>>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