use cases, perhaps, um, and maybe about your own business and, uh, and how we might be able to make it, make it perform a little better. So thank you.

>>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) >> Okay, we're back here in theCUBE, this is day three of our coverage right here in the middle of all the action of Cloud City at Mobile World Congress. This is the hit of the entire show in Barcelona, not only in person, but out on the interwebs virtually, this is a hybrid event. This is back to real life, and theCUBE is here. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante and DR is here, Danielle Royston. >> Totally. >> Welcome back to theCUBE for the fourth time now at the anchor desk, coming back, we love you. >> Well, it's been a busy day, it's been a busy week. It's been an awesome week. >> John: Feeling good? >> Oh my God. >> You made the call. >> I've made the call. >> You did on your podcast what, months ago. >> Yeah, right? >> You made the call. >> Made the call. >> You're on the right side of history. >> Right, and people were like, it's going to be canceled. COVID won't be handled, blahbity blah. >> She's crazy. >> Nope, I was just crazy, I'm okay with that, right? >> Crazy good. >> Right, I'm like I'm forward looking in a lot of ways. And we were looking towards June and we're like, I think this is going to be the first event back. >> You know, the crazy ones commercial that Apple ran is one of the best commercials of all time. You can't ignore the crazy ones in a good way. You can't ignore what you're doing. And I think to me, what I'm so excited about is cause we've been covering cloud we're cloud bigots, we love the cloud, public cloud. We've been on that train from day one. But when you hear the interviews we did here in theCUBE and interviews that we talked about with the top people, Google, Amazon Web Services. We're talking about the top people, both technology leaders like Bill Vass and the people who run the telecom verticals like Alfonzo, Adolfo, I mean, Hernandez. We had Google's top networking executive, we had their industry leader and the telecom, Microsoft and the Silicon all are validating, and it's like, surround sound to what you're saying here, and it cannot be ignored. >> I mean, we are coming to a big moment in Telco, right? And I mean, I've been saying it's coming. I called 2021, the year of Public Cloud and Telco. It helped that Erickson bailed. So thank you, Erickson people. >> It was a gift. >> It was a gift. >> It was. >> It really was a gift. And it was not just for me, but I think also for the vendors in the booth, I mean, we have a Cloud City army, right? Here we go, let's start marching, and it's awesome. >> He reminds me of that baseball player that took a break, cause he had a hangover and, Cal Ripkin. >> Cal Ripkin? >> Yeah, what was that guy's name? >> Did that really happen? >> Yeah, he took a break and uh- >> New guy stepped in. >> Yeah, and so well, not Cal Ripkin. >> No, no, so before, you want to know, who was it, Lou Gehrig? >> Lou Gehrig, yeah, Lou Gehrig. >> Right, so, Lou Gehrig was nobody, and we can't remember the guy's name, nobody knows the guy's name, what was that guy's name? Nobody knows, oh, there's Lou Gehrig, he got hurt. He sat out and Lou Gehrig replaced him and never hear of him again. >> Danielle: Love it, I'll take that. >> Never, never missed a game for his entire career. So again, this is what Erickson did, they just okay, take a break. >> Yeah, but I mean, it's been great again. I had a great day yesterday, my keynote was delivered. Things are going well with the booth, we had Jon Bon Jovi. I mean, that was just epic and it was acoustic and it was right after lockdown. I think everyone was really excited to be there. But I was talking to a vendor that said we'd been able to accomplish in three days, what normally it would take three years from a sales funnel perspective. I mean, that's big and that's not me. That's not my organization. That's other organizations that are benefiting from this energy. Oh, it's awesome. >> The post isolation economy has become a living metaphor for transformation, and I've been trying to sort of grok and put the pieces together as to how this thing progresses in my interview with Portal One in particular really brought it into focus for me, anyway, I'd love to get your thoughts. One of the things we haven't talked much about is public policy, and I think about all the time, all the discussion in the United States about infrastructure, this is critical infrastructure, right? And the spectrum is a country like South Africa saying, come on in, we want to open up. We want to innovate, to me, that's the model for these tier two and tier three Telcos that are just going to disrupt the big guys, whereas, maybe China's maybe on the other end of the spectrum, very controlling, but it's the former that is going to adopt the cloud sooner, and it's going to completely transform the next decade. >> Yeah, I think this is a great technology for a smaller challenge or CSP that still is a large successful company to challenge the incumbents that are, they are dinosaurs too, they move a little bit slow, and maybe if you're a little bit faster, quicker dinosaur you'll survive longer, maybe you'll be able to transform and, and a public cloud enables that. And I think, you know I'm playing the long game here, right? Is public cloud already for every Telco in every corner of the world, no. And there's a couple of things that are barriers to that. We don't really talk about the downsides, and so maybe we sort of wrap up with- there are challenges and acknowledge there are challenges, you know, in some cases their data regulations and issues, right? And you can't right? There's not a hyperscaler in your country, right? And so you're having a little bit of challenges, but you trend this out over 10 years and then pace it with the hyperscalers that are building new data centers. They're each at 25 plus each, you know, plus or minus a few, right? They're marching along, and you trend this out over 10 years, I think one of two things happened, your data regulations are eased or a hyperscaler appears in a place you can use it, and those points converge and hopefully the software's there, and that's my effort and (claps) yeah. >> Dave: You know what's an interesting trend, DR and John, that is maybe a harbinger to this, is you just mentioned something. If the hyperscalers might not have a presence in, in a country, you know what they're doing? And our data shows this, I do that weekly series breaking analysis and the data Openstack was popping up. Like where does OpenStack come from, well, guess what, when you cut the data, it was Telcos using open source to build clouds in regions where there was no hyperscalers. >> It's a gap filler. >> Yeah, it's a gap filler, it's a bandaid. >> But I think this is where, like. outpost is such a great idea, right? Like getting outposts, and I think Microsoft has the ability to do this as well, Google less so, right? They're not providing the staff, they're doing Anthos. So you're still managing this, the rack, but they're giving you the ability to tap into their services. But I was talking to a CTO in Bolivia. He was like, we have data privacy issues in our country. There's no hyperscaler, not sure Bolivia is like next on the list for AWS, right? But he's like, I'm going to build my own public cloud. And I'm like why would you do that when you can just use outposts? And then when your data regulations release, where they get to Bolivia, you can switch and you're on the stack, and you're ready to go. I think that's what you should do. You should totally do that. >> John: Yeah, one of the things that's come up on here in the interviews, in theCUBE and here, the show is that there are risk takers and innovators and there's operators. And this has been the consistent theme around, yeah, the on-premises world you mentioned this regulation reasons, and or some workflows just have to be on premise for security reasons, whatever, that's the corner case. But the operating model of the technology architecture is shifted. And that reality, I don't think is debatable, so I find it, I got to ask you this because I'm really curious. I know you get a lot of people staring at ya, oh the public cloud's just a hosting, but why aren't people getting this architectural shift? I mean, you mentioned outpost and wavelength, which Amazon has, is a game changer. It's Amazon cloud at the hub. >> Yeah, at the edge. >> Okay, that's a low latency, again, low-hanging fruit applications, real buys, whatnot. I mean, that's an architectural dot that's been connected. Why are people getting it. >> In our industry, I think it is a lot of not invented here syndrome, right? And that's a very sort of nineties thought and I have been advocating stand on the shoulders of the greatest technologists in the world, right, and you know, there's, there is a geopolitical US thing, I think we lived through a presidency that had a sort of nationalistic approach and a lot of those conversations pop up, but I've also looked to these guys and I'm like, you're still, you still have your Huawei kit installed. And there's concerns with that too. So, and you picked it because of cost, and it's really hard to switch off of, so give me a break with your public cloud USA stuff, right? You can use it, you're just making excuses, you're just afraid. What are you afraid of, the HR implications? Let's talk about that, right? And the minute I take it there, conversation changes. >> Yeah, I talked to Teresa Carlson when she was running the public sector at AWS, she's now president of Splunk. I call her a Renaissance woman. She's been a great leader and public sector for this weird little pocket of AWS where it's a guess a sales division, but it's still its own company. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And she's, did the CIA deal, the DOD, and the public sector partnerships are now private, a lot more private relationships, So it's not like just governments, you mentioned government and national security, and these things, you started to see the ecosystem not, not just be about companies, >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Government and private sector. So this whole vibe of the telecom being regulated, unregulated, unbundled is an interesting kind of theory. What's your thoughts and reactions to this, kind of this, melting pot of ecosystem change and evolution? >> Danielle: Yeah, I mean. I think there's a very nationalistic approach by the Telcos, right? They sort of think about the countries that they operate in. There's a couple of groups that go across multiple countries, but can there be a global Telco? Can that happen, right? Just like we say, you were saying it earlier, Netflix, right? You can say Netflix, UK. Right, and so can we have a global Telco, right. That is challenging on a lot of different levels. But think about that in a public cloud start to enable that idea, right? Elon Musk is going to get to Mars. You need a planetary level Telco. And I can, I think that day is, I mean, I don't think it's tomorrow, but I think that's like 10, 20 years away. >> Dave: You're done, we're going to see it start this decade, it's already starting. We're going to see the fruits of that dividend. >> Danielle: Yeah, it's crazy. >> I've got to ask you, you're a student of the industry and you get so much experience, it's great to have you on theCUBE and chat about, riff about these things, but, the classic who's ready for disruption question comes up, and I think there's no doubt that the Telcos as an industry has been slow moving and the role and the importance has changed. People need the need to have the internet access they need to access. >> Yeah. >> So, and you've got the edge, now applications are now running on it, since the iPhone 14 years ago, as you pointed out, people now are interested in how packets move. That's fast whether it's a doctor or an emergency worker or someone. >> Danielle: What we have done in 2020 without the internet and broadband and our mobile phones, I mean? >> You know, I think about 1920 when the Spanish flu pandemic hit a hundred years ago, those guys did not have mobile phones and they must have been bored, right? I mean, what are you going to do, right? And so, yeah I think last year really moved a lot of thinking forward in this respect, so. >> Yeah, it's always like that, that animal out in the Serengeti that gets taken down, you know, by the cheetah or the lion. How do know when someone is going to be disrupted What's the, what's the tell sign in your mind, you look at the Telco landscape. What is someone waiting to be disrupted or replaced like? >> You know what they're ostriches, how do you say that word, right? They stick their head in the sand. Like I don't want to talk about it, la la la, I don't want to, I don't want to think about it. You know, they bring up all these like roadblocks, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to come visit you in another six months to a year, and let's see what happens when the guys that are moving fast that are open-minded to this, and it's, I mean, when you start to use the public cloud, you don't, like, turn it on overnight. You start experimenting, right? You start, you take an application that is non-threatening. You have, I mean, these guys are running thousands of apps inside their data centers. Pick some boring ones, pick some old ones that no one likes, and move that to the public cloud, play with it. Right, I'm not talking about moving a whole network overnight tomorrow. You got to learn, you have no, I mean, very little talent in the Telco that know how to program against the AWS stack. Start hiring, start doing it, and you're going to start to learn about the compensation, and I used to do compensation, right? I spent a lot of time in HR, right? The compensation points and structures, they compare AWS and Google, versus a Telco. Do you want Telco stock? Do you want Google stock? >> Dave: Right, where do you want to go? >> Right, right? like that's going to challenge the HR organization in terms of compensate. How do we compensate our people when they're learning these new valuable skills? >> When you think about disruption, you know, the master or the professor of disruption, Clay Christensen, one of the best lectures he ever gave was who at Cambridge, and he gave a lecture on the steel industry, and he was describing it, it was like four layers of value in the steel industry, the value chain, it started with rebar, like the lowest end, right? >> Danielle: Yeah yeah. >> And the Telco's actually the opposite, so that, you know, when, when the international companies came in, they went after rebar, and the higher end steel companies said, nah, let them have it, that's the low margin stuff. And then eventually, uh, when they got up to the high end. >> Danielle: It was over, yeah. >> The Telcos are the opposite. They're like, the, you know, in the, in the conductivity and they're hanging on to that because it's so big, but all the high value stuff, it's already gone to the, over the top players, right. >> It's being eaten away, and I'm like, what is going to wake you guys up to realize those are your competitors, that's where the battle is, right? >> John: That's really where the value is. >> The battle of the bastards, you're there by yourself, like "Game of Thrones" and they're coming at you. >> John: You need a dragon. >> What are you doing about it? >> John: I need a dragon to compete in this market. Riding a dragon would be a good strategy. >> I know, I was just watching. Cause I have a podcast, I have a podcast called "Telco In 20" and we always put like little nuggets in the show notes, I personally reviewed them, I was just reviewing the one for the keynote that we're putting out, and I had a dragon in my keynote, right? It was a really great moment, it was really fun to do, but there's, I don't know if you guys are "Game of Thrones" fans. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> Right, but there's a great moment when Daenerys gets her dragons, the baby dragons, and she takes over the Unsullied Army, right? And it's just this, right? Like all of a sudden the tables turn in an instant where she has nothing, and she's like on her quest, right. I'm on a quest. >> Dave: Comes out of the fire. >> Right, comes out of the fire, the unburnt, right? She has her dragons, right? She has them hatch. She takes over the Unsullied Army, right? Slaves, it starts her march, right? And I'm like, we're putting that clip into the show notes because I think that's where we are. I think I've hatched some dragons, right? The Cloud City army, let's go, let's go take on Telco. >> John: Well, I mean, this to me. >> Easy. >> It definitely have made, made it happen because I heard many people talking about cloud, this is turning into a cloud show. The question is, when does this going to be a cloud show? That's just Cloud City, it's a big section of the show. I mean, all the big players are behind it. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> Amazon Web Services, Google Azure, Ecosystem, startups, thinking differently, but everyone's agreeing why aren't we doing this? >> I think, like I said, I mean, people are like, you're such a visionary, and how did, why do you think this will work, I'm like, it's worked in every other industry. Am I really that visionary, and like, these are the three best tech companies in the world, like, are, are you kidding me? And so I think we've shown the momentum here. I think we're looking forward to 2022, you know? And that we see 2022, you got to start planning this the minute we get back, right? Like I wouldn't recommend doing this in a hundred days again, that was a very painful, but you know, February, I was, there's a sign inside NWC, February 28th. Right, we're talking seven months. You got to get going now. >> John: Let's get on the phone. >> With Telco, I mean, I think you're right on. I mean, you know, remember Skype, in the early days, right? >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> It wasn't regional. It was just, plug into the internet. >> Danielle: It was just Skype, it was just WhatsApp. >> Well this is a great location, if you can get a shot guys of the people behind us, I don't know if you can, if you're watching check out the scene here, It's winding down, a lot of people having happy hour. Now this is a social construct here at Cloud City, not only is it chock full of information, reporting that we're doing and getting all the data and with the presentations on the main stage, with Adam and the studio and the team, this is a place where people are meeting and there's deals being done face to face, intimate relationships, the best of the best are here, they make the trek. So there's been a successful formula. Of course theCUBE is in the middle of all the action, which we love, we're psyched to be back. I want to thank you personally, while we have you on stage here. >> I want to thank you guys, and the crew, the crew has been amazing, turning out videos on short order. We have all these crews in different cities, it's, our own show has been virtual. You know, Adam's in Bristol, right? We're here, this was an experiment, we talked about this a hundred days ago, 90 days ago. Could we get theCUBE there, do the show but also theCUBE. >> You are a visionary, you said made for TV hybrid event with your team, produce television shows, theCUBE, we're digital, we love you guys, great alignment, but it's magical because the content doesn't end here, the show might end, they might break down the beautiful plants and the exhibits, but the community is going to continue, the content and the conversations. >> Yeah. >> So, we were looking forward to it and- >> I'm super glad, super glad we did this. >> Awesome, well, any final moments that you would like to share in the last two minutes we have, favorite moments, observations, funny things that have happened to you, weird things that have happened to you, share something that people might not know, or a favorite moment? >> I think, I don't know that people know, we have a 3D printer in the coffee shops, and so you can upload any picture and they're 3d printing, coffee art, right? So I've been seeing lots of social posts around people uploading their, their logos and things like that. I think Jon Bon Jovi, he was super thankful to be back. He thanked me personally two different times of like, I'm just glad to be out in front of people. And I think just even just the people walking around, thank you for being brave, thank you for coming back. You've helped Barcelona and we're happy to be together. Even if it is with masks, it's hard to do business with masks on, everyone's happy and psyched. >> John: Well the one thing that people cannot do relative to you is they cannot ignore you. You are making a great big wave. >> Danielle: I shout pretty loud, It's kind of hard to ignore me. >> You're making a great big wave, you're on the right side, we believe, of history, public cloud is driving the bus down main street of Cloud City, and if people don't get out of the way, they will be under the bus. >> I'm, like I said, in my keynote, it's go time let's do it. >> Okay. Thank you so much for all your attention and mission behind the cloud and the success. >> Danielle: We'll do it again. We're going to do it again soon. >> After Togi's a hundred million dollar investment, you're the CEO of Togi that, let's follow that progress, and of course, Telco DR, Danielle Royston, the digital revolution. Thanks for coming on with you. >> Thank you guys, it was super fun. >> This is theCUBE I'm John Furrier with Dave Vallante, we're going to send it back to Adam in the studio. Thanks, the team here. >> Woo! (audience applauding) >> I want to thank the team, everyone here, Adam is great, Chloe. >> Great working with you guys. >> Awesome, and what a great crew. >> So great. >> Thank you everybody. That's it for theCUBE, here on the last day, Wednesday of theCUBE, stay tuned for tomorrow more action on the main stage, here in Cloud City. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, Chloe, thank you very much. Hey folks, in here in the Cloud City We with Danielle Royston. Great to see you. Watching you up on stage, I got to say, as the CEO of TelcoDR, leader and chief executive of that company. As well as a great visionary, you laid out the vision. It's hard to debate that. I mean, I think there's people who will say that vision, is like freedom, no one can debate it. It's not going to happen. >> Yeah, there's still a lot of debate in our industry about it. There's a lot of articles being written about it. I've referenced one about, you know, should we let the dragons into the castle? For me, I think it's super obvious. I think other industries are like "Duh, we've made the move." And Telco is still like, "Hmm, we're not sure." And so, am I a visionary, I don't know. I'm just sort of just Babe Ruth-ing it a little bit. I think that's where we're going. >> You know you do, you have a lot of content, podcasts, you write blogs, you do a lot of speaking. You brought it all together on stage, right? That has got to feel good. >> Yeah. >> You've got a body of work and it came together very nicely. How did you feel up there? >> Oh my God, it's absolutely nerve wrecking. I sort of feel like, you know, could you tell if my hands were shaking? Right, could you tell that my heart was racing? >> It's a good feeling. >> I don't know. >> Come on! >> I'll be honest, I'm happy it's over, I'm happy. I think I did a really great job and I'm really happy >> Yeah, you did a great job, I love the dragon reference-- >> Have it in the can. >> Fantastic, loved the Game of Thrones vibe there. It was cool-- >> Totally. >> One of the things I wanted pick up on, I thought it was very interesting and unique was the iPhone reference 14 years ago, because that really, to me, was a similar moment because that shifted the smartphone. A computer that happened to make phone calls. And then we all knew who was the leader at that time, Nokia, Blackberry with the phones, and they became toast. That ushered in a whole another era of change, wealth creation, innovation, new things. >> Yeah. Well, up until that moment, carriers had been designing the phones themselves. They were branded with their logos. And so Steve Jobs fought for the design of the iPhone. He designed it with the consumer, with the user in mind. But I think what it really, I mean, it's such a big pivotal moment in our industry because it singled the end of voice revenue and ushered in the era of data. But it also introduced the OTT players, right? That came in through the apps and started a siphon approved from the carriers. And this is like, it's a pivotal moment in the industry, like, changed the industry forever. >> It's a step function, it was a step function change, it's obvious, everyone knew it. But what's interesting is that we were riffing yesterday about O-RAN and Android. So you have iPhone, but Android became a very successful open source project that changed the landscape of the handset. Some are saying that that kind of phenomenon is coming here. Into Telco with software, kind of like an Android model where that'll come in. What's your thoughts on that, reaction to that? >> Yeah, well the dis-aggregation of the hardware, right? We're in the iconic Erickson booth, right? They get most of their revenue from RAN, from Radio Access Networks. And now with the introduction of Open RAN, right? With 50% less CapEx, 40% less OPEX, you know, I think it's easiest for Greenfield operators like Dish, that are building a brand new network. But just this month, Vodafone announced they're going to build the world's largest Open RAN network. Change is happening and the big operators are starting to adopt Open RAN in a real big way. >> So to me, riding the dragon means taking the advantage of new opportunities on top of that dragon. Developing apps like the iPhone did. And you mentioned Android, they got it right. Remember the Windows Phone, right? They tried to take Windows and shove it to the phone-- >> Barely. >> It was a kin phone too. >> I try to delete it from my, look here, beep! >> I'm going to take this old world app and I'm going to shove it into the new world, and guess what, it failed. So if the Telco is trying to do the same thing here, it will fail, but if they start building 5G apps in the cloud and pick the cloud native and think about the consumer, isn't really that the opportunity that you're talking about? >> Well, I think it is, absolutely. And I think it's a wake up call for the vendors in our space, right? And I'm certainly trying to become a vendor with Totogi. I'm really pushing my idea. But you can't take, using your Windows example on the Windows Phone, you can't take a Windows app and stuff it onto a phone and you can't take these old school applications that were written 20 years ago and just stuff them into the cloud, right? Cloud is not a place, it's a way to design applications and it all needs to be rewritten and let's go write, rewrite it. >> It's not a destination as we always say. Let's take a step back on the keynote 'cause I know we just did a couple of highlights there, wasn't the whole thing. We were watching it, by the way, we thought you did a great job, you were very cool and calm under pressure. But take us through the core ideas in the keynote. Break down the core elements of what the talk was about. >> Yeah, I think the headline really is, you know, just like there were good and bad things about the iPhone, right? It killed voice, but introduced data and all these other things. There's good and bad things about the public cloud, right? It's not going to be smooth sailing, no downsides. And so I acknowledge that, even though I'm the self appointed queen, you know? This self appointed evangelist. And so, I think that if you completely ignore the public cloud, try to stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist, I think there's nothing but downsides for Telcos. And so I think you need to learn how to maximize the advantage there, ride he dragon, like spew some fire and, you know, get some speed and height, and then you can double your ARPU. But I think, going from there, so the next three, I was trying to give examples of what I meant by that, of why it's a double-edged sword, why it's two sides of the coin. And I think there's three areas, which is the enterprise, the network, and a relationship with subscribers. And so that really what the talk, that's what the talk is about >> The three main pillars. >> Yeah, yeah! >> Future, work, enterprise, transition, Open RAN. >> The network and then the relationship with the subscribers. >> Those are the structural elements you see. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> What's the most important one you think, right now, that people are focused on? >> I mean, I think the first one, with work, that's an easy one to do, because there's not too much downside, right? I think we all learned that we could work productively from home. The reason public cloud matter there is because we had tools like Zoom and G Suite and we didn't need to be, I mean, imagine if that this had happened even 20 years ago, right? Broadband at the home wasn't ready, the tools weren't ready. I mean, it would have been, I mean a bigger disaster than it was, right? And so this is an opportunity to sort of ride this work from home wave that a lot of CEOs are saying, we're not coming back or we're going to have smaller offices. And all of those employees need fiber to their home. They need 5G at their home. I mean, if I'm a head of enterprise in a Telco, I am shifting my 5G message from like random applications or whatever, to be like, how are you getting big pipes to the home so your workers can be productive there? And that, I don't hear Telco's talking about that and that's a really big idea. >> You know, you say it's a no brainer, but it's interesting you had your buildings crumbling, which was great, very nice effect in the talk. I heard a executive, Wall Street executive the other day, talking about how, "My people will be back in the office. "I'm going to mandate vaccinations, they're going to be back "in the office, you work for me. "Even though it's an employee friendly environment "right now, I don't care". And I was shocked. I go, okay, this is just an old guy. But, and it's not just the fact that it's an old guy, old guard doing that because I take two examples of old guys, Michael Dell and Frank Slootman. >> Yeah. >> Right, Michael Dell, you know, hundred billion dollar company, Frank Slootman, hottest, you know, software company. Both of them, sort of agree. It's a no brainer. >> Yeah. >> Why should I spend all this money on buildings? And my people are going to be more productive. They love it, so. Why fight the fashion? >> Well, I think the office and I can talk about this for a long time and I know we don't have that much time, but on offices, it's a way to see when did you come in and when did you leave, and look over your shoulder and what we're working on. And that's what offices are for. Now, we tell ourselves it's about collaboration and all this other stuff. And you know, these guys are saying, "come back to the office." It's because they don't have an answer on how to manage productivity. What are you working on? Are you off, are you authentically working 40 hours a week? I want to see, I know if at least you're here, you're here. Now, you might be playing, you know, Minesweeper. You might be playing Minesweeper on your computer, but at least you were, your butt was at your computer. So yeah, I think this is a pivotal moment in work. I think Telcos could push it, to work from home. We'll get you the pipes, we'll get you the cloud-based tools to help manage productivity, to change in work style. >> Yeah, and we've covered this in theCube many times, about how software is going to enable this virtual first model, no one's actually built software for virtual first. I think that's going to happen. Again, back to your team software, but I want to ask you about software defined infrastructure. You mentioned O-RAN, and as software eats the world and eats infrastructure, you still need infrastructure. So, talk about the relationship of how you see O-RAN competing and winning with the balance of software versus the commodity argument. >> Yeah, and I think this is really where people get scared in Telco. I mean, authentically nervous, right. Where you're like, okay, really the public cloud is at that network edge, right? We're really going to like, who are we? It's an identity crisis. We're not the towers anymore. We're renting space, right? We're now dis-aggregating the network, putting the edge cloud right there and it's AWS or Google. Who are we, what do we do, are we networks? Are we a tech company? Right, and so I'm like, guys, you are your subscribers and you don't focus on that. I mean, it's kind of like a last thought. >> So you're like a therapist then too, not just an evangelist. >> I'm a little bit of a therapist. >> Okay, lay down on the couch, Telco. >> Let's talk about what your problems are. (laughs) >> They have tower issues. >> All seriousness, no but, the tower is changing is backhauling. Look at direct connects for instance. The rise of direct and killed the exchanges. I mean, broadband, backhaul, last mile, >> Yeah. >> Completely, still issues, >> Yeah. >> But it's going to software and so that's there. The other thing I want to get to quickly, I know we don't have a lot of time, is the love relationship you talk about with subscribers. We had Peter Adderton on, from a Boost Mobile, formerly Boost Mobile, earlier. He was saying, if you don't have a focus on the customer, then you're just selling minutes and that's it. >> Yeah. >> And his point was, they don't really care. >> Yeah. Let's talk about organizational energy, right? How much energy is contained within any organization, not just Telco, but any organization. To some of your people time is the hours they work per week. And then you think of that as a sack on how you're allocating your time and spending your time, right? And so I think they spend 50% of their time, maybe more, fighting servers, machines, the network, right? And having all these battles. How much of that organizational energy is dedicated to driving great subscriber experiences? And it just shrunk, right? And I think that's where the public cloud can really help them. Like ride the dragon. Let the dragon deal with some of this underlying stuff. So that you can ride a dragon, survey the land, focus on your subscriber and back to the software. Use software, just like the OTT players are doing. They are taking away your ARPU. They're siphoning your ARPU, 'cause they're providing a better customer experience. You need to compete on that dimension. Not the network, not the three Telcos in the country. You're competing again, WhatsApp, Apple, Amazon, Facebook. And you spent how much of your organizational energy to focus on that? Very small. >> And that's where digital platforms roll by, it uses the word platform, why? Because everybody wants to be a platform. Why do you want to be a platform? Because I want to be like Amazon, they're a platform. And you think about Netflix, right? It's not, you know, you don't think about Netflix UK or Netflix Spain, right? >> It's global. >> There's one Netflix >> Yeah, yeah. >> You don't think about their marketing department or their sales department or their customer service, you think about the app. >> Yeah. >> You know. One interface. And that's what digital platforms allow you to do. And granted, there's a lot of public policy to deal with, but if you're shooting satellites up in space, >> Yeah. >> You know, now, you own that space, right, global network. >> And what makes Netflix so good, I think, is that it knows you, right? It knows what you're watching and recommends things, and you're like, "Oh, I would like that, that's great." Who knows more about you than your mobile phone? Carry it everywhere you go, right? What you're watching, what you're doing, who you're calling, what time did you wake up? And right now all of that data we talked about a couple of days ago, it's trapped in siloed old systems. And like why do people think Google knows so much about you? Telco knows about you. And to start to use that to drive a great experience. >> And you've got a great relationship with Netflix. The relationship we have with our our carrier is to your admin, "can you call these guys? "I don't know, I lost the password, I can't get in". >> Right. >> It's like-- >> Or you get SIM hacked-- >> I don't have an hour and a half to call your call center 'cause you don't have a chat bot, right. >> I don't have time. >> Chat bot, right. I can't even do the chat bot because my problem is, you're like, I got to talk to someone. All of their systems are built with the intention of a human being on the other side, and there's all this awesome chat bot AI that works. >> Yeah. >> Set it free. >> Yeah, yeah, right. You almost rather go to the dentist, then calling your carrier. >> Well, we're going to wrap things up here on the keynote review. Did you achieve what you wanted to achieve? I mean, controversy, bold vision, leadership, also that came across, but people they know who you are now. You're out there and that's great news. >> Yeah. I think I rocked the Telco universe and I'm really, that was my goal, and I think I accomplish it so, very excited. >> Well, we love having you on theCUBE. It's great to have great conversations, not only are you dynamic and smart, you're causing a lot of controversy, in a good way and getting, waking people up. >> Making people talk, that's a start. >> And I think, the conversations are there. People are talking and having relationships on the ecosystem open, it's all there. Danielle Royston, you are a digital revolution, DR. Telco DR, thanks for coming to theCube. >> Thank you so much, always fun. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks. >> Of course, back to the Cloud City studios. Adam is going to take it from here and continue on day three of theCube. Adam in studio, thanks for having us and take it from here.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay thanks, Adam, and the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action, the keynotes are going on in the background. It's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante's on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE, but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, and kicking it off day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me! It's very exciting! I love what you guys have got over here, very fun! >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is, and also, Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> No, I mean, the atmosphere is absolutely palpable. Isn't it? You can just feel it. People walk in and see what the future looks like for the telecoms industry. Very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage, we're really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. After the keynotes are going on, we're going to have DR maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that out. But let's check out this videotape. This is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel, and we'll be right back, and we'll talk about it. (smooth electronic music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson space at MWC 21, and for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is their unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston, or DR, as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat instrumental music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona! I'm here for MWC 21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors, and 70 demos, to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience. We're going to talk about what's in store for the new network, and the future of work. And I'm really excited to create a community, and invite awesome telco executives to see this new feature. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC 21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get-go, we planned this amazing experience that we call Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series, where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs, and awesome vendors, talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud, hosted by John furrier and Dave Vallente. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests focused on telco in the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco, and 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, am on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements, and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested $1,000,000 in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market this week at MWC. The first is at planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement, coupling your network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement, and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing is a planetary scale BSS system, built on top of the TM Forum Open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show floor. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco! I'm super excited to bring to you the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona, and virtually around the world! (upbeat instrumental music) Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry, and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (groovy electronic music) >> Okay, thanks. Just rolling that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel, I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star. And I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision, and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there! I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, it really is. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world! She's innovative, she's exciting. And if we've learned anything over the last 18 months, it's that we need that in this industry, to grow for the future of the industry. So, so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration! >> And I love the fact that she's so takes the tiger by the tail. Because the telco industry is being disrupted, she's just driving the bus here. And I remember, I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon Web Services, she was running the public sector, and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC, and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player! And she was an exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing, and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" >> Now of course, it's always that way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time, people thinking what is going on here, we don't like change, why are being shaken up? But actually, afterwards, in retrospect, they think, "Oh, okay. I see why that happened, and we needed it." So, really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here on theCUBE. Obviously, the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you missed some of the action, this is obviously the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a hybrid event, a lot of virtual action going on. So, you got theCUBE Virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites. But in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, and what was happening around the show. Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (groovy electronic music) (cheerful instrumental music) (groovy electronic music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're on the main floor out here with Chloe, who is emceeing, hosting, and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean so far, day one, I was watching your presentations and fireside chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, no, for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage, and his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing. And in 10 years, it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So, really interesting! I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great. Everyone's excited. It's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content! It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. It's very exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event, so since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event, and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry because of COVID, and people are glad to be here. But a lot of stuff's changed! >> Yeah. It's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed! Digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though, John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> John: Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years. We know that! But what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years. >> Oh, man. That's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks, and telecom, which is basically radios, and wireless, and then mobile. But it's very global, a lot of networks. But now it's evolving! And many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting, that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe, because of all the technology from the cloud players, and from the chips, getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So people look at the chips, the hardware. It's less about the speeds and feeds, it's more about the consumer experience. We got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I went, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, you order it, you pick it up. So that's kind of what can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. So, a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry? That is, the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is there anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well, I think the incumbents are going to lose their positions. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the the company that you don't see. (audience in background applauding) And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this! We saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. >> Chloe: Yeah, for sure. >> She just walked out there, and she's not afraid. >> Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up! And you can see as soon as she walks out, that is what she intends to do today. >> I love her mojo. She's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Chloe: Yep. >> I mean, even when Apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash, when Steve Jobs brought back Apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company, the iPad was a seminal, iPod, a seminal moment. Then the iPhone, and just, the rest is history. That kind of disruption is coming. You're going to see that now. >> Oh, it's exciting though, isn't it? To be future ready, rather than future proof! But actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about wire, as you're on AWS and Google Cloud, why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity. And it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. It's almost like global warming now, the icebergs are melting, and it's going to just change. And because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing, it's not like a better phone. It's a commercial app opportunity, because it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts, or football games, or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out. Can't upload their picture to Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them on the network. That's where 5G solves a problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth, and that's going to bring the edge to life, and that's money. So when you got money, and greed, and power, changing hands, if it's on the table, and the wheel's spinning, it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know! >> Oh, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved! And I suppose it circles back to the fact that DR is really leading the charge, and they're probably thinking, "Okay, what's going on here? This is different. We want something new." You did notice it, OpenRAN is something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here at Cloud City Live mention OpenRAN. What is it all about, Don? Because why all the buzz if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we get excited about it? >> That's a great thing. The 5G certainly will drive the main trend, for sure. OpenRAN is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular, and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation, has been the driver for most of the open source software. So, they're trying to make open software, and open architectures, to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware, and around infrastructure, because we need more infrastructure, we need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices. That could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology, and you want to minimize the licensing, and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What did we look at? So on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Phillip Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud, and within telco. So you just mentioned that OpenRAN is all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easily more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it at risk? >> I think it's going to increase the value of security, and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in a sense that could be explored by hackers, but open can also protect. And I think we've seen open source, and cloud in particular, be more secure. Because everyone said, cloud is not secure, open source is insecure. And as it turns out, when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security threats, but actually I was speaking to some leaders across various industries, and particularly in tech, and they were saying, actually, there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open-source environment, we are able to track them, and measure them, and defend more efficiently. So actually, they're being batted away. But the number is probably the same as it always was, we just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats, and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so to the threats. So on a net basis, it's more, because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look it, there's money involved, they are organized. There's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank, or ransomware is at an all time high. >> Yes! >> So this is like a big problem, and it's beyond the government. It's around individual freedom. So, security is huge. And I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think, the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's, again, about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time, but without collaboration, the industries are going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I'd just say on security, don't download that PDF, if you don't know who it came from. The phishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here of Mobile World Live. We're going to show this next segment, and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience, Chloe, for people who aren't here. To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona, and all the action. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Daniel Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDR. But you can call me DR! Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time! Let's do it. Holy shit! It sure is a great time to be a tech company! I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, Door Dash, or Uber, life's pretty great! Just look at these stock prices over the past five years, with their shareholder value going up and to the right. Totally amazing! But where's telco? Dare I add our stocks to this awesome chart? Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, TIM, America Movil, and Zain Group. Huh. Not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you, senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up! Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T than to Apple, because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people! I get it. You have the security blanket. You're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network, and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network, and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things. But because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far, you haven't had to. Every Telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best. Just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat. And it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting to WeChat, WhatsApp, and the other OTT apps. But it is not just texting. The total adjustable market, or TAM, of the mobile app disruptors is huge! Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about! I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love! They look at every interaction with the customer and say, how do we make the customer love this? Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive, they must make customers love them. So, they focus on it in a big way! And it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70, and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS, and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch, and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps, and becoming customer centered! Retooling around the customer is a huge change, so let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples, and drive big shareholder value, just like the tech companies on that chart! Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies in a variety of categories vying for your subscribers' disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services. Who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high valuations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You! Hello? What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAMs they throw around, you'd be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the cap ex to build out the network, I say to myself, hell yeah! We should totally go do it, and do whatever it takes to go get it. For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a Southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focus started in Rideshare, but then leveraged its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a Telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with the valuable services that helped grow your ARPU. That would be huge! So, how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app! A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great, but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called to Totogi that is going to help carriers build world-class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users. It's not the average order value. It's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user. That's the metric that matters. How many have you used that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top-up, or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences. Like Apple credit cards, no information required application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies. Like how Door Dash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings, because they do simple things, like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app, rather than forced you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. Hm, what do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder. While you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day, you have something that's 10 times better! You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network. 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to, your crappy, over customized, on-premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it, the public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi! Totogi will leverage all those network interactions, and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions, and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network, and all the network interactions, into customer engagement. This is something that super apps don't have, but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focused to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying, massive cap ex investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps, with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day, and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100,000,000 into it. You heard me right. $100,000,000. Is this what it feels like to be SoftBank? I'm investing into Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage their network interactions into super app usage! Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience, and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those telco valuations will go from down here, (buzzes lips) to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts. And I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, "Click. Eh." Everyone says, no way. Telcos can't do it. Zero chance. Total goose egg. (egg cracking) One suggested I build a bonfire with a hundred million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well, I think those people are dead wrong! I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco, and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because Totogi takes the value of the network, and the power of the public cloud, to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focused guys, like the other telcos. Instead, you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors, they know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf, and make the customers want to choose you. You need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We'll have to give up the security blanket of the network, and change. Instead of NPS at the thirties, it needs to be in the seventies. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible! I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me, and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time, and I can't wait to see you there! >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier. Chloe Richardson's filling in for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her involving major action, major pump you up, punch in the face, "Wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here!" She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is, John, there's trillions of dollars on the table, and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in, and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> And it's not going to be, it's going to be a fight! Who will win? >> Who will win, but also who will build the next big thing? (John laughing) >> Someone needs to die in the media conversations. It's always a fight. Something's dead. Something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. Think what's happened is Telco's already acknowledged that they need to change. And the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple. They've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm. You've got all these new things. So, the chips are getting faster, and the software's more open source. And I'm telling you, the cloud is just going to drive that bus right down Cloud Street, and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peepin' on the board as it drives down. (John laughing) John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written, and one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me, what does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets, and growing markets, things behave differently, and certainly economics, and the people, and the makeup, and the mindset. So the telco has been kind of this mature market, it's been changing and growing, but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit. You know, to install a lot of cable, you got to get the rents out of that infrastructure. And that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market. And it's about building, not just operating. And you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together. Builders being software developers, new technology, and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking. But in a growth market, it's turbulent, and the ride might not be quiet, first-class ticket to paradise. It's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer? Are there parallels there? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, replatform with the cloud, and then refactor your business! If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over, or go out of business. And that's what the telcos with all these assets, they're going to get bought, rolled into a SPAC, Special Purpose Acquisition Company, which is super hot in the United States. A lot of roll-ups going on with private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor, or replatform then refactor, they're going to be toast, and they're going to get rolled up, and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad, people, process, technology, and we think, process and technology really to the forefront here. But like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously, Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday, and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations, establishments. How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about? >> Yeah. I mean, education's huge, and this highlights the change that telco's now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around, and mobile was there. But once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So, you start to see people now aware of the value. And if you look at during COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses, and everyone survived because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad Zoom meetings here and there, and some teleconferences that didn't go well, but for the most part we survived, and they really saved everybody. So, they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education. People care about that stuff, so now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why the edge has got trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, "Oh, there's no jobs." Or, "I can't work." That's a bunch of BS, because you can just get online, get on YouTube, and just get a degree. You can get a degree. You can get an Amazon job. It pays a hundred thousand dollars a year! American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds, and be unemployed six months, and then be employed. So negative unemployment means, there's more jobs than people to fill them all, in fact. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that, because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in something, I think there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity. And there's such a skill shortage. There is nobody around to fill it! So it's an interesting problem to have, isn't it? Because it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades! And obviously, telco is in the same space. But what can we do about it do you think, to actually -- >> I think it's going to take leadership, and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university if they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money, if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there. But to me, it's the relationships, the mentorship. You're starting to see a women in tech, and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear courseware. Nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate, or degree, and accreditation, no problem. But the communities are out there, so that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that. And I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills. You can get that online, so why even go to school? So, people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also, even transferring. I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't they, so we could easily be talking to people from other industries, and bringing them into telco, and saying, "Look, bring what you know from your retail background, or your healthcare background, and help us at telco to, again, drive forwards." Just like DR was saying, it's all about the next big thing. >> Well, Danielle is always also driving a lot of change. And if you think about the jobs, and the pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy Leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to the school like that, and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now the jobs that are available weren't around five years ago, so there's no like pedigree or track record. There's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now, from a job standpoint, is people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy League, or the big degree, or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emerging and making things happen. Entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas! >> It's interesting you mention that, John, because we can't have more than five years experience in this space, we know that. But in telco, there is a problem. And maybe it's, again, it's a flipped problem where telco recruiters, or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> I think that's just, I mean I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening, one. But two, I think, you know, to be like a chip engineer, (laughs) you can't learn that online. But if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So, embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely paths you can specialize. Space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on. You see Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on a virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And you know, Danielle Royston always says, "What's going to happen first, Mars colony, or telco adopting public cloud?" And some people think Mars will happen first, but. >> What do you think, John? >> I think Telco's going to get cloud. I mean first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud, and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important, because it's an architectural beachhead. And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. So, the inside baseball, and the inside money, and all the investors are focusing on the edge, because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows, it's a public secret, and it's fun to watch everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah no, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So, it's an interesting flip. And I wonder if, with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development, this efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times, John. >> John: Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So, we're the hybrid CUBE, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. That is critical dynamic! And you're seeing it. Like virtual reality, for instance, now you're seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. You got, companies like Roblox went public recently. Metaverse. It's a good time to be in that business, because experiential human relations are coming. So, I think that's going to be powered by 5G. You know, gamers. So, all good stuff. Chloe, great to be with you here on theCUBE, and we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam, and the team. We're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City. And this is theCUBE, from Cloud City, back to you, Adam, and the studio.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks Adam in the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action. The keynotes are going on in the background, it's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante is on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City, with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and kicking it up day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me. It's very exciting. I love what you guys have got over here, very fun. >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is. And also the Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> Know, I mean the atmosphere is absolutely palpable, isn't it? You can just feel as people walk in and see what the future looks like to the Telecoms industry, it's very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage. We've been really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. Actually the keynote is going on, we're going to have DR, maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that up. But let's check out this videotape of, this is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel and we'll be right back, we'll talk about it. (upbeat music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson's space at MWC21. And for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is the unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston or DR as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona. I'm here for MWC21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors and 70 demos to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience, we're going to talk about what's in store for the new network and the future of work. I'm really excited to create a community and invite awesome telco executives to see this new future. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get go we plan this amazing experience that we call, Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs and awesome vendors talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live, is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud hosted by John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests, focused on telco and the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco. And 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, I'm on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested a hundred million dollars in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market, this week at MWC. The first is a planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement coupling dual network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing, is a planetary scale BSS system built on top of the TM forum, open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show for. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco. I'm super excited to bring to you, the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona and virtually around the world. (upbeat music) >> Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks. Just roll on that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel. I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star and I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there. I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, really isn't. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world. She's innovative, she's exciting and if we've learned anything over the last 18 months is that we need to in this industry to grow and for the future of the industry. So, it's so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration. >> And I love the fact that she's so, takes a tiger by the tail, because the telco industry is being disrupted. She's just driving the bus here and I remember I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon web services, she was running the public sector and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player. And she was exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, whoa, what's going on here? >> And of course, it's always the way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time people thinking what's going, we don't like change, why are we being shaken up. But actually afterwards, in retrospect, they think, oh, okay, I see why that happened and we needed it. So really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here in theCUBE. Obviously the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you miss some of the action, this is, I'll see the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a Hybrid event. A lot of virtual action going on. So you got theCUBE virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites, but in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, what was happening around the show? Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're the main floor out here with Chloe Richardson, who is emceeing, hosting and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean, so far day one, I was watching your presentations and inspire site chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, I know for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage. And his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing and in 10 years it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So really interesting. I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great, everyone's excited, there's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content. It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. Really exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event. So since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry cause of COVID and people are glad to be here, but a lot of stuff's changed. >> Yeah, it's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed, digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years, we know that, but what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years? >> Oh man, that's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks and telecom, which is basically radios and wireless and then mobile. It's very global, a lot of networks, but now it's evolving and many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe because what's all the technology from the cloud players and from the chips, are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So if you look at the chips, the hardware, it's less about the speeds and feeds. It's more about the consumer experience. You got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I'm like, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app, driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, if you order it you pick it up. So that's kind of can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. so a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry that is the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is that anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well I think the incumbents are going to lose their position. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. >> For sure. >> And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the company that's not, that you don't see. And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this. You saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. She just walked out there and she's not afraid. >> No. Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up and you can see as soon as she worked out. That is what she intends to do. >> I love her mojo, she's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Yep. >> I mean, even when apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash. When Steve Jobs brought back apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company. The iPad was a similar moment, then the iPhone and just the rest is history. That kind of disruption's coming. You're going to see that here. >> Yeah. Oh, it's exciting though isn't it? To be future ready rather than future proof but actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about why, as you're in MWS and Google Cloud? Why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot, hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity and it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. >> Okay. >> It's almost like global warming now. The icebergs are melting and it's going to just change and because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing. It's not like a better phone, it's a commercial app opportunity cause it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts or football games or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out, can't upload their pictures on Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them in the network. That's where 5G solves the problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth and that's going to bring the edge to life and that's money. So when you got money and greed and power changing hands, it's every, it's on the table and the wheel's spinning, and it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know. >> Yeah, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved. And I suppose it circles back to the fact that, DR is really leading the charge and they're probably thinking, okay, what's going on here? This is different, we want something new. You didn't know it's an open run or something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here constantly. I've mentioned open run. What is it all about John? Because why all the bars, if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we getting excited about it? >> That's a great thing. 5G certainly is Google Drive the main trend for sure. OpenRent is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation has been the driver for most of the open source software. So they're trying to bring software and open architectures to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware and around infrastructure because we need more infrastructure. We need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices that could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology and you want to minimize the licensing and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What if we look at, so on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Philippe Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud and within telco. So you just mentioned that. Open mind, it's all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easy, more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it a risk? >> I think that's going to increase the value of security and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in sense that could be explored by hackers, but it can be open to also protect. And I think we've seen open source and cloud in particular be more secure because everyone said, "Cloud is not secure, open source is not secure." And as it turns out when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security and threats. But actually I was speaking to some leaders in across various industries and particularly in tech. And they were saying, "Actually there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open source environment. We are able to track them and measure them and defend more efficiently. So actually they're being battered away, but the number is probably the same as it always was. We just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so do the threats. So on a net basis it's more because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look at it, there's money involved, they're organized, there's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank or ransomwares at an all time high. So this is like a big problem and it's beyond the government, it's our individual freedom. So security its huge and I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's again about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time but without collaboration that the industries aren't going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I just say in security, don't download that PDF if you don't know who came from. The fishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here on Mobile World Live, we're going to show this next segment and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience Chloe, for people who aren't here, right? >> Yeah. >> To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona and all the actions. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDr, but you can call me DR. Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time, let's do it. Holy shit. It sure is a great time to be a tech company. I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, DoorDash or Uber, life's pretty great. Just look at these stock prices over the past five years with their shareholder value going up into the right. Totally amazing. But where's telco? There I add our stocks to this awesome chart. Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, Tim, America Movil and Zain group. Huh, not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up. Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T and to Apple because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth, the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people. I get it, you have the security blanket, you're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street, to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things, but because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far you haven't had to. Every telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best, just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS, is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat and it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting, to WeChat, WhatsApp and the other OTT apps, but it is not just texting. The total adjustable market or term of the mobile app disruptors is huge. Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're a network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love. They look at every interaction with the customer and say, "How do we make the customer love this?" Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies, don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive they must make customers love them. So they focus on it in a big way and it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70 and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps and becoming customer centric. Retooling around the customer is a huge change. So let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples and drive big shareholder value just like the tech companies on that chart. Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies and a variety of categories vying for your subscriber's disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services, who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high evaluations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You. Hello. What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAAMs they throw around, you'll be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the CapEx, to build out the network, I say to myself, "Hell yeah, we should totally go do it and do whatever it takes to go get." For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focused started in rideshare, but then leverage its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with a valuable services that helped grow your ARPU, that would be huge. So how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app. A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called Totogi that is going to help carriers build world class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users, it's not the average order value, it's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user, that's the metric that matters. How many of you use that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top up or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences like Apple credit cards, no information required, application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies, like how DoorDash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings because they do simple things like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app rather than force you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. What do we do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder, why you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day. You have something that's 10 times better. You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to your crappy over customized on premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it. The public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network and all the network interactions into customer engagement. This is something the super apps don't have but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focus to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying massive CapEx investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100 million into it. You heard me right, $100 million. Is this what it feels like to be soft bank? I'm investing in Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage the network interactions into super app usage. Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those Telco valuations will go from down here to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts, and I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, click, everyone says, "No way, telcos can't do it." Zero chance, total goose egg. One suggested I build a bonfire with 100 million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well I think those people are dead wrong. I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing, the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because the Totogi takes the value of the network and the power of the public cloud to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focus guys like the other telcos, instead you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors. They know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf and make the customers want to choose you, you need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We will have to give up the security blanket of the network and change. Instead of NPS of the thirties, it needs to be in the 70s. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible. I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time and I can't wait to see you there. >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier, Chloe Richardson filling it for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her and while with major action, major pump me up, punch in the face, wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here. She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is John, there's trillions of dollars on the table and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> There's not going to be, it's going to be a fight, who will win. >> Who will win but also who will build the next big thing? >> Someone needs to die in the media conversation, it's always a fight, something's dead, something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. I think what's happened is, telco's already acknowledged that they need to change in the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple, they've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm, you've got all these new things. So the chips are getting faster and the software's more open source and I'm telling you, cloud is just going to drive that bus right down clouds street and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peeping on the board as it drives down. John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written. And one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me. What does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets and growing markets things behave differently and certainly economics and the people and the makeup and the mindset. >> Okay. >> So the telco has been kind of this mature market. It's been changing and growing but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit, you know, install a lot of cable. You got to get the rents out of that infrastructure and that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market, and it's about building, not just operating and you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together, builders being software developers, new technology and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. >> Okay. >> Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking, but in a growth market, it's turbulent and ride might not be quiet, first class ticket to paradise, but it's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer and the parallels? >> Yeah. I mean, the mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, re platform with the cloud and then refactor your business. If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over or go out of business. And that's what the telco with all these assets, they're going to get bought roll into a SPAC, special purpose acquisition company was a super hot in the United States. A lot of roll ups going on with Private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor or re platform, then refactor, they're going to be toast and they're going to get rolled up and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad. People process technology, and we think process and technology really take the forefront here but like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations establishments? How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about often? >> Yeah. I mean, education is huge and this highlights the change that telcos now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around and mobile was there, but once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So you start to see people now aware of the value and if you look at the, during the COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses and everyone was, survive because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad zoom meetings here and there and some teleconferences that didn't go well but for the most part we survived and they really saved everybody, my goodness. So they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education, people care about that stuff. So now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why The Edge has checked trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, oh, there's no jobs or I can't work, that's a bunch of BS because you can just get online, get on YouTube and just get a degree. You can get a degree, you can get an Amazon job, it pays a hundred thousand dollars a year, American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds and be unemployed six months and then be employed. So negative unemployment means there's more jobs than people to fill them qualify. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in some of the things there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity and there's such a skill shortage, there is nobody around to fill it. So it's an interesting problem to have isn't it? Cause it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades and obviously telco is in the same space. What can we do about it? Do you think it will actually bring people in? >> I think it's going to take leadership and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university, they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there, but to me it's the relationships, the mentorship. You starting to see women in tech and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear course where nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate or degree and accreditation no problem, but communities are out there. So that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that and I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills, you can get that online. So why even go to school? So people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also even transferring, I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't there? So we could easily be talking to people from other industries and bringing them into telco and saying, look, bring what you know from your retail background or your healthcare background and help us at telco to again, drive forward, just like DR is saying it's all about the next big thing. >> Danielle, I was also driving a lot of change and if you think about the jobs and a pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to a school like that and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now, the jobs that are available, weren't around five years ago. So there's no like pedigree or track record, there's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now is, from a job standpoint is, people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy league or the big degree or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emergent and make things happen, entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas. >> It's interesting you mentioned that John, because we can have more than five years experience in this space, we know that but in telco there is a problem and maybe it's, again it's a flipped problem where, telco recruiters or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> Well, I mean, I think that's just, I mean, I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening one, but two, I think, you know, you've got to be like a chip engineer, you can't learn that online, but if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely parts, you can specialize, space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on, obviously Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And, you know, Danielle Royston always says, who's going to happen first, Mars, colony, or telco adopting public cloud? Some people think Mars will happen first but. >> What do you think John? >> I think telco's going to get cloud. I mean, first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important because it's an architectural beachhead. >> Yeah. >> And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. >> Of course. >> So the inside baseball and the inside money and all the investors are focusing on the edge because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows it's a public secret and it's fun to watch, everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah, know, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So it's an interesting flip and I wonder if with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development its efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times John. >> Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So it's, we're the hybrid cube, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. >> Yeah. >> That is critical dynamic, and you seeing it. Like virtual reality for instance, now you seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. >> Exactly. >> You got, like Roblox went public recently. >> Yeah. >> Metaverse is a good time to be in that business because experiential human relations are coming. So I think that's going to be powered by 5G, you know, gamers. So all good stuff, Chloe, great to be with you here in theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam and the team, we're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City and this is theCUBE, from Cloud City back to you, Adam in the studio.

>>Hello everyone. Thank you, add appreciating the studio. We're here at the cube here in cloud city telco DRS Cloud city. I'm Jeffrey Day Volonte. We're here for the next three days. Wall to wall live coverage. It's a physical event with a virtual program. It's hybrid. We're here with Daniel Royston, the Ceo of telco D. R. And the acting Ceo Toby, which is announced today. Great >>to see you. It's awesome to see you guys. >>Awesome to see how you doing, how you >>Feeling? I'm feeling congratulations. Right. 101 days ago, I didn't even think this doesn't exist. Right. And we got in contact with you guys and we said we knew there was always going to be a big virtual component and we invited you guys and here we are together. It's insane. >>Well we did the preview videos, but we're kind of walking through and document in the early stages. It all came together beautifully spectacular For the folks watching behind us is the most spectacular build out clouds. It's an ecosystem open concept. It feels like the Apple store meets paradise. Of course. We got the cube here in the set and we got the studio with all the command and control of adam there. So I gotta ask you with the connected keynotes going on right now. The connected world. Yeah. It's connected. We all know that everyone knows that what's, what's different now real quick before we get into the program, what's going on? >>Yeah. I think a big part of my messages and advocating it's more than just the network, Right? And I think telcos forever have relied on. That's all it is. That's what it's about. And I'm like, nope, you guys got to start focusing on your subscribers, right? And so the over the top players keep coming in and siphoning away their revenue and it's time for them to start focusing on us, right and making experience great. And I think that's what this is all about. >>So we're gonna get the news but I want to toss it to Katie. The roving reporter is going to give it a detail on how it all came together. So Katie take it away. >>Mhm We're here in Barcelona and so excited to be back in this beautiful city over at the convention center. The team is working hard putting the finishing touches to tell Cody are amazing cloud city booth at MwC Barcelona 2021. I'm sure you know the story of how this all came together as one of the biggest vendors Erickson pulled out of M. W. C. With just over 100 days until the start of the event. When this happened last year, it kicked off a tidal wave of departures and MwC was called off this year. We all wondered if MWC was going to be cancelled again and that's when Daniel Royston Ceo of Telco D. R. And Tito G swooped in and took over the booth all 6000 square meters of it. The plan turn the booth into cloud city, the epicenter of public cloud innovation at MWC crews have been working around the clock. Over 100 and 50 people have been on this construction site for over three weeks with covid testing every day to prevent outbreaks during the build and in 100 days, it's become just that Cloud city has over 30 vendors presenting over 70 demos with 24 private meeting areas. Cloud City Live is a virtual showcase and live broadcast studio featuring 50 guests from cloud Thought leaders around the world. They have telepresence robots for a more personalized experience and the Cloud city quest game with a chance to win more than $100,000 to gain access to live streams of our nightly concerts with rosario flores and rock legend Jon bon Jovi. And don't forget to visit cloud city dot telco D R dot com to join in on the fun Daniel Royston and Nacho Gomez, founder and Ceo of one of the key vendors in the construction of the booth gave us a behind the scenes tour of the booth. >>Nacho. We did it. Yeah, we did. It can't even touch because of Covid. Yeah, but look what we did. But right, 100 days ago I called and I said I'm taking over the Ericsson booth. What did you think? I know you were crazy but just a little bit crazy, realized that you were mortgages than I thought. So at the very, at the very beginning I thought, yeah, she's crazy. But then I couldn't sleep that night. But the next uh then I realized that it was a very good it's a great idea. Yeah super smart. So yeah we're gonna show everyone toward the booth. Yeah let's go. Let's go. Okay So how do we build such an amazing, beautiful building now? So this is we've made building inside a book. So it was very hard to find a glassful of facade. The roof is around 24 tones. Yeah so it's crazy crazy but we made it work and it's totally amazing. Yeah. Do you want to go to tragedy life? Do let's go. Okay so here we are Cloud city live. I know we're producing a whole live streaming tv show. We always knew because of covid that not everyone will be able to come to Mwc as we wanted to make sure that people can learn about the public cloud. So over here we have the keynote stage, we're gonna have awesome speakers talking all throughout M. W. C. People from AWS Microsoft, google vendors companies. So really really great content. And then over there we have the cube interviewing people again 15 minute segments, live streaming but also available on demand. And you can find all of this content on cloud city. Tell Cody are calm and it's available for anyone to you. Well, a lot of content. And what about the roberts? I never get them out. Come on. We remember 100 days ago we were locked down. So we came up with the idea of having robots for the people who cannot attend in person. I know right. We always knew that there was gonna be a big virtual component to MWC this year. So we bought 100 telepresence robots. It's a great way to have a more personal experience inside the boot. Just sign up for one on cloud city dot telco D r dot com and you can control it yourself. Right? So today we have Nikki with us, who's dialing in from the Philippines in Manila? Hello, Nicky. Hi there, how are you? I were great. Can you show us a twirl all gaining on us? Super cool. Yeah, it is. What an experience. So Nikki robots are not the only cool thing we have in cloud city. We also have super awesome concert. We have rosario flores on monday. Who's a latin grammy award winner. We have Jon bon Jovi, Jon bon Jovi on Tuesday, can't be changing telephone that a little bit of rock n roll and that's Tuesday. And on Wednesday we have DJ official, it's going to be a super party. Now if you play our cloud city quest on cloud city telco D R dot com you can participate in a live streaming concert and so I know a lot of people out there have been a lockdown. Haven't been able to be going to concerts. Things from austin texas, which is the live music capital of the world, How to have music. It would be so exciting is gonna be great. I'm getting hungry. Why don't we go to the restaurant? Let's go eat. Let's go. Yeah, Here is our awesome restaurant. I know it's called Cloud nine. Right? It's a place to come and sit down and relax now. Barcelona is known for its great food and I'm a foodie. So we had to have a restaurant. Should we go check out my secret bar? Let's go. Mhm. Yeah, here >>thanks to a R. And thank you Nacho if you're watching this at home, I'm so sorry you can't join us in person. However, let's not forget this is a hybrid event meaning we're bringing all the public cloud action right to you wherever in the world you might be. This includes the Pact cloud city live program. We've partnered with the cube Silicon angle Media's live streaming video studio to make sure that all of the keynotes, panel discussions, demos, case studies interviews and way more are available on demand so you can watch them whenever and wherever you want or you can live stream and enjoy all things cloud city as and when they happen. So for those of you not able to join us in, Barcelona, be sure to log in to cloud city live and catch all the action and don't miss the awesome concert Tuesday night with Jon bon Jovi available for free. If you participate in our cloud city quest game, I'll be here throughout MWc bringing you reports and updates. Stay >>tuned. Yeah. >>Mhm. Okay, we're back here on the cube on the floor at mobile world congress in cloud city telco DRS clouds. They were here with D. R. Of telco, D R. Danielle Rice and great to see you back, we're back. So the keynotes going on connected world, the big news here, I'll see the open shift that's happening is going open. Open ran, it's been a big thing. Open ran alliance. You're starting to see the industry come together around this clear mandate that applications are gonna be cloud native and the public cloud is just coming in like a big wave and people are gonna be driftwood or they'll be surfing the wave. Yeah, this is what's happening. >>Yeah, I think public cloud is an unstoppable megatrend. It's hit every other industry regulated industries like banking, right? Top secret industries like government. They all use the public cloud tells us the last, you know, standing old school industry and it's coming and I don't think we could have had an MWc without talking about open man. That's the other major shift. And so we're bringing both of those ideas here together in cloud city. So >>the big theme is telco transformation. Maybe we could start with the basics like paint a picture of what the telco infrastructure looks like, particularly the data center stuff because they all have big data centers >>because that's >>those are the candidates to go into the cloud explained to the audience. >>Well, do you have a time machine? I think if any of us were in tech in the late 90s and early 2000s, that's what telcos like today. Right. So for people outside of the industry don't know right there mostly still managing their own data centers, they're just sort of adopting virtualization. Some of the more advanced telcos are mostly virtualized public cloud. Is this idea that like this advanced thought and so yeah, I mean things are on premise, things are in silom, things don't use a P. I. S there all integrated with custom code. And so the transformation, we can all see it because we've lived it in other industries. And I'm bringing that to telco and say come along for the ride. It totally works and it's gonna be amazing. >>So it's hardened purpose built infrastructure. Okay. That ultimately parts of that need to go to the public cloud. Right. What parts do you see going first? >>I think all of it. Really. Yeah. And I think when you look at like dish in the W. S. Which was an announcement that came out about two months ago. Right. I mean dish was doing all these are FPs. Everyone knew about it. They were looking for a cloud native software and no one knew what they were. They knew a big part was open man. But their coupling open ran with AWS and deploying their parts of their network onto the public cloud and the whole industry is like wait we thought this was years away, right? Or number two, you're crazy. And I'm saying this is what I've been talking about guys. This is exactly what you can do, leverage the Capex over. Let's see. I think Amazon did $100 billion 2020 right, leverage that Capex for yourself. Get that infinite scalability right? It's going to, well we >>have, we have a saying here in the queue, we just made this up called D. R. That's your initial tucker. The digital revolution and the three Rs reset re platform and re factor. I think the observation we're seeing is that you're coming in with the narrative what everyone's kind of like they're waking up because they have to reset and then re platform with the cloud. But the opportunity is gonna be the re factoring, You're seeing the public cloud, do that already with the Enterprise Enterprises. Already re factoring has done that. Already done that now. Telcos the last area to be innovated by the cloud. >>Yeah, I think there's old school big, we're kind of on a hollowed ground here in the Ericsson booth that I took over, right? They bailed and I kind of made fun of them. I was like, they don't have anything to say, right, They're not going to go to the show. I'm like, this is this is a revolution that's happening in telco and I don't think the big guys are really interested in rewriting their software that frankly makes them billions and billions of dollars of revenue. And I'm like to use the public cloud. All of the software needs to be rewritten needs to be re factored and you've got to start training your teams on how to use it. They don't have any capability. The telcos, in terms of those skills hire the right people, retrain your teams, move your applications, rewrite them. And I think that's what we're talking, this is not a short journey, this is a 10 year journey. So >>let's fast forward to the future a little bit because when I look around cloud city, I see ecosystem everywhere. So as you well know, the telcos have generally done a poor job of attacking adjacent seas. So my question is can they go beyond should they go beyond connectivity or is that going to be the role of the ecosystem? >>Yeah, I think it's time that the telco starts to focus on their subscriber, right? It's been really easy for them to rely on the oligopoly of the network, Right? The network, we live in the United States, we see the 18 T Verizon T mobile five G network, five G network. Like what about us? Right. And it's really easy for the over the top players right, that come in and they're always, telcos are always complaining about being coming dumb pipes and I'm like, you don't focus on the customer, we would rather buy from an Apple and amazon if they provided a mobile service because the customer experience will be better. Right? They need to start focusing on us. They have great businesses but they want to make them better. They need to start focusing on the subscriber, so >>it's a partnership with the ecosystem then for them to go beyond just straight connectivity because you're right, those are the brands that we want to do business >>with. You know, there was a great survey, Peter Atherton who will be talking as a speaker I think um I can't remember when he's talking but he was talking about how there was a survey done, where would you rather get your mobile service from? And it had a couple of big names in telco and then of course the obvious, you know, consumer brands, the ones that we all know and it was like overwhelmingly would rather buy from an amazon or an apple. And I'm like, this is like if you guys don't change, right, if telco doesn't change they keep rolling out 60 and blah blah blah. It's about the network and I don't start making about the subscriber right? Those revenues are going to continue to erode and they just sit there and complain about the O. T. T. Players. Like it's time to fight back. Yeah, I own the subscriber >>relationship. It's a digital revolution and I think This event really encapsulates in my mind this hybrid world here because it's physical events back. It's been since 2019 winter that this event actually happened. >>Well no it was even longer than, well I guess winter it was February of 19, right? And so like you look at ericsson and some of the big names that dropped out of the show, the time they come back, three years will have passed three years, right? This is how you feel your sales funnel is how you connect with your customers right? Tokyo is a very global, you know experience and so you gotta, you gotta get in front of people and you got to talk a >>lot of change to its happened, look at just what public clouds done in 2.5 years. You imagine three years being just >>gone, right? And I think a lot of people back to edition A. W. S. I think the industry was a little bit surprised by that announcement. So I've been telling executives if you were surprised by that, if you think that's, you know, if you don't know how that's gonna work, you need to come to cloud cities, you start meeting all the vendors are here. We have over 30 vendors, 70 demos, right? People who are pushing the technology forward, you need to learn what's going on here. We have several dish vendors here. Come learn about open rand, come learn about public cloud. So >>we're tight on time today, but we're going to have you back and we want to get into the tech, Get it to open, ran a little bit, get into what 5G and beyond and how we're going to take advantage of that and monetize it and what that all means. >>And also we want to hear what's going on the hallways. I know you got a lot of your key noting, you're gonna be a lot of events, the yacht. You've got a lot of briefings, >>yep. Yeah, I've already had two meetings this morning. I shot a video. Um, I met with one of the world's largest groups and I met with a tiny little super app company. Right? So running the gamut, doing everything reporter >>now, we could be like our roaming >>reporter. You know, I love, I love talking to execs and telco getting their perspective on what is public cloud and where are they going, what are they thinking about? And you talked to people who really, really get it and you get people who are just nascent and everywhere in between and I love mwc it's going great. >>Daniel Rose and you are a digital revolution telco DDR. There's amazing. Davis has been fantastic. Again for the folks watching, this is a hybrid events, there's an online component and we're reaching out with our remote interviews to get people brought in and we're shipping this content out to the masses all over the world. It's gonna be really amazing cube coverages here. It's gonna be rocking you guys are doing great. I just want to give you a compliment that you guys just did an amazing job. And of course we've got adam in the studio with the team. So adam, I'm gonna pass it off back to you in the studio

(soft music) >> Hi everyone. And welcome to this special cube conversation and kickoff preview of the Mobile World Congress Barcelona event. It's a physical event that's going to be taking place in person. It will probably be the first hybrid big event 68 days until the June 28th kickoff. You might've heard TelcoDr, Telco disruptor. Is on a mission to move the telco industry to the public cloud. And, and, and it's been taken of one of the biggest spaces this year from Erickson is the big story everyone's talking about. And of course the CUBE is excited to be there and broadcast and be a partner with TelcoDr. So I'm excited to bring on the founder and CEO of TelcoDr. Danielle Royston. Danielle great to see you. Thanks for coming on for this Mobile World Congress preview. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm psyched to talk to you about this, its going to be great. >> So Erickson always has the biggest booth 14 years. You're disrupting the Barcelona not people's shorts going to be on or off. It's officially on, it's happening. And there's going to be a physical event we're coming out of COVID still a risky move. It's going to be a big hybrid event. It's going to be in person. Tell us the story. How did you guys come out of nowhere a disruptor take the biggest real estate in the place and turn it into a community event. A news event, immediate event, everything tell us. >> Yeah, well, you know, I think it was March 9th a little over a month ago. Ericsson announced that they were pulling out of MWC and it's very analogous to what happened in 2020. They were one of the first vendors to bail as well. And it kind of started this like tidal wave of people saying, can't do it. And I think the distinction now is that, that was at the beginning of COVID. There was a lot of unknowns, you know, is it coming? Is it not? Is it safe? Is it not? We're now, you know, year 50 to three, four months into it. I think that when you look at where we are now cases are trending down. The vaccine is up. And I think the legacy players were sort of backward looking they're like, this is a repeat of 2020. We're going to, it's not safe to go. We're going to pull out. And I'm like with a hundred days to go. And the vaccine ramping, I think I see it a different way. I think there's a really big opportunity. John Hoffman, CEO of the GSMA had put out a two page missive on LinkedIn where he was personally responding to questions about how serious they were about making sure that the event was safe and could be held. And my, my view was this is going to happen. And with Ericsson pulling out, I mean this is hollowed ground. I mean, this is, you know, a, you know, massively successful company that has customers literally trained like Skinner's chickens to come to the same spot every year. And now I get to, you know, put out my shingle right there and say welcome and show them the future , right? And instead of the legacy past and all the normal rhetoric that you hear from those you know, sort of dinosaurs, Ericsson and Nokia now they're going to hear about the public cloud. And I'm really excited for this opportunity. I think the ROI on this event is instant. And so it was, it was a pretty easy decision. I think I thought about it for about 30 seconds. >> It's a real bold move. And it's, again, it's a risk that pays off if it happens, if it doesn't, you know, you didn't happen but you're like, it's like a, it's like the the startups that put a Superbowl commercial for the first time, it's a big hit and it's a big gamble that pays off huge. Take us through, I heard, how did it all happen? Did you just wake up and saw it was open? How do you know that it was open? Was it like, does the email go out, say hey I've got this huge space for >> Well, I mean, it was big news. It was big news in the industry that they were pulling out and all the journalists were like, Oh, here we go again. You know, everyone's going to bail, who who's next right? And, and everyone was sort of like building that sort of negative momentum energy. And I'm like, we got to squash this. So I put out a tweet on Twitter. I mean, I'm not the most followed person but I'm kind of known in telco. And I was like, hey GSMA, I'll take over the booth. And I don't think people even liked my tweet, right? Like no likes no retweets. I reached out to a couple of journalists. I'm like, let's do an interview. Let's do a story. Everyone's like, we'll have you on the podcast like in a month, I'm like what?! So, so when John Hoffman had put out that letter I had connected to him. And so I was like, Oh, I'm connected to the CEO of the GSMA. So I went out on LinkedIn and I referenced the story and I said, John Hoffman, I'll take over the booth. And I think about 30 minutes later he responded and said, let's do it. And I said, great, who do I talk to? And I was in touch with someone within a couple of hours. And I think we put the whole deal together in 48. And I think wrote the press release and announced it on Friday. So happened on Tuesday the ninth, announced by that Friday. And I really, I was like, GSMA, we've got to get this out. And we got to stop the negative momentum of the show and get people to realize it's going to be different in June. This is going to happen. Let's go do it. And so I think they are they're psyched that I stepped into the booth it's big booth it's 65,000 square feet, 6,000 square meters for for the rest of the World that use it, the metric system. And I mean, that's huge. I mean, that's the size of a professional pitch in a in a football field, a soccer field. That's a one and a half football fields. It's, it's a ton of space. It's a ton of space pull off. >> I think what's interesting is there's a points out that this new business model of being connected you were on LinkedIn, you connect to them you get a deal done so fast. This is how this is the direct to consumer as a start-up you're literally took over the primo space the best space in the area. So congratulations. And, and the other thing that's notable and why I'm excited to talk to you is that this kind of sets the table for the first global what I call hybrid event. This will probably be a cornerstone case study in and of itself because we're still kind of coming out of the pandemic. People are getting vaccinated. People want to fly. They want to get out of the house, were partnering with the CUBE and the CUBE 365 platform. And, you know, we'd love hybrid. We'd love doing events, theCUBE that's what we do with video. Now, we're going to do a partnership with you to create this hybrid experience. What can people and guests who come to Barcelona or watch remotely expect? >> Yeah, so I think there's a couple of experiences that we're trying to drive in the booth. I think obviously demonstrations, you know I can't fill 65,000 square feet on my own. I'm a startup small company. And so I am inviting like-minded forward thinking companies to join me in the booth. I'm, I'm paying for it providing a turnkey experience for those vendors. And so I think what we have in common is we're thinking about future technologies, like open ran on the network side and obviously public cloud which is a big part of my message. And so first and foremost, foremost, there's, you know come and see the companies that are driving the change the new technologies that are out there and what's available for, for carriers to start to adopt and think about. MWC is a meeting intensive event. Deals are done at this show. In 2019, I think the stat is $65 billion of deals were put together at the show. And so a big component of the booth will be a place for executives to come together and have private conversations. And so we're going to have that. So that's going to be a big piece of it. And I think the third part is driving education and thought leadership. And so there's going to be a whole, you know, talk track right? Tech topics, business topics customer case studies involve the hyperscalers and really start to educate the telco community around these new technologies. But there'll be shorter talks. They won't be like hour long keynotes. We're talking 15, 20 minutes. And I think one thing that we're going to do with you as you were just talking about with theCUBE is, you know MWC was the first big show to have to cancel with COVID I think in 2019, sorry, 2020, the the dates it's always the last Monday in February and and the rest of that week. And so that's like right at the beginning of that of the COVID stuff, Italy was just starting to take off. So it was one of the first shows that had to make a big call and decide to cancel, which they did. This is going to be one of the first shows that comes back online, post COVID right? And so I don't think things just snap back to the way that they used to be. I don't think we, as consumers are going to snap back to the way that we operating we're now used to being able to get curbside delivery from any restaurant in the city, right. I mean, it's just, it's just a sort of a different expectation. And so partnering with theCUBE, we really want to provide an experience that brings the virtual people into the booth. Typically in events like this you really have to be there to see it boosts are kind of like unveiled the day of the show. What's going on. One thing I'm trying to do is really educate people about what you can expect. What can you see? This is what it's going to look like. And so we're going to start to share some pictures of the booth of, of, you know, what it looks like. Number one, to drive excitement with the partners that are coming, right. Like you're going to be part of something really, really fabulous. I think number two attendees can wait, I don't know week of to make the decision to go. And so maybe if COVID continues to trend down and vaccines are, are picking up steam, maybe they're like it's safe for me to go and I want to go be a part of that. But I think from here on out we're going to have sort of that virtual experience. It's always going to be part of shows. And so we're going to experiment with you guys. We're going to have a live streaming event over the course of the, you know, all MWC. It's going to be a way for people who are unable to travel or, you know, can't afford it. COVID or whatever, see what's going on in the booth. And it's going to be everything from listen to a talk to watch what you guys are typically famous for, your awesome interviews. We're going to have a man on the street, you know, like you know, we're here at, at a demo station, take us through your little demo. We're going to have telepresence robots that people can reserve. And, you know, cruise to the booth, the robot can go to a talk. The robot can watch on this streaming thing the robot can go to a demo. The robot can go to a meeting and it's controlled by the the virtual attendees and so experimenting, right? Like how do we make this great for virtual people? How do we make the virtual people feel part of the physical? How do the physical people feel? The virtual people that are attending and really just make it feel like a community of both. So really excited >> That's super awesome. And I think one of the, first of all, thank you for having paying for everyone and including theCUBE in that but I think this speaks to the ecosystem of open you're bringing, you're creating an open ecosystem. And I think that is a huge thing. So for people who are at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this is going to be a nice, safe place to hang space as well as get deals done and to be comfortable doing media center, we'll get you on the digital TV, but also you're also designing the first what I call the first hybrid experience not just having people, having on-demand videos on their website, connecting Barcelona with other parts of the World, with meetings and stories and content. I think that to me is going to be a great experiment slash upgrade. We'll see, we'll get to see it. >> Well, it was really, I mean, we all lived through 2020. I mean, some of the shows went on AWS's re-invent happened. Google did like a crazy nine week program. It's very lonely to participate in those virtual events right. You know, you kind of log on by herself. No, one's really tweeting about it. You're watching, you know, an event the event is great, but it was really lonely. And so, you know, and I think what people love about the physical events is we're together and we're networking and we're meeting people. And so, you know, I think continue to evolve that experience so that virtual is not as lonely. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes. >> No, I've got to say your, your vision is really aligned with us and others that are in this open innovation World. Because if you look at like theCUBE physical went away, we had no events. We did Q virtual, a new brand. It wasn't a pivot. It was an extension, a line extension of theCUBE. Now theCUBES coming back to the physical. We're going to bring that cube virtual to connect everybody. So this is it. And it just amplifies the value of the physical event. So if done right, is so much cooler. So, so that's cool. And what I want to ask you though on the physical side to kind of bring it back to physical is there's still going to be keynotes. There's still going to be talks at Mobile World Congress. And so I saw that schedule and I just saw last week GSMA announced you're going to be doing a keynote speech. That's amazing. So how did that happen? So give us the lowdown on the keynote that you're doing. >> I'm sure the entire industry is like that happened. And it probably has something to do with the back that I have one of the biggest booths at the space. I always, you know, put in a request to speak. I feel that I have really exciting message to share with the industry. Over the last I guess it's been 9 or 10 months. I really been trying to amplify, amplify my voice. I have a podcast, I have a newsletter I'm talking to execs. I have a list that I literally go down one by one stalking each executive of like have I talked to them like how I told them about like the power of the public cloud. And so I am super thankful that I have this opportunity to spread that this message and I'm, I'm planning a really epic talk, just I really want to shake the industry. And this is, this is my opportunity, right? This is my opportunity to stand on the biggest stage in our industry. And command a presence and send out my message. And I'm absolutely thrilled to go do it. And I hope I crush it. I hope it's like a mic drop experience and can't wait to do it. >> Well, we're looking forward to covering it. And we love the open vision. We love the idea of public cloud and the enablement and the disruption, because just like you got the deal so fast, you can move fast with modern applications with the cloud moving at cloud scale, complete content, game changer, so great stuff. So totally applaud that looking forward to, and we're we're here to cheer you on and, and and ask the tough questions. I do want to get to on Twitter yesterday though, you put out on tweetstorm on Twitter, about the plans kind of teasing out the booth. How you going to plan to build the booth, are you worried that you're opening up too much of the kimono here and opened up putting too much on the table because it's usually a secret Mobile World Congress is supposed to be secret, not publicly out there. What, what's the, you know >> Well, I mean, I think this is just a little bit of a change has happened post COVID, right. You know, people usually build their booth in and don't reveal it until the first day of the show. And it's kind of like this excitement to go see what is there, what's their big message. And what's the big reveal. And there's always fun stuff. I think this year is a little bit different. So at first, like I said, at first big event back. I think I need to create a little bit of excitement for people who are going and maybe entice people that maybe you should think about coming. I realize this is a super personal decision, right? It depends on where you are and the country and your, your health and your status. But, but if you can do it I want people to know that you're going to miss out. It's going to be super fun. So, um, so yeah. >> Well, let's take it. Let's take a look at the booth though. And that's why my next question, I want to see I know we have guys, do we have that, rendering, let's pull that up and let's talk this through. Let's go look at the rendering. So you can see here on the screen, take us through this. >> Yeah. So what we want to do is give the sense of, of cloud city, right? And that's what we're calling this space in cloud cities. There's in a city there's outdoor space. Like you see here, and then there's in indoor space. And indoors is for you where you work, where you buy, where you meet. And so you can see here on the left, the demo stations that would have different vendors displaying you know, and it kind of, it goes way back. I mean, what we're feeling like I said is like a football field, an American football field and the half or a European football field a pitch it's pretty, it's pretty extensive. And so we think we're going to have, I don't know, 20 30 vendors showing their, their different software. I think we're, we're scheduling or planning for about 24 different meeting rooms that we can schedule all COVID safe with the, with the space requirements in there, but on the out in that outdoor space, it would be where you learn right. The education and then I think we're going to have this fabulous booth for the, for theCUBE. It's going to look, It's just so amazing with the backdrop of this amazing building. And, you know, I think I underappreciated or didn't really realize, you know, how devastated the both the event planning industry has been from COVID as well as construction. You know, obviously when events were shut down these companies had to lay off thousands of workers. Some of the big firms have laid off 50% of their workforce. And those people, you know they didn't just go home and sit around. They, they had to come up with a livelihood and this people have pivoted into another job. And they're not really, I mean events aren't really back yet. So some of these firms are shrunk. You know, the manpower is, is severely reduced. But then I think on the other side is and you can see this in just housing construction. There's a lumber shortage, there's a shortage of materials. And so everything that we source for the booth pretty much has to come from Spain. And so when we look at the booth, you know, we have, we have a pretty significant ceiling. Well, it looks like the roof of the building. It's an engineering feat to do. That we're still working through the sure. Someone with a protractor is doing lots of math. You know, the glass, we have those huge beautiful glass spans in the front getting a glass that spans that height. I think it's, I think it's 18 feet. It's six meters tall. That's going to be hard things like the flooring. I want to have like hardwood, laminate flooring. So it looks like hardwood floors. Don't know if we can find them right there. Like, why don't you do carpet? I'm like, can you just check one more vendor? I really want my floor. So, so we'll see how it goes. And yeah, I, I think that sharing this plan, the trials and tribulations, like how can this small startup, right? That usually, you know, take over a space that usually takes nine months to plan, right? Who is this girl? What is she doing? How are they going to pull this off? You know, I think it's like, grab your popcorn and watch the train wreck or, you know, hero's journey. We get it done. >> Well, people are on clubhouse. They're bored, they want to get out. I think this is a case study. Mobile World Congress has a huge economic impact for the, as a show it's got its own little economy built around it. Impacts the, the country of Spain in Barcelona, the city, a great city. People love it. And so it certainly is notable and newsworthy. We will be following that story. I have to ask you more of a, kind of a tactical question. If you don't mind, while I have you here, can you talk about some of the vendors that are coming and the kinds of talks you're going to have inside the booth and and how do people get involved? You mentioned it's open to people who love open ran and open public cloud, open technologies. I mean, that's pretty much everybody that's cool and relevant, which is like almost the whole World now. So like, is it going to be a space, is there a criteria? How do people get involved? What's the collaboration formula. >> Yeah, no. I had been working on putting together a list of potential vendors. You'd be surprised, not everyone is, is as bullish as I am on the public cloud. And so there was a little bit of a filtering criteria, but otherwise anyone can come right enterprise software vendors in telco where their primary customer is a communications service provider. That's their software runs on the public cloud come on in, right. People using open man. And it's still a little sort of small band of cohorts that are really trying to drive this new technology forward. And, and they're growing up, going up against some of the biggest companies in telco, right? They're going up against Huawei. They're going up against Ericcson. Both those guys are, are very anti and then not really pro open rank because it's hugely disruptive to their business. And so, you know I'm pretty sure those guys are not psyched to see open ran you know, you know, become a thing in telco. And so it's really sort of about disruptive technologies that are that are in the, in the booth. And so, yeah, I'm paying for the space. I'm paying for the, build-out bring your demos bring your people, come with your marketing message and and let's, and let's build a community. And so we're talking to open ran vendors like Mavenir. Which is a pretty big name in the open ran, open ran space. I've been talking with parallel wireless and LTO star. Those are also great players, software vendors like Totogi, which is a talk that I did a little over a month ago about this new startup that has a web-scale charger that they're trying to put out there. Aria is another company that I'm really familiar with that has some cloud for software and then little tiny startups like Zquence, and some other up-and-comers that no one's heard of. So we're really excited to invite them into the booth. I've been secretly stalking Elon, Elon Musk and Starlink and SpaceX to be a part of it. And we'll see, right. I'm kind of, you know, using Twitter and whatever I can to, to reach out and see if they want to be a part of it. But yeah, it's kind of really open arms, not really excluded. >> Oh, Elon, Elon is very disruptive and you know, he reached out on, you can reach out to him on Twitter. He's accessible. I mean, you've got to break through, but he is got this antenna up for innovators. People who think differently. They love people who break down walls and markets floor open wins. I mean, we, we know there's a history we've been covering it. I've been involved in my career. People who bet against open, always lose it's happened in every single wave of innovation. So Elons gettable, lets get him. >> Who doesn't love Elon Musk. I mean, I think some people don't, I love him, he's my hero. I model a lot of the things that I do around, around his, his approach, his vision, right, 20 years ago or close to 20 years ago, 2003 he said he was going to put people on Mars. And I think people laughed at him for being like the PayPal guy and this guy's crazy. But every year he makes progress against his goals, right. We have a real landable rocket. He's doing a manned mission this week, a second man mission or third man mission. And the guy makes progress. And I think I'm on the same, same mission here. My mission is to move telco to the public cloud. I think it's a, it's a long journey, right? I think people are like, who's this girl and she's like 12 people, and what's your story? And I'm like, I don't care. I have a singular mission is a quest. I am not going to stop until I moved the industry to the public cloud. And I it's my life's mission. And I'm psyched to do it. >> Well, we love the mojo. We'd love your style. We'd love Elon Musk, his mugshot. And again, just to bring the dots together you have that same mindset, which has, you know, as people you know, love her, love or like Elon, he's a builder. Okay, he builds things and he delivers. So as you said, so know I really appreciate the work you're doing. I love your philosophy. We're in total agreement, open, open building. Doing it together as a collective, being part of something. This is what the World needs. You got a lot of great ideas in the works and we can't wait to hear them. And what you got coming up over the next 68 days. This is the first of many conversations together. Thank you so much >> Yeah, yeah, no, it's going to be so awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Psyched to talk to you about it. >> Okay Mobile World Congress is happening in Barcelona on the June 28th. It's going to be in person and it's going to be probably the biggest hybrid event to date. Be there, check out telcoDR and theCUBE and the space that they took over 14 years at the helm there. Ericcson had it, now it's TelcoDR. Danielle Royston, founder and CEO here with me from TelcoDR. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>>mhm >>Yes, >>everyone welcome back to the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube, we've got a great segment here on how Red Hat is working with telcos and the disruption in the telco cloud. We've got a great guest cube alumni Darrell Jordan smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts at Red Hat, uh Darryl, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the cube. >>It's great to be here and I'm really excited about having the opportunity to talk to you >>today. Yeah, we're not in person in real life is coming back soon, although I hear mobile world congress might be in person this year looking like it's good a lot of people gonna be virtual activating. I know a lot to talk about this is probably one of the most important topics in the industry because when you talk about telco industry, you're really talking about um the edge, talking about five G talking about industrial benefits for business because it's not just Edge for connectivity access. We're talking about internet of things from self driving cars to business benefits. It's not just consumer, it's really bringing that together, you guys are really leading with the cloud native platform from rail, open shift men and services. Everything about the cloud native underpinnings you guys have been successful as a company but now in your area, telco is being disrupted. Absolutely. Give us your take on this is super exciting. >>Well, it's actually one of the most exciting times I've been in the industry for 30 years are probably aging myself now. But in the telecommunications industry, this, for me is the most exciting. It's where technology is actually going to visibly change the way that everyone interacts with the network and with the applications that are being developed out there on our platform and as you mentioned IOT and a number of the other ai and Ml innovations that are occurring in the market place. We're going to see a new wave of applications and innovation. >>What's the key delivery workloads you're seeing with Five G environment? Um, obviously it's not just, you know, five G in the sense of thinking about mobile phones or mobile computers as they are now. Um, it's not just that consumer, hey, surf the web and check your email and get an app and download and communicate. It's bigger than that. Now, can you tell us Where you see the workloads coming in on the 5G environment? >>You hit the nail on the head, The the the, the killer application isn't the user or the consumer and the way that we traditionally have known it, because you might be able to download a video in that take 20 seconds less, but you're not going to pay an awful lot more money for that. The real opportunity around five years, the industrial applications, things that I connected car, automotive, driving, um factory floor automation, how you actually interface digitally with your bank, how we're doing all sorts of things more intelligently at the edge of the network using artificial intelligence and machine learning. So all of those things are going to deliver a new experience for everyone that interacts with the network and the telcos are at the heart of it. >>You know, I want to get into the real kind of underpinnings of what's going on with the innovations happening. You just kind of laid out kind of the implications of the use cases and the target application workloads. But there's kind of two big things going on with the edge in five G one is under the hood, networking, you know, what's going on with the moving the packets around the workload, throughput, bandwidth etcetera, and all that goes on under the hood. And then there's the domain expertise in the data where AI and machine learning have to kind of weaving. So let's take the first part first. Um open shift is out there. Red hat's got a lot of products, but you have to nail the networking requirements and cloud Native with container ization because at large scales, not just packaged, it's all kinds of things going on security, managing a compute at the edge. There's a lot of things under the hood, if you will from a networking perspective, could you share what red hats doing in that area? >>So when we last spoke with the cube, we talked a lot about GMOs and actually people living Darryl, >>can I Cause you really quickly? I'm really sorry. Keep your answer in mind. We're gonna >>go right from that question. >>We're just kidding. Um, are you, is anything that you're >>using or touching running into the desk? We're just getting >>a little bit of shakiness on your camera >>and I don't want to. >>So anyway, >>that is my, my elbows. No worries. So no >>worries. Okay, so take your answer. I'll give you like a little >>321 from behind the scenes >>and and we'll go right as if >>john just ask >>the questions, we're gonna stay running. >>So I think, uh, >>can you ask the question just to get out of my mind? Perfect. Well let's, let's do >>from that. So we'll stay on your shot. So you'll hear john, but it'll be as if >>he just asked the question. So jOHn >>team up. Here we go. I'm just gonna just jimmy and just keep my other question on the okay, here we go. So Darryl, open shift is optimized for networking requirements for cloud native. It's complex into the hood. What is red hat doing under the hood to help in the edge in large complex networks for large scale. >>Yeah. So, so that's a very good question in that we've been building on our experience with open stack and the last time I was on the cube, I talked about, you know, people virtualizing network applications and network services. We're taking a lot of that knowledge that we've learned from open stack and we're bringing that into the container based world. So we're looking at how we accelerate packets. We're looking at how we build cloud native applications on bare metal in order to drive that level of performance. We're looking at actually how we do the certification around these applications and services because they may be sitting in different app lets across the cloud, but in some instances running on multiple clouds at the same time. So we're building on our experience from open stack, we're bringing all of that into open shipping, container based environment with all of the tallinn necessary to make that effective. >>It's interesting with all the automation going on. Certainly with the edge developing nicely the way you're describing it, certainly disrupting the Telco cloud, you have an operator mindset of cloud Native operator thinking, kind of, it's distributed computing, we know that, but it's hybrid. So it's essentially cloud operations. So there's an operator mindset here that's just different. Could you just share quickly before we move on to the next segment? What's different about this operating model for the, these new kinds of operators? As you guys been saying, the C I O is the new cloud operator, That's the skill set they have to be thinking and certainly to anyone else provisioning and managing infrastructure has to think like an operator, what's your >>view? They certainly do need anything like an operator. They need to look at how they automate a lot of these functions because they're actually deployed in many different places will at the same time they have to live independently of each other. That's what cloud native actually really is. So the whole, the whole notion of five nines and vertically orientated stacks of five nines availability that's kind of going out the window. We're looking at application availability across a hybrid cloud environment and making sure the application can live and sustain itself. So operators as part of open shift is one element of that operations in terms of management and orchestration and all the tooling that we actually also providers red hat but also in conjunction with a big partner ecosystem, such as companies like net cracker, for example, or IBM as another example or Erickson bringing their automation tool sets and their orchestration tool sets of that whole equation to address exactly that problem >>you bring up the ecosystem. And this is really an interesting point. I want to just hit on that real quick because reminds me of the days when we had this massive innovation wave in the nineties during that era. The client server movement really was about multi vendor, right. And that you're starting to see that now and where this ties into here I think is when we get your reaction to this is that, you know, moving to the cloud was all about 2 2015. Move to the cloud moved to the cloud cloud native. Now it's all about not only being agile and better performance, but you're gonna have smaller footprints with more security requires more enterprise requirements. This is now it's more complicated. So you have to kind of make the complications go away and now you have more people in the ecosystem filling in these white spaces. So you have to be performance and purpose built if you will. I hate to use that word, but or or at least performing an agile, smaller footprint grade security enabling other people to participate. That's a requirement. Can you share your reaction to that? >>Well, that's the core of what we do. A red hat. I mean we take open source community software into a hardened distribution fit for the telecommunications marketplace. So we're very adapt to working with communities and third parties. That ecosystem is really important to us. We're investing hundreds of engineers, literally hundreds of engineers working with our ecosystem partners to make sure that their applications services certified, running on our platform, but but also importantly is certified to be running in conjunction with other cloud native applications that sit over the same cloud. So that that is not trivial to achieve in any stretch of the imagination. And a lot of 80 technology skills come to bear. And as you mentioned earlier, a lot of networking skills, things that we've learned and we've built with a lot of these traditional vendors, we bring that to the marketplace. >>You know, I've been saying on the cube, I think five years ago I started talking about this, it was kind of a loose formulation, I want to get your reaction because you brought up ecosystem, you know, saying, you know, you're gonna see the big clouds develop out. The amazon Microsoft came in after and now google and others and I said there's gonna be a huge wave of of what I call secondary clouds and you see companies like snowflake building on on top of amazon and so you start to see the power law of new cloud service providers emerging that can either sit and work with across multiple clouds. Either one cloud or others that's now multi cloud and hybrid. But this rise of the new more C. S. P. S, more cloud service providers, this is a huge part of your area right now because some call that telco telco cloud edge hits that. What is red hat doing in this cloud service provider market specifically? How do you help them if I'm a cloud service provider, what do I get in working with Red Hat? How do I be successful because it's very easy to be a cloud service provider now more than ever. What do I do? How do you help? How do you help me? >>Well, we we we offer a platform called open shift which is a containerized based platform, but it's not just a container. It involves huge amounts of tooling associated with operating it, developing and around it. So the concept that we have is that you can bring those applications, developed them once on 11 single platform and run it on premise. You can run it natively as a service in Microsoft environment. You can actually run it natively as a service in amazon's environment. You can running natively on IBM's Environment. You can build an application once and run it in all of them depending on what you want to achieve, who actually provide you the best, owning the best terms and conditions the best, the best tooling in terms of other services such as Ai associated with that. So it's all about developing it once, certifying it once but deploying it in many, many different locations, leveraging the largest possible developing ecosystem to drive innovation through applications on that common platform. >>So assumption there is that's going to drive down costs. Can you why that benefits the economics are there? We talk about the economics. >>Yeah. So it does drive down costs a massive important aspect but more importantly it drives up agility. So time to market advantages actually attainable for you so many of the tell coast but they deploy a network service traditionally would take them literally maybe a year to roll it all out. They have to do it in days, they have to do updates in real time in data operations in literally minutes. So we were building the fabric necessary in order to enable those applications and services to occur. And as you move into the edge of the network and you look at things like private five G networks, service providers or telcos in this instance will be able to deliver services all the way out to the edge into that private five G environment and operate that in conjunction with those enterprise clients. >>So open shit allows me if I get this right on the CSP to run, have a horizontally scalable organization. Okay. From a unification platform standpoint. Okay, well it's 5G and other functions, is that correct? That's correct. Ok. So you've got that now, now I want to come in and bring in the top of the stack or the other element. That's been a big conversation here at Redhead Summit and in the industry that is A I and the use of data. One of the things that's emerging is the ability to have both the horizontal scale as well as the special is um of the data and have that domain expertise. Uh you're in the industries for red hat. This is important because you're gonna have one industry is going to have different jargon, different language, different data, different KPI S. So you've got to have that domain expertise to enable the ability to write the apps and also enable a I can, you know how that works and what were you doing there? >>So we're developing open shift and a number of other of our technologies to be fit for the edge of the network where a lot of these Ai applications will reside because you want them closer to the client or the the application itself where it needs to reside. We're creating that edge fabric, if you like. The next generation of hybrid cloud is really going to be, in my view at the edge we're enabling a lot of the service providers to go after that but we're also igniting by industry, You mentioned different industries. So if I look at, for example, manufacturing with mind sphere, we recently announced with Seaman's how they do at the edge of the network factory automation, collecting telemetry, doing real time data and analytics, looking at materials going through the factory floor in order to get a better quality results with lower, lower levels of imperfections as they run through that system and just one industry and they have their own private and favorite Ai platforms and data sets. They want to work with with their own data. Scientists who understand that that that ecosystem inherently you can move that to health care and you can imagine how you actually interface with your health care professionals here in north America, but also around the world, How those applications and services and what the Ai needs to do in terms of understanding x rays and looking at common errors associated with different x rays to. A practitioner can make a more specific diagnosis faster saving money and potentially lives as well. So different different vertical markets in this space have different AI and Ml requirements and needs different data science is different data models. And what we're seeing is an ecosystem of companies that are starting up there in that space that we have, what service part of IBM. But you have processed the labs of H T H 20 and a number of other very, very important AI based companies in that ecosystem. >>Yeah. And you get the horizontal scalability of the control plane and in the platform if you will, that gives you cross organizational leverage uh and enable that than vertical expertise. >>Exactly. And you want to build an Ai application that might run on a factory floor for for certain reasons to its location and what they're actually physically building. You might want to run their on premise, you might actually want to put it into IBM cloud or in Zur or into AWS, You develop, it wants to open shift, you can deploy it in all of those as a service sitting natively in those environments. >>Darrell, great chat. I got a lot going on telco cloud, There's a lot of cloud, native disruption going on. It's a challenge and an opportunity and some people have to be on the right side of history on this one if they're going to get it right. Well, no, and the scoreboard will be very clear because this is a shift, it's a shift. So again, you hit all the key points that I wanted to get out. But I want to ask you to more areas that are hot here at red hat summit 21 as well again and as well in the industry and get your reaction and thoughts on uh, and they are def sec ops and automation. Okay. Two areas. Everyone's talking about DEV ops which we know is infrastructure as code programming ability under the hood. Modern application development. All good. Yeah, the second their security to have sex shops. That's critical automation is continuing to be the benefits of cloud native. So Deb see cops and automation. What you're taking has that impact the telco world in your world. >>You can't you can't operate a network without having security in place. You're talking about very sensitive data. You're talking about applications that could be real time chris pickling mrs actually even life saving or life threatening if you don't get them right. So the acquisition that red hat recently made around stack rocks, really helps us make that next level of transition into that space. And we're looking about how we go about securing containers in a cloud native environment. As you can imagine, there will be many, many thousands tens of thousands of containers running if one is actually misbehaving for what one of a better term that creates a security risk in a security loophole. Were assuring that up that's important for the deployment, open shift in the Tokyo domain and other domains in terms of automation. If you can't do it at scale and if you look at five G and you look at the radios at the edge of the network and how you're gonna provision of those services. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of nodes, hundreds of thousands. You have to automate a lot of those processes, otherwise you can't scale to meet the opportunity, you can't physically deploy, >>you know, Darryl, this is a great conversation, you know, as a student of history and um development and I always kind of joke about that and you you've been around the industry for a long time. Telcos have been balancing this um evolution of digital business for many, many decades. Um and now with Cloud Native, it's finally a time where you're starting to see that it's just the same game now, new infrastructure, you know, video, voice, text data all now happening all transformed and going digital all the way, all aspects of it in your opinion. How should telcos be thinking about as they put their plans in place for next generation because you know, the world is now cloud Native. There's a huge surface here of opportunities, different ecosystem relationships, the power dynamics are shifting. It's it's really a time where there will be winners and there will be losers. What's your, what's your view on on how the telco industry needs to clarify and how they be positioned for success. >>So, so one of the things I truly believe very deeply that the telcos need to create a platform, horizontal platform that attracts developer and ecosystems to their platform because innovation is gonna sit elsewhere, then there might be a killer application that one telco might create. But in reality most of those innovations that most of those disruptors are going to occur from outside of that telco company. So you want to create an environment where you're easy to engage and you've got maximum sets of tools and versatility and agility in order to attract that innovation. If you attract the innovation, you're going to ignite the business opportunity that 5G and 60 and beyond is going to actually provide you or enable your business to drive. And you've really got to unlock that innovation and you can only unlock in our view, red hat innovation. If you're open, you follow open standards, you're using open systems and open source is a method or a tool that you guys, if you're a telco, I would ask you guys need to leverage and harness >>and there's a lot, there's a lot of upside there if you get that right, there's plenty of upside, a lot of leverage, a lot of assets to advantage the whole offline online. Coming back together, we are living in a hybrid world, certainly with the pandemic, we've seen what that means. It's put a spotlight on critical infrastructure and the critical shifts. If you had to kind of get pinned down Darryl, how would you describe that learnings from the pandemic as folks start to come out of the pandemic? There's a light at the end of the tunnel as we come out of this pandemic, companies want a growth strategy, wanna be positioned for success what you're learning coming out of the pandemic. >>So from my perspective, which really kind of 11 respect was was very admirable. But another respect is actually deeply uh a lot of gratitude is the fact that the telecommunications companies because of their carrier, great capabilities and their operational prowess were able to keep their networks up and running and they had to move significant capacity from major cities to rural areas because everyone was working from home and in many different countries around the world, they did that extremely and with extremely well. Um and their networks held up I don't know and maybe someone will correct me and email me but I don't know one telco had a huge network outage through this pandemic and that kept us connected. It kept us working. And it also what I also learned is that in certain countries, particularly at a time where they have a very large prepaid market, they were worried that the prepaid market in the pandemic would go down because they felt that people would have enough money to spend and therefore they wouldn't top up their phones as much. The opposite effect occurred. They saw prepaid grow and that really taught me that that connectivity is critical in times of stress that we're also everyone's going through. So I think there are some key learnings that >>yeah, I think you're right on the money there. It's like they pulled the curtain back of all the fun and said necessity is the mother of invention and when you look at what happened and what had to happen to survive in the pandemic and be functional. Your, you nailed it, the network stability, the resilience, but also the new capabilities that were needed had to be delivered in an agile way. And I think, you know, it's pretty much the forcing function for all the projects that are on the table to know which ones to double down on. So I think you pretty much nailed it. Darrell Jordan smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts for red hat kibble, unnatural. Thanks for that insight. Thanks for sharing great conversation around telcos and telco clouds and all the edge opportunities. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you john >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 21. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm mhm

hey welcome to analytics unleashed i'm robert christensen your host today thank you for joining us today we have three quick wins that drive big gains in the enterprise workloads and today we have olaf with erickson we have john with orok and we have dragon with dxc welcome thank you for joining me gentlemen yeah good to be here thank you thank you good to have you hey olaf let's start off with you what big problems are you trying to solve today that are doing for those quick wins what are you trying to do today top top of mind yeah when we started looking into this microservices for our financial platform we immediately saw the challenges that we have and we wanted to have a strong partner and we have a good relationship with hp before so we turned to hp because we know that they have the technical support that we need the possibilities that we need in our platform to fulfill our requirements and also the reliability that we would need so tell me i think this is really important you guys are starting into a digital wallet space that correct yeah that's correct so we are in a financial platform so we are spanning across the world and delivering our financial services to our end customers well that's not classically what you hear about ericsson diving into what's really started you guys down that path and specifically these big wins around this digitization no what what we could see earlier was that we have a mobile networks right so we have a lot of a strong user base within them uh both kind of networks and in the where we started in the emerging markets uh you normally they have a lot of unbanked people and that people also were the ones that you want to target so be able to instead of going down and use your cash for example to buy your fruits or your electricity bill etc you could use your mobile wallet and and that's how it all started and now we're also turning into the emerged markets also like the western side part of worlds etc that's fantastic and i hey i want to talk to john here john's with o'rock and he's the one of those early adopters of those container platforms for the uh in the united states here the federal government tell us a little bit about that program and what's going on with that john yeah sure absolutely appreciate it yeah so with orock what we've done is we developed one of the first fedramp authorized container platforms that runs in our moderate and soon to be high cloud and what that does is building on the israel platform gave us the capability of offering customers both commercial as well as federal the capability and the flexibility of running their workloads in a you know as a service model where they can customize and typically what customers have to do is they have to either build it internally or if they go to the cloud they have to be able to take what resources are available then tweak to those designs to make what they need so in this architecture built on open source and with our own infrastructure we offer you know very low cost zero egress capability but the also the workload processing that they would need to run data analytics machine language and other types of high performance processing that typically they would need as we move forward in this computer age so john you you touched on a topic that's i think is really critical and you had mentioned open source why is open source a key aspect for this transformation that we're seeing coming up in like the next decade yeah sure yeah with open source we shifted early on to the company to move to open source only to offer the flexibility we didn't want to be set on one particular platform to operate within so we took and built the cloud infrastructure we went with open source as an open architecture that we can scale and grow within because of that we were one of the very first fedramp authorizations built on open source not on a specific platform and what we've seen from that is the increased performance capability that we would get as well as the flexibility to add additional components that typically you don't get on other platforms so it was a it was a good move we went with and one that the customer will definitely benefit from that that's that's huge actually because performance leads to better cost and better cost leads better performance around that i i'm just super super happy with all the advanced work that you always are doing there is fantastic and dragon so so you're in a space that i think is really interesting you're dealing with what everybody likes to talk about that's autonomous vehicles you're working with automobile manufacturers you're dealing with data at a scale that is unprecedented can you just open that door for us to talk to about these big big wins that you're trying to get over the line with these enterprises yeah absolutely and um thank you robert we approach uh leveraging esmeral from the data fabric angle we practically have a fully integrated the esmeral data fabric into our robotic drive solution rewarding drive solution is actually a game changer as you've mentioned in accelerating the development of autonomous driving vehicles it's a an end-to-end hyper-scale machine learning and ai platform as i mentioned based on the esmeralda data fabric which is used by the some of the largest manufacturers in the world for development of their autonomous driving algorithms and i think we all in technology i think and following up at the same type of news and research right across the globe in in this area so we're pretty proud that we're one of the leaders in actually providing uh hyperscale machine learning platforms for uh kind manufacturers some of them i cannot talk about but bmw is one of uh one of the current manufacturers that we provide uh these type of solutions and they have publicly spoken about their uh d3 platform uh data driven development platform uh just to give you an idea um of the scale as robert mentioned uh daily we collect over 1.5 petabytes of data of raw data did you say daily data daily the storage capacity is over 250 petabytes and growing uh there's over 100 000 cores and over 200 gpus in the in in the compute area um over 50 50 petabytes of data is delivered every two weeks into a hardware in loop right for testing and we have daily uh thousands of engineers and data scientists accessing the relevant data and developing machine learning models on the daily basis right part of it is the simulation right simulation cuts the cost as well as the uh time right for developing of the autonomous uh driving algorithms and uh the the simulations are taking probably 75 percent of the research uh that's being done on this platform that's amazing dragon i i i i the more i get involved with that and i've been part of these conversations with a number of the folks that are involved with it i i computer science me my geekiness my little propeller head starts coming out i might just blows my mind and i think so i'm going to pivot back over to olaf oh left so you're talking about something that is a global network of financial services okay correct and the flow of transactional typically non-relational transactional data flows to actual transactions going through you have issues of potential fraud you have issues a safety and you have multi-geographic regional problems with data and data privacy how are you guys addressing that today so so to answer that question today we have managed to solve that using the container platform to together with the data fabric but as you say we need to span across different regions we need to have the data as secure as possible because we have a lot of legal aspects to look into because if our data disappears but your money is also disappearing so it's a really important area for us with the security and the reliability of the platforms so so that's why we also went this way to make sure that we have this strong partner that could help us with this because just looking at where we are deployed in in more than 23 countries today and and we it's processing more than 900 million us dollars per day in our systems currently so it is a lot of money passing through and you need to take security in a it's as it's a very important point right it really is it really is and so uh john i mean you you uh obviously are dealing with you know a lot of folks that have three letters as acronyms around the government agencies and uh they range in various degrees of certa of security when you say fedramp i mean what could you just uh articulate why the esmerald platform was something that you selected to go to that fedrak compliant container platform because i think that's that that kind of speaks to the to the industrial strength of what we're talking about yeah it all comes down to being able to offer a product that's secure that the customers can trust and when we went with fedramp fedramp has very stringent security requirements that have monthly poems which are performance reviews and and updates that need to be done if not on a daily basis on a monthly basis so the customers there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that they don't are able to articulate and what by selecting the hp esmerald platform for containers um one of the key strengths that we looked at was the esmo fabric and it's all about the data it's all about securing the data moving the data transferring the data and from a customer's perspective they want to be able to operate in an environment that they can trust no different than being able to turn on their lights or making sure there's water in their utilities you know containers with the israel platform built on orok's infrastructure gives that capability fedramp enables the security tied to the platform that we're able to follow so it's government uh guided which includes this and many and over hundreds of controls that typically you know the customers don't have time or the capability to address so our commercial customers benefit our federal customers you know that you discuss they're able to follow and check the box to meet those requirements and the container platform gives us a capability where now we're able to move files which we'll hear about through the optimal fabric and then we're able to run the workloads in the containers themselves and give isolation and the security element of fed wrapping esmeral gave us that capability in order to paint that environment fedramp authorized that the customers benefit from from security so they have confidence in running their workloads using their data and able to focus on their core job at hand and not worry about their infrastructure the fundamental requirement isn't it that that isolation between that compute and storage and going up a layer there in in a way that provides them a set of services that they can i wouldn't say set it and forget it but really had the confidence that what they're getting is the best performance for the dollars that they're spending uh john my hat's off to what the work that you all do in there thank you we appreciate it yeah yeah and dragon i want to i wanted to pivot a little bit here because you are primarily the the operator what i consider one of the largest data fabrics on the on the planet for that matter um and i just want to talk a little bit about the openness of our architecture right of all the multiple protocols that we support that allow for you know you know some people may have selected a different set of application deployment models and virtualization models that allow to plug into the data fabric you know it did can you talk a little bit about that yeah and i i think um in my mind right um to operate uh such a uh data fabric at scale right um there were three key elements that we were looking for right uh that we found in uh esmeralda fabric ring the first one was a speed cost and scalability right the second one was the globally distributed data lake or ability to distribute data globally and third was certainly the strength of our partnership with with hpe in this case right so if you look at the uh as well data fabric it's it's fast it's cost effective and it's certainly highly scalable because we as you just mentioned stretch the uh sort of the capabilities of the data fabric to hundreds of petabytes and over a million the data points if you will and it important what was important for us was that the esmeralda fabric actually eliminates the need for multiple vendor solutions which would be otherwise required right because it provides integrated file system database or or a data lake right and the data management on top of it right usually you would probably need to incorporate multiple tools right from different vendors and the file system itself it's it's so important right when you're working at scale like this right and honestly in our research maybe there are three file systems in the world that can support uh this kind of size of the auto data fabric the distributed data lake was also important to us and the reason for that is you can imagine that these large car manufacturers are testing and have testing vehicles all around the world right they're not just doing it locally around the uh their data their id centers right so uh collecting the data and this 1.5 petabytes example right uh for for bmw on a daily basis it's it's it's really challenging unless you have the ability to actually leverage the data in a distributed data like fashion right so data can basically reside in different data centers globally or even on-premise and in cloud environments which became uh very important later because a lot of this car manufacturers actually have oems right that would like to get either portions of the data or get access to the data in a in different environments not necessarily in their data center um and truly i think uh to build something at this scale right uh you you need a strong partner and we certainly had that in hpe and uh we got the comprehensive support right for uh for the software um but but more importantly i think uh partner that clearly understood uh criticality of the data fabric trend and the need for the vice fast response right to our clients and you know jointly i think we met all the challenges and it's so doing i think we made the esmo data fabric a much better and stronger product over the over the last few years that's fantastic thank you dragon appreciate it uh hey so if we're going to wrap up here any last words olaf do you want to share with us no looking forward now in from our perspective on helping out with the kobe 19 situation that we have uh enabling people to still be in the market without actually touching each other and and and leaving maybe for action market and being at home etc doing those transactions that's great thank you john in last comment yeah thanks yeah uh look for uh a joint offering announcement coming up between hpe and orok where we're going to be offering sandbox as a service where the data analytics and machine language where people can actually test drive the actual environment as a service and if they like it then they can move into a production-wise environment so stay tuned for that that's great john thank you for that and hey dragon last words yeah last words um we're pretty happy what we have done already for car manufacturers we're taking this solution right in terms of the uh distributed data-like capabilities as well as the uh hyperscale machine learning and ai platform to other industries and we hope to do it jointly with you well we hope that you do it with us as well so thank you very much everybody gentlemen thank you so much for joining us i appreciate it thank you very much thank you very much hey this is robert christensen with analytics unleashed i want to thank all of our guests here today and we'll catch you next time thank you for joining us bye [Music] [Music] [Music] easy [Music] you