(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm delighted to introduce our next guests to highlight the award for Best Partner Transformation, Best Telco Solution, and of course, I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. We are now joined by Avishai Sharlin Division President at Amdocs Technology, and Ralf Hellenbran, Program Director of Technology at Vodafone Germany. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Let's have the opening question for both of you. You know, but let's first start with Avishai. What has been the highlight to date in the journey of both Amdocs and Vodafone? >> Well, it's a good question. I believe that the highlight was the teaming and getting things done together as partners. Unlike many previous experiences, this time, we understood that success equals us working hand in hand together, making sure that we overcome and achieve everything as true partners. So the greatest obstacles and also the biggest achievement were done together as one team. We always speak about the hurdles, we negotiate sometimes. But eventually, we're coming to the solution together, and making sure that everything is properly managed and properly done in the right timing, and according to plans. >> Terrific, well, Ralf, let's go to you. What do you see as the highlights of this collaboration. >> Now exactly what Avishai said, but let me add to that. What we are following is a real collaborative approach. Now, there's a lot of strengths in that approach. Because we are using for example, swarm intelligence, we are using elements, which you see in clouds attempts as well, for example, yeah, but you see it in agile attempts and agile working methods. And this is what we applied. And as Avishai said, we are doing that as real partners in the program. And we are pulling a lot of strengths out of that by detecting problems early, we have a high level of transparency, we put everything on the table, and differences that we do not fight about the problems. We work collaborative on the solution. And that's really kind of new to the industry we are working in. And that's kind of game changing for it. At the beginning, we said it will be game changing if it works. Now we see that it does. >> Terrific. Well, why do you think generally speaking, that the Telco industry has been so slow, to you know, embrace these kinds of innovations? Let's start with Avishai. >> Yeah. It's less about I think the actual technology, it's more about a handful of parameters that need to be aligned, once you are trying to address these big transformations. You need to upskill a lot of people, you need to educate your manpower, to new technologies and new ways and processes, how to embrace DevOps, how to work in a cloud environment, how to embrace an agile, safe methodology. So there are many small pockets of things that needs to be changed. Not a single element, actually is the same as like five years ago. So in a way, if the organization as a whole, is not being transformed, it's very tough to embrace all those new technologies and succeed in such a journey. So for us, and I think also to our partners in Vodafone, it was a mutual understanding that we need to not just work together, but also tackle the new technologies and methods and processes all together and change the entire organization and ecosystem in order to succeed. In many other cases in the industry, we see that some pockets are not being changed. And then even if the technology is right, you're missing the upscaling of people, if you upskill the people and you forgot the technology, and so on so forth. >> Perfect now, Ralf, I'd love for you to respond to that question as well. >> So the Telco industry is a quite complex industry, that you look to the product it seems to be quite easy. You pick up a phone and you do a phone call or you go to the internet and so on and so forth. But if you think of all the services, which you're using via your smartphone, for example, yeah, it's far away from just doing a phone call. So at the same time where the Telco industry is producing and selling products, it's producing and selling services. At the same time, while you're using it for leisure, you're also using it for emergency calls. So there's a high level of safety, which we need to bring, and we need to pair it with a lot of innovation elements, right, both together. Now, if you take all this and you think of the complexity, it's not easy to introduce new methods and new ways of working, etc, to such an industry, again you need to take two things into account, you need to make it very safe and stable and educated and controlled. And at the same time, you need to be very fast, because it's a fast moving industry. And both together explains how we adopt it and why sometimes we are a bit slower than others, because the trial and error, yeah, it's not that easy, because the error cannot be allowed in big scale. The more I'm happy that in the approach we're taking together with Amdocs and also AWS, we can apply these new methods while keeping the safety and stability. >> Terrific, well, thank you for outlining that safety methodology. Avishai, I'd like to move this back to you. How are you redefining this operation through DevOps and automation? >> Oh, that's an interesting question. I think that automation, needs to be baked into almost everything that we're doing in such a transformation. It's not from the basic technology stuff, but it goes into all the processes, the way you develop, the way you test. The way you deploy, the way later on, you're making sure that everything run in the right way. So automation is key fundamental element in the end to end journey of such a big transformation, especially if you're going into agile development, and you need to fail fast, react fast, change fast, and then continue onwards with a new solution. So first, as you rightfully said, it's automation. And DevOps is also key over here, because you need to make sure that what you develop is also something that you deploy in the right way. So you need to put in place all the right mechanism, such as (indistinct), and the cloud frameworks, and the relevant different technologies that are adhering into this end to end solution. >> Perfect, now, Ralf, what are your thoughts? How are you redefining the operation now through DevOps and automation? >> We are trying to solve the paradox. Again, the paradox is we want to have things very stable, that would dictate us to do very detailed plans and to adhere to it and so on this is what we did in the past, it fostered for example, taylorism, and similar things. Now, we want to go a step further, we want to apply agile methods, we want to dismantle the taylorism. And the techniques around DevOps, cloud operation, etc, agile methods help us to do that. Now, while we are transforming our way of working, we don't want to lose the good elements of what we have been doing before, we want to do a step forward and not at the same time step back. And therefore we are combining things. And automation, for example, is one way to do that. DevOps is another way to do that. We are joining the good thinking of operations and the good thinking of development together, and we are pulling additional strengths out of that, while not taking into account or taking on board the weaknesses of the former approach. So it's a stepwise transformation we are following. Automation helps us to focus on the real problems, and not on the things you can automate by technology. >> Terrific. Well, now Avishai, bringing this back to you, Ralf talks about agility and also DevOps, explain the journey today on such a large program. >> The the journey, in what sense? Can you give me some coloring? >> Yeah tell us about this collaboration and keeping that in mind, keeping in mind agility as well as DevOps. You know, the step by step process in developing such a large collaborative program. >> Thank you for clarification. So I think that the journey as a whole had several components, (indistinct) and myself also the beginning about the nature of being true partners here. But it is also about establishing something very new in the industry. Many of the things that we're working are, you know, the first time that we're doing agile manner of developing software and testing, it's so fast, it's the first time we're implementing the latest and greatest DevOps technologies. The first time, we're adhering into new standards and way and behavior from a modernized technology organization. So in a way, this journey is all about a mixture of innovation, new stuff, on one hand, aligned with a very, very tight in a good way, I would call it German engineering, in the sense of making sure the things are in place and making sure that the processes are well defined. And we're seeing at any given point, the different status we're in, what needs to be improved, what is going well, and what future lies ahead. >> Staying with that topic on the journey opening to both of you, and perhaps Ralf would like to jump in here, first, how have AWS technologies been featured as part of this journey. >> AWS has been chosen wisely by us because of its technology components brought to the table. Now, without now pointing to a particular service, which we are using, we talked about automation, we talked about DevOps, now everyone can itself about how AWS in general helps to foster that, the sheer fact that we can merge the different way of working with a different mindset of people working in our collaboration and technology components coming not only, but also from AWS, this is ensuring our success. If you would pull out one of these elements, yeah, out of the equation, that most probably it would not work. I have problems to rate which element is more important, they are all part of the puzzle and otherwise, you will not see the picture and create the picture. So in a nutshell, we are utilizing the AWS technologies in order to allow the speed of development, lots of first times which we have in our collaboration, and the AWS technologies are an essential part of that. >> Terrific and Avishai, what are your thoughts on that? >> I think that the collaboration with AWS goes in several, in a way different shapes and form. On the technology, pure technology level, we're utilizing native EKS, we're moving with the managed Kubernetes. We're using, you know the latest technology in databases, and many other very, very cool technologies coming from AWS. And on a different level, completely different level, I think that AWS understands the behavior of complex enterprise and are assisting us with programs, looking into well architected framework and how to work in a managed environment and what are the technologies that we need to utilize. And also in, from an Amdocs perspective, something that assisted us a lot in this journey, we have a unique technology which defines an end to end solution to development within a micro service cloud native environment, we'll call it M360. AWS assisted a lot in making this a mature technology and allowing us to develop faster and fully utilize the benefits of cloud native environments. >> Terrific, now to both of you, what do you see as the next step in your collaboration together? Let's bring this to Ralf. >> There is no distinct next step. And maybe this is the consequence of the way of working we have established. There are many small steps we will pursue and most probably, if you want to know, which are the next steps, you need to talk to our teams. This is another aspect of this new way of working, which we apply. The people working in that approach, they tell us how they construct, how they structure this approach. If I would summarize it, we are constantly tearing down the walls between the companies, between silos, between departments working in that collaboration, and we are getting more close together every day. And solving problems quicker, we are getting them quicker on the table, we are getting them quicker, and softer, faster, soft, and AWS, Amdocs are part of this. And this is really nice to see and be part of, that this is really happening. So the next step is, foster the collaboration. >> Avishai do you have any thoughts? >> Yeah, on a personal level, I think the next step would be to glide together in Europe. But on a more serious note, I think that this is becoming like a true partnership. And I think that I see a lot of empowerment coming from both sides, allowing the team to develop together, to think together and to start to create new stuff, that even if you plan ahead, you will never achieve without true collaboration. So this empowerment, the fact that the teams feel that they can do things on their own, and make one and one equals three, two, or you know, or seven, is the big change that I see in front of us. And I really feel it in the air. And I also feel it in in the way we act and we move forward. >> Yeah, so Ralf, how do you see that this program will enable continuous innovation? >> Oh, it does already. So if you're looking to big transformation programs of the past, (indistinct) beside the fact that lots of them actually did not achieve what they are, what they were asked to achieve. Usually big programs, do big plans, and then you have a very long period of preparation. And then usually you have a rather big bank or life and then everything shall be fun. That sometimes work but not most times, it's difficult. Now within our program, we are doing that in collaboration, but step by step by step. And it's more an evolution than a revolution, which we are doing. At least in the way we deploy things, again, we are back to DevOps, continuous integration, continuous deployment and so on all these elements, which you can see in these approaches. And this is where the wheel spinning slice. So it's evolving step by step. And it's bringing benefits step by steps. So the benefits are already in place into to a certain extent, and they're constantly growing. >> Terrific, Avishai, what are your thoughts? How do you see the innovation of being able to continue and even further? >> In a way we're in a world that everything is in continuum, so it's continuous delivery, and continuous development and also continuous innovation. As long as you know, the ecosystem of ours continues to innovate as a whole, we are part of it. And inevitably, we are part of the larger ecosystem on one hand, and also players within it on a smaller scale in this project and as organization. So I think innovation is baked into everything we're doing today. Sometime it's small incremental steps, sometimes it's big, innovative moves, but all in all, it's something that is currently part of our DNA. >> And how is this system helping you both you know, be more proactive? Either one of you who would like to go first? >> No, I started first. >> Avishai? Okay. So, we are data driven, we are way more data driven. And by knowing exactly what is happening, we can be faster, we can be more innovative, we can be more productive. So, in cases where we either discover a problem or we discovering opportunity, we are much faster in analyzing whether it's really one, how should we redirect on that? How can we solve it or utilize it? And that's really working well. >> Perfect. And, you know, Avishai, feel free to join in on that too. >> In the digitized economy, I think that productivity comes a lot from the business side. If there is something that completely changed lately is the fact that business people are driving many, many changes on one end, and technology is here to adhere on one end and flexible to to move forward. So many of the productive concepts are coming from non technology savvy people, and the ability of what we're doing together to adjust and support different business behaviors and business models, and also, you know, business initiatives is thought of as being productive and being able to adapt into the digitalized economy. >> Let me join in on that one, what Avishai said, Let's think of a business person who wants to change something, and you don't know whether it's a white way as a corporation. Now you bring in the technology bits and pieces from different angles, and all of a sudden, you can combine it with a data driven approach, then, you know much better how to react on this business demand and how to bring it to life by using technology. Yeah, that might be a very high level of example of what we're doing here. Again, collaboration, get it done together with is the theme of that, technology is a very important part of that, paired with the business. >> Yeah, we talked on some very broad terms like themes, collaboration, innovation, I just want to focus a bit now on automation. Why do you think it is so critical to the vision of this program, Avishai. >> First of all, because it ends with ation, and everything that has this, but what I think that we started with this, automation is fundamental to everything that needs to be nimble, everything that needs to be fast. You cannot do it manually. And if you want to react either to a business demand or to a data driven decision, analytic decision, if you want to adopt new technology, if you want to test a new business scenario or technology scenario, you need automation to be part, inevitable part of everything that you're doing. So automation is a key element in everything that we're doing. And it's critical part of also the way to look into the future and to make sure that everything is working the right way. >> Perfect Ralf, any quick thoughts on that? >> Actually, nothing, nothing to add. >> All right, terrific. Well, it's been so wonderful to have you on the program. I know people are coming in from all over the world to join us. Really fantastic opportunity to highlight this important innovation in the Telco sector. Glad to have you here. Ralf Hellenbran, Program Director of Technology at Vodafone Germany, as well as Avishai Sharlin, the Division President at Amdocs Technology. we're highlighting the award that they won as part of the AWS, Global Public Sector Partner Awards. So great to have you on the show. And I'm your host Natalie Erlich, do stay tuned for more coverage. (upbeat music)

from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 I'm Stu minimun and it's our seventh year doing the cube this year of course it is a digital event which means we are reaching all the community members where they are around the globe really excited to bring program first time guests and a first time to redhead summit Vachon Vora he's the chief technology officer of Vodafone idea joining me from Mumbai India bhishan nice to see you take so much for joining us it's a pleasure to be here as >> I'm looking forward to this interaction all right so as I said I've been at Red Hat show for many years the the telecommunications space you know service providers are some of the you know more interesting in the technology space you talk about scale you talk about change you talk about you know software eating the world all of those discussions are ones I've had for many years but you know I think many people know Vodafone may be a vote a fun idea escape for us you know the organisation and of course you've got the CTO at so you know what that means inside your organization sure so what a fun idea is a company that came came to acclaim as a result of a merger about 18 months ago so the number two and number three operators in India which was Vodafone an idea came together to create a telco serving over 300 million subscribers and we've been integrating the the networks over the last 18 months and consolidating and doing one of the largest integration in the world of two networks comprising over 200 thousand sites and carrying you know more than 50 billion MB of traffic per hour per day serving more than 40 million voltaic customers and we have been duplicating the network very very busy with her and we taken down so far almost a hundred thousand base stations which is equivalent to the size of a large operator in us so that's about the carnahan that is about the scale of the the operator that word of an idea is and what we've been busy with for the last day yeah well well Besant of course the reason we're doing this event online is because right now with the global pandemic the vast majority of the population they're at home so you know healthcare of course you know one of the major concerns I actually have done interviews with some of the power and energy companies critically important at this time but you know telecommunications you know what one of the top of the list you know in normal times for what people need but today it's the the only way that we can all connect it so tell us a little bit about do you know what the current situation you know the impact and importance this really highlights of your business yeah so just as the rest of the world India is also in a lockdown and India actually has one of the largest the largest lockdown in the world putting all 1.3 billion people in a lockdown yeah across the entire country so within that context the telecom network is crucial to make sure that the life goes on the essential services are delivered the industry continues to still operate as the best it can and all of that is made possible because of a stable and reliable network that we offer so a huge huge impact on the society always has been but in in this current context it is even more more critical and crucial so what we do is we make sure that we are the invisible layer you talked about health healthcare workers and emergency services well we are the invisible essential service that probably many people don't see but we are the ones who are really helping this country survive this this crisis and so far we have seen 25 30% increase in traffic in a single day in one week we experienced the same amount of traffic growth we would have experienced in the entire year so we we scalability is very very critical in our network and we've been able to keep up with that kind of a growth and continue to serve the communities and in this crucial juncture and all this dude large extent has been made possible because of a large-scale deployment of cloud technologies that we have done over the last 18 months which has really helped us scale up a large lot of our capabilities in the back yeah I'd love if you could explain a little bit more on that it you know challenging times you know I'm curious the amount of people that are using your services probably haven't changed but the demand and how much they're using it as change a lot so cloud obviously gives you scalability but you know are there concerns about what this does the profitability how you maintain things how much of this is a temporary change and how much will this be you know I know in the United States there's a lot of talk about how much work from home will become more of a standard than it had been before this pandemic so you know short term what's the impact on your business and what are you and other telecommunication companies thinking about what long-term impact this will have >> I think that's a very very interesting question I think even for me and my organization what we have been able to do working from home is amazing I never would have thought that it was possible to do as much as we've been able to do just staying young with most of the work for staying at home and that has really I think happened across industries across the entire country I think many organizations have now realized that work from home or work from anywhere which is the other term he's gonna become quite possible and prevalent going forward because people have realized that you can just get you can get just as much productivity out you can get so many things done working from home and it gives so much more personal flexibility to the individuals so I see when I look back at our organizational experience I see our productivity has been actually quite good actually better then haha where probably even in the office days so I think that is definitely one thing that is gonna come out as a global change across all industries I think the second thing that is gonna happen is data analytics I think there is going to be far more analysis of data to understand patterns and understand trends and how to take advantage of that I think of course the immediate application is in the healthcare and the spread of the pandemic but I think this will spur a lot of other analytics I think the third thing is going to do is the adoption of digital as the primary mode digital was already something that most companies are working on as is a top priority but I think going outward is gonna become very evident to people that it is actually essential just talking about my business I can tell you today you know all the stores all the shops every place that we used to check our cell or recharge vouchers are closed so the only place we are able to get any revenue from is our digital channel and on end only place where customers have been able to recharge their prepaid subscriptions etc has all been through digital I think digital we will also become a massive massive requirement so in that context I think telecom will be seen as a critical critical backbone I think to a large extent it has been seen by many in the past is more of an essential commodity but I think many organizations will realise that this is actually a value creator so I think it's a great exciting opportunity for us to take advantage of those new business opportunities that will come and at the same time be a very very important player in the digital economy that every nation around the world is gonna press you know for Sean said it really appreciates some really good commentary there you know we've been talking for years about customers going through their digital transformation it's really about the data and how they leverage that and if you're data-driven then you really have gone through that transformation and you kind of described what we call the new innovation cocktail you're leveraging cloud that there's data you put those all together as to how you drive your company and you can drive innovation oftentimes when we think about what results we're going to get from deploying cloud and using these types of new technologies we think we know what we're gonna get but the reality of how your company is dealing with things today of course you know proves what you were hoping that build for here help us understand you know what we're talking here is part of red hat summit this week you know what's red hats role in this piece and you know how did the reality of rolling this out and then how it has helped you in the current global situation impacted your business sure oh so I would say actually the three words that I used digital cloud and analytics to me they're actually inseparable cuz I do not believe that you can have a digital business that is not based on cloud or that is not good at data analytics I think if you want to really have a successful cloud offering it implies that automatically that you are a digital business and you're gonna do extensive modern data and analytics and build those capabilities I think those are three inseparable terms now speaking specifically about a red head I would say that red head has been a very very critical partner for us right from the beginning 18 months ago when the two companies too came together to create this network we knew that we had to do several things number one was actually to have a completely rationalized structure which was around extracting the synergies from the from the merger but beyond that we needed to build a telco of the future technology company of the future which will let us transform the business and create capabilities that will give us a step ahead a leapfrog ahead of our competition and cloud was a very very essential part of the journey and we knew we needed to build a cloud based on open systems because we did not want to get into a proprietary logins with anybody and we are a very large business we have suffered a sufficiently large scale to really be able to build a very large cloud so we started working with Red Hat about two years ago and it in the last two years we have deployed 80 plus cloud locations distributed cloud locations across the country and these all of these clouds our vision is to orchestrate them as a single cloud our vision is to build a cloud there is a universal cloud actually that is the word there is a word we use when we talk about cloud it's a universal cloud what does that mean that means that cloud will carry not only the traditional telco workloads but it will also carry IT workloads it will also carry lot of the enterprise offerings we have so - for the end-user for our enterprise clients and all of those capabilities out to be accommodated with a platform that is versatile that is scalable and that is gonna give me in enormous amount of flexibility and control as a organization so Red Hat has been a very important part of the journey and on the red head OpenStack cloud today I have a Daffy's working from any major supplier you can think of I have any enemies working from Nokia Ericsson Huawei ziti even some smaller players like Marvin here so we have demonstrated that this is possible we've been able to break the lock in that the traditional naps have had on their cloud offerings which were really more of a virtualized offerings rather than a cloud computer is a truly universal cloud on the back of the technology provided by a red well that's that's fantastic congratulations on that I love the the result of what you're calling Universal Cloud is the promise that we talked about for a number of years you know is that nitty gritty networking piece it was like you know network functions virtualization and if be sitting an open stack and everybody's like well OpenStack am I trying to build a cloud to compete against the public cloud providers it was like no what you said exactly there's services that you want to be able to deliver and it's not just about oh we're getting away from hardware appliances it's you know just like most people today they're used to whatever smart device they're doing I want to be able to turn on channels and access new things that's your now you know reducing that barrier to Vodafone idea to deliver that to your users have I captured that properly that is correct as a matter of fact I'll just give you one proof point my water phone app is the app that we we have for our consumers and that app is currently running on my telco clock what used to be called the telco cloud so on that platform we are running my packet or actually there are about 40 and FB is for virtualized traditional calculations running alongside with an IT application a digital application okay so one of the things I you know I would like to understand there that what you've deployed there over the last couple of years sounds like a significant shift so you know you're talking about apps you're talking more of a developer type of environment bring us inside a little organizationally you know what new skills have new people had to learn has there been new people added to the organization have there been in a restructures what what is this this this whole initiative to get to universal cloud meant for your organization sure so I look after both the network and IT pieces of the part of parts of the company and you know we traditionally were in the past legacy we have had a IT cloud and we have heard indigo cloud what we are now creating is a single universal cloud what either of the two workloads are gonna be facilitated so for that actually the two organization the two parts of the organization need to come together and start to really work as one now it is very important that the telco guys understand the scale and the 99-year the five nines required in a running a network but at the same time IT guys also understand very much what all of the the flexibility that the business requires and the responsiveness required for the for the enterprise so bringing those two talents together I think in infusing that to create a single organization is one of the biggest challenges I think any telco has we also face it that is one aspect of it the second aspect of it is that there just aren't too many cloud experts in the world and we have been struggling with that I think skill shortage is a clear challenge for us now we try to address it using variety of means we of course try to upscale rescale lot of the traditional network core engineers that we have had we also try to use talent available or from consultants and then we also try to use our vendors so one of the concepts we've been working with our vendors is a concept of a resident engineer so we try to actually get them to second some of their engineers to work with us and at the same time we've been now working with both IBM and redhead to create a program to really go out and create a community around us of developers who can really work with this cloud and therefore we will have enough of skills available to leverage all of the potential benefits there are then the platform but can only be unleashed if I have the right skills and right people you touched on a very important issue it is a challenge but we are working our way through it and so far we've been a bit we make good all right well if it's shot I can't let a CTO go without looking a little bit into the future so want to help understand we talked about some of the technologies talked about transformation of what's happening your business what's happening your organization and there's some big waves coming week you know cloud is still in early days 5g of course you know is expected to have massive impact on on everyone's environment for this so what is the winning formula for the the telecoms going forward well I think Phi G is an exciting world we are a 4G network today the Phi G spectrum hasn't been auctioned in India but what we are building today is what I call a 4G plus network which means the lot of the architectural principles of PI G we have already applied in my core networks today and in my transport network in that world I think IOT is gonna play a very very big role and if you want to do things like IOT and if you want to do things like blockchain now I think telco cloud has a huge role to play because we are the telcos are traditionally the only ones in a country anywhere in the world who have experiences experience in operating in very far front powerful places dealing with lot of the infrastructure challenges especially if you're in a developing country you know that you have to work with a poor power availability poor transport etc I do not see any of the big guys the the big cloud players really having those capabilities today I think telcos are gonna play a very big role in enabling that pi g io t work and it is going to be an exciting journey for telcos I think telcos will very soon be called tech companies that is one thing that I strongly believe in I think also many of the things that depend on blockchain will require the kind of cloud that telcos will create because a telco cloud is far more demanding than a traditional IT application in many ways for example latency or for example throughputs now all those things aren't very important in blockchain apple type of applications I think that's another exciting opportunity for telcos really is to get into that and of course there are discussions about smart cities smart government government and because of Kovach kharkova crisis I think many governments are gonna explore new ways of organizing Society's new ways of governing economic activities and the backbone for a lot of those things is gonna be our telecom networks and the cloud distributed clouds to the edge that we create so I think it'll create many many exciting business opportunities as a consequence of some of those technological innovation yeah Shanta I can't remember who said it as they said don't waste a crisis but Vasant Bora CTO of Vodafone idea pleasure talking with you thank you so much for joining us hope you enjoy the Red Hat event as it is distributed this year and definitely look to be able to meet you sometime at a future physical event back when we have those in the future Thank You Stu it's been a pleasure meeting you virtually and look forward to these all right lots more coverage from the cubes Red Hat summit at 20/20 activity I'm Stu minimun and thanks as always for watching [Music]

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

(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)

(electronic music) (graphics whooshing) (graphics tinkling) >> Telecommunications is well north of a trillion-dollar business globally, that provides critical services on which virtually everyone on the planet relies. Dramatic changes are occurring in the sector, and one of the most important dimensions of this change is the underlying infrastructure that powers global telecommunications networks. Telcos have been thawing out, if you will, they're frozen infrastructure, modernizing. They're opening up, they're disaggregating their infrastructure, separating, for example, the control plane from the data plane, and adopting open standards. Telco infrastructure is becoming software-defined. And leading telcos are adopting cloud native microservices to help make developers more productive, so they can respond more quickly to market changes. They're embracing technology consumption models, and selectively leveraging the cloud where it makes sense. And these changes are being driven by market forces, the root of which stem from customer demand. So from a customer's perspective, they want services, and they want them fast. Meaning, not only at high speeds, but also they want them now. Customers want the latest, the greatest, and they want these services to be reliable and stable with high quality of service levels. And they want them to be highly cost-effective. Hello and welcome to this preview of Mobile World Congress 2023. My name is Dave Vellante, and at this year's event, theCUBE has a major presence at the show made possible by Dell Technologies, and with me to unpack the trends in telco, and look ahead to MWC23 are Dennis Hoffman, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Dell's telecom business, and Aaron Chaisson, who is the Vice President of Telecom and Edge Solutions Marketing at Dell Technologies, gentlemen, welcome, thanks so much for spending some time with me. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> So, Dennis, let's start with you. Telcos in recent history have been slow to deliver and to monetize new services, and a large part because their purpose-built infrastructure could been somewhat of a barrier to responding to all these market forces. In many ways, this is what makes telecoms, really this market so exciting. So from your perspective, where is the action in this space? >> Yeah, the action Dave is kind of all over the place, partly because it's an ecosystem play. I think it's been, as you point out, the disaggregation trend has been going on for a while. The opportunity's been clear, but it has taken a few years to get all of the vendors, and all of the components that make up a solution, as well as the operators themselves, to a point where we can start putting this stuff together, and actually achieving some of the promise. >> So Aaron, for those who might not be as familiar with Dell's a activities in this area, here we are just ahead of Mobile World Congress, it's the largest event for telecoms, what should people know about Dell? And what's the key message to this industry? >> Sure, yeah, I think everybody knows that there's a lot of innovation that's been happening in the industry of late. One of the major trends that we're seeing is that shift from more of a vertically-integrated technology stack, to more of a disaggregated set of solutions, and that trend has actually created a ton of innovation that's happening across the industry, or along technology vendors and providers, the telecoms themselves. And so, one of the things that Dell's really looking to do is, as Dennis talked about, is build out a really strong ecosystem of partners and vendors that we're working closely together to be able to collaborate on new technologies, new capabilities that are solving challenges that the networks are seeing today. Be able to create new solutions built on those in order to be able to bring new value to the industry. And then finally, we want to help both partners, as well as our CSP providers activate those changes, so that they can bring new solutions to market, to be able to serve their customers. And so, the key areas that we're really focusing on with our customers is, technologies to help modernize the network, to be able to capitalize on the value of open architectures, and bring price performance to what they're expecting, and availability that they're expecting today. And then also, partner with the lines of business to be able to take these new capabilities, produce new solutions, and then deliver new value to their customers. >> Great, thank you, Aaron. So Dennis, you and I, known you for a number of years. I've watched you, you're are a trend spotter. You're a strategic thinker. I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze, and now you got to make it happen. So, how would you describe Dell's strategy in this market? >> Well, it's really two things. And I appreciate the comment, I'm not sure how much of a trend spotter I am, but I certainly enjoy, and I think I'm fascinated by what's going on in this industry right now. Our two main thrusts, Dave, are first round, trying to catalyze that ecosystem, be a force for pulling together a group of folks, vendors that have been flying in fairly loose formation for a couple of years, to deliver the kinds of solutions that move the needle forward, and produce the outcomes that our network operator customers can actually buy and consume, and deploy, and have them be supported. The other thing is, there's a couple of very key technology areas that need to be advanced here. This ends up being a much anticipated year in telecom. Because of the delivery of some open infrastructure solutions that have being developed for years. With the Intel Sapphire Rapids program coming to market, we've of course got some purpose-built solutions on top of that for telecommunications networks. Some expanded partnerships in the area of multi-cloud infrastructure. And so, I would say the second main thrust is, we've got to bring some intellectual property to the party. It's not just about pulling the ecosystem together. But those two things together really form the twin thrusts of our strategy. >> Okay, so as you point out, you obviously not going to go alone in this market, it's way too broad, there's so many routes to market, partnerships, obviously very, very important. So, can you share a little bit more about the ecosystem and partners, maybe give some examples of some of the key partners that you'd be highlighting or working with, maybe at Mobile World Congress, or other activities this year? >> Yeah, absolutely. As Aaron touched on, I'm a visual thinker. The way I think about this thing is a very, very vertical architecture is tipping sideways. It's becoming horizontal. And all of the layers of that horizontal architecture are really where the partnerships are at. So, let's start at the bottom, silicon. The silicon ecosystem is very much focused on this market. And producing very specific products to enable open, high performance telecom networks. That's both in the form of host processors, as well as accelerators. One layer up, of course, is the stuff that we're known for, subsystems, compute storage, the hardware infrastructure that forms the foundation for telco clouds. A layer above that, all of the cloud software layer, the virtualization and containerization software, and all of the usual suspects there, all of whom are very good partners of ours, and we're looking to expand that pretty broadly this year. And then at the top of the layer cake, all of the network functions, all of the VNF's and CNF's that were once kind of the top of proprietary stacks, that are now opening up and being delivered, as well-formed containers that can run on these clouds. So, we're focusing on all of those, if you will, product partnerships, and there is a services wrapper around all of it. The systems integration necessary to make these systems part of a carrier's network, which of course, has been running for a long time, and needs to be integrated with in a very specific way. And so, all of that, together kind of forms the ecosystem, all of those are partners, and we're really excited about being at the heart of it. >> Interesting, it's not like we've never seen this movie before, which is, it's sort of repeating itself in telco. Aaron, you heard my little intro up front about the need to modernize infrastructure, I wonder if I could touch on another major trend, which we're seeing is the cloud, and I'm talkin' about not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. Telcom providers are lookin' to the public cloud for specific use cases, you think about like bursting for an iPhone launch or whatever. But at the same time, these cloud vendors, they're sort of competing with telcos. They're providing local zones, for example, sometimes trying to do an end run on the telco connectivity services, so telecom companies, they have to find the right balance between what they own and what they rent. And I wonder if you could add some color as to what you see in the market and what Dell specifically is doing to support these trends. >> Yeah, and I think the most important thing is what we're seeing, as you said, is these aren't things that we haven't seen before. And I think that telecom is really going through their own set of cloud transformations, and so, one of the hot topics in the industry now is, what is telco cloud? And what does that look like going forward? And it's going to be, as you said, a combination of services that they offer, services that they leverage. But at the end of the day, it's going to help them modernize how they deliver telecommunication services to their customers, and then provide value added services on top of that. From a Dell perspective, we're really providing the technologies to provide the underpinnings to lay a foundation on which that network can be built, whether that's best of breed servers that are built in design for the telecom environments. Recently, we announced our Infer block program, in partnering with virtualization providers, to be able to provide engineered systems that dramatically simplify how our customers can deploy, manage, and lifecycle manage throughout day two operations, an entire cloud environment. And whether they're using Red Hat, whether they're using Wind River, or VMware, or other virtualization layers, they can deploy the right virtualization layer at the right part of their network to support the applications they're looking to drive. And Dell is looking to solve how they simplify and manage all of that, both from a hardware, as well as on management software perspective. So, this is really what Dell's doing to, again, partner with the broader technology community, to help make that telco cloud a reality. >> Aaron, let's stay here for a second, I'm interested in some of the use cases that you're going after with customers. You've got Edge infrastructure, remote work, 5G, where's security fit, what are the focus areas for Dell, and can we double click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's two main areas of telecommunication industry that we're talking to. One, we've really been talking about the sort of the network buyer, how do they modernize the core, the network Edge, the RAN capabilities to deliver traditional telecommunication services, and modernize that as they move into 5G and beyond. I think the other side of the business is, telecoms are really looking from a line of business perspective to figure out how do they monetize that network, and be able to deliver value added services to their enterprise customers on top of these new networks. So, you were just touching on a couple of things that are really critical. In the enterprise space, AI and IoT is driving a tremendous amount of innovation out there, and there's a need for being able to support and manage Edge compute at scale, be able to provide connectivity, like private mobility, and 4G and 5G, being able to support things like mobile workforces and client capabilities, to be able to access these devices that are around all of these Edge environments of the enterprises. And telecoms are seeing as that, as an opportunity for them to not only provide connectivity, but how do they extend their cloud out into these enterprise environments with compute, with connectivity, with client and connectivity resources, and even also provide protection for those environments as well. So, these are areas that Dell is historically very strong at. Being able to provide compute, be able to provide connectivity, and being able to provide data protection and client services, we are looking to work closely with lines of businesses to be able to develop solutions that they can bring to market in combination with us, to be able to serve their end user customers and their enterprises. So, those are really the two key areas, not only network buyer, but being able to enable the lines of business to go and capitalize on the services they're developing for their customers. >> I think that line of business aspect is key, I mean, the telcos have had to sit back and provide the plumbing, cost per bit goes down, data consumption going through the roof, all the over at the top guys have had the field day with the data, and the customer relationships, and now it's almost like the revenge (chuckles) of the telcos. Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell, if you break out the binoculars a little bit. >> Yeah, I think you hit it earlier. We've seen the movie before. This has happened in the IT data center. We went from proprietary vertical solutions to horizontal open systems. We went from client server to software-defined open hardware cloud native. And the trend is likely to be exactly that, in the telecom industry because that's what the operators want. They're not naive to what's happened in the IT data center, they all run very large data centers. And they're trying to get some of the scale economies. Some of the agility, the cost of ownership benefits for the reasons Aaron just discussed. It's clear as you point out, this industry's been really defined by the inability to stop investing, and the difficulty to monetize that investment. And I think now, everybody's looking at this 5G, and frankly, 5G plus 6G, and beyond, as the opportunity to really go get a chunk of that revenue, and Enterprise Edge is the target. >> And 5G is touching so many industries, and that kind of brings me, Aaron into Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got Industry 4.0, you've got our traditional industry and telco colliding. There's public policy. So, give us a teaser to Mobile World Congress 23, what's on deck at the show from Dell? >> Yeah, we're really excited about Mobile World Congress. This, as you know, is a massive event for the industry every year. And it's really the event that the whole industry uses to kick off this coming year. So, we're going to be using this obviously to talk to our customers and our partners about what Dell's looking to do, and what we're innovating on right now, and what we're looking to partner with them around. In the front of the house, we're going to be doin', we're going to be highlighting 13 different solutions and demonstrations to be able to show our customers what we're doing today, and show them the use cases, and put into action, so they get to actually look and feel, and touch, and experience what it is that we're working around. Obviously, meetings are important, everybody knows Mobile World Congress is the place to get those meetings and kickoff for the year. So, we're going to have, we're lookin' at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be lookin' to have across the industry with our customers and partners in the broader community. And of course, we've also got technology that's going to be in a variety of different partner spaces as well. So, you can come and see us in hall three, but we're also going to have technologies, kind of spread all over the floor. And of course, there's always theCUBE. You're going to be able to see us live all four days, all day, every day. You're going to be hearing our executives, our partners, our customers, talk about what Dell is doing to innovate in the industry, and how we're looking to leverage the broader, open ecosystem to be able to transform the network, and what we're lookin' to do. So, in that space, we're going to be focusing on what we're doing from an ecosystem perspective, our infrastructure focus. We'll be talking about what we're doing to support telco cloud transformation. And then finally, as we talked about earlier, how are we helping the lines of business within our telecoms monetize the opportunity? So, these are all different things we're really excited to be focusing on, and look forward to the event next month. >> Yeah, it's going to be awesome in Barcelona at the FITA, as you say, Dell's big presence in hall three, Orange is in there, Deutsche Telecom, Intel's in hall three. VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone, you got some great things to see there. Check that out, and of course, theCUBE, we are super excited to be collaborating with you, we got a great setup. We're in the walkway right between halls four and five, right across from the government of Catalonia, who are the host partners for the event, so there's going to be a ton of action there. Guys, can't wait to see you there, really appreciate your time today. >> Great, thanks. >> Alright, Mobile World Congress, theCUBE's coverage starts on February 27th right after the keynotes. So, first thing in the morning, east coast time, we'll be broadcasting is, Aaron said all week, Monday through Thursday in the show floor, check that out at thecube.net. siliconangle.com has all the written coverage, and go to dell.com, see what's happenin' there, have all the action from the event. Don't miss us, this is Dave Vellante, we'll see you there. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Telecommunic^ations is well north of a trillion-dollar business globally that provides critical services on which virtually everyone on the planet relies. Dramatic changes are occurring in the sector, and one of the most important dimensions of this change is the underlying infrastructure that powers global telecommunications networks. Telcos have been thawing out, if you will, their frozen infrastructure, modernizing. They're opening up. They're disaggregating their infrastructure, separating, for example, the control plane from the data plane and adopting open standards. Telco infrastructure is becoming software-defined, and leading telcos are adopting cloud-native microservices to help make developers more productive, so they can respond more quickly to market changes. They're embracing technology consumption models and selectively leveraging the cloud where it makes sense, and these changes are being driven by market forces, the root of which stem from customer demand. So from a customer's perspective, they want services, and they want them fast, meaning not only at high speeds, but also they want them now. Customers want the latest, the greatest, and they want these services to be reliable and stable with high quality of service levels, and they want them to be highly cost effective. Hello and welcome to this preview of Mobile World Congress 2023. My name is Dave Vellante and at this year's event, theCUBE has a major presence at the show, made possible by Dell Technologies, and with me, to unpack the trends in Telco and look ahead to MWC 23, Dennis Hoffman. He's the senior vice-president and general manager of Dell's telecom business and Aaron Chaisson, who is the vice-president of telecom and edge solutions marketing at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks so much for spending some time with me. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, glad to be here. So, Dennis, let's start with you. Telcos in recent history have been slow to deliver and to monetize new services, in a large part, because their purpose-built infrastructure can been somewhat of a barrier to respondent to these market forces. In many ways, this is what makes telecoms, really, this market, so exciting. So from your perspective, where is the action in this space? >> Yeah, the action, Dave, is kind of all over the place, partly because it's an ecosystem play. You know, I think it's been, as you point out, the disaggregation trend has been going on for a while. The opportunity's been clear, but it has taken a few years to get all of the vendors and all of the components that make up a solution, as well as the operators themselves, to a point where we can start putting this stuff together and actually achieving some of the promise. >> So, Aaron, for those who might not be as familiar with Dell's a activities in this area, you know, here we are just ahead of Mobile World Congress. It's the largest event for telecoms. What should people know about Dell, and what's the key message to this industry? >> Sure, yeah, I think everybody knows that there's a lot of innovation that's been happening in the industry of late. One of the major trends that we're seeing is that shift from more of a vertically-integrated technology stack to more of a disaggregated set of solutions, and that trend has actually created a ton of innovation that's happening across the industry, well, along technology vendors and providers, the telecoms themselves, and so one of the things that Dell's really looking to do is, as Dennis talked about, is build out a really strong ecosystem of partners and vendors that we're working closely together to be able to collaborate on new technologies, new capabilities, that are solving challenges that the networks are seeing today, be able to create new solutions built on those in order to be able to bring new value to the industry and then finally, we want to help both partners as well as our CSP providers activate those changes so that they can bring new solutions to market to be able to serve their customers, and so the key areas that we're really focusing on, with our customers, is technologies to help modernize the network to be able to capitalize on the value of open architectures and bring price performance to what they're expecting and availability that they're expecting today and then also partner with the lines of business to be able to take these new capabilities, produce new solutions and then deliver new value to their customers. >> Great, thank you, Aaron. So, Dennis, I have known you for a number of years. I've watched you. You are a trend spotter, and you're a strategic thinker, and I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze, and now you got got to make it happen. So how would you describe Dell's strategy in this market? >> Well, it's really two things, and I appreciate the comment. I'm not sure how much of a trend spotter I am, but I certainly enjoy, and I think I'm fascinated by what's going on in this industry right now. Our two main thrusts, Dave, are, first round, trying to catalyze that ecosystem, you know, be a force for pulling together a group of folks, vendors, that have been flying in fairly loose formation for a couple of years to deliver the kinds of solutions that move the needle forward and produce the outcomes that our network-operator customers can actually buy, and consume, and deploy, and have them be supported. The other thing is there's a couple of very key technology areas that need to be advanced here. This ends up being a much anticipated year, in telecom, because of the delivery of some open infrastructure solutions that have been being developed for years, with the Intel Sapphire Rapids program coming to market. We've of course got some purpose-built solutions on top of that for telecommunications networks, some expanded partnerships in the area of multi-cloud infrastructure, and so I would say the second main thrust is we've got to bring some intellectual property to the party. It's not just about pulling the ecosystem together, but those two things together really form the twin thrusts of our strategy. >> Okay, so as you point out, you're obviously not going to go alone in this market. It's way too broad. There's so many routes to market, partnerships, obviously, very, very important. So can you share a little bit more about the ecosystem and partners, maybe give some examples of some of the key partners that you'd be highlighting or working with, maybe at Mobile World Congress or other activities this year? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, as Aaron touched on. I'm a visual thinker. The way I think about this thing is a very, very vertical architecture is tipping sideways. It's becoming horizontal, and all of the layers of that horizontal architecture are really where the partnerships are at. So let's start at the bottom, silicon. The silicon ecosystem is very much focused on this market and producing very specific products to enable open, high-performance telecom networks. That's both in the form of host processors as well as accelerators. One layer up, of course, is the stuff that we're known for, subsystems, compute, storage, the hardware infrastructure that forms the foundation for telco clouds. A layer above that, all of the cloud software layer, the virtualization and containerization software and all of the usual suspects there, all of whom are very good partners of ours, and we're looking to expand that pretty broadly this year, and then at the top of the layer cake, all of the network functions, all of the VNFs and CNFs that were once kind of the top of proprietary stacks that are now opening up and being delivered as well-formed containers that can run on these clouds. So, you know, we're focusing on all of those, if you will, product partnerships, and there is a services wrapper around all of it, the systems integration necessary to make these systems part of a carrier's network, which, of course, has been running for a long time and needs to be integrated with in a very specific way, and so all of that together kind of forms the ecosystem. All of those are partners, and we're really excited about being at the heart of it. >> Interesting, it's not like we've never seen this movie before, which is sort of repeating itself in telco. Aaron, you heard my little intro up front about the need to modernize infrastructure. I wonder if I could touch on, you know, another major trend which we're seeing, is the cloud, and I'm talking about, not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. You know, telecom providers are looking to the public cloud for specific use cases. You think about, like, bursting for an iPhone launch or whatever but at the same time, these cloud vendors, they're sort of competing with telcos. They're providing, you know, local zones, for example, sometimes trying to do an end run on the telco connectivity services. So telecom companies, they have to find the right balance between what they own and what they rent, and I wonder if you could add some color as to what you see in the market and what Dell, specifically, is doing to support these trends. >> Yeah, I think the most important thing is what we're seeing, as you said, is these aren't things that we haven't seen before, and I think that telecom is really going through their own set of cloud transformations, and so one of the hot topics in the industry now is what is telco cloud and what does that look like going forward? And it's going to be a, as you said, a combination of services that they offer, services that they leverage, but at the end of the day, it's going to help them modernize how they deliver telecommunication services to their customers and then provide value-added services on top of that. From a Dell perspective, you know, we're really providing the technologies to provide the underpinnings to lay a foundation on which that network can be built, whether that's best-of-breed servers that are built and designed for the telecom environments. Recently we announced our, our Infra Block program in partnering with virtualization providers to be able to provide engineered systems that dramatically simplify how our customers can deploy, manage and lifecycle-manage throughout day-two operations, an entire cloud environment, and whether they're using Red Hat, whether they're using Wind River or VMware or other virtualization layers, they can deploy the right virtualization layer at the right part of their network to support the applications they're looking to drive, and Dell is looking to solve how they simplify and manage all of that, both from a hardware as well as a management software perspective. So this is really what Dell's doing to, again, partner with the broader technology community to help make that telco cloud a reality. >> Aaron, let's stay here for a second. I'm interested in some of the use cases that you're going after with customers. You've got edge infrastructure, remote work, 5G. Where's security fit? What are the focus areas for Dell, and can we double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's two main areas of telecommunication industry that we're talking to. One, we've really been talking about sort of the network buyer, how do they modernize the core, the network edge, the RAN capabilities, to deliver traditional telecommunication services and modernize that as they move into 5G and beyond. I think the other side of the business is telecoms are really looking, from a line of business perspective, to figure out how do they monetize that network and be able to deliver value-added services to their enterprise customers on top of these new networks. So you were just touching on a couple of things that are really critical. You know, in the enterprise space, AI and IoT is driving a tremendous amount of innovation out there, and there's a need for being able to support and manage edge compute at scale, be able to provide connectivity, like private mobility and 4G and 5G, being able to support things like mobile workforces and client capabilities to be able to access these devices that are around all of these edge environments of the enterprises, and telecoms are seen as that, as an opportunity for them to not only provide connectivity, but how do they extend their cloud out into these enterprise environments with compute, with connectivity, with client and connectivity resources, and even also provide protection for those environments as well. So these are areas that Dell's historically very strong at, being able to provide compute, being able to provide connectivity and being able to provide data protection and client services. We are looking to work closely with lines of businesses to be able to develop solutions that they can bring to market in combination with us to be able to serve their end user customers and their enterprises. So those are really the two key areas, not only network buyer, but being able to enable the lines of business to go and capitalize on the services they're developing for their customers. >> I think that line of business aspect is key. I mean, the telcos have had to sit back and provide the plumbing. Cost per bit goes down. Data consumption going through the roof. All the way over to the top guys, you know, had the field day with the data and the customer relationships, and now it's almost like the revenge of the telcos. (chuckles) Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell, if you, you know, break out the binoculars a little bit? >> Yeah, I think you hit it earlier. We've seen the movie before. This has happened in the IT data center. We went from proprietary vertical solutions to horizontal open systems. We went from client server to software-defined, open-hardware, cloud-native and you know, the trend is likely to be exactly that, in the telecom industry, because that's what the operators want. They're not naive to what's happened in the IT data center. They all run very large data centers, and they're trying to get some of the scale economies, some of the agility, the cost of ownership benefits for the reasons Aaron just discussed. You know, it's clear, as you point out, this industry's been really defined by the inability to stop investing and the difficulty to monetize that investment, and I think now everybody's looking at this 5G, and, frankly, 5G plus, 6G and beyond, as the opportunity to really go get a chunk of that revenue, and enterprise edge is the target. >> And 5G is touching so many industries, and that kind of brings me here into Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got industry 4.0. You've got, you know, our traditional industry and telco colliding. There's public policy. So give us a teaser to Mobile World Congress '23. What's on deck at the show for from Dell? >> Yeah, we're really excited about Mobile World Congress. This, as you know, is a massive event for the industry every year, and it's really the event that the whole industry uses to kick off this coming year. So we're going to be using this, obviously, to talk to our customers and our partners about what Dell's looking to do and what we're innovating on right now, and what we're looking to partner with them around. In the front of the house, we're going to be highlighting 13 different solutions and demonstrations to be able to show our customers what we're doing today and show them the use cases and put it into action, so they get to actually look and feel and touch and experience what it is that we're working around. Obviously, meetings are important. Everybody knows Mobile World Congress is the place to get those meetings and kick off for the year. You know, we're looking at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be looking to have across the industry with our customers and partners and the broader community, and, of course, we've also got technology that's going to be in a variety of different partner spaces as well. So you can come and see us in hall three, but we're also going to have technologies kind of spread all over the floor, and, of course, there's always theCUBE. You're going to be able to see us live all four days, all day, every day. You're going to be hearing our executives, our partners, our customers, talk about, you know, what Dell is doing to innovate in the industry and how we're looking to leverage the broader open ecosystem to be able to transform, you know, the network and what we're looking to do. So in that space, we're going to be focusing on what we're doing from an ecosystem perspective, our infrastructure focus. We'll be talking about what we're doing to support telco cloud transformation and then finally, as we talked about earlier, how are we helping the lines of business within our telecoms monetize the opportunity. So these are all different things we're really excited to be focusing on and look forward to the event next month. >> Yeah, it's going to be awesome In Barcelona at the Fira. As you say, Dell's big presence in Hall three. Orange is in there, Deutsche Telekom. Intel's in Hall three. VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone. You got great things to see there. Check that out and of course, theCUBE, we are super excited to be collaborating with you. We got a great setup. We're in the walkway, right between halls four and five, right across from the Government of Catalonia, who are the host partners for the event. So there's going to be a ton of action there. Guys, can't wait to see you there. Really appreciate your time today. >> Great, thanks. >> All right, Mobile World Congress, theCUBE's coverage starts on February 27th, right after the keynotes. So first thing in the morning, East coast time, we'll be broadcasting, as Aaron said, all week, Monday through Thursday, on the show floor. Check that out at thecube.net. Siliconangle.com has all the written coverage, and go to dell.com, see what's happening there. Have all the action from the event. Don't miss us. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)

foreign welcome to thecube's coverage of AWS re invent 2022. this is a part of our AWS executive Summit AT AWS re invent sponsored by Accenture I'm your host Lisa Martin I've got three guests here with me Christoph schulteis head of devops and infrastructure at Vodafone Germany joins us as well as IMAP baldasare the Accenture AWS business group Europe delivery lead attic Center and Philip schmuckel senior manager at Accenture technology we're going to be talking about what Vodafone Germany is doing in terms of its agile transformation the business and I.T gentlemen it's great to have you on thecube Welcome to the program thank you thanks for having us my pleasure Kristoff let's go ahead and start with you talk to us about what Vodafone Germany is doing in its transformation project with Accenture and with AWS certainly these are but let me first start with explaining what Vodafone does in general so Vodafone is one of the leading telephone and Technology service providers in Germany half of all German citizens are Vodafone customers using Vodafone technology to access the internet make calls and watch TV in the economic sector we provide connectivity for office farms and factories so this is vodafone's largest business and I.T transformation and we're happy to have several Partners on this journey with more than a thousand people working in scaled agile framework with eight Agile Release strings and one of the largest safe implementations in Europe why are we doing this transformation well not only since the recent uncertainties the Telco Market is highly volatile and there are a few challenges that Vodafone was facing in the last years as there are Market changes caused by disruptions from technological advances in competitors or changing customer customer expectations who for example use more of the top services like Netflix or Amazon Prime video what is coming up in the next wave is unknown so Technologies evolve continual disruption from non-tel causes to be expected and being able to innovate fast is the key Focus for everyone in order to be able to react to that we need to cope with that and do so in different aspects to become the leading digital technology company therefore Vodafone Germany is highly simplifying its products as well as processes for example introducing free product upgrades for customers we're driving the change from a business perspective and modernize the it landscape which we call the technology transformation so simply business-led but it driven for that Accenture is our integration partner and AWS provides the services for our platforms got it thank you for the background on the Vodafone the impact that it's making you mentioned the volatility in the Telecom market and also setting the context for what Vodafone Germany is doing with Accenture and AWS email I want to bring you into the conversation now talk to us about the partnership between Accenture and Vodafone in AWS and how is it set up to provide maximum value for customers yeah that's a great question actually well I mean working in Partnership allows obviously to bring in transparency and trust and these are key starting points for a program of this magnitude and a program like this comes out of strong willingness to change the game both internally and on the market so as you can imagine particular attention is required that's top level alignment in general when you implement a program like this you also need to couple the long-term vision of how you want to manage your customers what are the new products that you want to bring to the market with the long-term technology roadmap because the thing that you don't want to happen is that you invest many years and a lot of efforts and then when it comes the end of the journey you figure out that you have to restart a New Journey and then you enter in the NeverEnding Loop so obviously all these things must come together and they come together in what we call the power of three and it consists in AWS Vodafone and Accenture having a strategic Vision alignment and constant updates and most importantly the best of breed in terms of technology and also people so what we do in practice is uh we bring together Market understanding business Vision technical expertise energy collaboration and what is even more important we work as a unique team everybody succeeds here and this is a true win-win partnership more specifically Vodafone leads the Strategic Direction obviously they understand the market they are close to their customers AWS provides all the expertise around the cloud infrastructure insights on the roadmap and this is a key element elasticity both technical but also Financial and the then Accenture comes with its ability to deliver with the strong industry expertise flexibility and when you combine all these ingredients together obviously you understand it's easy to succeed together the power of three it sounds quite compelling it sounds like a very partnership that has a lot of flexibility elasticity as you mentioned and obviously the customer at the end of the day benefits tremendously from that Kristoff I'd like to bring you back into the conversation talk to us about the unified unified platform approach how is walk us through how Vodafone is implementing it with AWS and with Accenture so the applications that form the basis for the transformation program were originally pursuing all kinds of approaches for deployment and use of AWS services in order to support faster adoption and optimize the usage that I mentioned before and we have provided the Vodafone Cloud framework that has been The Trusted platform for several projects within the it in Germany as a side effect the framework facilitates the compliance with Vodafone security requirements and the unified approach also has the benefit that someone who is moving from one team to another will find a structure that looks familiar the best part of the framework though is the operative rights deployment process that helps us reducing the time from implementing for example a new stage from a few weeks to me hours and that together with improvements of the cicd pipeline greatly helped us reducing the time to speed up something and deploy the software on it in order to reach our Target kpis the unified platform provides all kinds of setups like AWS eks and the ecosystem that is commonly used with coping dentists like service mesh monitoring logging and tracing but it can also be used for non-continental erased applications that we have and provide the integration with security monitoring and other tools at the moment we are in contact with other markets of Vodafone to globally share our experience in our code which makes introducing a similar system into other markets straightforward we are also continuously improving our approach and the completely new version of the framework is currently being introduced into the program Germany is doing is really kind of setting the stage as you mentioned Christopher other parts of the business who want to learn from so that's a great thing there that that what you're building is really going to spread throughout the organization and make a positive impact Philip let's bring you into the conversation now let's talk about how you're using AWS specifically to build the new Vodafone Cloud integration platform talk to us about that as part of this overall transformation program sure and let's make it even more specific let's talk API management so looking at the program and from a technology point of view what it really is it is a bold step for Vodafone it's rebuilding huge parts of the infrastructure of their business ID infrastructure on AWS it's Greenfield it's new it's a bold step I would say and then if you put the perspective of API management or integration architecture what I call it it's a unique opportunity at the same time so what it what it gives you is the the opportunity to build the API management layer or an API platform with standardized apis right from the get-go so from the beginning you can build the API platform on top which is in contrast what we see throughout the industry where we see huge problems at our clients at other engagements that try to build these layers as well but they're building them on Legacy so that really makes it unique here for Vodafone and a unique opportunity to we have this API first platform built as part of the transformation program so what we have been built is exactly this platform and as of today there is more than 50 standardized apis throughout the application landscape already available to give you a few examples there is an API where I can change customer data for instance I can change the payment method of a customer straight from an API or I can reboot a customer equipment right from it from an API to fix a network issue other than that of course I can submit an order to order one of vodafone's gigabit internet offerings so on top of the platform there's a developer portal which gives me the option to explore all of the apis yeah in a convenient way in a portal and that's yeah that's developer experience meaning I can log into this portal look through the apis understand what I what I need and just try it out directly from the portal I see the response of an API live in the portal and this is it is really in contrast to what what we've seen before where you would have a long word document a cumbersome spreadsheet a long lasting process to get your hands on and this really gives you the opportunity to just go in try out an API and see how it works so it's really developer experience and a big step forward here then yeah how have we built this platform of course it's running on AWS it's Cloud native it's using eks but what I want to point out here is three principles that that we applied where the first one is of course the cloud native principle meaning we using AKs we are using containers we have infrastructure scales so we aim for every component being Cloud native being meant to be run in the cloud so our infrastructure will sleep at night to save Vodafone cost and it will wake up for the Christmas business where Vodafone intends to do the biggest business and scale of its platform second there is the uh the aim for open API specifications what we aim for is event non-vendor-specific apis so it should not matter whether there's an mdocs backend there's a net tracker back end or an sap Behind These apis it is really meant to decouple the different Business Systems of of a Vodafone by these apis that can be applied by a new custom front-end or by a new business to business application to integrate these apis last but not least there's the automate everything so there's infrastructure as code all around our platform where where I would say the biggest magic of cloud is if we were to lose our production environment lose all apis today it will take us just a few minutes to get everything back and whatever everything I mean redeploy the platform redeploy all apis all services do the configuration again and it will be back in a few minutes that's impressive as downtime is so costly for so many different reasons I think we're gonna know when the vision of this transformation project when it's been achieved how are you going to know that okay so it's kind of flipping the perspective a bit uh maybe uh when I joined Vodafone in in late 2019 I would say the vision for Vodafone was already set and it was really well well put out there it was lived in in the organization it was for Vodafone to become a digital company to become a digital service provider to to get the engineering culture into the company and I would say this Vision has not changed until today maybe now call it a North star and maybe pointing out two big Milestones that have been achieved with this transformation program so we've talked about the safe framework already so with this program we wrote out the one of the biggest safe implementations in the industry which is a big step for Vodafone in its agile Journey as of today there's the safe framework supporting more than 1 000 FTE or 1000 colleagues working and providing value in the transformation program second example or second big milestone was the first go-life of the program so moving stuff to production really proving it works showcasing to the business that it it is actually working there is actually a value provided or constant value provided with a platform and then of course you're asking for next steps right uh talking next steps there is a renewed focus on value and A Renewed focus on value between Accenture and Vodafone means focus on what really provides the most value to Vodafone and I would like to point out two things here the first being migrate more customers scale the platform really prove the the the the the cloud native platform by migrating more customers to it and then second it enables you to decommission the Legacy Stacks decommissioning Legacy Stacks is why we are doing it right so it's migrating to the new migrating to the new platform so last but not least maybe you can hear it we will continue this journey together with with Vodafone to become a digital company or to say that their own words from Telco to TECO I love that from Telco to technology gentlemen thank you so much for joining us on thecube today talking about the power of three Accenture AWS Vodafone how you're really enabling Vodafone to transform into that digital technology company that consumers at the end of the day that demanding consumers want we appreciate your insights and your time thank you so much thank you for having us my pleasure for my guests I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube's coverage of the AWS executive Summit AT AWS re invent sponsored by Accenture thanks for watching

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. This is "theCube". We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're here at a live event, hybrid event, two sets. We had two remote studios prior to the event, over 100 interviews. Really excited to have George Elissaios here. He's the director of product management for EC2 Edge, really interesting topic at AWS. George, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So, everybody's talking about Edge, IoT, EC2. What's the scope of your portfolio, your responsibility? >> Yeah, well, our vision here at AWS is to really bring the power of the AWS platform wherever customers need it. AWS wherever our customers want it is our long-term vision. And we have a bunch of products in this space that help us do that and help us enable our customers whatever their use case is. So we have things like Wavelength. I know we talked about Wavelength before here in "theCube", where we bring full AWS service at the edge of the 5G network, so with 5G edge computing in partnership with telcos worldwide, our partnership with Verizon in the US has been flourishing. We're up to, I think, 15 or more Wavelength zones right now in many of the major cities in the US, but also in Japan and Korea, and in Europe with Vodafone. So that's one of the portfolio kind of offerings. And that helps you as a customer of AWS if you want to have the best latency to mobile devices, whether they are sensors, or mobile phones, or what have you. But we're also feeling out that Edge portfolio with local zones. Earlier today in Werner's keynote, we announced that we're going to launch another 30 local zones in 20 new countries, everywhere from South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe, obviously. So a lot of expansion there. Very excited about that. And that is kind of a similar offering, but it basically brings you closer to customers in metropolitan areas over the internet. >> So, Wavelength's a big feature. George, I want to get just to touch on it because I think latency comes up a lot in Edge conversations, low latency issues, whether it's cars, factories. You guys gave a demo yesterday to the press corps in the press room, I was there, where you had someone in San Francisco from the Opera and someone in person here in Vegas, and you had 13 milliseconds going back and forth demoing, real time- >> Collaboration. >> The benefit of low latency in remote. It wasn't next door. It was San Francisco. This is kind of the purpose of what Edge is about. Can you explain what that means, that demo, why it was important, and what you were trying to show, and how does it mean for the Edge? >> So there is multiple use cases. One of them is human collaboration, right? Like, we spent the last two years of our lives over conferences and kind of like the teleconferences, and trying to talk over each other and unmute ourselves desperately. But existing solutions kind of work, generally, for most of the things that we do, but when it comes to music collaboration where milliseconds matter, it's a lot harder with existing solutions to get artists to collaborate when they're hundreds of miles away. Last night, we saw a really inspiring demo, I think, of how two top tier musicians, one located in San Francisco and one located in Vegas, can collaborate in opera, which is one of the most precise art forms in the music world. There are no beats in opera to kind of synchronize, so you really need to play off each other, right? So we provided a latency between them of less than 30 milliseconds, which translates, if you're thinking about audio or if you're thinking about the speed of sound, that's like being in the same stage. And that was very inspiring. But there's also a lot of use cases that are machine to machine communications, where even lower latencies matter, and we can think of latencies down to one millisecond, like single digit milliseconds when it comes to, for example, vehicles or robots, and things like that. So we're, with our products, we're enabling customers to drive down that latency, but also the jitter, which is the variation of latency. Especially in human communications, that is almost more important than latency itself. Your mind can adapt to latency, and you can start predicting what's going to happen, but if I'm keep changing that for you, that becomes even harder. >> Well, this is what I want to get to because you got outcomes and applications like this opera example. That's an application, I guess. So working backwards from the application, that's one thing, but now people are really starting to trying to figure out, "What is the Edge?" So I have to ask you, what is AWS's Edge? Is it Outpost, Wavelength? What do people buy to make the Edge work? >> Well, for us, is providing a breadth of services that our customers can either use holistically or combine multiple of those. So a really good example, for example, is DISH Wireless. I'm sure you know we're building with DISH the first in the world mobile network, 5G mobile network fully on cloud, right? So these combines Outposts and combines local zones in order to distribute the 5G network across nationwide. And different parts of their applications live in different edges, right? The local zone, the Outputs, and the region itself. So we have our customers... You know, I talked about how local zones is going to be, you know, in total, 45 cities in the world, right? We're already in 15 in the U.S. We're going to do another 30. But customers might still come, and say, "Oh, why are you not," you know, "in "in Costa Rica?" Well, we'll have Outposts in Costa Rica. So you could build your own offering there, or you could build on top of Outputs while you distribute the rest of your workload in existing AWS offering. So to answer your question, John, there is no single answer. I think that it is per use case and per workload that customers are going to combine or choose which one of- >> Okay, so let's go through local zones. Explain what a local zone is real quick. I know we covered it a bit last year with the virtual event, but local zones are now part of the nomenclature of the AWS language. >> Yes. >> And we know what a region is, right? So regions are regions. What's a local zone? >> When your region's saying new availability zones, and then we're just (chuckles)- >> You got availability zones. Now you got local zones. Take us through the topology, if you will, of how to think about this. >> Right, so a local zone is a fully-managed AWS infrastructure deployment. So it's owned and managed and operated by AWS. And because of that, it offers you the same elasticity, and security, and all of the goodies of the cloud, but it's positioned closer to your end customers or to your own deployment. So it's positioned in the local urban, metropolitan or industrial center closer to you. So if you think about the U.S., for example, we have a few regions, like, in the East Coast and in the West Coast, but now, we're basically extending these regions, and we're bringing more and more services to 15 cities. So if you are in Miami, there is a local zone there. If you are in LA, there is two locals zones actually in LA. That enables customers to run two different types of workloads. One is these distributed clouds or distributed Edge kind of workload that we've been hearing more and more about. Think of gaming, for example, right? Like, we have customers that are, like Supercell, that need to be closer to the gamers, wherever they are. So they're going to be using a bunch of local zones to deploy. And also, we have these hyper-local use cases, where we're talking, for example, about Netflix that are enabling in LA their creative artists to connect locally and get like as low as single millisecond latencies. So local zone is like an availability zone, but it's closer to you. It offers the same scalability, the same elasticity, the same security and the same services as the AWS cloud. And it connects back to the regions to offer you the full breadth of the platform. >> So just to clarify, so the Edge strategy essentially is to bring the cloud, AWS, the primitives, the APIs, to where the customers are in instances where they either can't move or won't move their resources into the cloud, or there's no connectivity? >> Right, we have a bunch of use cases where customers either need to be there because of regulation or because of some data gravity, so data is being generated in a specific place and you need to locally process it, or we'll have customers in this distributed use case. But I think that you're pointing out a very important thing, which is a common factor across all of these offerings. It's it is the cloud. It's not like a copycat of the cloud. It's the same API. It's the same services that you already know and use, et cetera. So extending the cloud rather than copying it around is our vision, and getting those customers who, well, connectivity obviously needs to be there. We were offering AWS Private 5G. We talked about it yesterday. >> Now, a premise that we've had is that a lot of Edge use cases will be driven by AI inferencing. And so... First of all, is that a reasonable premise, that's growing, we think, very quickly, and it has huge potential. What does the compute, if that's the correct premise, what does the compute look like for that type of workload? >> That is a great premise, and that's why we think that the model that we're offering is so powerful, because you have the Edge and the cloud fully cooperating and being connected together. You know, the Edge is a resource that's more limited than the full cloud in the AWS region. So when you're doing inferencing, what you really want to do is you want to train your models back up in the region where you get more scalability and the best prices. You know, you have the full scale of AWS. But for the latency-sensitive parts of your applications, you want to push those to the Edge. So when you're doing the actual inferencing, not the training of the models- >> Real time. Yeah. >> Real time, you push that to the Edge, whether that's if your connectivity is 5G, you can push that into a Wavelength zone. If your connectivity is wired, you can push it into a local zone. If you really need it to be in your data center, you can push it in your Outposts. So you see how our kind of like building out for all of those use cases. >> But in those instances, I'm interested in what the compute looks like, 'cause I presume it's got to be low power, low cost, super high performance. I mean, all of those things that are good for data-driven workloads. >> Right, the power, if we think here, is the same compute that you know and love in the cloud. So the same EC2 instance types, the EBS volumes, the S3 for storage, or RDS for your databases and EMR clusters. You can use the same service. And the compute is the same powerful all the way down from the hardware up to the service. >> And is the promise to customers that eventually those... It's not all of those services, right? I mean, you go to Outposts today, it continues to grow. >> Continuing to grow, yeah. Right, so but conceptually, as many services you could possibly push to the Edge, you intend to do so? >> We are pushing services according to customer requests, but also there is a nuance here. The nuance is that you push down the services that are truly latency-sensitive. You don't need to push everything down to the Edge when you're talking about latency- >> Like, what's an example of what you wouldn't push down? >> So management tools, right? So when you're doing monitoring and management, yeah, you don't need these to be at the Edge. You can do that, and you can scale that. Or, you know, batch processing, it doesn't have to be at the Edge because it's, by definition, not online, not like a latency service. So we're keeping those, like AWS Batch, for example, that's in the region because, you know, that's where customers really use it. But things like EC2, EBS, EMR, we're pushing those to the Edge because those are more- >> We got two minutes left. I want to get the Outposts kind of update. I remember when Outposts launched. It was really a seminal moment for re:Invent. Hybrid. "Oh, Andy Jassy said hybrid." Yeah. "I'll never say hybrid." But now hybrid's kind of translated into all cloud operations. Now you got local zones. A lot's changed from Amazon Web Services standpoint since Outposts launched. Local zones, things are happening. 5G, DISH. Now what's the status of Outposts? Are you guys happy with it? What has it morphed into? Is it still the same game? What is Outposts today, vis-a-vis what people may think it is or isn't? >> Yeah, we've been focusing in what we're talking about, building out a number of services that customers request, but also being in more and more places. So I think we're in more than 60, now, countries with Outposts. We've seen very good adoption. We've seen very good feedback. You know, half of my EBCs have been on Outposts, but this year, I think that one of the most exciting announcements were the Outposts servers. So the smaller form factors that enable an additional use cases, like for example, retail or even building your 5G networks. You know, one of our partners, Mavenir, is moving their 5G core, so the smarts of the network that does all the routing, on Outposts servers, and we can distribute those all over the place. So, we're keeping on the innovation. We're keeping on the expansion. And we've been getting very good customer feedback- >> So all steam ahead, full steam ahead? >> Full steam ahead plus 10%. (John laughs) >> All right, guys. Thank you so much, George. Really appreciate it. We're seeing the cloud expand. The definition is growing, kind of like the universe, John. Dave Vellante for John John Furrier. You're watching "theCube" at AWS re:Invent, the leader in high tech coverage globally. We'll be right back.

>>Oh, well, the back to the cubes coverage of ADA bus reinvent, 2021 executive seminar, I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. We've got a great segment here on the modernization. We were ringing in the success with Amazon web services, Vodafone digital in the UK, an example of modern engineering examples using Amazon, the cloud, looking at where we're cloud native is actually changing the game two great guests, Ben Collie, head, head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK, and Maynard Williams, managing director of center. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on the cube and sharing the story. >>Thanks, John. Appreciate it. So >>I gotta, I gotta ask you guys one of the main themes that we've been covering all year and even even pre pandemic, we, we saw the cloud native wave coming pretty hard containers. Great for modernization sets the table. You seeing things like Kubernetes and now serverless changing the game on all aspects of how modernization is happening. And everyone's talking about application modernization shift left all great for business, but you have to, you have to kind of take care of things under the, under the covers a little bit, the infrastructure, making sure the engineering teams are all set. So this has been a top topic. This is kind of what you guys are doing. Can you guys explain to me the needs that Vodafone has, um, that brought about this transformation? >>Yeah, sure. Um, so we we've been on this transformation for around four years, but you're absolutely right. The, uh, the pandemic has been a real catalyst for, for all kinds of organizations like ours around the world. Uh, so we were really driving a digital first agenda for quite a long time. Uh, and that, that came as, as you just said, John, it, it really did start with the, uh, the cloud hosted, uh, and then, uh, and then moving and realizing the difference between that and become native to the, to the cloud and really leveraging the services, uh, like AWS, um, in order to really drive pace, uh, and, and the outcomes that we needed for the business. Uh, we've seen a huge change over the last, uh, purely over the last 18 months, really. Um, our daily traffic, uh, these days is as it was on our highest ever, uh, uh, like an iPhone launch day, for example, um, before the pandemic, is I a daily traffic these days. And so that scalability and flexibility and that leveraging those services has been absolutely fundamental to supporting the, the changing needs and expectations of our customers. >>You know, back in the old days, uh, Maynard, you know, it's oh yeah, black Friday surge, you need the cloud to scale up and be flexible. Agile elastic, you know, scale is definitely now table stakes. And if you're not dealing with scale and some sort of either SRE fashion or whatever, you, you really ain't going to be behind the curve, but the next level that's being discussed is how do you leverage the scale for not just customer experience and business value, but we're talking about system architecture, kind of thinking there's kind of, this is our system design is now a big part of it. Can you talk about how this kind of threads together? Because we always talk about consumer experience, customer experience CX, but now there's a new system was mindset out there. Can you kind of share your vision on that >>Thing that stands out for me is if I look at digital, we've designed it to a point where the scale is just as you say, it's the table stakes, and only for launch with something that two years ago needed to be planned and thought about. And it's now absolutely routine. We think about the business side of it, but a big increase in scale really is seamless. But if I look at the full stack, we're still connected into some of the older backend systems, um, where any production, uh, they were on prime actually tasks. This is on AWS now, which is a big step forward, but when you've got to manage scaling in a way that translates from backend systems that are on premises on prime, and therefore we can't lastingly scale through to the front tab where we have to be able to scale up very seamlessly and balancing that across with, uh, an architecture that supports that level of scale and makes it so seamless on something like, as you say, iPhone launches or back Friday, any product coming out is actually key to the way we've architected that. >>So you're saying that essentially AWS combined with Vodafone worked on this solution that was more of a cloud native solutions that the innovation here, can you just summarize and unpack a little bit of what is the innovation, what problems did you solve together with essentially those and Vodafone? What was the core challenge? Yes. >>I think that the core is actually, how do you get to the point where, um, at the scaling is seamless, where you can move from being on the cloud to cloud native has been, just touched on what the same time you're actually connected into an enterprise state where the production systems are all on prem and don't have that ability to scale in the same fraction. So you can't, for example, push you to load into, uh, an on-prem backend system and, and simply expected to scale in the same fashion. So between our three organizations architecting something that is robust scales, we usable and takes away a load of pieces that actually were quite complex two years ago. And turns them into just routine has been a big step forward. >>And I want to get your reaction to this because, you know, you're, you're the you're on the, on the front line saying, Hey, be more agile at Basel saying, be agile, do different left, take that hill. Um, it's, it's easier said than done. Talk about what goes on when you have to implement and the stakes involved. Again, there's always the old way, new way. Can you just kind of give some color on what's going on? What's your perspective showing? >>And as I just said, that the real benefits and the story behind this was the ability to launch an iPhone. For example, as a event for Vodafone previously was weeks and months of preparation and design and testing and confidence building. And now it really is, it just happens. Uh, and we watched things scale and, and, and then down again, gracefully, um, and really do celebrate the, the another level up, if you like the leveling up of us as an organization, allowing our commercial colleagues to, to launch propositions or to launch campaigns without needing us to be involved anymore, because they're confident, we're all that things will, will flex like that. But you're absolutely right, that, that the changes and the demands of us as a, as a team, but also the, the expectations of our stakeholders, uh, have been changing for quite a long time now. Uh, and we're really excited now to be able to meet them by leveraging the services that we're discussing. >>Yeah. So the guys say said launched the iPhone, no big deal routine, hit the pub. Everyone's happy having a good day. >>Uh, >>Let's get into the solution, how it works. Talk about what's going on with the covers. How does this all work? Can you take us through, what's the state of the art of the, of the solution? Sure. >>Well, uh, as you mentioned earlier, we were very much inclined to serverless these days. So we rolled out fire gate, um, a few, uh, uh, started about 18 months ago. Um, and that really has, um, freed us up in, into all kinds of, um, uh, scalability, uh, measures, but also really about, about reusing and applying this across much more than just the, the engineering or the digital part of Vodafone, where we, where we began. So that's been a really big part of our agenda, uh, and that's, that's informed all kinds of things, the ability to scale and flex like that, and the architecture beneath us, um, and the containerization and orchestration that that goes along with that has really enabled us to, um, to flex that, uh, ability to, to reuse it across other areas. And because of that, now it's driven our hiring policy or tooling and, uh, technical, uh, our procedural approaches, uh, it all now leverages that ability to move a patient, to be able to scale, uh, not just in, um, uh, infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in ability to deliver for the business commercially as well. Uh, and this is all now informed on our direction. I think, as an organization, >>It's interesting, you mentioned far you far gate than a trigger of events happens. People get excited, opens up new doors of opportunities as a chain reaction from that. Um, talk about the impact to the staff and the operations, because you almost, it's motivating at some level you get new things happening, but you're actually making things go better and faster, cheaper. >>Yeah. Uh, well, the, the impact is one, uh, because we're on a journey at Vodafone of this transformation, really becoming a technology business first and foremost, rather than a telco classically like our competitors, uh, we're able to really drive cultural change as well. So the impact on our people is a really, it's been particularly engaging. One with, we've also been part of, uh, a real recruitment drive. We've just announced 7,000 new, uh, roles, uh, joining our team across Europe and that these are engineering roles, um, driving more of the same, uh, behaviors and principles of a modern software engineering business like ours. Uh, and that really is fueled by our, our ability to experiment and try, but become cloud native and, and, uh, employ these services in the way that they're designed to be >>Maynard. I'd like to get your take on this and, and, and shift to a topic around how, what this all means. Um, if you zoom out and you say, okay, with the pandemic, it's become a mobile virtual hybrid. Now world around work play, all those lines are kind of blurring. It's not as clean as it used to be. Oh, the network segmented over here. This is over here. These legacy systems were built around the notion of things when nicely segmented. Um, now you have this whole kind of mashup, if you will, of how you just want to work, right. There's mobilization is a huge thing. So access identity, these are things that we're all kind of set up nicely before the pandemic, or at least, you know, not as, uh, stable, maybe not scalable, but what's your take on this? What's the big picture what's all happening. >>I think, I mean, the pandemic has accelerated a set of changes that were already happening anyway. And I'd say the other particles is under the covers. A lot of the work's been done has been to create the microservices that stitch together to produce those journeys, but, you know, running the containers. And so that, that opens up an omni-channel future that starts to move away from saying actually businesses are organized around the environment in which they're serving. Is it a retail store? Is it, is it online that additional and so on, and actually into much more of a space where you're building the best journeys and those journeys come and are served through digital or through a call center or through a store and so on. And that makes a huge difference because the focus on improving the customer's experience has been enormous. And I think that's one of the other parts that come out of the whole cloud native setup. >>And the ability to experiment has been iteratively and endlessly improving the experience for the customer. And that's, that's a, that's a massive step forward. So we can talk about the fact that we deploy a huge number of times more frequently than we did even a year ago, uh, or the, you know, our quality has improved by a massive percentage and so on. And I think the thing that's really interesting is the improvement in the experience and the endless improvement and iteration of that, because we can make lots and lots of small changes and do every day. That's a big one, >>You know, what's interesting Ben, and let's get your reaction on this. And if you don't mind to just add a little color to this, this is just another example of reports that we've been talking with folks on where it's not about just replatforming to the cloud. It's refactoring the business, uh, with, with the engineering, the modernization. And so there's two things that go on one, you see the efficiencies and new doors open up new things are happening. People are getting excited, good, some good Mo morale boosting things are becoming clear, but then there's actually new business, new business value being created or new propositions engineering propositions. Can you share from a digital standpoint, because this seems to be the new role of the digital person, whether it's engineering or on the business side, make things run faster, cheaper, and better, and then create new opportunities, new propositions, what's your >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's fundamentally around pace of delivery. Uh, being able to, as, as may not says, uh, moving from a world, uh, two or three years ago where we were deploying once every two or three months, uh, this is a website once every two or three months where we were, uh, to now it's happening all the time every day. Uh, it's, it's, it's a skill that we've given us as an organization that we couldn't have leveraged before. And what we're able to do with that now is experiment our way and iterate our way to new value streams, as you say, but also trial and error. What we already know, uh, or expects to be true with our customers much, much more easily and much, much more frequently, very little a barrier to production or friction between us and the customer these days, and the almost instant response and feedback we get from customers. Um, we, we learn constantly about because of that. And it's, uh, it's become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases where they work well, they worked and are much more experimental initiative. Uh, we, most of the propositions we know about, but also to the experiments, um, and unknowns in our future. Um, that also now unlocked, >>That's a great point. You mentioned about the whole timing of, you know, the old way, months, weeks, just for website stuff, uh, Maynard. And if you guys can share this new world order is actually pretty exciting, but also daunting if you're not like in the water, so to speak, right? So, you know, some people are actually, you know, putting their toe in the water, they're experimenting, but it's a game changer. I mean, a significant step up of value. What's your advice about solutions and they're not easy. I mean, you just got to get your hands around the sensor. You guys have been doing a lot more of these projects is seeing more and more of these, these kinds of partnerships, uh, and the value is there. Can you guys share your, your, uh, opinion and advice to folks out there watching saying, how do I do this and is it going to be worth it? Is that bridge to the future there? >>I mean, I think there's a mechanical piece. How do I enable this? And we can talk about dev ops and moving to cloud native, and actually some of the, some of the process side of as an organization, how do I get really comfortable with deploying very frequently and it being low risk and routine. And so the other part for me, which we sort of haven't touched on is as much as we talk about experimentation, it's about the data and the analytics and the knowledge that we create of that. So the, the, the small changes we're making are highly scientific. And when we think about actually understanding how we're optimizing experiences, that's all about the whole set of data points that I'm pinning up. And so I'll take two parts is know the, the journey we've been on here is, is about enablement. It's about moving the architecture. It's about moving the ways of working so that a lot of things that were hard or required thinking about two years ago on that quality team. But the other part of it is understanding the data and having the analytics capability and being able to make a very scientific experiment where you can see the result in the day-to-day >>Ben, what's your reaction advice to folks watching as they modernize exciting, challenging. It's a lot of hard work, but what's it look, it's the end game, >>All of those things, yes. I'd say it's, um, more than anything, it's a necessity these days we have to embark on this journey. It is, it is daunting. And, and of course, a lot of large organizations like ours, we were successful for doing things in a particular way, uh, have built up a lot of, uh, protection mechanisms for doing, for making sure we protect that. And so to come at it from a new angle is, is obviously daunting. And it's very challenging as well. There is an immune system in all of our organizations that is real, but I'll deal with it. Um, but the, the real, um, success behind, uh, the real, I think the reasons behind a lot of our success has been beat by being able to quickly prove value to quickly prove that outcomes are deliverable and achievable. Um, and then to build on those and iterate on it. And as, as I said, it's, it's about being able to move at pace for us in Vodafone. It's about leveraging our scale. We're a huge organization. Um, and we're, we're now coming together as one to really make sure that we do just lean on that scale more than we have them. Yeah, that's really about iterating, as I said, and, and, um, finding things that work, keep doing it, finding things that hold you back and get rid of them as quickly as you can, uh, is what I would say for us. >>It's interesting. You mentioned the scale. The thing about the cloud is when I hear the common pattern is it takes advantage of the strengths of your environment. You know, so every environment is a bit different, but you guys have the scale. I have to ask you while you're here. What are some of the anecdotal comments that kind of, you hear from folks that make you happy? When about the results? I think saying, Hey man, I'm not even seeing this anymore, or, wow. This is faster. What's some of the sound bites that you guys take as proof points of the success of this project. >>Yeah. It's, uh, I'd say it's mainly an R there's two things I would say, uh, the ability to rely less on it delivery if you like. So empowering our commercial business to make changes for themselves in a safe and secure manner. So providing these self-service capabilities, we've started to see a real pace about our commercial business, as well as our technology business. Uh, but also the, the time it takes to get things out is probably one of the biggest, uh, really tangible results and outcomes for us at the moment. Um, just the sheer amount of things we can release to production, uh, in, in sorts of short space, space of time really does bring to life, our ability to now trial and error, to AB test a Canary deploy. Things like that is really, um, it's been a real superpower for our, um, transformation, I think yes. >>Kind of kidding about can't make time to go to the pub, but in reality, it's free time freeing up people from doing those tasks that were slower shifting that value. >>Yeah. Whereas as you mentioned, Johnny, it really is much more than a technical journey. This is a cultural one as well for a lot of organizations and, um, by being more connected, by being more connected to the outcomes or the value that you add into production, uh, it really does drive a new culture and engagement across our teams. You know, if it's six months between writing a line of code and seeing it in production by up no sense of ownership or pride in what I've done there, but if I can deploy code immediately see an impact good or bad, um, then, uh, I really do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I'm driving to, to the business and to our customers. So there really is a great cultural, >>Yeah. I remember Andy Jassy last year when he was a sea of AWS on stage and talked about that dynamic of the teamwork, people rowing in the right direction. Um, feeling part of it may know this is a cultural shift on how companies do business. I know center I've covered probably a dozen or so killer projects that have just been awesomely new and kind of different, but successful built on the cloud. So a lot of replatforming refactoring you're in the front lines, working with, uh, companies that essentially what's the pattern that you see that's that's happening right now. What's the, what's your view of the current market? >>Um, I mean, I think there's a huge shift to this, that this journey too has been part of the move from being on the cloud to being proud nature. I'm really getting that value because there's a, um, a kind of, almost a example. I see there's a light bulb moment where ownership of what you put in production means that you move away from a model of we change code because either the business tell us too, because they have a functional requirement or because something's broken. When we get into the model of that, I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of. That's not leave. And you suddenly see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability, all of those things improving. And so if, if I look more generally that cultural shift is it is an evolution that organizations go through and it starts with actually delivering it in a more agile way. At some large scale, you see agility moving up into kind of business agility and starting to affect things like budgeting cycles and the kind of corporate functions. If you like that tend to sit around, uh, you know, supporting Pete pieces of delivery. And there's a lot more of that happening at the moment, a load with more organizations pushing into being properly cloud native and transforming rather than the kind of first wave, which was the shift onto the cloud. Now it's actually, that's really leveraged what we've got with the, >>Yeah. And you guys essentially have been riding on the wave of AWS and the cloud for many, many years. We've been covering it. Ben great success story. Thanks for coming on the cube, a head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK, great example of modern engineering at work using AWS in Europe. Uh, thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing your story. Maynor thank you for also coming on and the work you're doing at Accenture and AWS. Thank you. Thanks John. The cube coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 executive summit. I'm John furry, your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021 Executive Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the modernization, where we're ringing in the success with Amazon Web Services and Vodafone Digital in the UK. An example of modern engineering, examples using Amazon, the cloud. Looking at where cloud-native is actually changing the game. We got two great guests, Ben Connolly, Head of Digital Engineering at Vodafone UK, and Maynard Williams, Managing Director of Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing the story. >> Thanks John, appreciate the invite. >> So I got to ask you guys, one of the main themes that we've been covering all year, and even pre-pandemic, we saw the cloud-native wave coming pretty hard. Containers, great for modernization, sets the table. You seeing things like Kubernetes, and now Serverless changing the game on all aspects of how modernization is happening. And everyone's talking about application modernization, shift left, all great for business, but you have to kind of take care of things under the covers a little bit. The infrastructure, making sure the engineering teams are all set. So this has been a top topic. This is kind of what you guys are doing. Can you guys explain to me the needs that Vodafone has that brought about this transformation? >> Yeah, sure. So we we've been on this transformation program for years, but you're absolutely right. The pandemic has been a real catalyst for all kinds of organizations like ours around the world. So we were really driving digital first agenda for quite a long time. And that that came as you just said John, it really did start with the cloud hosted and then moving and realizing the difference between that and become native to the cloud and really leveraging the services like AWS in order to really drive pace and the outcomes that we needed for the business. We've seen a huge change purely over the last 18 months really. Our daily traffic these days is as it was on our highest ever like an iPhone launch day, for example, before the pandemic is daily traffic these days. And so that scalability and flexibility and that leveraging those services has been absolutely fundamental to supporting the changing needs and expectations of our customers. >> You know, back in the old days, Maynard oh yeah, Black Friday surge, you need the cloud to scale up and be flexible, agile, elastic. The scale is definitely now table stakes. And if you're not dealing with scale and some sort of either SRE fashion or whatever, you're really going to be behind the curve. But the next level that's being discussed is how do you leverage the scale for not just customer experience and business value but we're talking about system architecture, kind of thinking there's going to, this is our system design is now a big part of it. Can you talk about how this kind of threads together? Because we always talk about consumer experience, customer experience CX, but now there's a new systems mindset out there. Can you kind of share your vision on that. >> Yeah, I think the thing that stands out for me is if I look at digital, we've designed it to a point where the scale is just as you say, it's the table stakes. And iPhone launch was something that two years ago needed to be planned and thought about. And it's now absolutely routine. We think about the business side of it but a big increase in scale really is seamless. But if I look at the full stack, we're still connected into some of the older backend systems where we're in production they're on prime actually tests is on AWS now, which is a big step forward, but when you've got to manage scaling in a way that translates from backend systems that are on-premises or on-prem, and therefore we can't elastically scale through to the front tab where we have to be able to scale up very seamlessly and balancing that across with an architecture that supports that level of scale and makes it so seamless on something like, as you say, iPhone launches or Black Friday or any product coming out is actually key to the way we've architected that. >> So you saying that essentially AWS combined with Vodafone worked on this solution that was more of a cloud native solutions. Is that the innovation? Can you just summarize and unpack a little bit, what is the innovation? What problems did you solve together with Accenture and Vodafone? What was the core challenge? >> Yes well, I think that the core is actually, how do you get to the point where the scaling is seamless, where you can move from being on the cloud to cloud native, as Ben just touched on, when at the same time you're actually connected into an enterprise state where the production systems are all on-prem and don't have that ability to scale in the same fashion. So you can't, for example, push you to load into an on-prem backend system and simply expected to scale in the same fashion. So between our three organizations, architecting something that is robust scales, reusable and takes away a load of pieces that actually were quite complex two years ago and turns them into just routine has been a big step forward. >> And I want to get your reaction to this because you're on the front line saying, hey, be more agile, the boss that says, be agile, do different left, take that hill. It's easier said than done. Talk about what goes on when you have to implement and the stakes involved. Again, there's always the old way, new way. Could you just kind of give some color on what's going on? What's your perspective? >> Sure, and Maynard just said that the real benefits and the story behind this was the ability to launch an iPhone For example, as a non event for Vodafone previously was weeks and months of preparation and design and testing and confidence building. And now it really is, it just happens. And we watched things scale and then down again gracefully and really do celebrate the level up if you like, the leveling up of us as an organization, allowing our commercial colleagues to launch propositions or to launch campaigns without needing us to be involved anymore, because they're confident, we're all confident that things will flex like that. But you're absolutely right that the changes and the demands of us as a team, but also the expectations of our stakeholders have been changing for quite a long time now. And we're really excited now to be able to meet them by leveraging the services that we're discussing it. >> Yeah, so the guy said launched the iPhone, no big deal routine, hit the pub, everyone's happy. Having a good day. Let's get into the solution, how it works. Talk about what's going on under the covers. How does this all work? Can you take us through what's the state of the art of the of the solution? >> Sure. Well as you mentioned earlier, we were very much inclined to Serverless these days. So we rolled out fire gate a few, it started about 18 months ago and that really has freed us up into all kinds of scalability measures but also really about reusing and applying this across much more than just the engineering or the digital part of Vodafone where we began. So that's been a really big part of our agenda and that's informed all kinds of things. The ability to scale and flex like that and the architecture beneath us and the containerization and orchestration that goes along with that has really enabled us to flex that ability to reuse it across other areas. And because of that now it's driven our hiring policy, our tooling and technical, our procedural approaches, and it all now leverages that ability to move a pace and to be able to scale, not just in infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in ability to deliver for the business commercially as well. And this is all now informed on our direction I think, as an organization. >> It's interesting, you mentioned you far gate then a trigger of events happens. People get excited, opens up new doors of opportunities, there's a chain reaction from that. Talk about the impact to the staff in the operations because you almost it's motivating. At some level, you got new things happening but you're actually making things go better and faster, cheaper. >> Yeah, well, the impact is one because we're on a journey at Vodafone of this transformation really becoming a technology business first and foremost, rather than a telco classically like our competitors. We're able to really drive cultural change as well. So the impact on our people is a really, it's been a particularly engaging one, we've also been part of a real recruitment drive. We've just announced 7,000 new roles joining our team across Europe. And these are engineering roles driving more of the same behaviors and principles of a modern software engineering business like ours. And that really is fueled by our ability to experiment and try but become cloud native and employ these services in the way that they're designed to be. >> Maynard, I'd like to get your take on this and shift to a topic around what this all means. You zoom out and you say, okay, with the pandemic, it's become a mobile virtual hybrid now world around work play, all those lines are kind of blurring. It's not as clean as it used to be. Oh, the network segmented over here, this is over here, these legacy systems were built around the notion of things were nicely segmented. Now you have this whole kind of mashup if you will, of how you just want to work, right? There's mobilization is a huge thing. So access, identity, these are things that we're all kind of set up nicely before the pandemic, or at least not as a stable maybe not scalable. But what's your take on this? What's the big picture? What's all happening? >> I think, I mean, the pandemic has accelerated a set of changes that were already happening anyway. And I'd say the other part of this is under the covers. A lot of the work has been to create the microservices that stitch together to produce those journeys that run in the containers and so that opens up an Omni-channel feature that starts to move away from saying actually, businesses are organized around the environment in which they're serving. Is it a retail store? Is it online, additional and so on? And actually into much more of a space where you're building the best journeys and those journeys can and are served through digital or through a call center or through a store and so on. And that makes a huge difference because the focus on improving the customer's experience has been enormous. And I think that's one of the other parts that come out of the whole cloud native setup and the ability to experiment has been intuitively and endlessly improving the experience for the customer. And that's a massive step forward. So we can talk about the fact that we deploy a huge number of times more frequently than we did even a year ago or that our quality is improved by a massive percentage and so on. And I think the thing that's really interesting is the improvement in the experience and the endless improvement and iteration of that because we can make lots and lots of small changes and do every day. That's a big step forward. >> You know, what's interesting, Ben and let's get your reaction on this and if you don't mind to just add a little color to this. This is just another example of reports that we've been talking with folks on where it's not about just re-platforming to the cloud. It's refactoring the business with the engineering, the modernization. And so there's two things that go on. One, you see the efficiencies, new doors open up, new things are happening, people are getting excited, get some good morale boost, things are becoming clear, but then this actually new business value being created or new propositions, engineering propositions. Can you share from a digital standpoint because this seems to be the new role of the digital person, whether it's engineering or on the business side, make things run faster, cheaper and better and then create new opportunities, new propositions. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, it's fundamentally around pace of delivery. Being able to, as Maynard says, moving from a world two or three years ago where we were deploying once every two or three months. This is a website once every two or three months, it's where we were. And so now it's happening all the time every day. It's a skill that we've given us as an organization that we couldn't have leveraged before. And what we're able to do with that now is experiment our way and iterate our way to new value streams, as you say, but also to trial and error what we already know or expect to be true with our customers much, much more easily and much, much more frequently. Very little a barrier to production or friction between us and the customer these days and the almost instant response and feedback we get from customers, we learn constantly because of that and it's become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases where they work well, they work to now much more experimental initiative. That way both to the propositions we know about but also to the experiments and unknowns in our future that also now unlocked for us. >> That's a great point you mentioned about the whole timing of, the old way, months, weeks, just for website stuff. Maynard, if you guys can share this new world order is actually pretty exciting but also daunting if you're not like in the water, so to speak. So some people are actually putting their toe in the water, they're experimenting but it's a game changer. I mean, a significant step up of value. What's your advice about solutions? And they're not easy. I mean, you just got to get your hands around Accenture. You guys have been doing a lot more of these projects and seeing more and more of these kinds of partnerships and the value is there. Can you guys share your opinion and advice to folks out there watching saying, how do I do this and is it going to be worth it? Is that bridge to the future there? >> I mean, I think there's a mechanical piece. How do I enable this? We could talk about DevOps and moving to cloud native and actually some of the process side of as an organization, how do I get really comfortable with deploying very frequently and it being low risk and routine and so on. The other part for me, which we sort of haven't touched on is as much as we talk about experimentation, it's about the data and the analytics and the knowledge that we create out of that. So the small changes we're making are highly scientific. And when we think about actually understanding how we're optimizing experiences, that's all about a whole set of data points that underpin it. And so I'd say two parts. It's the journey we've been on here is about enablement. It's about moving the architecture. It's about moving the ways of working so that a lot of things that were hard or required thinking about two years ago on that are routine but the other part of it is understanding the data and having the analytics capability and being able to make a very scientific experiment where you can see the result in the day to day. >> Ben, what's your reaction advice to folks watching as they modernize exciting, challenging. It's a lot of hard work, but what is its the end game? >> All of those things, yes. I'd say it's more than anything, it's a necessity these days we have to embark on this journey and it is daunting. And of course, a lot of large organizations like ours, we were successful for doing things in a particular way and built up a lot of protection mechanisms for making sure we protect that. And so to come at it from a new angle is obviously daunting. And it's very challenging as well. There is an immune system in all of our organizations it is real and we will all deal with it. But the success behind, I think the real reasons behind a lot of our success has been by being able to quickly prove value, to quickly prove that outcomes are deliverable and achievable. And then to build on those and iterate on it. And as I said, it's about being able to move at pace. For us in Vodafone it's about leveraging our scale. We're a huge organization, and we're now coming together as one to really make sure that we do lean on that scale more than we have them. We're really about iterating, as I said and finding things that work, keep doing it, finding things that hold you back and get rid of them as quickly as you can is what I would say for us. >> It's interesting you mentioned the scale. The thing about the cloud is when I hear the common pattern is it takes advantage of the strengths of your environment. So every environment's a bit different but you guys have the scale. I have to ask you while you're here. What are some of the anecdotal comments that kind of you hear from folks that make you happy, what about the results? I think saying, hey man, I'm not even seeing this anymore or wow this is faster. What's some of the sound bites that you guys take as proof points of the success of this project. >> Yeah, I'd say it's mainly there's two things I would say, the ability to rely less on IT delivery if you like. So empowering our commercial business to make changes for themselves in a safe and secure manner. So providing these self-service capabilities, we've started to see a real pace about our commercial business, as well as our technology business. But also the time it takes to get things out is probably one of the biggest, really tangible results and outcomes for us at the moment. Just the sheer amount of things we can release to production in sorts of short space of time really does bring to life our ability to now trial and error, to AB test Canary deploy, things like that is really, it's been a real superpower for our transformation. >> Yeah, kind of kidding about having time to go to the pub but in reality, it's free time freeing up people from doing those tasks that were slower and shifting that value. >> Yeah, as you mentioned John, it really is much more than a technical journey. This is a cultural one as well for a lot of organizations. And by being more connected to the outcomes or the value that you add into production, it really does drive a new culture and engagement across our teams. If it's six months between rising line of code and seeing it in production, I have no sense of ownership or pride in what I've done there, but if I can deploy code immediately see an impact good or bad, then I really do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I'm driving to the business and to our customers. So there really is a great cultural journey as well. >> Yeah, I remember Andy Jassy last year when he was the CEO of AWS on the stage and talked about that dynamic of the team where people run in the right direction, feeling part of it. Maynard, this is a cultural shift on how companies do business. I know Accenture have covered probably a dozen or so killer projects that have just been awesomely new and kind of different but a successful built on the cloud. So a lot of re-platforming refactoring. You're in the front lines working with companies at Accenture. What's the pattern that you see that's happening right now? What's your view of the current market? >> I mean, I think there's a huge shift in this journey too has bankrupted the move from being on the cloud to being cloud native. I'm really getting that value because there's a kind of almost example I see, there's a light bulb moment where ownership of what you put in production means that you move away from a model of we change code because either the business tell us to cause they have a functional requirement or because something's broken when we get into the model of but I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of that's not alive. And you suddenly see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability, all of those things improving. And so if I look more generally that cultural shift is an evolution that organizations go through and it starts with actually delivering it in a more agile way. At some large scale, you see agility moving up into that kind of business agility and starting to affect things like budgeting cycles and the kind of corporate functions if you like, that tend to sit around supporting peak pieces of delivery. And there's a lot more of that happening at the moment, aligned with more organizations pushing into being properly cloud native and transforming rather than the kind of first wave which was the shift onto the cloud. Now it's actually, that's really leveraged what we've got with the cloud. >> Yeah and you guys essentially have been riding on the wave of AWS and the Cloud for many, many years we've been covering it. Ben great success story. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, a head of Digital Engineering, Vodafone UK. Great example of modern engineering at work using AWS in Europe. Thanks for coming on theCUBE sharing your story. Maynard, thank you for also coming on and the work you're doing at Accenture and AWS, thank you. >> Thanks John, great to be here. >> It's theCUBE coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021 Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Welcome to the new abnormal. Yes, you know, the pandemic, it did accelerate the shift to digital, but it's also created disorder in our world. I mean, every day it seems that companies are resetting their office reopening playbooks. They're rethinking policies on large gatherings and vaccination mandates. There's an acute labor shortage in many industries, and we're seeing an inventory glutton in certain goods, like bleach and hand sanitizer. Airline schedules and pricing algorithms, they're all unsettled. Is inflation transitory? Is that a real threat to the economy? GDP forecasts are seesawing. In short, the world is out of whack and the need for fast access to quality, trusted and governed data has never been greater. Can coherent data strategies help solve these problems, or will we have to wait for the world to reach some type of natural equilibrium? And how are companies, like Google, helping customers solve these problems in critical industries, like financial services, retail, manufacturing, and other sectors? And with me to share his perspectives on data is a long-time CUBE alum, Bruno Aziza. He's the head of data analytics at Google. Bruno, my friend, great to see you again, welcome. >> Great to see you, thanks for having me, Dave. >> So you heard my little narrative upfront, how do you see this crazy world of data today? >> I think you're right. I think there's a lot going on in the world of data analytics today. I mean, certainly over the last 30 years, we've all tried to just make the life of people better and give them access more readily to the information that they need. But certainly over the last year and half, two years, we've seen an amazing acceleration in digital transformation. And what I think we're seeing is that even after three decades of investment in the data analytics world, you know, the opportunity is still really out wide and is still available for organizations to get value out of their data. I was looking at some of the latest research in the market, and, you know, only 32% of companies are actually able to say that they get tangible, valuable insights out of their data. So after all these years, we still have a lot of opportunity ahead of us, of course, with the democratization of access to data, but also the advent in machine learning and AI, so that people can make better decisions faster than their competitors. >> So do you think that the pandemic has heightened that sort of awareness as they were sort of forced to pivot to digital, that they're maybe not getting enough out of their data strategies? That maybe their whatever, their organization, their technology, their way they were thinking about data was not adequate and didn't allow them to be agile enough? Why do you think that only 32% are getting that type of value? >> I think it's true. I think, one, digital transformation has been accelerated over the last two years. I think, you know, if you look at research the last two years, I've seen almost a decade of digital acceleration, you know, happening. But I also think that we're hitting a particular time where employees are expecting more from their employers in terms of the type of insights that can get. Consumers are now evolving, right? So they want more information. And I think now technology has evolved to a point where it's a lot easier to provision a data cloud environment so you can get more data out to your constituents. So I think the connection of these three things, expectation of employees, expectation of customers to better customer experiences, and, of course, the global environment, has accelerated quite a bit, you know, where the space can go. And for people like me, you know, 20 years ago, nobody really cared about databases and so forth. And now I feel like, you know, everybody's, you know, understands the value that we can get out of it. And we're kind of getting, you know, in the sexy territory, finally, data now is sexy for everyone and there's a lot of interest in the space. >> You and I met, of course, in the early days of Hadoop. And there were many things about Hadoop that were profound and, of course, many things that, you know, just were overly complex, et cetera. And one of the things we saw was this sort of decentralization. We thought that Hadoop was going to send five megabytes of code to petabytes of data. And what happened is everything, you know, came into this centralized repository and that centralized thinking, the data pipeline organization was very centralized. Are you seeing companies rethink that? I mean, has the cloud changed their thinking? You know, especially as the cloud expands to the edge, on-prem, everywhere. How are you seeing organizations rethink their regimes for data? >> Yeah, I think, you know, we've seen over the last three decades kind of the pendulum, right, from really centralizing everything and making the IT organization kind of the center of excellence for data analytics, all the way to now, you know, providing data as a self-service, you know, application for end-users. And I think what we're seeing now is there's a few forces happening. The first one is, of course, multicloud, right? So the world today is clearly multicloud and it's going to be multicloud for many, many years. So I think not only are now people considering their on-prem information, but they're also looking at data across multiple clouds. And so I think that is a huge force for chief data officers to consider is that, you know, you're not going to have data centralized in one place, nicely organized, because sometimes it's going to be a factor of where you want to be as an organization. Maybe you're going to be partnering with other organizations that have data in other clouds. And so you want to have an architecture that is modern and that accommodates this idea of an open cloud. The second problem that we see is this idea around data governance, intelligent data governance, right? So the world of managing data is becoming more complex because, of course, you're now dealing with many different speeds, you're dealing with many different types of data. And so you want to be able to empower people to get access to the information, without necessarily having to move this data, so they can make quick decisions on the data. So this idea of a data fabric is becoming really important. And then the third trend that we see, of course, is this idea around data sharing, right? People are now looking to use their own data to create a data economy around their business. And so the ability to augment their existing data with external data and create data products around it is becoming more and more important to the chief data officers. So it's really interesting we're seeing a switch from, you know, this chief data officer really only worried about governance, to this we're now worried about innovation, while making sure that security and governance is taken care of. You know, we call this freedom within the framework, which is a great challenge, but a great opportunity for many of these data leaders. >> You mentioned several things there. Self-service, multicloud, the governance key, especially if we can federate that governance in a decentralized world. Data fabric is interesting. I was talking to Zhamak Dehghani this weekend on email. She coined the term data mesh. And there seems to be some confusion, data mesh, data fabric. I think Gartner's using the term fabric. I know like NetApp, I think coined that term, which to me is like an infrastructure layer, you know. But what do you mean by data fabric? >> Well, the first thing that I would say is that it's not up to the vendors to define what it is. It really is up to the customer. The problem that we're seeing these customers trying to fix is you have a diversity of data, right? So you have data stored in the data mart, in a data lake, in a data warehouse, and they all have their specific, you know, reasons for being there. And so this idea of a data fabric is that without moving the data, can you, one, govern it intelligently? And, two, can you provide landing zones for people to actually do their work without having to go through the pain of setting up new infrastructure, or moving information left and right, and creating new applications? So it's this idea of basically taking advantage of your existing environment, but also governing it centrally, and also now providing self-service capabilities so people can do their job easily. So, you know, you might call it a data mesh, you might call it a data fabric. You know, the terminology to me, you know, doesn't seem to be the barrier. The issue today is how do we enable, you know, this freedom for customers? Because, you know, I think what we've seen with vendors out there is they're trying to just take the customer down to their paradigms. So if they believe in all the answers need to be in a data warehouse, they're going to guide the customer there. If they believe that, you know, everything needs to be in a data lake, they're going to guide the customer there. What we believe in is this idea of choice. You should be able to do every single use case. And we should be able to enable you to manage it intelligently, both from an access standpoint, as well as a governance standpoint. >> So when you think about those different, and I like that, you're making it somewhat technology agnostic, so whether it's a data warehouse, or a data lake, or a data hub, a data mart, those are nodes within the mesh or the fabric, right? That are discoverable, accessible, I guess, governed. I think that there's got to be some kind of centralized governance edict, but in a federated governance model so you don't have to move the data around. Is that how you're thinking about it? >> Absolutely, you know, in our recent event, in the Data Cloud Summit, we had Equifax. So the gentleman there was the VP of data governance and data fabric. So you can start seeing now these roles, you know, created around this problem. And really when you listen to what they're trying to do, they're trying to provide as much value as they can without changing the habits of their users. I think that's what's key here, is that the minute you start changing habits, force people into paradigms that maybe, you know, are useful for you as a vendor, but not so useful to the customer, you get into the danger zone. So the idea here is how can you provide a broad enough platform, a platform that is deep enough, so the data can be intelligently managed and also distributed and activated at the point of interaction for the end-user, so they can do their job a lot easier? And that's really what we're about, is how do you make data simpler? How do you make, you know, the process of getting to insight a lot more fluid without changing habits necessarily, both on the IT side and the business side? >> I want to get to specifics on what Google is doing, but the last sort of uber-trends I want to ask you about 'cause, again, we've known each other for a long time. We've seen this data world grow up. And you're right, 20, 30 years ago, nobody cared about database. Well, maybe 30 years ago. But 20 years ago, it was a boring market, right now it's like the hottest thing going. But we saw, you know, bromide like data is the new oil. Well, we found out, well, actually data is more valuable than oil 'cause you can use, you know, data in a lot of different places, oil you can use once. And then the term like data as an asset, and you said data sharing. And it brings up the notion that, you know, you don't want to share your assets, but you do want to share your data as long as it can be governed. So we're starting to change the language that we use to describe data and our thinking is changing. And so it says to me that the next 10 years, aren't going to be like the last 10 years. What are your thoughts on that? >> I think you're absolutely right. I think if you look at how companies are maturing their use of data, obviously the first barrier is, "How do I, as a company, make sure that I take advantage of my data as an asset? How do I turn, you know, all this information into a sustainable, competitive advantage, really top of mind for organizations?" The second piece around it is, "How do I create now this innovation flywheel so that I can create value for my customers, and my employees, and my partners?" And then, finally, "How do I use data as the center of a product that I can then further monetize and create further value into my ecosystem?" I think the piece that's been happening that people have not talked a lot about I think, with the cloud, what's come is it's given us the opportunity to think about data as an ecosystem. Now you and I are partnering on insights. You and I are creating assets that might be the combination of your data and my data. Maybe it's an intelligent application on top of that data that now has become an intelligent, rich experience, if you will, that we can either both monetize or that we can drive value from. And so I think, you know, it's just scratching the surface on that. But I think that's where the next 10 years, to your point, are going to be, is that the companies that win with data are going to create products, intelligent products, out of that data. And they're just going to take us to places that, you know, we are not even thinking about right now. >> Yeah, and I think you're right on. That is going to be one of the big differences in the coming years is data as product. And that brings up sort of the line of business, right? I mean the lines of business heads historically have been kind of removed from the data group, that's why I was asking you about the organization before. But let's get into Google. How do you describe Google's strategy, its approach, and why it's unique? >> You know, I think one of the reasons, so I just, you know, started about a year ago, and one of the reasons for why I found, you know, the Google mission interesting, is that it's really rooted at who we are and what we do. If you think about it, we make data simple. That's really what we're about. And we live that value. If you go to google.com today, what's happening? Right, as an end-user, you don't need any training. You're going to type in whatever it is that you're looking for, and then we're going to return to you highly personalized, highly actionable insights to you as a consumer of insights, if you will. And I think that's where the market is going to. Now, you know, making data simple doesn't mean that you have to have simple infrastructure. In fact, you need to be able to handle sophistication at scale. And so simply our differentiation here is how do we go from highly sophisticated world of the internet, disconnected data, changing all the time, vast volume, and a lot of different types of data, to a simple answer that's actionable to the end-user? It's intelligence. And so our differentiation is around that. Our mission is to make data simple and we use intelligence to take the sophistication and provide to you an answer that's highly actionable, highly relevant, highly personalized for you, so you can go on and do your job, 'cause ultimately the majority of people are not in the data business. And so they need to get the information just like you said, as a business user, that's relevant, actionable, timely, so they can go off and, you know, create value for their organization. >> So I don't think anybody would argue that Google, obviously, are data experts, arguably the best in the world. But it's interesting, some of the uniqueness here that I'm hearing in your language. You used the word multicloud, Amazon doesn't, you know, use that term. So that's a differentiation. And you sell a cloud, right? You sell cloud services, but you're talking about multicloud. You sell databases, but, of course, you host other databases, like Snowflake. So where do you fit in all this? Do you see your role, as the head of data analytics, is to sort of be the chef that helps combine all these different capabilities? Or are you sort of trying to help people adopt Google products and services? How should we think about that? >> Yeah, the best way to think about, you know, I spend 60 to 70% of my time with customers. And the best way I can think about our role is to be your innovation partner as an organization. And, you know, whichever is the scenario that you're going to be using, I think you talked about open cloud, I think another uniqueness of Google is that we have a very partner friendly, you know, approach to the business. Because we realized that when you walk into an enterprise or a digital native, and so forth, they already have a lot of assets that they have accumulated over the years. And it might be technology assets, but also might be knowledge, and know-how, right? So we want to be able to be the innovation vendor that enables you to take these assets, put them together, and create simplicity towards the data. You know, ultimately, you can have all types of complexity in the backend. But what we can do the best for you is make that really simple, really integrated, really unified, so you, as a business user, you don't have to worry about, "Where is my data? Do I need to think about moving data from here to there? Are there things that I can do only if the data is formatted that way and this way?" We want to remove all that complexity, just like we do it on google.com, so you can do your job. And so that's our job, and that's the reason for why people come to us, is because they see that we can be their best innovation partner, regardless where the data is and regardless, you know, what part of the stack they're using. >> Well, I want to take an example, because my example, I mean, I don't know Google's portfolio like you do, obviously, but one of the things I hear from customers is, "We're trying to inject as much machine intelligence into our data as possible. We see opportunities to automate." So I look at something like BigQuery, which has a strong affinity in embedded machine learning and machine intelligence, as an example, maybe of that simplification. But maybe you could pick up on that and give us some other concrete examples. >> Yeah, specifically on products, I mean, there are a lot products we can talk about, and certainly BigQuery has tremendous market momentum. You know, and it's really anchored on this idea that, you know, the idea behind BigQuery is that just add data and we'll do the rest, right? So that's kind of the idea where you can start small and you can scale at incredible, you know, volumes without really having to think about tuning it, about creating indexes, and so forth. Also, we think about BigQuery as the place that people start in order to build their ecosystem. That's why we've invested a lot in machine learning. Just a few years ago, we introduced this functionality called BigQuery Machine Learning, or BigQuery ML, if you're familiar with it. And you notice out of the top 100 customers we have, 80% of these customers are using machine learning right out of, you know, BigQuery. So now why is that? Why is it that it's so easy to use machine learning using BigQuery is because it's built in. It was built from the ground up. Instead of thinking about machine learning as an afterthought, or maybe something that only data scientists have access to that you're going to license just for narrow scenarios, we think about you have your data in a warehouse that can scale, that is equally awesome at small volume as very large volume, and we build on top of that. You know, similarly, we just announced our analytics exchange, which is basically the place where you can now build these data analytics assets that we discussed, so you can now build an ecosystem that creates value for end-users. And so BigQuery is really at the center of a lot of that strategy, but it's not unlike any of the other products that we have. We want to make it simple for people to onboard, simple to scale, to really accomplish, you know, whatever success is ahead of them. >> Well, I think ecosystems is another one of those big differences in the coming decade, because you're able to build ecosystems around data, especially if you can share that data, you know, and do so in a governed and secure way. But it leads to my question on industries, and I'm wondering if you see any patterns emerging in industries? And each industry seems to have its own unique disruption scenario. You know, retail obviously has been, you know, disrupted with online commerce. And healthcare with, of course, the pandemic. Financial services, you wonder, "Okay, are traditional banks going to lose control of payment systems?" Manufacturing you see our reliance on China's supply chain in, of course, North America. Are you seeing any patterns in industry as it pertains to data? And what can you share with us in terms of insights there? >> Yeah, we are. And, I mean, you know, there's obviously the industries that are, you know, very data savvy or data hungry. You think about, you know, the telecommunication industry, you think about manufacturing, you think about financial services and retail. I mean, financial services and retailers are particularly interesting, because they're kind of both in the retail business and having to deal with this level of complexity of they have physical locations and they also have a relationship with people online, so they really want to be able to bring these two worlds together. You know, I think, you know, about those scenarios of Carrefour, for instance. It's a large retailer in Europe that has been able to not only to, you know, onboard on our platform and they're using, you know, everything from BigQuery, all the way to Looker, but also now create the data assets that enable them to differentiate within their own industry. And so we see a lot of that happening across pretty much all industries. It's difficult to think about an industry that is not really taking a hard look at their data strategy recently, especially over the last two years, and really thought about how they're creating innovation. We have actually created what we call design patterns, which are basically blueprints for organization to take on. It's free, it's free guidance, it's free datasets and code that can accelerate their building of these innovative solutions. So think about the, you know, ability to determine propensity to purchase. Or build, you know, a big trend is recommendation systems. Another one is anomaly detection, and this was great because anomaly detection is a scenario that works in telco, but also in financial services. So we certainly are seeing now companies moving up in their level of maturity, because we're making it easier and simpler for them to assemble these technologies and create, you know, what we call data-rich experiences. >> The last question is how you see the emerging edge, IoT, analytics in that space? You know, a lot of the machine learning or AI today is modeling in the cloud, as you well know. But when you think about a lot of the consumer applications, whether it's voice recognition or, you know, or fingerprinting, et cetera, you're seeing some really interesting use cases that could bleed into the enterprise. And we think about AI inferencing at the edge as really driving a lot of value. How do you see that playing out and what's Google's role there? >> So there's a lot going on in that space. I'll give you just a simple example. Maybe something that's easy for the community to understand is there's still ways that we define certain metrics that are not taking into account what actually is happening in reality. I was just talking to a company whose job is to deliver meals to people. And what they have realized is that in order for them to predict exactly the time it's going to take them from the kitchen to your desk, they have to take into account the fact that distance sometimes it's not just horizontal, it's also vertical. So if you're distributing and you're delivering meals, you know, in Singapore, for instance, high density, you have to understand maybe the data coming from the elevators. So you can determine, "Oh, if you're on the 20th floor, now my distance to you, and my ability to forecast exactly when you're going to get that meal, is going to be different than if you are on the fifth floor. And, particularly, if you're ordering at 11:32, versus if you're ordering at 11:58." And so what's happening here is that as people are developing these intelligent systems, they're now starting to input a lot of information that historically we might not have thought about, but that actually is very relevant to the end-user. And so, you know, how do you do that? Again, and you have to have a platform that enables you to have a large diversity of use cases, and that thinks ahead, if you will, of the problems you might run into. Lots and lots of innovation in this space. I mean, we work with, you know, companies like Ford to, you know, reinvent the connected, you know, cars. We work with companies like Vodafone, 700 use cases, to think about how they're going to deal with what they call their data ocean. You know, I thought you would like this term, because we've gone from data lakes to data oceans. And so there is certainly a ton of innovation and certainly, you know, the chief data officers that I have the opportunity to work with are really not short of ideas. I think what's been happening up until now, they haven't had this kind of single, unified, simple experience that they can use in order to onboard quickly and then enable their people to build great, rich-data applications. >> Yeah, we certainly had fun with that over the years, data lake or data ocean. And thank you for remembering that, Bruno. Always a pleasure seeing you. Thanks so much for your time and sharing your perspectives, and informing us about what Google's up to. Can't wait to have you back. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. Appreciate you watching this CUBE Conversation, and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

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

(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.

(cheery music) >> Thanks, Adam. Thanks for everyone in the studio. Dave, we've got some great main stage CUBE interviews. Normally we'll sit at the desk, and do a remote, but since it's a virtual event, and a physical event, it's a hybrid event. We've got two amazing Google leaders to talk with us. I had a chance to sit down with Amol who was gone yesterday during our breaking news segment. They had the big news. We had two great guests, Amol Phadke. He's our first interview. He's the head of Google's telecom industry. Again, he came in, broke into our segment yesterday with breaking news. Obviously released with Ericsson, and the O-RAN Alliance. I had a great chance to chat with him. A wide ranging conversation for 13 minutes. Enjoy my interview with Amol, right now. (cheery music) Well welcome to the CUBE's coverage for Mobile World Congress, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of the CUBE. We're here in person as well as remote. It's a hybrid event. We're on the ground at Mobile World Congress, bringing all the action here. We're remote with Amol Phadke, who's the Managing Director of the Telecom Industry Solutions team at Google Cloud, a big leader, and driving a lot of the change. Amol, thank you for coming on theCUBE here in the hybrid event from Mobile World Congress. >> Thank you, John. Thank you, John. Thank you for having me, So, hybrid event, which means it's in person, we're on the floor, as well as doing remote interviews and people are virtual. This is the new normal. Kind of highlights where we are in this telecom world, because the last time, Mobile World Congress actually had a physical event was winter of 2019. A ton has changed in the industry. Look at the momentum at the Edge. Hybrid cloud is now standard. Multi-cloud is being set up as we speak. This is all now the new normal, what is your take? And so it's pretty active in your industry. Tell us your opinion. >> Yes, John I mean the last two years have been seismic to say the least, right? I mean, in terms of the change that the CSP industries had had to do. You know, John, in the last two years, the importance of a CSP infrastructure has never become so important, right? The infrastructure is paramount. I'm talking to you remotely over the CSP infrastructure right now, and everything that we are doing in the last two years, whether it's working, or studying, or entertaining ourselves, all on that CSP infrastructure. So from that perspective, they are really becoming a critical national global information fabric on which the society is actually depending on. And that we see at Google as well, in the sense that we have seen up to 60% increase in demand, John, in the last two years, for that infrastructure. And then when we look at the industry itself, unfortunately all of that huge demand is not translating into revenue, because as an industry, the revenue is still flat-lining. In fact, the forecasted revenue for globally, for all the industry over the next 12 months is three to five per cent negative on revenue, right? So one starts to think, how come there is so much demand over the last two years, post-pandemic, and that's not translating to revenue? Having said that, the other thing that's happening is this demand is driving significant CapEx and OPEX investments in the infrastructure, as much as eight to $900 billion over the next decade is going to get spent in this infrastructure, from our perspective, Which means it's really a perfect storm. John, We have massive demand, massive need to invest to meet that demand, yet not translating to revenue, and the crux of all this is customer experience, because ultimately all of that translates into not having that kind of radically disruptive or transformational customer experience, right? So that's a backdrop that we find ourselves in the industry, and that really sets the stage for us to look at these challenges in terms of how does the CSP industry as a whole, grow top line, radically transform CSPCO, at the same time, reinventing the customer experience and finding those capital efficiencies. It's almost an impossible problem to find solution. >> It's a perfect storm. The waves are kind of coming together to form one big wave. You mentioned CapEx and OPEX. That's obviously changing the investments of their post-pandemic growth, and change in user behavior and expectations. The modern applications are being built on top of the infrastructure, that's changing. All of this is being driven by Cloud Native, and that's clear. You're seeing a lot more open kind of approaches, IT and OT coming together, whatever you want to do, this is just, it's a collision, right? It's a collision of many things. And this positive innovation coming out of it. So I have to ask you, what are you seeing as a solution that are showing the most promise for these telco industry leaders, because they're digitally transforming, so they got to re-factor their platforms while enabling innovation, which is a key growth for the revenue. >> Yes. So John, from a solution standpoint, what we actually did first and foremost as Google Cloud, was look at ourselves. So just like the transformation we just talked about in the CSP industry, we are seeing Google being transformed over the last two decades or so, right. And it's important to understand that there's a lot Google data over the last two decades that we can actually not externalize all of that innovation, all of that open source, all of that multicloud, was originally built for all the Google applications that all of us use daily, whether it's YouTube, or email or maps, you know. Same infrastructure, same open source, same multicloud. And we decided to sort of use the same paradigm to build the telecom solutions that I'm going to talk about next, right. So that's important to bear in mind, that those assets were there, and we wanted to externalize those assets, right. There are really four big solutions that are resonating really well with our CSP partners, John. You know, number one to your point, is how can they monetize the Edge? All of this happens at the Edge. All of this gets converged at the Edge. We believe with 5G acting as the brilliant catalyst to really drive this Edge deployment. CSPs would be in a very strong position, partnering with Cloud players like ourselves to drive growth, not just for their top line, but also to add value to the actual end enterprises that are seeking to use that Edge. Let me give you a couple of examples. We've been working with industries like retail and manufacturing, to create end solutions in a post-pandemic world. Solutions like contact-less shopping, or visual inspection of an assembly line in a manufacturing plant, without the need for having a human there, because of the digitalization of workforce. Which meant these kinds of solutions, can actually work well at the Edge driven by 5G. But of course they can't be done in isolation. So what we do is we partner with CSPs. We bring our set of solutions, and we actually launch in December 30 partners that are already on our Google Cloud Solutions. And then we partner with the CSPs based on our infrastructure, and their infrastructure to ultimately bring this all to life at the end customer, which often tends to be an enterprise, whether it's a manufacturing, plant, or a retail chain. >> Yeah, you guys got some great examples there. I love that Edge story. I think it's huge. I think it's only going to get bigger. I got to ask you while I got you here, because again, you're in the industry, you're the managing director, so you have to oversee this whole telecom industry. But it's bigger, it's beyond Telecom, where it's now Telecom's just one other Edge network, piece of the pie of the surety computing, as we say. So I got to ask you, one of the big things that Google brings to the table is the developer mojo, and opensource, and scale obviously. Scale's unprecedented, everyone knows that. But ecosystems are super important, and Telco's kind of really aren't good at that, right? So, you know, the Telco ecosystem was, I mean, okay, I'd say, okay, but mostly driven by carriers and moving bits from point A to point B. But now you've got a developer mindset, public cloud, developer ecosystem. How is this changing the landscape of the CSPs and how is it changing this cloud service provider's ability to execute, because that's the key in this new world? What's your opinion? >> Absolutely, John. So, there are two things, there are two dimensions to look at. One is when we came to market a couple of years ago with AnToks, we recognized exactly what you said, John, which is the world is moving to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. We needed to provide a common platform that the developer community can utilize through microservices and API. And that platform had to by definition, work not just from Google Cloud, but any cloud. It could work on any public cloud, can work on CSP's private cloud. And of course, supports on some Google Cloud, right? The reason was, once you deploy and cause, once as a seamless application development platform, you could put all kinds of developer apps on top. So I just talked about 5G Edge John, a minute ago, those apps can sit on Antoks, but at the same time, IT to your point, John, IT apps could also sit on the same AnToks paradigm, and network apps. So as networks start becoming Cloud Native, whether it's SRAN, whether it's O-Ran, whether it's 5G core, same principle. And that's why we believe when we partner with CSPs, we are saying, "Hey, you give this AnToks to an ecosystem of community, whether that community is network, whether that community is IT, whether the communities Edge apps, all of those can reside seamlessly on this sort of AnToks fabric, John. >> Yeah, and that's going to set the table for multicloud, which is basically cloud words for multi-vendor, multi app. Amol, I've got to ask you while I have you here, first of all, thank you for coming on and sharing your insights. It's really great industry perspective. And obviously Google Cloud's got huge scale, and great leadership. And again, you know, the big, cloud players are moving in and helping out, and enabling a lot of value. I got to ask you, if you don't mind sharing, if someone asked you, "Amol, tell me about the impact that public cloud is having on the Telco industry." What would you say? What's the answer to that? Because a lot of people are like, okay, public cloud, I get it. I know what it looks like, but now everyone's knows it's going hybrid. So everyone will ask you the question, "What is public cloud doing for the telecom sector?" >> Yeah, I think it's doing three things, John, and great question by the way. Number one, we are actually providing unprecedented amount of insights on data that the CSPs traditionally already had, but have never looked at it from the angle we have looked at it. Whether that insights are at the network layer, whether those insights are to personalize customer experiences on the front-end systems. Or whether those insights are to drive care solutions in contact centers, and so on, and so forth. So it's a massive uplift of customer experience that we can help with, right. So that's a very important point, because we do have a significant amount of leadership, John at Google Cloud on analytics and data and insights, right? So, and we offer those roads to these people. Number two, is really what I talked about, which is helping them build an ecosystem, because let's take retail as an example. As a minimum, there are five constituents in that ecosystem, John. There is a CSP, there is Google Cloud, there's an actual retail store. There is a hardware supplier, there's a software developer. All of them as a minimum, have to work together to build that ecosystem, which is where we give those solutions, right? So that's the second part. And then the third part is, as they move towards Cloud Native, we are really helping them change their business model to become a DevOps, a Cloud Native mindset, not just a Cloud Native network or IP. But a Cloud Native mindset that creates unparalleled agility and flexibility in how they work as a business. So those are the three things I would say, as a response to that question. >> And also the retail's a great vertical for Google to go in there, given the Amazon fear out there. People want this for certainly low hanging fruit. I think the DevOps piece is going to be a big, winning opportunity to see how the developers get driven into the landscape. I think that's a huge point. Amol, that's really great insight. A final question for you, while I got you here. If someone says, "Hey, what's happened in the industry since 2019?" Last time we had Mobile World Congress, they were talking speeds and feeds. Now the world has changed. We're coming out of the pandemic. California is opening up. There's going to be a physical event. The world's going hybrid, certainly on the event, and certainly cloud. What's different in the telecom industry, from, you know, many, many months ago, over a year and a half ago, from 2019? >> I would say primarily, it's the adoption of digital everywhere, which previously, you know, there were all these inhibitions and oh, would this work? Would my customer systems become fully digital? Would I be able to offer AR VR experiences? Ah, that's a futuristic thing, you know. And suddenly the pandemic has created this acceleration that says, "Oh, even post-pandemic, half my customers are always going to talk to me, via our digital channel only." Which means the way they experience us, has to be through these new experiences whether it's AR VR, whether it's some other thing or applications. So that has been accelerated John, and the CSPs have therefore really started to go to the application, and to the services. Which is why you are seeing less on, you know, speeds and feeds because 5G is here, 5G's been deployed. Now, how do we monetize 5G? How can we leverage that biggest number? So that's the biggest- >> There's down stack, and then there's a top of the stack for applications. And certainly there's a lot of assets in the telecom landscape, a lot of value, a lot of refactoring going on, and new opportunities that are out there. Great, great conversation. Well, thank you, Amol Phadka, Managing Director, Telecom Industry Solutions. Thanks for comin' on the CUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. Thank you having me. >> Okay, Mobile World Congress here, in person, and hybrid, and remote. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thank you for watching. We are here in person at the Cloud City Expo Community Area. Thanks for watching. Okay, that was us. That was me, online. Now, I'm here in person, as you can see Dave. That's a lot of fun. I love doing those interviews. So we had a chance to grab Google's top people when we could. They're not here, obviously. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google, the three hyperscalers, Dave, didn't make it out here. They didn't have a booth, but we had a chance to grab them. And that was head of the industry marketing, and I mean the industry group. So he's like the managing door. He runs the business side. >> It's an important sector for Google. You know, Amazon was really first, with that push into telco. Thomas Curran last March, laid out Google strategy for Telco. It's a huge sector. They know it. They understand how the cloud can disrupt it, and play a massive role there. >> Yeah. >> And Google, of course. >> They're not going to object to the public cloud narrative that Danielle Royston- >> No. >> I think they like it open source, Android coming to telco. Who knows what it's going to look like? >> That's what we call digital- >> So the next interview I did was with Shailesh Shukla. He is the Senior Vice-president. He's the Senior Leader at Google Cloud for Networking. And if you know, Google, Dave, Google's networking is really well known in the industry for being really awesome, because they power obviously Google Search, and a variety of other things. They pioneered the concept of SRE, Site Reliability Engineer, which is now a de facto position for DevOps, which is a cloud now persona inside almost every company, and certainly a very important position. And so- >> Probably the biggest global network, right? Undersea cables, and- >> I mean, Microsoft's got a big hyper-scale, because they've had MSN, and bunch of other stuff, infrastructure globally. But Amazon, Google and Microsoft all have massive scale, and Google again, very well engineered. They're total, and they're as we know, I live in Palo Alto, so I can attest that they're very strong. So this next interview is really from a networking perspective, because as infrastructure, as code gets more prolific and more penetrated, it's going to be programmable. And that's really going to be a key new enabler. So let's hear from Shailesh, Head of Networking at Google Cloud, and my interview with him. (cheery music) Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. We are here in person in Barcelona, as well as remote. It's a hybrid event. You're going to have the physical space, in Barcelona for the first time, since 2019, and virtual worlds connecting. I've got a great guest here from Google, Shailesh Shukla, Vice-president and General Manager of the Networking Team, Google Cloud. Shailesh, it's great to see you. Thank you for coming on theCUBE for the special presentation from Mobile World Congress. Obviously, the Edge networking core, Edge human devices, all coming together. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, John. It's great to see you again. And it's always a pleasure talking to theCUBE. And I want to say hello to everybody, from, you know, in Mobile World Congress. >> Yeah, and people don't know your background. You have a great history in networking. You've been there, many ways of innovation. You've been part of directly, big companies that were now known. Big names are all there. But now we haven't had a Mobile World Congress, since 2019. Think about that. That's, you know, many months, 20 something months gone by, since the world has changed in telco. I got to ask you, what is the disruption happening? Because think about that. Since 2019, a lot's changed in telco. Cloud-scale has happened. You've got the Edge developing. It's IT like now. What's your take? Shailesh, tell us. >> Yeah, John, as you correctly pointed out the last 18 months have been very difficult. And you know, I'll acknowledge that right up front, for a number of people around the world. I empathize with that. Now in the telecom, and kind of the broader Edge world, I would say that the last 18, 24 months have actually been transformative. O-RAN, it turns out was a very interesting sort of, you know, driver of completely new ways of both living, as well as working, right, as we all have experienced. I don't think that I've had a chance to see you live in 24 months. So, what we are seeing is the following. Number one, a number of telecom carriers around the world have started the investment process for 5G, right, and deployment process. And that actually changes the game, as you know, due to latency, due to all of the capabilities around kind of incalculable bandwidth, right. Much lower latency, as well as, much higher kind of enterprise oriented capabilities, right? So network's licensing, as an example, quality of service, you know, by a traffic type, and for a given enterprise. So that's number one. Number two, I would say that the cloud is becoming a lot more kind of mainstream in the world, broader world of telecom. What we are seeing is an incredible amount of partnerships between telecom carriers and cloud providers, right? So instead of thinking of those two as separate universes, those are starting to come together. So I believe that over a period of time, you will see the notion of kind of Cloud Native capability for both the IT side of the house, as well as the network side of the house is becoming, you know, kind of mainstream, right. And then the third thing is that increasingly it's a lot more about enabling new markets, new applications, in the enterprise world, right. So certainly it opens up a new kind of revenue stream for service providers and carriers around the world. But it also does something unique, which is brings together the cloud capabilities right, around elasticity, flexibility, intelligence, and so on, with the enterprise customer base that most of the cloud providers already have. And with the combination of 5G, brings it to the telecom world. And those, you know, I started to call it, as a kind of the triad, right? The triad of an enterprise, the telecom service provider, and the cloud provider, all working together to solve real business problems. >> Yeah, and it's totally a great call out there on the pandemic. I think the pandemic has shown us, coming out of it now, that cloud-scale matters. And you look at all the successes between work, play, and how we've all kind of adjusted, the cloud technologies were a big part of that, those solutions that got us through it. Now you've got the Edge developing with 5G. And I got to ask you this question, because when we have CUBE interviews with all the leaders of engineering teams, whether it's in the industry, or customers in the enterprise, and even in the telcos, the modern application teams have end-to-end visibility into the workload. You're starting to see more and more of that. You starting to see more open source in everything, right. So okay, I buy that. You got an SRE on the team, you got some modern developers, you're shifting left, you've got Devs set up. All good, all cloud. However, you're a networking guy. You know this. Routing packets across multiple networks is difficult. So if you're going to have end-to-end visibility, you got to have end-to-end intelligence on the networking. How is that being solved? Because this is a critical discussion here at Mobile World Congress. Okay, I buy Cloud Native, I buy observability, I buy open source, but I got to have end-to-end visibility for security, and workload management and managing all the data. What's the answer on the network side? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. And the simple way to think about this, is first and foremost, you need kind of global infrastructure, right? So that's a given, and of course, you know, Google with its kind of global infrastructure, and some of the largest networks in the world, we have that present, right. So that's important. Second is, to be able to abstract a way that underlying infrastructure, and make it available to applications, to a set of APIs. Right, so I'll give an analogy here. Just as you know, say 10 years ago, around 10 years ago, Android came into the market from Google, in the following way. What it did, was that it abstracted away the underlying devices with a simple kind of layer on top of operating system, which exposed APIs northbound. So then application developers can write new applications. And that actually unleashed, you know, a ton of kind of creativity right, around the world. And that's precisely what we believe is kind of the next step, as you said, on an end-to-end observability basis, right? If you can do an abstraction away from all of the underlying kind of core infrastructure, provide the right APIs, the right kind of information around observability, around telemetric, instead of making, you know, cloud and the infrastructure, the black box. Make it open, make it kind of visible to the applications. Bring that to the applications, and let the thousand flowers bloom, right? The creativity in each vertical area is so significant, because there are independent software vendors. There are systems integrators. There are individual developers. So one of the things that we are doing right now, is utilizing open source technologies, such as Kubernetes, right? Which is something that Google actually brought into the market. And it has become kind of the de facto standard for all of the container and modernization of applications. So by leveraging those open technologies, creating this common control plane, exposing APIs, right, for everything from application development, to observability, you certainly have the ability to solve business problems through a large number of entities in the systems integrator and the ISC and the developer community. So that's the approach that we are taking, John. >> I love the Android analogy of the abstraction layer, because at that time, the iPhone was closed. It still is. And they got their own little strategy there. Android went the other way. They went open, went open abstraction. Now abstraction layers are good. And now I want to get your thoughts on this, because anyone in operating systems knows abstractions are great for innovation. How does that apply to the real world on telco? Because I get how it could add some programmability in there. I get the control plane piece. Putting it into the operator's hands, how do you guys see, and how do you guys talk about the Edge service offering? What does it mean for the telco? Because if they get this right, this is going to be in telco cloud developer play. It's going to be a telco cloud ecosystem play. It's an opportunity for a new kind of telco system. How do you see that rolling out in real world? >> Great question, John. So the way I look at it, actually even we should take a step back, right? So the confluence of 5G, the kind of cloud capabilities and the Edge is, you know, very clear to me that it's going to unleash a significant amount of innovation. We are in early stages, no question, but it's going to drive innovation. So one almost has to start by saying what exactly is Edge, right? So the way I look at it, is that the Edge can be a continuum all the way from kind of an IOT device in automobiles, right? Or an enterprise Edge, like a factory location, or a retail store, or kind of a bank branch. To the telecom Edge, which is where the service providers have, not only their points of presence, and central offices, but increasingly a very large amount of intelligent RAN sites as well, right. And then the, kind of public cloud Edge, right. Where, for example, Google has, you know, 25 plus kind of regions around the world. 144, you know, PoPS, lots of CDN locations. We have, you know, few thousand nodes deployed deep inside service provider networks for caching of content, and so on. So if you think about these as different places in the network that you can deploy, compute, storage and intelligence act, right. And do that in a smart way, right? For example, if you were to run the learning algorithms in the cloud with its flexibility and elasticity, and run the inferencing at the Edge, very Edge, at the point of sort of a sale, or a point, a very consumer standing. Now you suddenly have the ability to create a variety of Edge applications. So going back to the new question, what have we seen, right? So what we are seeing, is depending on the vertical, there are different types of Edge applications, okay. So let's take a few examples. And I'll give you some, a favorite example of mine, which is in the sports arena, right? So in baseball, when you are in a stadium, and soon there are people sort of starting to be in stadiums, right? And a pitcher is throwing the pitch, right, the trajectory of the ball, the speed of the pitch, where the batter is, you know, what the strike zone is, and all of these things, if they can be in a stadium in real time, analyzed, and presented to the consumer as additional intelligence, and additional insight, suddenly it actually creates kind of a immersive experience. Even though you may be in the stadium, looking at the real thing, you are also seeing an immersive experience. And of course at home, you get a completely different experience, right? So the idea is that in sports, in media and entertainment, the power of Edge compute, and the power of AI ML, right, can be utilized to create completely new immersive experiences. Similarly, in a factory or an automotive environment, you have the ability to use AI ML, and the power of the Edge and 5G coming together, to find where the defects are, in a manufacturing environment, right? So every vertical, what we're finding is, there are very specific applications, which you can call as kind of killer apps, right in the Edge world, that over time will become prevalent and mainstream. And they will drive the innovation. They will drive deployment, and they also will drive ultimately, kind of the economics of all of this. >> You're laying out, essentially the role of the public cloud in the telco market. I'd love to get your thoughts, because a lot of people are saying, "Oh, the cloud, it's all Edge now. It's going back to on-premises." This is not the case. I mean, I've been really vocal on this. The public cloud and cloud operations is now the new normal. So developers are there. So I want you to explain real quick, the role of the public cloud in the telecom market and the Telecom Edge, because now they're working together. You've got abstraction, you mentioned that Android-like environment coming, there's going to be an Android-like effect, that abstraction. You got O-RAN out there, creating these connection points, for interoperability, for radio signals, and the End Transceivers or the Edge of the radios. All of this is happening. How is Google powering this? What is the role of public cloud in this? >> Yeah, so let me first talk about genetically the role of public cloud. Then I'll talk about Google, okay, in particular. So, if at the end of the day, the goal here is to create applications in a very simple and efficient manner, right? So what do you like, if you look for that as the goal, then the public cloud brings, you know, three fundamental things. Number one, is what I would call as elasticity and flexibility, right? So why is this important? Because as we discussed earlier, Edge is not one place, it's a variety of kind of different locations. If there is a mechanism to create this common control plane, and have the ability to kind of have elastic compute, elastic networking, elastic storage, and have this deployed in a flexible manner. Literally if you think, think about it like an effortless Edge is what we are starting to call it. You can move workload and capability, and run it precisely where it makes sense, right? Like I said, earlier, training and learning algorithms in the deep cloud. Inferencing, at the very edge, right? So if you can make that decision, then it becomes very powerful. So that's the first point, you know, elasticity and flexibility that cloud can bring. Second is, intelligence. The whole notion of leveraging the power of data, and the power of AI and ML is extremely crucial for creation of new services. So that's something that the public cloud brings. And the third is this notion of, write once, deploy anywhere, right? This notion of kind of a full stack capability that when open, kind of developer ecosystem can be brought in, right? Like we talked about Kubernetes earlier. So if there's a way in which you can bring in those developer and ISV ecosystem, which is already present in the world of public cloud, that's something that is the third thing that public cloud brings. And Google strategy very simply, is to play on all of these, right? Because we, you know, Google has incredibly rich deployment experience around the world for some of the largest services on the planet, right? With some of the biggest infrastructure in the networking world. Second, is we have a very open and flexible approach, right? So open as you know, we not only leverage kind of the Kubernetes environment, but also there are many other areas, Key Native, and so on where Google has brought a lot of open kind of capabilities to the broader market. And the third, is the enablement of the ecosystem. So last year we actually announced 200 applications, you know, from 30 ISVs in multiple verticals that we're now going to be deployed on Google Cloud, in order to solve specific business pain points, right. And building out that ecosystem, working with telecom service providers, with systems integrators, with equipment players, is the way that we believe Google Cloud can make a difference in this world of developing Edge applications. We are seeing great traction, John, you know, whether it is in the carrier world. Carrier such as Orange, Telecom Italia, TELUS, SK Telecom, Vodafone. These have all publicly announced their work with Google Cloud, leveraging the power of data, analytics, AI ML, and our very flexible infrastructure. And then a variety of kind of partners and OEM players, in the industry. As an example, Nokia, right, Amdocs, and Netcracker, and many others. So we are really excited in the traction that we are getting. And we believe that public cloud is going to be a key part of the evolution of the telecom industry. >> Shailesh, it's great to have you on. Shailesh Shukla, VP and GM of Networking at Google Cloud. And I would just add to that final point there, that open and this Android-like open environment is going to create a thousand flowers to bloom. Those are new applications, new modern applications, new companies, a new ecosystem in the Telco Cloud. So congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Google Cloud, you guys are about the data, and being open. Thanks for comin' on. >> Thank you, John. Good to talk to you. >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Mobile World Congress. Google Cloud, featured interview here on theCUBE. Really a big part of the public cloud is going to be a big driver. Call it public cloud, hybrid cloud, whatever you want to call it. It's the cloud, cloud and Edge with 5G, making a big difference and changing the landscape, and trying innovation for the telco space. I'm John Furrier, your CUBE host. Thanks for watching. Okay, Dave, that's the Google support. They are obviously singing the same song as Danielle Royston, every vertical. >> Two great interviews, John. Really nice job. We can see the tech. The strategy is becoming more clear. You know, one of the big four. >> Yeah, I just love, these guys are so smart. Every vertical is going to be impacted by elastic infrastructure, AI, machine learning, and this new code deployment, write once, deploy anywhere. That's theCUBE. We love being here it's a cloud show now. Mobile World Congress, back to the studio for more awesome Cloud City content.

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