>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back here and live here in Mosconi North. The Emerald 2019 Cube Live coverage on Shopping Day Volante Jr Jr. Who's here? EVP general manager, Telco and Edge of Cloud for Vienna. Where Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. I know you're super busy. We don't have a lot of time. Get right to it. Um five g a big part of the key. No discussion that's gonna enable a whole bunch of Pakal the pregame show pre gaming not even talk about that. Also. Telco on the Edge Computing Big part Michael Dell said, Edges the future Now these air to emerging areas for you guys. What's the positioning? What's the update? >> No, absolutely. I mean, if you look a tw telecom infrastructure. For the longest time, telcos have played a role just as pure basic connectivity providers. And with five g coming on board, they finally have an opportunity to break out of that and redefine the cloud off the future. So for us the big opportunity around five g is not just the better provisioning off like Higher Man With Service is to consumer for voice and data buy the whole set off new enterprise service is that can be provided on top of this five g network. And in order to be able to do that, you really need to go in with a virtualized telco Cloud architecture. Underneath that, and so we are working with carriers globally now preparing them for five G with an architecture that's going to help them deploy. New service is faster for both their consumer as well as enterprise. >> Going to be the white knight at, so to speak. For these telcos because they've been struggling for years over the top and any kind of differentiates service is even in the network layer. Exactly. I've had tons of rack and stack machine, so they're after their well, well stacked up in terms of computer storage. Also connectivity to the edge. That's the back hall. So you have back haul, which is connectivity. Companies that have massive expertise in scale but fumbling in operational cloud natives that >> by not just that, but I also think that having the idea off on application platform that allows them to go and deploy service is faster and then decide whether they're just going to play at the network connectivity level or at the application tear or a full SAS tear. These are all options that are open to them now with this notion off. Telco five G coupled with an NFI and cloud telco cloud infrastructure. Underneath that and never before have they had this option to doing that. And this is now open to them >> and the cloud native is there greenfield for AP supporter having applications on top of it. Exact icing on the cake, right? >> Exactly, Exactly. And so they're all looking at core architectures and then, potentially, their radio architectures now all being opened up toe deploying new service is that are much faster to provisions and then extending that to EJ and >> five G's deploying. So we know it's out there. So it is pre game is Pat, Guzman said. You know, not even an inning Yet in the metaphor of baseball innings, I >> gotta ask you get my phone. That's not that's fake ill. I know it >> did that with four g to >> skeptic e stands for evolution, which is coming soon. >> That's vaporware for tell Coke language. The surface area is going to radically get bigger with this capability. Yeah, security's gonna be baked in. This is the number one concern for io ti. And more importantly, industrial I ot We've been reporting on silicon angle dot com. This is a national security issue because we're under cyber attacks. Town's getting locked out with ransomware critical infrastructure exposed. We're free country, and I want to be free. We don't lock down. So you have security built into this new promiscuous landscape that is called the coyote Edge. Because you wanna have no perimeter. You want the benefits of cloud. But one whole malware is in there. One take over physical device could cost lives. >> Yeah, there's a big concern. Yeah. What's your thoughts? Yeah, No. So I think there >> are two ways of looking at it. One is the way you looked at it in terms of the security perimeter expanding and then us making sure that we have the right level off infrastructure security baked in to enable this to be an easier, manageable security architecture. This is sort of the pitch you heard from Mia Mary, even in the context of our acquisition of carbon black and how we're thinking about baking security into the infrastructure, the other way of looking at this is if you think about some of the concerns around providers off telecom infrastructure today and how there might be or might not be security back doors. This is happening in today's hardware infrastructure. Okay, so in fact, I would argue that a sick software defined architecture, er, actually ends up providing you greater levels of security. Because what you now have is the option off running all of these network functions as secured as software workloads in a policy envelope that you can introspect. And then you can decide what kind of security you want to deploy on what kind of workload. >> That's an innovative approach. But it doesn't change much, really, from an infrastructure standpoint, does it? Or does it? >> No, it does, >> because now, instead of having a hardware box where you have to worry, I mean, if it's a close, hard red box and you don't quite know what is happening there, the question is, is that more secure than a infrastructure radio running the software that you can actually introspect. I would argue that the software defined approach is more secure than having a hardware box that you don't know. >> I would buy the premise that certainly we know that supply chain concerned. You know the speculation Super Micro, which never was proved. >> It doesn't matter who the vendor is or what the country is. It really is a concern in terms of not being able to introspect what has happened Going inside >> for my tea shop. I'm running VM where operating I want developers. So now you're going to tell Coz you revitalize their business model? They had a rule out appy. Now what did you see? That connecting is gonna be connective tissue between >> I'll think about it. I didn't feel goto a telco. We look at really three stakeholders in there. One is I t the second Is there be to be or enterprise facing business and then the 3rd 1 is their core and access network or the CTO. We're now have a value proposition of having a uniform architecture across all three stakeholders with the uniform ability to create applications and drop it on top of each of these infrastructures with the ability to manage and secure these again in a uniform way, not just that, but also make this work well with other cloud infrastructures private, hyper scale, public as well as EJ. >> That's table stakes. You have to do that. These jokers have to operate whatever >> well it is, But it's not. I mean, if you think about what the infrastructure off a tailcoat today is, it's far from that, because it's it's sort of a closed environment. You can't access anything from a telco environment in order to go build an application to it, and it does not resemble anything like any club >> you could enable Telco. Just I'm just kind of thinking connecting the dots here real time in the Cube. If I'm a telco, hell, I'll take that VM wear on a deli and see model. Make me a cloud and I'll sell Cloud Service is to markets that kind of >> it is. Actually it's a very important part of our business model because most telcos would not move their own infrastructure from a network standpoint onto a public cloud. But they are eagerly awaiting the ability to operate their own network as a cloud, and if they can have somebody manage that for them, then that is very much within the >> you're enabling. An increase in the number of cloud service provides potentially the paint on the makeup of the telco tier one tier two tier three size. Pretty much >> potentially. I mean, it's taking an existing operator and having them operate in a more agile way and potentially increasing anew form off a cloud service >> provided telcos wouldn't move into the public cloud because of they want to control. And the cost is that right or it's >> mostly control. It's not about cost. It's about taking What is your sort of coordinating for, ah, packet corps or for a radio network? Yeah, and there is also an angle around competition, I think telcos our what in about the Amazons of the world and the azure eyes of the world potentially becoming a service provided >> themselves. And that's what I wanted to ask you about the business impact of all this discussion you guys were having is, you know, the cost for bits coming down. The amount of data is increasing faster. You got over the top providers just, you know, picking off the telcos. Telcos can't compete their infrastructures of so hardened. Will this all change that? >> Absolutely So. I think that it has the potential to changing all that. I don't think all the telcos will take advantage of it. Some off them might end up being more traditional and sort of sticking to where they were. But for those that are willing to make the leap, I mean, as an example, Vodafone is a customer that has actually gone in with this architecture with us. A. T and T is working with us with the Vela Cloud software from via Mary bringing a new form off branch computer branch connectivity through SD man. So these are all examples of telcos that are actually leading the >> charter. But if they don't lean in, they have this vision there either. Well, it's either because they're protected by their local government or they're going to go out of business. No, I would >> agree. I mean, it's sort of silly from our standpoint to be talking about five G and not thinking about this as the architecture for five, right? I mean, if you only focus on radio waves and your wireless network that's like a part of the problem, but you really need to have the ability to deploy these agile service's. Otherwise, you could get killed by >> the O. T. T. So how do you compete against the competition? What's the business plan that you have? C. Five G? We see that in the horizon that's evolving its evolution, so to speak. Pun intended on edge is certainly very relevant for enterprises, whether it's manufacturing or industrial or just people. Yeah, >> I'd say there are two things. One is a CZ. I'm sure you heard from folks at GM, where our vision is this notion of any any anywhere. We've talked about any cloud at any application that any device. So that becomes one of the strongest different chaining factors in terms of what V Amir can bring. Tow any of our customers compared to the competition, right? Nobody can actually make it really across these dimensions. If you then take that architecture and use that to deploy a telco cloud, we're now making investments that are telco specific that allow the tailcoat than take this and make the most out of it. As an example, we're investing in open stack we're investing in container ization. We just bought a company called Johanna and Johanna essentially allows the operator to go and provide metrics from their radio access networks. Use at that to train a learning engine and then feed that back so that the operator can tune their network to get like fewer dropped calls in the region. So if you combined technology like that with this, any cloud infrastructure that we have underneath that that's the best in class deployment methodology for any. Tell Cho to deploy >> five. Your business model metrics for you internally is get Maur deployments. What stage of development five G certainly is in a certain stage, but you know, edges there. Where is the Progress bar? If you're the kind of oh, >> it's actually mold phenomenally. I mean, every time we have conversations like this, we're moving about further in terms off. How many carriers are deploying on via mare on a telco cloud Architecture? How many subscribers are basically being serviced by an architectural like this? And then how many network functions are being deployed? Two of'em air architecture. So we are over 100 carriers now we are over. We have about 800 million subscribers, or so that about globally are being serviced by a V M Air supported network. On then, we have essentially over 120 network functions that >> are operating on top of you. Usually bring in all the same stuff that's announced that the show that stuff's gonna fold into the operating platform or Joe Chuckles have different requirements. Off course. It's >> both. We take the best of what is there from the sort of overall vehement factory and then as a team. My team then builds other widgets on top that are telco specific. >> How big is your your tam up Terry for you? >> Well, so the best way to look at it as telcos globally spend about a trillion dollars in capital investment and then probably to X that in terms of their operating expenditure over the course off all of the things that they do right? And out of that, I would say probably a tent off that. So if you take about $100 billion opportunity, opens itself up toe infrastructure investment in terms off the kinds of things that we're talking about now, they're not gonna move from like 0 200 of course. So if you take some period of time, I would say good subset off that $100 billion opportunity is gonna open itself up >> to it. This kind of business cases, eliminating that two x factor, at least reducing it. Is that exactly? That's not just that Service is that's, >> ah, cost reduction alternative. But then you have the ability to go deploy. Service is faster, so it's really a combination off both sort of carrot and the stick, right? I mean, the character here is the ability to go monetize More new service is with five G faster. The stick is that if you don't do it, Ortiz will get there faster and your costs off. Deploying your simple service is will increase his >> telcos, in your opinion, have what they have to do to get the DNA chops to actually be able to compete with the over to top OT T providers and be more agile. I mean, it's obviously sort of new skills that they have to bring in a new talent. Yeah, >> well, first and foremost, they need toe get to a point where their infrastructure is agile and they get into a business model off knowing how to monetize that agile infrastructure. So, for example, they could offer network as a service on a consume as you go basis. They could offer a platform as a service on top off that network in order for or titties to go build applications so they can do Rev shares with the forties. Or they could have offer. Full service is where they could go in and say, We are the conferencing provider for videoconferencing for enterprises. I mean, these are all models that >> the great conversation love to do. Your Palo Alto? Yes. Have you in our studio want to do more of a deep dive? We love the serious, super provocative, and it's important Final question for you. Though Pat Sr here on the Cube, lay asked him, Look back in the past 10 years. Yeah, look back in the next 10 years. What waves should everyone be riding? He said three things that working security and kubernetes humans being number one actually promoting convinced everyone for the ride, for obvious reasons, clouded. I get that, but networking Yeah, that's your world. That's changing. Which which events do you go to where you meet your audience out there in the telco because networking is a telco fundamental thing. Sure moving packets around. This is a big thing, >> eh? So far, operator networking related stuff, I would say. I mean the biggest shows that for us would be Mobile World Congress as an example, right? It's where many operators are. But I would also say that when we do our own events like this is the ember. But the movie forums in in Asia packers an example. A lot of the telco conversations I find they are best done one on one before. Yeah, the forums are our forums, but we will goto have one on one conversations or small group conversations >> with our telco customers. Locals Shakaar Thanks for spending. You get a hard stop. Very busy. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me >> here, Sugar Yaar, Who's here inside the Cube bringing down five G, which is still pregame. A few winning something first thing is gonna come up soon, but edges super hot. A lot of telco customers be back with more live coverage of the emerald after this short break

Sand Hill Road to the heart of Silicon Valley it's the cute presenting the people first Network insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders when I'm John Ferrari with the cube I'm the co-host also the founder of Silicon angle me we are here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield for the people first conversations I'm John furry with the cube weird Allen being global CTO and IT of innovation at Procter & Gamble formerly the same position at coca-cola has done a lot of innovations over the years also a reference account back in the day for web methods when they call on the financing of that one of the most famous IPOs which set the groundwork for web services and has a lot of history going back to the 80s we were just talking about it welcome this conversation on people first network thank you for inviting me so the people first network is all about people and it's great to have these conversations you're old school you were doing some stuff back on the 80s talking about doing RPA 3270 you've been old school here yeah I go back to APL as my first programming language went through the the third generation languages and of course the old 30 to 70 emulation which is what we know today is our PA one of the cool things I was excited to hear some of your background around your history web methods you were a reference call for venture financing of web methods which was financed on the credit card for the two founders husband and wife probably one of the most successful I appeals but more importantly at the beginning of the massive wave that we now see with web services this is early days this was very early days when I was at DHL we were looking at what we're gonna do for the future and in fact we built one of the first object-oriented frameworks in C++ at the time because that was all that was available to us or the best was available we rejected Corbis and we said look if we're gonna go this direction and one of my developers found web methods found philip merrick it was literally at the time working out of his garage and had this technology that was going to allow us to start moving into this object-oriented approach and I remember the day Robin Vasan form a field called and said hey I'm thinking about investing in web methods what do you think about it and not only was it one of the first startups that I ever worked with but it's actually the first time I met anybody in the venture community way back in nineteen I think 1997 is what had happened and that was a computing time in computer science and then the rest is history and then XML became what it became lingua franca for the web web services now Amazon Web Services you see in cloud computing micro services kubernetes service meshes this is a new stack that's being developed in the cloud and this is the new generation you've seen many waves and at Procter & Gamble formerly coca-cola you're the same role you have to navigate this so what's different now what's different say 15 20 years ago how are you looking at this market how you implementing some of the IT and infrastructure and software development environments I think what's change is you know when we got into the the early 2000s Nicolas car came out and said IT doesn't matter and I think anybody that was an IT had this very objectionable response initially but when you step back and you looked at it what she realised was in many cases IT didn't matter and those were those areas that were non-competitive those things that could be commoditized and it was completely right the reality is IT has always mattered that technology does give you a competitive advantage in certain markets and certain capabilities for a company but back then we had to go out and we had to purchase equipment we had to configure the equipment there was a lot of heavy lifting in corporations just did not want to invest the capital so they outsource the stuff wholesale I think General Motors was the first one that just out sourced everything and was followed by other companies including Procter & Gamble the decision at that time was probably right but as we go forward and we see what's happened with corporations we see the valuations of corporations the amount of return on equity based on the on the capital that's being invested we can see that data is important we can see that agility flexibility is key to competing in the future and therefore what's changing is we are now moving into an age of away from ERP so we're moving into an age away from these outsource providers on a wholesale basis and using it selectively to drive down costs and allowing us to free up money in order to invest in those things that are most important to the company so you're saying is that the folks naturally the server consolidation they've bought all this gear all this software over you know 18-month rollouts before they even see the first implementation those are the glory days of gravy trains for the vendor's yeah not good for the practitioners but you're saying that the folks who reinvested are investing in IT as a core competency are seeing a competitive advantage they certainly are you know I think I made the statement front of a number of the vendors and a few years ago and people were not comfortable with it but what I said was like you gone are the ears of these 10 20 million dollar deals gone are the ears of the million two million dollar deals we're in the ear of throwaway technology I need to be able to use and invest in technology for a specific purpose for a specific period of time and be able to move on to the next one it's the perfect time for startups but startups shouldn't be looking at the big picture they should be looking at the tail on these investments let me try things let me get out in the market let me have a competitive advantage in marketing which is most important to me or in supply chain those are the areas that I can make a difference with my consumers and my customers and that's where the investments have to go so just in constant of throwaway technology and you know you'd also be said of you know being more agile though interesting to look at the cloud SAS business model if Amazon for us I think that's the gold standard where they actually lower prices on a per unit basis and increase more services and value but in the aggregate you're still paying more but you have more flexibility and that's kind of a good tell sign so that you're seeing that ability to reuse either the infrastructure that's commoditized to shift the value this is are people having a hard time understanding this so I want to get your reaction to how should I tea leaders understand that the wave of cloud the wave of machine learning what a I can bring to the table these new trends how how should leaders figure this out is there a playbook as there are things that you've learned that you could share you know that there's really a playbook it's still early on everyone's looking for one cloud fits all the reality is whether it's Google whether it's Amazon whether it's Microsoft whether it's IBM all clouds are different all clouds have our special are purpose-built for different solutions and I think as an IT leader you have to understand you're not going to take everything and lift and shift that's what we used to do we're now in the position where we have to deconstruct our business we have to understand the services the capabilities that we want to bring to market and not lock ourselves in its building blocks its Legos we're in the period of Legos putting these things together in different manners in order to create new solutions if we try to lock ourselves in the past of how we've always financed things how we've always built things then we're not going to be any better off in the new world than we were in the old alan i want to get your reaction to to two words our PA and containers well as i said earlier our PA is 3270 emulation from the 1980s and for those of us that are old enough to remember that i I still remember scraping the the old green screens and and putting a little process around it it what's nice though is that we have moved forward machine learning and AI and other other capabilities are now present so that we can do this I actually played around with neural nets probably back in 1985 with an Apollo computer so that tells you how far back I go but technologies change processing speeds change everything the technology trends are allowing us to now to do these things the question that we have is also a moral dilemma is are we trying to replace people or are we trying to make improvements and I think that you don't look at our PA as a way simply to replace work it's a way to enhance what we're doing in order to create new value for the customer or for the consumer in our case I think in the in the area of containers you know again been around for a while been around for a while it's just another another approach that we're not we don't want lock in we don't want to be dependent on specific vendors we want the portability we want the flexibility and I think as we start moving containers out to the edge that's where we're gonna start seeing more value as the business processes and the capabilities are spread out again the idea of centralized cloud computing is very good however it doesn't need to be distributed what's interesting I find about the conversation here is that you mentioned a couple things earlier you mentioned the vendors locking you in and saying here's the ERP buy this and with this you have to have a certain process because this is our technology you got to use it this way and you were slave to their their tech on your process serve their tech with containers and say orchestration you now the ability to manage workloads differently and so an interesting time there's that does that change the notion of rip and replace lift and shift because if I a container I could just put a container around it and not have to worry about killing the old to bring in the new this is on the fundamental kind of debate going on do you have to kill the old to bring in the new well you need to kill the old sometimes just because it's old it's time to go other times you do need to repackage it and other times I hate to say it you do need to lift and shift if you're a legacy organization they have a long history such as most of the manufacturing companies in the world today we can't get rid of old things that quickly we can't afford to a lot of the processes are still valid as we're looking to the future we certainly are breaking these things down into services we're looking to containerize these things we're looking to move them into areas where we can compute where we want to when we want to at the right price we're just at the beginning of that journey in the industry I still think there's about five to seven years to go to get there now I'll talk about the role of the edge role of cloud computing as it increases the surface area of IT potentially combined with the fact that IT is a competitive advantage bring those two notions together what's the role of the people because you used to have people that would just manage the rack and stack I'm provisioning some storage I'm doing this as those stovepipes start to be broken down when the service area of IT is bigger how does that change the relationship of the people involved you know you win with people at the end of the day you don't win with technology you know a company of such as Proctor and Gamble and I think what's happened if you look at historically the ERP vendors came out probably 99 2000 and it used to be and remember these I'm old to be honest with you but I remember that we used to have to worry about the amount of memory we were managing we had to be able to tune databases in all of this and the vendors went ahead and they started automating all those processes with the idea that we can do it better than a human and a lot of people a lot of the technology talent then started leaving the organizations and organizations were left with people that we're focusing on process and people a process excuse me process and the the the business which is very good because you need the subject matter experts going forward we have to reinvest in people our people have the subject matter expertise they have some technology skills that they've developed over the years and they've enhanced it on their own but we're in this huge change right now where we have to think different we have to act different and we have to behave differently so doubling down on people is the best thing that you can do and the old outsource model of outsourcing everything kind of reduces the core competency of the people yeah now you got to build it back up again exactly I mean we when we left at P&G 15 years ago about 5,000 people left the organization when we outsource them when we outsource the technology to our partner at that time now it's time we're starting to bring it back in we've brought the network team back in and stood up our own sock in our own NOC for the first time in years just this past year we're doing the same thing by moving things out to the cloud more and more is moving to the cloud we're setting up our own cloud operations and DevOps capabilities I can tell you having been on both sides of it it's a lot harder to be able to bring it back in than it is to take it out and you know interesting proctoring games well known as being a very intimate with the data very data-driven company the data is valuable and having that infrastructure NIT to support the data that's important what's your vision on the data future of the data in the world well I think data is has a value to itself but when you tie it to products you tie it to your customers and consumers it's even more valuable and we're in the process now of things that we used to do completely internally with our own technology or technology partners we're now moving all of that out into the cloud now and I must say cloud its clouds plural again going back to certain clouds are better for certain things so you're seeing a dramatic shift we have a number of projects underway that are in the cloud space but for customers and consumers number of cloud projects in the way for our own internal employees it's all about collecting the data processing the data protecting that data because we take that very seriously and being able to use it to make better decisions I want to get your reaction on two points and two quite lines of questioning here because I think it's very relevant on the enterprise side you're a big account for the big whales the old ERP so the big cloud providers so people want to sell you stuff at the same time you're also running IT innovation so you want to play with the new shiny new toys and experiments start up so if startups want to get your attention and big vendors want to sell to you the tables have kind of turned it's been good this is a good it's a good buyers market right now in my opinion so what's your thoughts on that so you know start with the big companies what do they got to do to win you over well they got to look like how they got to engage and for startups how do they get your attention I think the biggest thing for either startup or large companies understanding the company you're dealing with whether it's Procter & Gamble whether it's coca-cola whether it was DHL if you understand how I operate if you understand how decisions are made if you understand how I'm organized that's gonna give you an a competitive advantage now the large corporations understand this because they've been around through the entire journey of computing with these large corporations the startups need to step back and take a look and see where do I add that competitive advantage many times when you're selling to a large corporate you're not selling to a large corporate you're selling two divisions you're selling two functions and that's how you get in I've been working with startups as I said back since web methods and it was just a two-person company but we brought them in for a very specific capability I then took web methods with me when I left DHL I took them to GE when I left GE I took them to ing because I trusted them and they matured along the way I think finding that right individual that has the right need is the key and working it slowly don't think you're gonna close the deal fast if you're start-up know it's gonna take some time and decide if that's in your best interest or not slow things down focus don't try to boil the ocean over too many of them try to boy you're right Jimmy people try to boil the ocean get that win one win will get you another one which will get you another win and that's the best way to succeed get that beachhead Ellen so if you could go back and knowing what you know now and you're breaking into the IT leadership's position looking forward what would you do differently can do a mulligan hey what would you do differently well you know I think one of the one of the dangers of being an innovator in IT is that you really are risk taker and taking risks is counterculture to corporations so I think I would probably try to get by in a little bit more I mean someone once told me that you know you see the force through the trees before anybody else does your problem is you don't bring people along with you so I think I would probably slow down a little bit not in the adoption of technology but I'd probably take more time to build the case to bring people along a lot faster so that they can see it and they can take credit for it and they can move that needle as well yeah always sometimes early adopters and pioneers had the arrows on the back as they say I've had my share now thanks for sharing your experience what's next for you what's the next mountain you're going to climb well I think that as we're looking forward latency is still an issue you know we have to find a way to defeat latency we're not going to do it through basic physics so we're gonna have to change our business models change our technology distribution change everything that we're doing consumers and customers are demanding instant access to enhanced information through AI and m/l right at the point where they want it and that means we're now dealing with milliseconds and nanoseconds of having to make decisions so I'm very interested in looking at how are we going to change consumer behavior and customer behavior by combining a lot of the new technology trends that are underway and we have to do it also with the security in mind now before we security was secondary now as we're seeing with all of the hacks and the malware and everything that's going on in the world we have to go in and think a little bit different about how we're gonna do that so I'm very much engaged in working with a lot of startups I live here in the Silicon Valley I commute to Cincinnati for Procter & Gamble I'm spending time and just flew in from tel-aviv literally an hour ago I'm in the middle of all the technology hotspots trying to find that next big thing and it's a global it's global innovation happens everywhere and anywhere the venture community if you look at the amount of funds it used to be invested out of the Silicon Valley versus the rest of the world it continues to be on a downward trend not because the funding isn't here in the Silicon Valley but because everyone is recognizing that innovation and technology is developed everywhere in the world Alan Bain was the CTO global CTO and IT innovator there at the cube conversation here in San Hill Road I'm John for a year thanks for watching you

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation; Red Hat, an additional ecosystem of support. (upbeat synthesizer music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my cohost John Troyer. This is The CUBE, worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Coming into the show this year, here, at OpenStack, discussion of edge was something that had a little bit of buzz. Last year's show in Austin, the telecommunication all of the NFV solutions were definitely one of the highlights. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Beth Cohen, who is the SDN and NFV Network Product Strategy at Verizon. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, yes. >> All right, so Beth, I mean, we hear cloud in a box, Edge, all those pieces in the keynote, Monday. People are excited, you know, telecommunications. I worked in telecom back in the '90s. I'm excited to see that people are getting involved and looking at this, but before we get into all the tech, just tell us, briefly, about you and your role inside Verizon. >> Sure. So, I actually work at Verizon as a New Product Strategist, so I come up with new products, so I do product management. This is actually my second product for Verizon. The previous one was Secure Cloud Interconnect which is a very successful product. Who would have thought that connecting privately to the cloud would be a good idea? It turns out, everybody thinks that's an excellent idea, but I worked in telecom back, for GTE, back in the 1990s and through BBN, so I've been in this industry for a while and I've always stayed kind of on the cutting edge of things, so I'm very excited to be working on these cutting-edge projects within Verizon. >> All right, so speaking of cutting edge, let's cut to the Edge. >> Beth: Cut to the Edge (laughs). >> And, give our audience a little bit about what the announcement was, >> Sure. >> the actual product itself. >> So, Virtual Network Services, is the product. We originally announced it in July with a universal CP box. That box was not a, what we're calling a white box which I think is the industry term, now. That one was based on the Juniper NFX250 which is, we call, a gray box, so it's using the Juniper NFX software, but the new, new announcement is this is truly a white box. It's an x86 box. It's generic, any x86 will work, and, in fact, the product has, we realized, actually, working with customers that some customers want to have a very small box, very small footprint, low cost, that only supports maybe two, possibly three, NFVs, Virtual Network Functions, all the way up to our largest box, is 36 core. So, we have four core at the bottom, so that's used for the coffee shops or the small retail-type functions where they're only looking for security in routing or security in SDN or SD-WAN or whatever, so very small, compact use all the way up to 36 core which can support, you know, 10 or 12 different functions, so load balancing, routing, security, whatever you want, >> Yeah. >> cloud in a box. >> There's so many pieces of OpenStack and they've been, for years, talking about the complexity. This, really, if I understand it right, I mean, it's OpenStack at the edge in a small box, so how do we kit such a complicated thing in a little box and what kind of functionality does that bring? You know, what will customers get with it? >> So, obviously, it's, we didn't take old everything, >> Right. >> of course, so, you know, it does include Neutron for the networking and it does include Nova in the computes and so it has the core components that you need for OpenStack. And, why did we choose that? Because OpenStack really gave us that consistent platform across both out at the edge and also within the core, so we are building the hosted network services platform which we're using internally, as well, to host our, to support our network services and we're also supporting customers on this same platform. So, that gives us the ability to give a customer experience both out at the edge and within the core. So, of course, everybody wants to know the secret source. How did we cram that in? Containers, so we containerize OpenStack. One of the requirements is it had to be a single core, so it is a single core in the box because, of course, particularly in a small box, you want to leave as much space as possible for services that our customers want because the OpenStack is the infrastructure that supports it all. >> That's great, I mean, so, Beth, that was one of the highlights of the whole show, for me, right. I like when tech blows my mind a little bit and the idea of something that we might have run on a some embedded Linux source or embedded OS before, now, it's actually running a whole cloud platform, in a box, in my office, was amazing. As you're looking at the center of the network versus the edge, is that one, to you and to network ops, is that one big cloud, is that a cloud of clouds? What's kind of the architecture? >> Beth: Cloud of clouds. >> Yeah. >> Is it fog? (co-hosts laughing) >> It's, yeah, you could say it is a fog, because one of the things when you pull a network to the edge like that, Verizon lives, I mean, we live and breathe networks and the networks are WANs, Wide Area Networks, right, they're everywhere, so we live and breathe that every day. So, traditionally, as I mentioned in the keynote, is that cloud has been sort of the data center centric, right, and that changes the equation because, if you think about it, most data center centric clouds, the network ends at, there's some mystery thing that happens and the end, right? It just goes to that network router, you know, NNI, network-to-network net router and it just kind of disappears, right? Well, of course, we know what's on the other side, so what we've done is we've said, okay, we have functionality within that data center, but we've expanded that out to the edge and we understand that you can't just have everything sitting in the cloud and then rely on that edge to just work, so you need to move pieces of it out so it's not reliant on that inside data center. So, there's tools back there, but if that data center connection goes away, that function will still work out at the edge. >> That's great. You talked about both SDN and NFV, a big conversation at OpenStack for the last several years. >> Yeah. >> Can you talk a little bit about maybe the state of SDN and NFV and how you all are looking at that and are we there yet? What do we still, >> (laughs) Are we there yet? >> what places do you still see we need to go? >> So, when I worked with the marketing team, they were like, "Oh, we're going to have to use this NFV term. "We have to use the SDN," and when I talk to customers, inevitably, they're like, "What is the NFV stuff?" They have no idea, so, really, at the end of the day, I see NFV as a telco thing. Absolutely, we need it, but we have to translate what that means to customers because all that back-end stuff, as far as they're concerned, that's magic. That's the magic: that we deliver the services. Those packets just arrive, they do what they're supposed to do. So, I say, okay, network services is really what you're talking about, because they understand, "Oh, yeah, I need that security, I need that firewall, "I need that WAN Optimizer, I need that load balancer." That, they understand. >> Yeah. >> Well, Beth, I, with my telecom background, I think of, there's lots of hardware, there's lots of cabling, there's the challenges that you have with wireless and we're talking a lot about 5G, you're talking about software, though, and it's delivering >> Yeah. >> those services that the customer needs, so, right, is that what they ask for? Is it, I need these pieces and now I can do it via software as opposed to before, I had to, you know, we talked, it's the appliances to the software move? >> Right. >> What are the, your customers asking for and how are they embracing this? >> Well, so our customers are very excited. I can't think of a single customer that I have gone to that have said, "Why would I do that?" They're all saying, "No, this is really exciting," and so what they're doing is they're really rethinking the network because they're used to having stacks of boxes, so the appliance base, you know, that was really pioneered back, of course, Cisco sort of pioneered it back in the '90s but I remember talking to Infoblox back in the, oh, like the early 2000s when they came out with DHCP DNS appliance and I was like, "Wow, that's so cool." So, this is sort of the next generation, so why do you need to have six different boxes that do a single thing? Why don't we just make it a cloud in the box and put all those functions together and service chain them? That gives you a lot more flexibility. You're not stuck with that proprietary hardware and then worrying about, I mean, I can't tell you how many customers want to do this for tech refresh. They have end-of-life equipment that the vendor is saying, "Forget it, (laughs) this is 10-year-old equipment. "We're not supporting it anymore." >> Yeah, but what are the security implications, here, though? We've seen the surface area of where attacks can come from just seems to be growing exponentially. I think, I go to the edge, I've got way more devices, there's more vulnerabilities. Your last product, you said, was security. How does security fit into all of this? What are you hearing from your costumers? How do you partner with other people? >> So, security is absolutely paramount to our customers. As I mentioned in the talk, there was a, we did a survey of our customers. Security was absolutely the top priority, but security's a lot more sophisticated, as you said, than it used to be and the vectors for attack are much more sophisticated and so it's not enough to just have a firewall. That's, your attack is, you know, the sqiushy inside and the hard outside, forget it. That's just (laughs)-- >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get it. >> That's just not there anymore. >> Indeed, the moats are gone. They're in the castle. >> Yeah. >> They're in the castle, right. So, for us, it's very appealing to our customers, that, the idea that they can put the security where they need it, so they can put it out at the edge and some of them so want it at the edge and we give them the choice of setting up a sort of a minimal basic firewall or a full-featured next-gen firewall. We also find customers kind of like the brand names, so we offer Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco, Juniper and others will be coming, so that appeals to them. They tend to be a shop of one or the other. >> John: All on a software basis? >> All on a software basis. >> Giving them the virtual clients discount? >> Right, yeah, all virtual clients is right. And, you know, at the end of the day, our customers don't actually care about the hardware. For them, it's the service. >> I wanted to take it over to OpenStack itself for a little bit. You know, the great conversation here, this week, has been something about modularization, talking about the ecosystem, talking about containers, both the app layer up on top and the packaging layer down below, which is kind of really cool, as well. How are you seeing the OpenStack community engage with the ecosystem be available to different use cases like this? Right, slim it down, take what you need, leave the rest, different, for a while, the conversation was, there were so many projects and, about everything, and do you feel like OpenStack is going where we need it to go, now, in terms of, again, a usable partner and community to work with? >> I do believe that because, so, my product is really a portfolio, if you think about it, so it's a portfolio of services and I view our use of OpenStack in the same way. So, we're really taking that portfolio of OpenStack services and pulling, you know, putting together the package that we need to deliver the services. So, what's out at the edge, that package of OpenStack services at the edge, that's not the same set of services as what's within the core data center. There's some commonality, but we've chosen the ones that are important to us for the edge and chosen the ones that are important to us for the core. So, I think that the OpenStack community is really embracing this notion and we really welcome that, that thing. Now, what I'm finding is that the vendors that we're supporting, you know, that, in the ecosystem, at the application layer, are still struggling with, "Okay, do we containerize? "Do we support, what do, how do we support it?" I can't tell you how many vendors I've gone to and I said, "If you want to be in our portfolio," and obviously most of them do, you know, Verizon's a big company, "you have to be virtualized. "You have to be able to support, run under OpenStack," and they have to get past that, (laughs) that issue. >> Beth, I noticed in some of your social feeds, you've attended some of the Women at OpenStack event. >> Yes. >> I wonder if you have any comment on the events there and diversity in general in the community? >> So, one of the things I love about OpenStack is it's really, really gone out of its way in, within the open source community, in general, to really focus on the value of diversity and it really does track the number of women that, you know, there's a metric that says the percentage of women at every summit and it's going up and the Women of OpenStack community focus on mentoring, and it's not just women, because mentoring's very important, but it really allows, but women are, have sort of special challenges and minorities have special challenges, as well, and we really try to embrace that fact that you do need a leg up if you're not a 50-year-old white guy (laughs). >> All right, Beth Cohen, really appreciate you joining us. Congratulations on the keynote, the product and wish you the best of luck going forward. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back with more coverage here from OpenStack Summit in Boston. For John and myself, thanks for watching The CUBE. (upbeat synthesizer music)