(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)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Mobile World Congress is alive, theCUBE will be there and we'll certainly let you know if it's alive and well when we get on the ground. Now, as we approach a delayed mobile world congress, it's really appropriate to reflect in the state of the telecoms industry. Let's face it. Telcos have done of really good job of keeping us all connected during the pandemic, supporting work from home and that whole pivot, accommodating the rapid shift to landline traffic, securing the network and keeping it up and running but it doesn't change the underlying fundamental dilemma that Telco has faced. Telco is a slow growth, no growth industry, with revenue expectations in the low single digits. And at the same time network traffic continues to grow at 20% annually. And last year it grew at 40% to 50%. Despite these challenges, Telcos are still investing in the future. For example, the Telco industry collectively is selling out more than a trillion dollars in the first half of this decade on 5G and fiber infrastructure. And it's estimated that there are now more than 200 5G networks worldwide. But a lot of questions remain, not the least of which is, can and should Telcos go beyond connectivity and fiber. Can the Telcos actually monetize 5G or whatever's next beyond 5G? Or is that going to be left to the ecosystem? Now what about the ecosystem? How is that evolving? And very importantly, what role will the Cloud Hyperscalers play in Telco? Are they infrastructure on which the Telcos can build or are they going to suck the value out of the market as they have done in the enterprise? Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, it's my pleasure to welcome a long time telecoms industry analyst and colleague, and the founding director of Lewis Insight, Mr. Chris Lewis. Chris, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. >> It is really our pleasure. So, we're going to cover a lot of ground today. And first thing, we're going to talk about Mobile World Congress. I've never been, you're an expert at that and what we can expect. And then we're going to review the current state of telecoms infrastructure, where it should go. We're going to dig into transformation. Is it a mandate? Is it aspirational? Can Telcos enter adjacent markets in ways they haven't been able to in the past? And then how about the ecosystem? We're going to talk about that, and then obviously we're going to talk about Cloud as I said, and we'll riff a little bit on the tech landscape. So Chris, let's get into it, Mobile World Congress, it's back on, what's Mobile World Congress typically like? What's your expectation this year for the vibe compared to previous events? >> Well Dave, the issue of Mobile World Congress is always that we go down there for a week into Barcelona. We stress ourselves building a matrix of meetings in 30 minutes slots and we return at the end of it trying to remember what we'd been told all the way through. The great thing is that with the last time we had a live, with around 110,000 people there, you could see anyone and everyone you needed to within the mobile, and increasingly the adjacent industry and ecosystem. So, he gave you that once a year, big download of everything new, obviously because it's the Mobile World Congress, a lot of it around devices, but increasingly over the last few years, we saw many, many stands with cars on them because the connected car became an issue, a lot more software oriented players there, but always the Telcos, always the people providing the network infrastructure. Increasingly in the last few years people provided the software and IT infrastructure, but all of these people contributing to what the network should be in the future, what needs to be connected. But of course the reach of the network has been growing. You mentioned during lockdown about connecting people in their homes, well, of course we've also been extending that connection to connect things whether it's in the home or the different devices, monitoring of doorbells and lights and all that sort of stuff. And in the industry environment, connecting all of the robots and sensors. So, actually the perimeter, the remit of the industry to connect has been expanding, and so is the sort of remit of Mobile World Congress. So, we set an awful lot of different suppliers coming in, trying to attach to this enormous market of roughly $1.5 trillion globally. >> Chris, what's the buzz in the industry in terms of who's going to show up. I know a lot of people have pulled out, I've got the Mobile World Congress app and I can see who's attending. And it looks like quite a few people are going to go but what's your expectation? >> Well, from an analyst point of view, obviously I'm mainly keeping up with my clients and trying to get new clients. I'm looking at it and going most of my clients are not attending in person. Now, of course, we need the DSMA, we need Mobile World Congress for future for the industry interaction. But of course, like many people having adopted and adapted to be online, then they're putting a lot of the keynotes online, a lot of the activities will be online. But of course many of the vendors have also produced their independent content and content to actually deliver to us as analysts. So, I'm not sure who will be there. I like you, but you'll be on the ground. You'll be able to report back and let us know exactly who turned up. But from my point of view, I've had so many pre-briefs already, the difference between this year and previous years, I used to get loads of pre-briefs and then have to go do the briefs as well. So this year I've got the pre-brief so I can sit back, put my feet up and wait for your report to come back as to what's happening on the ground. >> You got it. Okay, let's get into a little bit and talk about Telco infrastructure and the state, where it is today, where it's going, Chris, how would you describe the current state of Telco infrastructure? Where does it need to go? Like, what is the ideal future state look like for Telcos in your view? >> So there's always a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to Telco. I think going forward, the connectivity piece was seen as being table stakes, and then people thought where can we go beyond connectivity? And we'll come back to that later. But actually to the connectivity under the scenario I just described of people, buildings, things, and society, we've got to do a lot more work to make that connectivity extend, to be more reliable, to be more secure. So, the state of the network is that we have been building out infrastructure, which includes fiber to connect households and businesses. It includes that next move to cellular from 4G to 5G. It obviously includes Wi-Fi, wherever we've got that as well. And actually it's been a pretty good state, as you said in your opening comments they've done a pretty good job keeping us all connected during the pandemic, whether we're a fixed centric market like the UK with a lot of mobile on top and like the US, or in many markets in Africa and Asia, where we're very mobile centric. So, the fact is that every country market is different, so we should never make too many assumptions at a very top level, but building out that network, building out the services, focusing on that connectivity and making sure we get that cost of delivery right, because competition is pushing us towards having and not ever increasing prices, because we don't want to pay a lot extra every time. But the big issue for me is how do we bring together the IT and the network parts of this story to make sure that we build that efficiency in, and that brings in many questions that we going to touch upon now around Cloud and Hyperscalers around who plays in the ecosystem. >> Well, as you know, Telco is not my wheelhouse, but hanging around with you, I've learned, you've talked a lot about the infrastructure being fit for purpose. It's easy from an IT perspective. Oh yeah, it's fossilized, it's hardened, and it's not really flexible, but the flip side of that coin is as you're pointing out, it's super reliable. So, the big talk today is, "Okay, we're going to open up the network, open systems, and Open RAN, and open everything and microservices and containers. And so, the question is this, can you mimic that historical reliability in that open platform? >> Well, for me, this is the big trade-off and in my great Telco debate every year, I always try and put people against each other to try and to literally debate the future. And one of the things we looked at was is a more open network against this desire of the Telcos to actually have a smaller supplier roster. And of course, as a major corporation, these are on a national basis, very large companies, not large compared to the Hyperscalers for example, but they're large organizations, and they're trying to slim down their organization, slim down the supplier ecosystem. So actually in some ways, the more open it becomes, the more someone's got to manage and integrate all those pieces together. And that isn't something we want to do necessarily. So, I see a real tension there between giving more and more to the traditional suppliers. The Nokia's, Ericsson's, Huawei's, Amdocs and so on, the Ciscos. And then the people coming in breaking new ground like Mavenir and come in, and the sort of approach that Rakuten and Curve taken in bringing in more open and more malleable pieces of smaller software. So yeah, it's a real challenge. And I think as an industry which is notorious for being slow moving, actually we've begun to move relatively quickly, but not necessarily all the way through the organization. We've got plenty of stuff sitting on major or mainframes still in the back of the organization. But of course, as mobile has come in, we've started to deal much more closely, uninteractively in real time, God forbid, with the customers. So actually, at that front end, we've had to do things a lot more quickly. And that's where we're seeing the quickest adaptation to what you might see in your IT environment as being much more, continuous development, continuous improvement, and that sort of on demand delivery. >> Yeah, and we're going to get to that sort of in the Cloud space, but I want to now touch on Telco transformation which is sort of the main theme of this episode. And there's a lot of discussion on this topic, can Telcos move beyond connectivity and managing fiber? Is this a mandate? Is it a pipe dream that's just aspirational? Can they attack adjacencies to grow beyond the 1% a year? I mean, they haven't been successful historically. What are those adjacencies that might be, an opportunity and how will that ecosystem develop? >> Sure. >> So Chris, can and should Telcos try to move beyond core connectivity? Let's start there. >> I like what you did there by saying pipe dreams. Normally, pipe is a is a negative comment in the telecom world. But pipe dream gives it a real positive feel. So can they move beyond connectivity? Well, first of all, connectivity is growing in terms of the number of things being connected. So, in that sense, the market is growing. What we pay for that connectivity is not necessarily growing. So, therefore the mandate is absolutely to transform the inner workings and reduce the cost of delivery. So, that's the internal perspective. The external perspective is that we've tried in many Telcos around the world to break into those adjacent markets, being around media, being enterprise, being around IOT, and actually for the most part they've failed. And we've seen some very significant recent announcements from AT&T, Verizon, BT, beginning to move away from, owning content and not delivering content, but owning content. And the same as they've struggled often in the enterprise market to really get into that, because it's a well-established channel of delivery bringing all those ecosystem players in. So, actually rather than the old Telco view of we going to move into adjacent markets and control those markets, actually moving into them and enabling fellow ecosystem players to deliver the service is what I think we're beginning to see a lot more of now. And that's the big change, it's actually learning to play with the other people in the ecosystem. I always use a phrase that there's no room for egos in the ecosystem. And I think Telcos went in initially with an ego thinking we're really important, we are on connectivity. But actually now they're beginning to approach the ecosystem things saying, "How can we support partners? How can we support everyone in this ecosystem to deliver the services to consumers, businesses and whomever in this evolving ecosystem?" So, there are opportunities out there, plenty of them, but of course, like any opportunity, you've got to approach it in the right way. You've got to get the right investment in place. You've got to approach it with the right open API so everyone can integrate with your approach, and approach it, do I say with a little bit of humility to say, "Hey, we can bring this to the table, how do we work together? >> Well, it's an enormous market. I think you've shared with me, it's like 1.4 trillion. And I want to stay on these adjacencies for a minute, because one of the obvious things that Telcos will talk about is managed services. And I know we have to be careful of that term in an IT context, that it's different in a, you're talking about managing connectivity, but there's professional services. That's a logical sort of extension of their business and probably a safe adjacency, maybe not even adjacency, but they're not going to get into devices. I mean, they'll resell devices, but they're not going to be, I would presume not go back to trying to make devices, but there's certainly the edge and that's so, it'll define in opaque, but it's huge. If there's 5G, there's the IT component and that's probably a partnership opportunity. And as you pointed out, there's the ecosystem, but I wonder, how do you think about 5G as an adjacency or indoor opportunity? Is it a revenue opportunity for Telcos or is that just something that is really aspirational? >> Oh, absolutely it's a revenue opportunity, but I prefer to think of 5G as being a sort of a metaphor for the whole future of telecom. So, we usually talk, and MWC would normally talk about 5G just as a mobile solution. Of course, what you can get with, you can use this fixed wireless access approach, where the roots that sits in your house or your building. So, it's a potential replacement for some fixed lines. And of course, it's also, gives you the ability to build out, let's say in a manufacturing or a campus environment, a private 5G network. So, many of the early opportunities we're seeing with 5G are actually in that more private network environment addressing those very low latency, and high bandwidth requirements. So yeah, there are plenty of opportunities. Of course, the question here is, is connectivity enough, or especially with your comment around the edge, at the edge we need to manage connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, and of course the applications. So, that's a blend of players. It's not going to be in the hands of one player. So yes, plenty of opportunities but understanding what comes the other way from the customer base, where that's, you and I in our homes or outward as an about, or from a business point of view, an office or a campus environment, that's what should be driving, and not the technology itself. And I think this is the trap that the industry has fallen into many times, is we've got a great new wave of technology coming, how can we possibly deliver it to everybody rather than listening to what the customers really require and delivering it in a way consumable by all those different markets. >> Yeah now, of course all of these topics blend together. We try to keep them separately, but we're going to talk about Cloud, we're going to talk about competition, But one of the areas that we don't have a specific agenda item on is, is data and AI. And of course there's all this data flowing through the network, so presumably it's an opportunity for the Telcos. At the same time, they're not considered AI experts. They do when you talk about Edge, they would appear to have the latency advantage because of the last mile and their proximity, to various end points. But the Cloud is sort of building out as well. How do you think about data and AI as an opportunity for Telco? >> I think the whole data and AI piece for me sits on top of the cake or pie, whatever you want to call it. What we're doing with all this connectivity, what we're doing with all these moving parts and gathering information around it, and building automation into the delivery of the service, and using the analytics, whether you call it ML or AI, it doesn't really matter. But actually using that information to deliver a better service, a better outcome. Now, of course, Telcos have had much of this data for years and years, for decades, but they've never used it. So, I think what's happening is, the Cloud players are beginning to educate many of the Telcos around how valuable this stuff is. And that then brings in that question of how do we partner with people using open APIs to leverage that data. Now, do the Telcos keep hold of all that data? Do they let the Cloud players do all of it? No, it's going to be a combination depending on particular environments, and of course the people owning their devices also have a vested interest in this as well. So, you've always got to look at it end to end and where the data flows are, and where we can analyze it. But I agree that analysis on the device at the Edge, and perhaps less and less going back to the core, which is of course the original sort of mandate of the Cloud. >> Well, we certainly think that most of the Edge is going to be about AI inferencing, and then most of the data is going to stay at the edge. Some will come back for sure. And that is big opportunity for whether you're selling compute or conductivity, or maybe storage as well, but certainly insights at the Edge. >> Everything. >> Yeah. >> Everything, yeah. >> Let's get into the Cloud discussion and talk about the Hyperscalers, the big Hyperscaler elephant in the room. We're going to try to dig into what role the Cloud will play in the transformation of telecoms on Telecom TV at the great Telco debate. You likened the Hyperscalers, Chris, to Dementors from Harry Potter hovering over the industry. So, the question is, are the Cloud players going to suck the value out of the Telcos? Or are they more like Dobby the elf? They're powerful, there's sometimes friendly but they're unpredictable. >> Thank you for extending that analogy. Yes, it got a lot of reaction when I use that, but I think it indicates some of the direction of power shift where, we've got to remember here that Telcos are fundamentally national, and they're restricted by regulation, and the Cloud players are global, perhaps not as global as they'd like be, but some regional restrictions, but the global players, the Hyperscalers, they will use that power and they they will extend their reach, and they are extending their reach. If you think they now command some fantastic global networks, in some ways they've replaced some of the Telco international networks, all the submarine investments that tend to be done primarily for the Hyperscalers. So, they're building that out. So, as soon as you get onto their network, then you suddenly become part of that environment. And that is reducing some of the spend on the longer distances we might have got in the past approaches from the Telcos. Now, does that mean they're going to go all the way down and take over the Telcos? I don't believe so, because it's a fundamentally different business digging fiber in people's streets and delivering to the buildings, and putting antennas up. So, they will be a coexistence. And in fact, what we've already seen with Cloud and the Hyperscalers is that they're working much more close together than people might imagine. Now, you mentioned about data in the previous question, Google probably the best known of the of the AI and ML delivers from the Cloud side, working with many of the Telcos, even in some cases to actually have all the data outsourced into the Google Cloud for analytics purposes. They've got the power, the heavy lifting to do that. And so, we begin to see that, and obviously with shifting of workloads as appropriate within the Telco networking environment, we're seeing that with AWS, and of course with Azure as well. And Azure of course acquired a couple of companies in affirmed and Metro switch, which actually do some of the formal 5G core and the likes there within the connectivity environment. So, it's not clean cuts. And to go back to the analogy, those Dementors are swooping around and looking for opportunities, and we know that they will pick up opportunities, and they will extend their reach as far as they can down to that edge. But of course, the edge is where, as you rightly say, the Telcos have the control, they don't necessarily own the customer. I don't believe anyone owns the customer in this digital environment, because digital allows you to move your allegiance and your custom elsewhere anyway. So, but they do own that access piece, and that's what's important from a national point of view, from an economic point of view. And that's why we've seen some of the geopolitical activity banning Huawei from certain markets, encouraging more innovation through open ecosystem plays. And so, there is a tension there between the local Telco, the local market and the Hyperscaler market, but fundamentally they've got an absolute brilliant way of working together using the best of both worlds to deliver the services that we need as an economy. >> Well, and we've talked about this you and I in the past where the Telcos, portions of the Telco network could move into the Cloud. And there of course the Telcos all run the big data centers, and portions of that IT infrastructure could move into the Cloud. But it's very clear, they're not going to give up the entire family jewels to the Cloud players. Why would they? But there are portions of their IT that they could move into. Particularly, in the front end, they want to build like everybody. They want to build an abstraction layer. They're not going to move their core systems and their backend Oracle databases, they're going to put a brick wall around those, but they wanted abstraction layer, and they want to take advantage of microservices and use that data from those transaction systems. But the web front end stuff makes sense to put into Cloud. So, how do you think about that? >> I think you've hit the nail on the head. So you can't move those big backend systems straight away, gradually over time, you will, but you've got to go for those easy wins. And certainly in the research I've been doing with many of my clients, they're suggested that front end piece, making sure that you can onboard customers more easily, you can get the right mix of services. You can provide the omnichannel interaction from that customer experience that everybody talks about, for which the industry is not very well known at all by the way. So, any improvement on that is going to be good from an MPS point of view. So yeah, leveraging what we might, what we call BSS OSS in the telecom world, and actually putting that into the Cloud, leveraging both the Hyperscalers, but also by the way, many of the traditional players who people think haven't moved Cloud wards, but they are moving Cloud wards and they're embracing microservices and Cloud native. So, what you would have seen if we'd been in person down in Barcelona next week, would be a lot of the vendors who perhaps traditionally seems a bit slow moving, actually have done a lot of work to move their portfolio into the Cloud and into Cloud native environments. And yes, as you say, we can use that front end, we can use the API openness that's developed by people at the TM forum, to actually make sure we don't have to do the backend straight away, do it over time. Because of course the thing that we're not touching upon here, is the revenue stream is a consistent revenue stream. So, just because you don't need to change the backend to keep your revenue stream going, this is on a new, it keeps delivering every month, we keep paying our 50, 40, whatever bucks a month into the Telco pot. That's why it's such a big market, and people aren't going to stop doing that. So, I think the dynamics of the industry, we often spend a lot of time thinking about the inner workings of it and the potential of adjacent markets, whereas actually, we keep paying for this stuff, we keep pushing revenue into the pockets of all the Telcos. So, it's not a bad industry to be in, even if they were just pushed back to be in the access market, it's a great business. We need it more and more. The elasticity of demand is very inelastic, we need it. >> Yeah, it's the mother of old golden geese. We don't have a separate topic on security, and I want to touch on security here, is such an important topic. And it's top of mind obviously for everybody, Telcos, Hyperscalers, the Hyperscalers have this shared responsibility model, you know it well. A lot of times it's really confusing for customers. They don't realize it until there has been a problem. The Telcos are going to be very much tuned into this. How will all this openness, and we're going to talk about technology in a moment, but how will this transformation in your view, in the Cloud, with the shared responsibility model, how will that affect the whole security posture? >> Security is a great subject, and I do not specialize in it. I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would say security for me is a bit like AI and analytics. It's everywhere. It's part of everything. And therefore you cannot think of it as a separate add on issue. So, every aspect, every element, every service you build into your micro services environment has to think about how do you secure that connection, that transaction, how do you secure the customer's data? Obviously, sovereignty plays a role in that as well in terms of where it sits, but at every level of every connection, every hop that we look through, every route to jump, we've got to see that security is built in. And in some ways, it's seen as being a separate part of the industry, but actually, as we collapse parts of the network down, we're talking about bringing optical and rooting together in many environments, security should be talked about in the same breath. So when I talked about Edge, when I talked about connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, I should've said security as well, because I absolutely believe that is fundamental to every chain in the link and let's face it, we've got a lot of links in the chain. >> Yeah, 100%. Okay, let's hit on technologies and competition, we kind of blend those together. What technology should we be paying attention to that are going to accelerate this transformation. We hear a lot about 5G, Open RAN. There's a lot of new tech coming in. What are you watching? Who are the players that we maybe should be paying attention to, some that you really like, that are well positioned? >> We've touched upon it in various of the questions that have proceeded this. So, the sort of Cloudification of the networking environment is obviously really important. The automation of the process we've got to move away from bureaucratic manual processes within these large organizations, because we've got to be more efficient, we've got to be more reliable. So, anything which is related to automation. And then the Open RAN question is really interesting. Once again, you raised this topic of when you go down an Open RAN routes or any open route, it ultimately requires more integration. You've got more moving parts from more suppliers. So, therefore there are potential security issues there, depending on how it's defined, but everybody is entering the Open RAN market. There are some names that you will see regularly next week, being pushed, I'm not going to push them anymore, because some of them just attract the oxygen of attention. But there are plenty out there. The good news is, the key vendors who come from the more traditional side are also absolutely embracing that and accept the openness. But I think the piece which probably excites me more, apart from the whole shift towards Cloud and microservices, is the coming together, the openness between the IT environment and the networking environment. And you see it, for example, in the Open RAN, this thing called the RIC, the RAN Interconnection Controller. We're actually, we're beginning to find people come from the IT side able to control elements within the wireless controller piece. Now that that starts to say to me, we're getting a real handle on it, anybody can manage it. So, more specialization is required, but understanding how the end to end flow works. What we will see of course is announcements about new devices, the big guys like Apple and Samsung do their own thing during the year, and don't interrupt their beat with it with MWC, but you'll see a lot of devices being pushed by many other providers, and you'll see many players trying to break into the different elements of the market. But I think mostly, you'll see the people approaching it from more and more Cloudified angle where things are much more leveraging, that Cloud capability and not relying on the sort of rigid and stodgy infrastructure that we've seen in the past >> Which is kind of interesting because Cloud, a lot of the Clouds are Walled Gardens, at the same time they host a lot of open technologies, and I think as these two worlds collide, IT and the Telco industry, it's going to be interesting to see how the Telco developer ecosystem evolves. And so, that's something that we definitely want to watch. You've got a comment there? >> Yeah, I think the Telco developer they've not traditionally been very big in that area at all, have they? They've had their traditional, if you go back to when you and I were kids, the plain old telephone service was a, they were a one trick pony, and they've moved onto that. In some ways, I'd like them to move on and to have the one trick of plain old broadband that we just get broadband delivered everywhere. So, there are some issues about delivering service to all parts of every country, and obviously the globe, whether we do that through satellite, we might see some interesting satellite stuff coming out during NWC. There's an awful lot of birds flying up there trying to deliver signal back to the ground. Traditionally, that's not been very well received, with the change in generation of satellite might help do that. But we've known traditionally that a lot of developer activity in there, what it does bring to the four though, Dave, is this issue of players like the Ciscos and Junipers, and all these guys of the world who bring a developer community to the table as well. This is where the ecosystem play comes in, because that's where you get the innovation in the application world, working with channels, working with individual applications. And so it's opening up, it's basically building a massive fabric that anybody can tap into, and that's what becomes so exciting. So, the barriers to entry come down, but I think it will see us settling down, a stabilization of relationship between the Telcos and the Hyperscalers, because they need each other as we talked about previously, then the major providers, the Ciscos, Nokias, Ericssons, Huawei's, the way they interact with the Telcos. And then allowing that level of innovation coming in from the smaller players, whether it's on a national or a global basis. So, it's actually a really exciting environment. >> So I want to continue that theme and just talk about Telco in the enterprise. And Chris, on this topic, I want to just touch on some things and bring in some survey data from ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, our partner. And of course the Telcos, they've got lots of data centers. And as we talked about, they're going to be moving certain portions into the Cloud, lots of the front end pieces in particular, but let's look at the momentum of some of the IT players within the ETR dataset, and look at how they compare to some of the Telcos that ETR captures specifically within the Telco industry. So, we filtered this data on the Telco industry. So, this is our X, Y graph that we show you oftentimes on the vertical axis, is net score which measures spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, this data is for shared accounts just in the Telco sector. So we filtered on certain sectors, like within the technology sectors, Cloud, networking, and so it's narrow, it's a narrow slice of the 1500. It respondents, it represents about 133 shared accounts. And a couple of things to jump right out. Within the Telco industry, it's no surprise, but Azure and AWS have massive presence on the horizontal axis, but what's notable as they score very highly in the vertical axis, with elevated spending velocity on their platforms within Telco. Google Cloud doesn't have as much of a presence, but it's elevated as well. Chris was talking about their data posture before, Arista and Verizon, along with VMware are also elevated, as is Aruba, which is HPEs networking division, but they don't have the presence on the horizontal axis. And you got Red Hat OpenStack is actually quite prominent in Telco as we've reported in previous segments. Is no surprise You see Akamai there. Now remember, this survey is weighted toward enterprise IT, so you have to take that into consideration, but look at Cisco, very strong presence, nicely elevated as is Equinox, both higher than many of the others including Dell, but you could see Dell actually has pretty respectable spending in Telco. It's an area that they're starting to focus on more. And then you got that cluster below, your Juniper, AT&T, Oracle, the rest of HPE TELUM and Lumen which is formerly, century link via IBM. Now again, I'm going to caution you. This is an enterprise IT heavy survey, but the big takeaway is the Cloud players have a major presence inside of firms that say they're in the telecommunications industry. And certain IT players like Cisco, VMware and Red Hat appear to be well positioned inside these accounts. So Chris, I'm not sure if any of this commentary resonates with you, but it seems that the Telcos would love to partner up with traditional IT vendors and Cloud players, and maybe find ways to grow their respective businesses. >> I think some of the data points you brought out there are very important. So yes, we've seen a Microsoft Azure and AWS very strong working with Telcos. We've seen Google Cloud platform actually really aggressively pushed into the market certainly the last 12, 24 months. So yeah, they're well positioned, and they all come from a slightly different background. As I said, the Google with this, perhaps more data centric approach in its analytics, tools very useful, AWS with this outpost reaching out, connecting out, and as you'll, with its knowledge of the the Microsoft business market certainly pushing into private networks as well, by the way. So yeah, and Cisco, of course in there does have, and it's a mass scale division, a lot of activity there, some of the people collapsing, some of that rooting an obstacle together, their big push on Silicon. So, what you've got here is a sort of cross representation of many of the different sorts of suppliers who are active in this market. Now Telcos is a big spenders, the telecom market, as we said, a $1.4 trillion market, they spend a lot, they probably have to double bubble spend at the moment to get over the hump of 5G investment, to build out fiber where they need to build out. So, any anything that relates to that is of course a major spending opportunity, a major market opportunity for players. And we know when you need the infrastructure behind it, whether it's in data centers or in their own data centers or in the Cloud to deliver against it. So, what I do like about this as an analyst, a lot of people would focus on one particular piece of the market. So you specialize on handsets, people specialize on home markets and home gateways. So, I tend to sit back and try and look at the big picture, the whole picture. And I think we're beginning to see some very good momentum where people are, where companies are building upon, of course their core business within the telecom industry, extending it out. But the lines of demarcation are blurring between enterprise, Telco, and indeed moving down into small business. And you think about the SD-WAN Market, which came from nowhere to build a much more flexible solution for connecting people over the wide area network, which has been brilliant during the pandemic, because it's allowed us to extend that to home, but be of course, build a campus ready for the future as well. So there are plenty of opportunities out there. I think the big question in my mind is always about from going into the Telco, as I said, whether they wannna reduce the number of suppliers on the roster. So that puts a question mark against some of the open approaches, and then from the Telco to the end customer, because it goes to the Telcos, 30% of their revenue comes from the enterprise market, 60% from the consumer market. How do they leverage the channel? Which includes all the channels, we talked about security, all of the IT stuff that you've already touched upon and the Cloud. It's going to be a very interesting mix and balancing act between different channels to get the services that the customers want. And I think increasingly, customers are more aware of the opportunities open to them to reach back into this ecosystem and say, "Yeah, I want a piece of humans to Telco, but I want it to come to me through my local integrated channel, because I need a bit of their expertise on security." So, fascinating market, and I think not telecom's no longer considered in isolation, but very much as part of that broader digital ecosystem. >> Chris, it's very hard to compress an analysis of a $1.4 trillion business into 30 or 35 minutes, but you're just the guy to help me do it. So, I got to really thank you for participating today and bringing your knowledge. Awesome. >> Do you know, it's my pleasure. I love looking at this market. Obviously I love analogies like Harry Potter, which makes it bring things to life. But at the end of the day, we as people, we want to be connected, we as business, we want to be connected, in society we want to be connected. So, the fundamental of this industry are unbelievably strong. Let's hope that governments don't mess with it too much. And let's hope that we get the right technology comes through, and help support that world of connectivity going forward. >> All right, Chris, well, I'll be texting you from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and many thanks to my colleague, Chris Lewis, he brought some serious knowledge today and thank you. And remember, I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. And these episodes are all available as podcasts. You just got to search for Breaking Analysis podcasts. You can always connect with me on twitter @dvellante or email me at dave.vellante@siliconangle.com. And you can comment on my LinkedIn post, and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

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

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in Palo Alto for SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE's new studio, 4500 square feet in Palo Alto. Just moved in less than a month ago, and we're bringing you all the in-studio coverage of what's going on in Barcelona, Spain at Mobile World Congress. This is day two of two days of coverage. Here in the studio we're bringing people in that's in Silicon Valley into the studio, experts, entrepreneurs, venture capitalist investors, angel investors, and of course, analysts here from our own team, and we have Peter Burris with me here. And we're covering all the action. Of course, we have reporters and analysts and friends on the ground doing call-ins in Barcelona, bringing you all the action, and really, bringing the big story that's not being told, which is AI, IOT, and cloud-ready, cloud-native action is happening. This is the disruptor, the calm before the storm as we were saying earlier yesterday. Peter Burris, great to see you. We were talking yesterday morning on the kickoff, let's take that to the next level. Cloud-native, IOT, really the big story that's not being told at Mobile World Congress this year, mainly because it's just in everyone's face right now, and people are making sense of it. Your thoughts on this as you are looking at the research, looking at the marketplace, this is reality. The IOT is real. >> Oh, it's very much real, John. Let's start with why cloud and mobile are so important together. In many respects, the thing that made the cloud real is mobility because the minute that you don't know where your device is going to connect, where the termination point's going to be, then you don't want to have to control and own that network. And so in many respects, the whole concept of mobility catalyzed the need for the cloud because you didn't want to have to utilize a, you didn't want to have to build your own network to support people as they moved around. So the cloud as a front end, or as a set of capabilities that supports mobility is really crucial to this whole concept, and it's somewhat surprising that it's not more closely tied together at Mobile World Congress. But the most important thing that we could talk about obviously is that IOT is going to have a major impact on all kinds of different factors. It's going to have a major impact on the devices that are manufactured, it's going to have a major impact on what the scale efficiencies that you have in manufacturing, the nature of the sensors, the nature of microprocessors, how much memory gets put on stuff, how much flash memory is going to be manufactured over the next decade. All these things are going to have a significant impact on the concept of mobility and what it means and the networks it provided over the course of the next 10 years. >> Peter, I want to bring up something that you brought up yesterday, and I think this is important, that's why I wanted to do a real drill down on what seems to be a major paradigm shift and inflection point. We've been talking about autonomous vehicles, media entertainment, smart cities, smart homes. Those are all the sexy demos at Mobile World Congress. But the real change, as pointed out by Val Bercovici who just came in as CTO is that the sea change underneath it, and you pointed out yesterday the convergence between enterprise and consumers coming together is that this internet of things and people, IOTP, or IOTNP, 'cause things can be sensors and devices, are changing it, and what's obvious to us and now coming out of Mobile World Congress as it's just starting to be seen by the mainstream press and media and community is that the TelCos aren't used to dealing with rapidly provisioning things. They're used to a subscriber who buys a phone, dials up a service, gets provisioned and connected, and they have a number, and then they try to connect to the base station and get on the internet. That's simple, and those connections we all know fail, but now imagine that multiplied by millions and millions of devices that are going to be turned on and connected. This is a scale problem, this is a network problem, this is a physics problem. >> Well, it's a physics problem-- >> Explain your theory on this. >> Yeah, it's a physics problem at a very, very base level. Just talking about the TelCos for a second. You're absolutely right, John. We're talking about, when we talk about the scale problem in the TelCos, it's not that they don't know what to do with their networks, it's not that they don't know how to connect devices to the networks. They just don't know how to provide it at a service level. It's going to be demanded by the scale of the devices moving into and out of networks as we think about IOT and P, the TelCos have historically thought about, they've thought about the assets that they have in place, the rates that they charge for those assets, the returns they generate, the tariff rules they work with with governments around the globe. They tend to focus on, good or bad, 10, 20-year time horizons. >> And their P is phone, not people. >> That's right, their P is absolutely. Their P is phone, and I can, and you were probably around. I can remember when you could not buy a phone that didn't have, on a particular company's network, you still can't buy a phone on a network today. You buying a mobile phone and it goes, it's associated with-- >> You're buying a carrier. >> That's right, that's exactly right. And that's how TelCos want to work. Now, they're hoping that eventually they're going to find themselves in the position to be able to spin up devices very quickly, but the reality is that's not how provisioning works in the real world. It's one of the reasons why TelCos continue to get their lunches eaten by companies that are building out their own networks and doing a much better job of rapid provisioning. >> You and I were talking last night off-camera about this notion of IOT and P, and of course, we all believe in and we're passionate about it, but you made a comment that was interesting. It was that we're going to look back at this time in history as a moment where before and after kind of, before Christ, after Christ, however you want to look at it. I mean, there's always that AD, BC kind of thing going on where before, I always call it before Steve Jobs and iPhone. Now it's going to a whole other level with the societal changes from little things, like we had a guest on talking about waste disposal efficiency. Traffic light management, healthcare, every single digital service. NTT Docomo's investor was on yesterday. She was talking about investing in services and bringing AI as a service, not network services, lifestyle services. What do you mean by that, that this is going to be something that we're going to look back 50 years from now and say this was the moment? Can you expand your? >> Yeah, absolutely, John, and it's really actually pretty simple. If you take a look at how executives are starting to think, what's happening is for the first time, we're really starting to look at data as an asset. That's a big question, but let me try to break it down and be a little bit more concise about what I mean by that. When we think about IOT and P, we're thinking about the idea that we can distribute enormous, billions of devices that are going to be sources of data. They're going to be going into the analog world, put into the analog world, and they're going to take analog signals and turn them into, and transduce them into digital signals. Once those signals become digital, then they hit big data, they hit AI, they hit machine learning. That's what's catalyzing a lot of the social concerns about, well, what does it mean for machines to be more autonomous, to take more responsibility? What's going to happen with business accountability when business are increasingly relying on machines that quote, "think." When we think about these big societal changes, we're talking about the ability that IOT's providing, IOT and P is providing, that for the first time how we're going to capture enormous net-new data, how we're going to process that enormous net-new data, and then ultimately, what we call systems of enaction, how we're going to enact specific events back in the real world as a consequence of what machines say is the right thing to do. That is a demarcation point. It moves from a machine being regarded as a tool, and almost exclusively as a tool, something that performs work better but having that work be very well described and very well articulated and the concept clear to something that might actually introduce new work or do work differently. Take responsibility for how it performs work. That's a major sea change. And so when we say that it's going to be, we'll look back and say, "It was before this time "and after this time," it's because we are now in the position to economically be able to gather these streams of data, process them in ways that are unprecedented, and then have the results of that processing enact in unpredictable ways, and that's a major change. >> I don't know if we can talk about some of your research that's coming out, I dunno, can we touch on some of the points? This has yet to be released research from the Wikibon team headed up by Peter with SiliconANGLE Media. I want to just point out, 'cause I find this interesting, you say that there's a architectural decision point within IOTP, a new phrase, hashtag IOTP if you're interested in working with us, just hit us up at Twitter. But there's really four points you point, physics, the law, legal, of course, everything's legal. Physics, legal, economical, economics, and then, authority. >> Right. >> What do you mean by those four? Can you just take us through conceptually these are dimensions, they interplay, are they dependencies, are they interdependent, are they all intertwined? What's the rationale behind these architectural forces? >> When people think about information systems historically, they've been relatively well circumscribed. So, I have an employee that I'm going to provide a service to from a network that I control that has latency requirements and aren't that big a problem because at the end of the day a human being doesn't operate at nanosecond kind of levels, and I got a machine that's mine, and I own running an application that I've licensed. That is a very, very tightly bound unit. When we start introducing IOTP and some of these other things, now we're talking about emergent behaviors that might be far away that we don't control, we're working with partners, et cetera, and the basic architectural challenge of thinking about what do we have to do to get a handle on the requirements of the processing, 'cause at the end of the day these things are still computers, and they still have operational characteristics that have to be accommodated. We think that there's going to be four factors that are going to influence how what we call the edge zone expands or compresses based on the work that needs to be conducted. One is physics. You're not going to go faster than the speed of light, and in fact, generally speaking, if you look at the distance that you have to travel, you're going to be outside the automation zone. You're going to be outside the automation zone if light has to travel, at best, you're going to be about a 10th of the speed of light, so if your automation zone, if you want your automation zone to be about 100 miles, then it means that from there and back with the speed of light you're not going to be able to automate anything that takes longer than that, just for example. Physics is one. >> Physics and wireless is a great example of physics. >> Wireless is, yeah. >> And moving packets around. >> None of this stuff works without physics, right. The second one is legal, that the reality is is that while the laws of physics are relatively immutable as far as we know, there are also government regulations that are what they are, and that could include privacy, it can include requirements for disclosing things, and so, those also, borders are going to have an impact on this notion of automation zones, or edge zones as we call them. Economics is another one. It costs money to move data from point A to point B, and the question is how much data's going to move. A lot of people think that everything's going to go up to the cloud, it's going to be processed up there, and then some instruction's going to come down for automation. That's probably not the way it's going to work. Our findings are suggesting-- >> Not only is it the cost of data, I would argue that also the product design criteria will be impacted economically on that decision point. >> Absolutely. But that's based on how much does it cost to move the data around. The operational characteristics of a product or service are fundamentally, a digital product or service, are fundamentally tied to the cost of moving data. We think that 95-plus percent of the data's actually going to stay in the edge. And the last one is authority, and we kind of touched upon this a second ago in that we're now suggesting that machines are going to take actions without human intervention. Not just actions, but they're actually going to change the scope and nature of the actions that are going to be taken. What does that mean? What does it mean for a machine to act on behalf of a brand? Or on behalf of a person? People use a simple explanation, "Does the autonomous car take out the old lady "or the cub scouts if you got a problem? "Or does it do something else?" It's those kinds of things that we don't know the answer to. A lot of the questions of authority and how we distribute authority and how we codify authority and how we track authority is going to have a major impact on what limits to behavior we put on these things. >> There's also the security angle alone is another one, too, just like basic stuff. These are interesting. And you see these architectural forces. Are you calling them forces, factors, variables? >> Just factors simply because the concept of factor, or you can call it constraints, is the idea that your decision has to factor these things, so we're just calling 'em factors right now. >> Alright, so let's step back now, and look at some of the commentary from this week in Mobile World Congress and our interviews here in theCUBE as well as the remotes. Certainly the hallway conversation is the business model of the TelCos. Saar Gillia who was on yesterday brought up a point of, hey, where's the use cases? Show me the use case, and then I'll say yes. And it's this too complicated, he was not seeing the use cases, and he was saying, "I'd prefer more battery life than "more one gigabit wireless right now" given that's his current situation. The balancing of where to get started seems to be the number one theme. What do I do next, what's the first step? Will the bridge collapse that I'm trying to cross to this future? Or I can't see the other side? Is the world flat or round? These are kind of more personal feelings that people have around taking that leap of faith into this new world? How do you advise and package that together and assimilate that? I mean, do you, how should people look at that? >> I think it's a great question, and I wasn't part of the conversation yesterday, but let's look at that for example. Today, if you're using your phone, you effectively have a relatively simple number of sensors in your phone, relatively simple number of transducers, right. You have a chip that turns your analog voice into a digital signal, so there's that in there. You have some neat stuff that presents the screens, so there's that in there. You have a microphone, et cetera, that kind of stuff, but when we start thinking about 5G and what networking could become, as we talked about yesterday, it's not so much the absolute bandwidth speeds, and it certainly is not going to have any impact on latency for the most part. It really is the number of devices that you can support at one time. It allows for greater density of sources. Now, without looking at 5G, we can talk about a phone being able to support not just a few generators, or a few sources of data on that phone, but maybe dozens, so maybe things that, you know, the whole concept of wearables. Again, do I want to get involved in the use case? No, you and I are sitting here being analysts, and that's not our business. But are there going to be use cases for more wearable technology? Well, if you're sick, if you have a chronic disease, just for example, yeah, that's a use case. I could see people actually living much higher quality lives because they can support more sensors as a result of 5G, with greater security. Again, we go to the autonomous car. There's going to be a lot of sensors in an autonomous car. Most of them are going to operate locally, but having said that, it might be nice if we could actually have a very, very fast low-cost network with inside the car itself to handle a lot of that work. I think we've, human beings, developers, have always found new use cases when given more compute, more memory, and more networking. I don't think that's going to change. I think we're going to see more of that. >> Peter, what's your thoughts, if you had to summarize and encapsulate it into a narrative, Mobile World Congress 2017, now looking back at day two kind of coming to a close, seeing what's out there, how do you look at that? How would you tell someone here is the story of Mobile World Congress? Tell that story. >> To me, John, having looked at the stuff come over the transom and you know, a lot of new devices being talked about and generating a little bit of excitement, a lot of new this and a little bit of excitement, I think that the question for me is are we moving into a period where integration's going to matter again? And I think in many respects that's going to be kind of the subtext of what's coming out of Mobile World Congress. Is it good enough to have the best of breed device and this and that, with a software stack that's doing this and that? Or is there going to be more value to the enterprise and ultimately to the consumer by taking more of an end-to-end perspective? Apple from a consumer and an experience standpoint has done that and has, what is it? They're worth $150 billion more than any other company on the planet right now or something crazy like that? Don't quote me on that, but I think that's what somebody told me. >> Trillions of dollars in cash overseas, for sure. >> Yeah, so it's that notion of are we moving back into a world where integration is going to matter because we're going through a period of significant discontinuity. >> Integration is a great point, 'cause I see that, I do see that as a thing, and bring the Apple example. Apple, the way they develop might be different than say, what we see in an open source, for instance. If you look at what Intel's doing, and I look at Intel as a bellwether, and this is from my perspective, because they have such a huge long game in play, they have been the leader in my opinion in the tech industry playing the long game, and they have to because they make chips. And they're looking at the 5G as an ecosystem play, and they're admitting and saying it's not one vendor. They don't say take village, but they're basically saying it takes a village to rise all the tide or float all the boats, if you will. If you look at what Intel's doing, they're essentially saying that it's an integration game through their own moves, which is ecosystem, playing well together. Now, you could fight for best of breed on point solutions, whether it's a Snapdragon Qualcom, or Intel processor on the device. At the end of the day, it's, as we were saying, network function virtualization to make those dynamic networks work seem to be the key. To play in that, if as a society globally, to your four factors, it has to be an integration game. No one company can do those factors. >> You're absolutely right. Here's how I would say it to put a slightly different twist on it. The tech industry has moved from a product orientation to a service orientation, or is moving from a product orientation to a service orientation, from an orientation where we focus on what's the intrinsic value of what we're buying to what's the utility of what we're using. From a "Hey, let's a put a spend a lot of money upfront "and maybe we'll get to some point of time in the future "where it's valuable" to a, "Let's only pay for what we got." It's difficult to imagine the tech industry moving successfully into that service orientation without taking more of an integration approach to it. Certainly that's what Amazon's trying to do or AWS is trying to do, that's what Google is trying to do, that's what all the companies that are trying to move infrastructure into the cloud are trying to do, so I think that this is a general issue. If we're moving to a service orientation, we have to start taking the integration view on things. >> Awesome, great, Peter. You're watching theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE Media, Inc., and SiliconANGLE Media, Inc. comprises of siliconangle.com, led by Rob Hof, that's our publishing journalism, wikibon.com led by Peter Burris and research, and theCUBE, our internet TV led by Jeff Frick, and of course CrowdChat is the data brand and the data science, and we love bringing you this great content. Pete, I'll give you quick plug because I know that you've been doing a ton of work building out the research team at Wikibon and expanding the work behind the firewall, it's a paid subscription. Some premium that we see on siliconangle.com for the most part. A great body of work on the research. I want to congratulate you, but give you an opportunity to share with the folks who are watching what's going on with research and some of the things that you're working on and why they should potentially reach out to Wikibon. >> Yeah, so we're focused on a couple of relatively simple things. We're not a huge team, so we tend to focus less on products, again, the idea of let's take a look at the intrinsic value of products, and we focus more on the impacts. What does it mean to get utility out of things? How do you get utility out of whatever you buy? The other thing we focus on is disruption, and we talked a lot about what are the disrupting factors. IOT, big data, and what we call the systems of enaction, all supported by significant changing infrastructure and new digital business models. So, it's kind of a combination of those five things that we are focusing our time and attention on. Ultimately, we want to be in a position to help our clients make decisions that improve the value of their business by better utilizing data through these digital models, digital business models that require these technology changes to go. >> Great, and it also helped show Mobile World Congress is about cloud-ready. You had a great report on Amazon we posted on siliconangle.com. What was the summary, bottom line that big body of work you did about Amazon that the headline was, "How big can Amazon be?" What was the key findings from your big assembled report on Amazon Web Service? >> The big finding is Amazon's going to get big, but the cloud's also going to get big, and we think that Amazon, the simple finding is, we think Amazon's going to hold share. That may not sound like much, but for the most part, most of the value's going to go into SaaS, most of the value's going to go into the use cases associated with stuff. That's where a lot of the money's going to go. Amazon holding share, given that they're one of the, in many respects, they created this whole thing, is actually a pretty stunning statement. And it all started, John, because when we went and we looked at our semi-annual update to what's going on in the cloud marketplace, the question that kept coming to us was, okay, so we think it's going to go this fast. Well, what's Amazon going to do with that? What's it going to mean to Amazon? How is Amazon's growth going to affect these things? And so, we started with that answer. We built our models and talked to a lot of users, built our scenarios, so we think that Amazon's going to continue to grow very fast, we think it's going to be a $40 billion company, $40 billion-plus company >> John: In revenue. >> In revenue, AWS. >> John: Not Amazon. >> Not Amazon, Amazon's a totally different beast. We'll see what Amazon does. But AWS will be about a $40-plus billion company in four or five years, and still have about eight-plus percent market share in the entire-- >> And Microsoft has changed their game, they're coming right after Amazon. >> Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Google, and when you start talk internationally, Ali Baba, there's going to be a dozen companies that create enormous businesses. >> And there are companies that don't have a cloud that are late to the game and might not have a seat when the music stops in the old musical chair analogy, so certainly we know who they are. >> You know, what's going to happen to the TelCos? Good question. >> The world, we live in very exciting times as the saying goes. Peter Burris, great to have you, great commentary. Love what you're doing, I think the research around IOT and the edge is a fundamental architectural shift. You've got the four forces laid out. Congratulations, looking forward to doing more where there's totally going to be a game-changer. This will impact everything that we live, and it'll make the autonomous vehicles and the drones and the AI and smart cities a reality. Thanks for the commentary. More Mobile World Congress coverage here in Palo Alto, breaking it all down. We've got a couple late night call-ins, so stay with us. Hopefully, folks will be sauced up a bit, and maybe share some of the news and breaking stories from the hallway. More from theCUBE after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Palo Alto, California for SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE special two-day coverage of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. As people starting to get ready to take that nap to go out all night in Barcelona after they've had their tapas and wine we're here in California breaking it all down. Two days of coverage, this is end of day two in Spain. We're in the middle of it here, and breaking down the analysis, covering all the news, commentary, identifying the trends and talking to the folks here in the Bay Area that can add value to the conversation, and our next guest is Bob Stefanski, who's the managing director of eLab, located in Palo Alto, a venture capitalist making investments and really a key player bridging Silicon Valley with Michigan Motor City here bringing the two worlds together as the autonomous vehicles and the automotive industry's under massive disruption and change, and the car companies know about it and they're not afraid of it. Ford's here, GM's here, they're all here, and now we have Bob Stefanski here in theCUBE. Bob, good to see ya, thanks for coming in. >> John, thanks for having me on. It's good to be here. >> I love this story, and I think this is not really well documented, but this is the beginning of what's been happening for a while, kind of as an outpost to Michigan and Motor City, you have some satellite offices in Palo Alto or Silicon Valley. They're close to Stanford, close to Cal, close to a lot of the research, but now it's a change where you're starting to see Ford, GM, all the car companies, BMW, big venture fund as well, all here in Silicon Valley because the software defined blank is everything, so software-defined radios in 5G, big story at Mobile World Congress, software-defined networks, the world is software-driven, so they're here. You're bridging the investments, trying to identify the key trends. >> Bob: You bet. >> To help identify this new game-changing technology that's going to bring a whole new world together, and certainly Intel and others are changing the networks, creating an end-to-end architecture digitally to bring autonomous vehicles, media entertainment, smart cities, the smart home, and we're seeing Alexa, Google's got their device, and you're seeing smart cities. What's the big bridge being built around? I mean, obviously, the cars themselves are changing. What is this bridge between Silicon Valley and Michigan Motor City? Obviously, that's a big part of Uber and whatnot. >> Absolutely, John, you know, I grew up in Michigan, I grew up in the days before there was a single chip, I think, in cars. I worked for General Motors when I was a summer intern in the early '80s in the engineering group there. There was a very distinct automotive culture. I then fast forward 20 years, and I'm in Silicon Valley. I've spent the majority of my career here in Silicon Valley doing Silicon Valley things, so software, enterprise software was where I spent most of my career with TIBCO software. We are now bridging these two things. We're bridging, the automotive industry is, I think we all know, anyone who's paying attention, the car now has a lot of chips in it, and it's about to have a lot more, the car is becoming a data center on wheels. It's becoming another mobile device, a very big mobile device, and the really neat thing is with, we're the only venture fund with offices and partners located in both places. We have fairly deep networks and connections into the whole Michigan ecosystem back there in automotive, and of course, we're out here in Silicon Valley as well. It's been fascinating to see after spending, after having that early childhood experience, young adult experience as I was growing up in the auto industry, and really kind of the heyday of the auto industry, maybe the beginning of the decline in the '70s and early '80s, and then having sort of spent the career working on the latest, greatest, newest technologies as they've come along out here in Silicon Valley. This is a fascinating time to see these two now finally merging together with autonomous vehicles. >> One of the things that we're seeing in Intel, obviously the bellwether, and they always have the long game going and make the big bets, and autonomous vehicles and virtual reality is that showcase, but what I find interesting and I want to get your thoughts on and reaction to is that I shared on my Facebook feed a post by autoblog.com that says, "Race for autonomous cars is over in Silicon Valley." And they were kind of pointing to the obvious things that people are seeing today, which is myopic and narrow in my opinion, but obviously Apple kind of tapped out of building a car, and I think a lot of people thought, "Oh, Apple should build a car. "They built a watch, why not build a car?" Obviously, they forgot about Teslas here, so I'm not sure what they're thinking, but I think they missed the point that it's bigger than the actual car. Could you share some color commentary around the mindset of Detroit? Because we're seeing that certainly Ford's not lookin' the other way, they have their finger on the pulse. Others do as well. What is the general mindset for the folks in both ecosystems and how are they working together right now? >> Sure, that's a great question, John. And you said it right at the outset, look, all the autos are here, and they're here in our backyard in Palo Alto. They've really sort of migrated here over the last five, seven years probably. GM is here, Ford is here in a big way, BMW's here, Mercedes' here. So they all obviously recognize that the car's becoming all about technology, and they need to be, if they're going to be a key part of that in the future, they need to be out here, and they need to be understanding that, on the other hand, making cars is hard. Making cars is not a simple thing, and this is where 70% of auto research in the U.S. is still happening in Michigan in the Detroit area. Michigan has a very high density of automotive engineers, and integration engineers and integrating IT with the autos and so forth. There's a lot of talent there, there's a lot of experience there. I think, you know, frankly probably the biggest and most interesting thing in this bridge is going to be to watch the cultures either integrate or not, and there's a lot of talk about who wins and the autos can't move fast enough, and that may be the case, but we'll find out. I'm not so sure. They know how to compete and there's a lot of smart people. >> There's no way that Detroit's going away. >> Bob: Not at all. >> My view is they're very solid, and I think they got good self-awareness, and I think if you look at the signals, I would say that I'm pretty confident it's just a matter of how they get reconfigured in this new value-creation model around 5G and whatnot. But I want to get your thoughts on another point, which is if you look at what the iPhone did, that created a new class of app developer and that, I would call them, on one hand artisan developers, people who are composing much more design-centric, obviously, and then, you still had the hardcore developers, and that was lower in the stack, but also other harder problems. But when you talk about automotive, there are some serious technology challenges that require, I won't say old-school engineering, but really hardcore engineering. You're talking about wireless, which is a physics issue, you have all kinds of policy challenges, but really hardcore engineering and software development. I'm not discounting what the app guys are doing, but certainly there will be plenty of apps like all that more the finishing touches in, say, cars for instance. What are some of those technologies because that's really where you need to see the classic double-E, computer science, physics gurus, the real PhD kind of guys. What's your thoughts and what trends do you see in that hardcore area? >> Absolutely, you know, I mean, look, we all know that cars are no longer about just axles and engines, and those hard things. But I think when we make this transition to highly automated, to fully autonomous vehicles, the technologies that are driving that, the fundamental technologies and the really hard stuff are around sensors, right. We're constantly developing newer, faster, better, further range, more precise sensors, so we're talking about Lidar, we're talking about of course, Mobileye and what's happening with the camera and vision processing. We're talking about even radar, a 1940s technology that actually is changing very fast. There's a lot of interesting things happening. >> AI's an old technology coming back now and getting rebooted with cloud computing and whatnot. >> Yeah, absolutely, and then, connecting all that to the cloud, right. I think the hardest, and I think we talked about this before, probably still the single hardest piece and the point of this fear on this is artificial intelligence at the end of the day. It's the same stuff that's driving virtual reality, it's the same stuff that's driving a lot of different things right now, but it's also true in self-driving cars. These things, when you make a car, first of all, it's got to be safe. It has got to be safe. The Department of Transportation, the government regulatory interest is in safety. To make a car safe, they have to be tested, tested, tested, tested, what's that about? Well, when autonomous takes over, it's no long John Furrier driving that car, it's the AI driving the car, right? How do you make it AI smart? >> The crash test dummy's inside AI. >> Right, this is fundamental deep learning. This is fundamental deep learning that the guys at Google know as much as anybody in the world and Facebook and all, you know, that we all know about the arms race in artificial intelligence, but that's at the core of what's happening in self-driving vehicles, and most of that talent, the talent is spread out, it's all over the world, but there's a lot of it out here. And they know they need to have those engineers here. >> What's interesting about your background, you mentioned when we started this segment, you have an enterprise software background in Silicon Valley and you've been very successful, it's interesting, we were talking yesterday and we kind of validated this morning on our opening segment around Mobile World Congress, it's a two-show game right now. It's kind of a bipolar show. You got devices, the new phones, the glam and the sizzle, Samsung and so on, so forth, LG. >> Bob: Can't wait. >> And then you got the TelCo show, which is, TelCo's trying to figure things out, but what's interesting is what we noticed is that there's really a trend between enterprise computing concepts, network data center with consumer clash, so there's a direct collision course between the TelCos which serve as consumers, but the infrastructure challenges are all enterprise. >> Bob: Right, right. >> And the number one thing that's key there is integration and ecosystems. So, you kind of have the right background for this, so we want to get your thoughts on ecosystem integration concepts where a lot of boats in the harbor, so rising tide will float all boats, we see that as a trend, but also integrating. You mentioned the testing, so it's not one company's going to do all this. >> It's not one company that's going to do all this, and in fact, it's going to one of the more complex integrations we've ever undertaken because we're going to have to have those automotive engineers, we're going to have to have those, the software developers, we're going to have to have the AI guys, we're going to have to have the sensor guys, and it's all going to the cloud ultimately. And don't forget GPS, you got GPS. You got a lot. >> Connectivity challenges. Mobility. >> Connectivity challenges, and of course, 5G when 5G comes down the line is going to be a critical part of this as well. You're also going to have smart cities, you're going to have infrastructure embedded in the environment, and in particular, the highly dense areas is where it'll happen first. It's not going to, rural America and so forth, they're going to be probably driving their cars without the embedded sensor for a while, but there are a lot of different components to integrate. >> We had a CTO on earlier before, Val Bercovici, he was talking about the cloud native architecture really plays well in this market because it's not so much about the one car, it's about the one cars in relations to thousands of other cars that are self-driving. It's a multi-touch data equation. Alright, Bob, final question I want to get to you is what are you investing in? What are some of the things that you're looking at? Can you share? I know some of the stuff is pretty stealthy on your end, 'cause it's pretty high end, but can you share any, show a little leg on investments you've made? >> You bet, you bet. Yeah, John, we're, some of the, probably the coolest stuff I can't talk about right now, you're right. Hint hint, it's in some of the things I've already talked about. We're certainly in artificial intelligence. We have a portfolio company in that. We're looking at others. In better sensors, some of the sensor areas I talked about, we are in the process of looking at companies. We have investments in the connected space, not autonomous, but connected space, which is also going to be a very big and important part of this. Company called Aperia right up here that is, at the end of the day, they're tire inflation, but it's all about data. They do automated tire inflation, connected, they'll be connecting every fleet in America. And so we're-- >> It's those boring little efficiency areas that really yield a lot of cash. We just talked about a guest about waste optimize, waste disposal industries. >> Absolutely. >> Little things that are luring billion dollar innovations. >> Little things, very big problems, right, and it's where you can marry things like tire inflation on commercial fleets with data, with lots of data that we never had before. And then apply artificial intelligence to that to learn what's happening and map an entire fleet or multiple fleets nationwide, worldwide, collect all that data and start to correlate and understand what. Those are the problems that are, where a lot of value can be added actually with these technologies. >> It's super interesting, and I think you got a great opportunity, congratulations. Great to see the bridge between Silicon Valley and Michigan Motor City, and I think that's anecdotally means automotive, but there's probably other bridges your connecting, too. Bob, thanks for coming in and sharing. Final question for you while we got you, got a little bit more time. What premises would you, are you betting on? I mean, everyone has a premise, and you mentioned before you came on-camera that one of your premises is that automotive won't miss mobility. What other premises are you investing, what thesises are you building around? >> Well, look, for the, are you talking about autonomous vehicles or much--? >> For the bridge fund and how you're looking at the future of autonomous driving in the connected ecosystem, what are the premise, what's on the premise? >> The premise there is that we're in for what I think is going to be the biggest change in the biggest thing to happen in transportation ever, but it's not just transportation, so we're looking at areas that are not autonomous per se, but that are going to be fundamentally impacted, so services. We're talking about things like insurance, we're talking about all the shared services that are going to come out of this. Medicine is going to probably change, and there's some interesting plays there. And so all of this sort of periphery that is going to be disrupted, we're trying to look five years, 10 years ahead and look at how life is going to change, people's individual experiences are going to change, and how new services, in particular shared services, are going to be enabled by autonomy. >> Bob Stefanski here inside theCUBE, breaking down his commentary and direction of his investments bridging Silicon Valley with Michigan Motor City, or really looking at the autonomous future of vehicles and transportation. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more coverage and analysis of Mobile World Congress 2017 after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Silicon Valley, it's The Cube. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Kay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Palo Alto, California for SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. Coverage of two days of wall-to-wall, eight a.m. pacific time to six both days. Yesterday, Monday. Today, Tuesday. Breaking down the news, getting the analysis, sharing our commentary, and getting reaction, from here inside the studio for folks in Silicon Valley who couldn't make it to Barcelona, but also covering what's happening on the ground. And of course we'd love to phone in and get commentary directly from Barcelona, and we have on the live Peter Jarich who's the Chief Analyst at Global Data, formerly a Current Analyst, Peter thanks for taking the time, I know it's gettin' late there. It's close to bedtime for the people who are burnt out and for the people who are going to go party, they're just going out. Thanks for-- >> Peter: You know, unfortunately it's this thing, then dinner starts at nine o'clock, it's still early, late nights, early mornings but no worries, glad to talk to you guys. >> So, obviously, the show at Mobile World Congress this year is kind a bi-polar, as always, you have the device people making their big announcements on Saturday and Sunday on the weekend leading up to the show, LG, Huawei, and everyone else, but the big phones, and all the, you know, the screens, that's the glam and sizzle, but behind second half of the show is about tel cos, right? The transformation going on the wireless world the, the tel co world, the service provider world, where the new network architecture seems to be the top story. A new network transformation, IOT, Internet of Things with cars, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and certainly 5G has been at the center of all the action, really since yesterday and today. So I wanted to get your take. Is that actually what's happened, are we reading the tea leaves on the grid properly? Is 5G the top story, or what's your take on the top stories out there right now? >> Peter: Yeah, you know, I mean clearly, as far as the buzz, where the buzz is, you're right, 5G is sucking a lot of the energy out of the (coughing), excuse me, out of the show. It's interesting, I mean it's, the show is, I feel like a proverbial blind man, (mumbling) man. (coughing) Excuse me, I mean, there's so much going on, that depending upon where you want to focus, you could come away with any take away. If you focus on the devices, you could focus on IOT, and you could literally come away with anything. If 5G has been the one piece of news that is sort of in the background of anything, I think it's in the background of everything because in part, the definition of 5G is still broad. Right, there's the radio access side, there's the core network side, IOT is a big part of 5G, reaching out to (mumbling) industries, vertical industry is a big part of it. So, as operators start talking about 5G, it's easy enough for every vendor to sort of just attach themselves in some way, and I think that's what we're seeing here this year. It really is just a question of, how we get the 5G, are we ready for 5G we saw on Sunday, the big news of acceleration, how are we accelerating towards it, (mumbling) deals from a number of major mobile operators and they're talking about how we're going to get there. But that's really from the transformation side of things, completely right. That's the big question on everyone's mind. >> Is 5G ready honestly? It seems to be hyped up big time. As we said in one of our blog posts, "Hug the hype," cause 5G people want to all go there. But is that the real meaty story or is it, it's kind of like the AI in my mind. AI's obviously relevant, but where's the real AI. We're seeing more IOT conversations in the back channel around service provider impact, the IOT, so'd loved to get your thoughts on, you know, the impact of IOT to the business model and architecture, of the service providers. >> Peter: Yeah, it's interesting, because IOT, I mean, I think if we look at IOT versus 5G, right, one is solely sold in that theoretical stage, one is, we kind of understand IOT, and I think the number of times I've heard people talk about IOT is the way that (mumbling) will figure out how to grow their (mumbling) and not just (mumbling) to the bottom line, right? I mean, there's like, last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, there's a lot of discussion around the air transformation that will be opex reduced and it'll be (mumbling) reduced, and then some of it will save them money, but we know that they also struggle to grow their revenues, and proof at the topline. I think a lot of folks are looking at IOT, the question I think is still out there, that I'm not necessarily seeing addressed here, is how, right, because a lot of that focuses on how do they move beyond just being access providers, and we know that, yes, we're going to be talking about the devices, that it'll be low brand with many of them, and so (mumbling) revenues from those may not be where they need to be to really help grow those revenues, and so the question is how we (mumbling) move beyond it? Or how does it mix with the move into industry deep enough so that connectivity (mumbling) be reaching enough industries, reach enough connections, that connectivity (mumbling) will be significant. And I don't know that we've got an answer for that, and everyone's talking about vertical industries. Everyone. And the operators, I think what's interesting, is I heard from both operators and vendors, that we don't know them well enough. >> What's the key enabler-- >> Peter: I was running a panel with CTO's from Ericson, Nokia, Huiwei, and they all said at the end, you know, one of the biggest concerns for 5G is that we pin the hopes of 5G to some extent on helping enable these vertical industries, right? How do we reach out to mining and utilities and smart cities, and how we make 5G be pervasive towards not just consumers but (mumbling) in those markets? That there's no certainty that we actually understand what they need, and it's (mumbling) service to them unsuccessfully, as with some places that (mumbling) automotive that would be good to see progress on, a lot of them I think are still that sort of >> Yeah. >> Peter: We don't know enough to know how we'll help them. >> That's a great analysis. We have Peter on the phone here, an analyst breaking down the commentary. Question for you, as an analyst, you have a good approach on this, and I want to get some commentary on you around for the folks who are trying to keep up with the turbulence, I mean, there's so much going on, you got wireless, which has it's own set of things, is it more bandwidth, or more mobility, what's the trade off, is it a (mumbling), is this spectrum, unlicensed, all this craziness, radios, core network you mentioned, it's a lot of moving parts. Question is, how do you figure out the tell signs of success, and what are red flags, so what are you looking for that is proof points that things are going in the right direction for the industry, and proof points that there's red flags? What do you, what's your key indicators for benchmarking this opportunity around 5G and network transformation? To make all this stuff work? Smart cities, autonomous vehicles, et cetera. >> Peter: To be honest, it's a great question, I think in a lot of the conversations here come down to the focus on business versus technology, right, and I'm not too worried. I mean, we need to continue to watch technology, and make sure technology gets (mumbling) and we need to make sure that what we're hoping to do with 5G, that we can do, and (mumbling) right, the idea of we found something with (mumbling), the twee if you will, for (mumbling), work great. I've got no doubt that we can solve the tecnology issues. Oh that's supporting, unlike the spectrum, or shared spectrum of (mumbling) bands, a millimeter, or whatever (mumbling). No doubt that we can make those work. I think where I look to make sure that things are okay is, you know, none of this will really matter if it's just, 5G is no different than what we saw with 3G or 4G. And one way to think about it is, we moved from 1G to 2G and 2G to 3G and three to four, it was always a fairly one dimensional move. Right, 1G to 2G was really about more voice capacity. 2G to 3G you know, was really moving to do basic data. 3G to 4G was more data, meaning we took IP network. But, you know, what we see with 5G is that it can't just be about more data. It can't just be about faster. We've seen, I mean, heck, just look at the U.S., right, we've seen where the pricing is, and the price wars, so just throwing more bandwidth at this isn't going to help the operators. What we need to do is to figure out how to leverage these new technologies to test new markets and grow the revenues, right, grow their business, and I think that's why we're hearing so many people talk about all these different industries. And do I know that automotive is the best example, no. You know, I think automotive is sexy-- >> Yeah, it's eye candy. It's total eye candy-- >> Peter: You can get people rallied around it, but. You know what, it's public safety, you know, automotive or utilities, or industrial automation or retail, or whatever, that seeing operators build those relationships, manage to serve them, figure out how to serve them (mumbling), that's what I'm looking for, otherwise it's just going to be no different than any other G. >> Yeah. >> Peter: And it'll be sort of a race to the bottom. >> Yeah, I agree. I think another thing too, when you looked at even when wireless was exploding, the question for the carriers and the operators was, can they move past managing subscribers and truck rolls, and building core competencies, to being much more comprehensive through their operations. I think, now more than ever, that's the big pressure point, isn't it? They have to go outside of there core competencies, traditionally, and get down and dirty. >> Peter: Yeah, and you know I'm always encouraged when I see interesting little business models, right, (mumbling) AT&T move it's select products, and try to take it internationally. Or we've seen Verizon do this week. It's interesting seeing those business models. Look what Telfonica is doing, data platforms. You know, I think those innovations are great, but, whether or not they work, I'm not too-- >> Yeah. >> Peter: I'm not too (mumbling) whether or not those work. What I am more concerned about again is how they reach past that consumer and just basically business user, (mumbling) because, you can talk about IOT and I think IOT and 5G get going (mumbling), but with every IOT, except for consumer IOT, which we (mumbling) that's (mumbling) IOT cases are all vertical specific. And so, you're not going to get to address things, your (mumbling) won't, unless they come to understand that and they show that they can actually reach out to those (mumbling). >> Peter Jarich, Chief Analyst at Global Data, formerly Current Analysis, great to chat with you. Calling in from Barcelona, thanks for taking the time. Final question for you. What's the bumper sticker on the show this year? As you look at the formations of what's been announced, and where it's going, the trajectory, wraps up, you know, next day and a half. What's going to be the bumper sticker for this year's Mobile World Congress? >> Peter: You know, honestly, I think what's probably surprising is, so the bumper sticker will probably be LTE before 5G. And what I mean is as much as we're talking about 5G and really those being our big sexy topics, and seeing so many operators talking about how they see it in the near term, going into the long term, LTE supporting them, especially with gigabit LTE speed. And you've got Qualcomm talking about what they can do, (mumbling) LTE speeds are only 20 megahertz LTE carrier than you'd even notice (mumbling). You hear T-Mobile, who came up from the first morning at presentation, there was a session, media event with Ericson, and as much as Ericson was talking about 5G, (mumbling) from T-Mobile got to talk about how excited they are about their LTE network, right. And I think there is this recognition that yes, 5G is coming, but (phone cuts out). >> Alright Peter, we just lost you there. Quick, quick I lost my battery on my phone here, or the speaker. Thanks so much for your commentary, really appreciate it. >> Peter: No, no worries, no worries. Thanks again, and feel free to reach out any time. >> Alright, have a great time in Barcelona. Get some sleep, or go out, hit the night clubs. As always, going on the ground, getting to our friends and colleagues out doing the work, pounding the pavement, that's Peter, he's got the great commentary. We'll have that on replay as well, and it'll be up on YouTube as well, so this is The Cube, with more coverage from Mobile World Congress after this short break. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Lauren Cooney, and welcome back to theCUBE. Today we have Jeff Frick with us, who is the general manager of theCUBE, and we're here to learn about what goes on at theCUBE, what the business is like, some of the most fun aspects of what he does, and go from there. >> Jeff: Great to be here. >> Thank you so much. So, Jeff, starting out, really, when did you join theCUBE, and really what are your goals and aspirations for theCUBE as you look to business going forward now? >> My first CUBE gig was, I've known John for a long, long time, reached out. It was actually Splunk.conf 2012 in the Cosmo, I'll never forget, and they needed an extra host, we were over-subscribed, and I went and did that show. I did it with Jeff Kelley, and was really touched by this format where you've got kind of this professional looking, newsy, opportunity for people to tell their story, most people don't ever get to tell their story in that context, which I thought was pretty cool. And then also just to personalize the people behind the tech because since Steve Jobs, and that genre of people, people want to know who the people are behind the technology. So not only the people that run the companies, but who creates it. I think Open-source had a lot to do with that where people are interested in other people, not just the tech for itself. And that's what I really like. >> You bring up a great point with stories, and luminaries, and visionaries. Can you talk about some of those folks that you've had on theCUBE, some of the best guests you've ever had? >> Oh my gosh, we've had so much. People ask me this all the time, I need to prepare my answer better. But like Scott Cook, from Intuit, was just phenomenal. Tremendously successful, still focused on the same core vision that he came up with when his wife was filling out her checkbook, writing checks, about just a better way to organize and manage cash. And that show is so inspirational because it's really a small business show pretending to be an accounting show. We've had Robert Gates on, I didn't get to interview Robert Gates, but served with many, many President's. We're really fortunate, we often get the keynotes. Fred Luddy, from ServiceNow, phenomenal founder, goofy, quirky. Maria Klawe who runs Harvey Mudd College, goofy, quirky, great personality. So there's just so many great individuals and then some that you don't know. We had, an original ServiceNow we had this little older lady who had got a ServiceNow POC through, it's some ancient company, I don't even remember what company it was, and it was just fascinating to me how this, you know, she wasn't young and hip and new and on top of things, was able to kind of see the vision, get it funded, get a project underway, and then eventually build into being a customer for them. And how she was able to do that, and what was the story, and how many peers out there are curious to know how they could do that for their company. And those, I love those stories. >> Those are great. And I think one of the things that we want to look at too is that we want to understand for the most part what are some of the bloopers that you've seen out there? What are some of the things that you've noticed that are funny or were oh my gosh, you know, while you were on air, while you were thinking about different things. Can you tell me a little bit about that? >> Well, of course, the classic one that we've referenced over and over and over, and if you've seen any of our promos you see, it was John Cleese. Ironically again, at another ServiceNow keynote he was doing their CIO Summit or something, and he came on and he basically decided he wanted to rewrite the end of the, it became a sketch, not an interview. And just stood up and threw his water all over John and Dave, fried Dave's laptop, and marched off the stage. Half the people there, we had a huge live audience, were laughing hysterically. The other half were petrified. Unfortunately, a number of those were the client senior executives who didn't really know, and we had to go out and do some investigation and find out he actually does it a lot to people. And in fact the guys ran into him later that night and he said, "Wasn't that fun, wasn't that fun?" So that's one that just jumps right off the page. Another great one was Michael North from the NFL was at an IBM event talking about how they build the schedule. And while the analytics are fine, and you run an algorithm and it can plug a bunch of numbers, it's really the softer side. You know, how do you leverage at that point a Peyton Manning versus a Tom Brady match up? Do you use it to leverage an existing relationship? Do you use it to build a new network? Do you use it in your feature presentation to get the most leverage from that asset? So a whole lot of kind of soft, softer sided things in terms of the decision making. Which I think is what's really interesting. >> Yeah, I think that's great. And I want to take it a little bit further into what are the business aspects of theCUBE? What do you do on a day to day basis? What are the things that matter the most for running this business? >> Big question. So most important area is our customers. So what customer, what value does theCUBE bring to people when they take us to their conference? >> Lauren: And who are the key customers? >> Well key customers, right. IBM, and we've mentioned ServiceNow, Splunk, EMC, Dell EMC now, Vmware and their ecosystem partners. So a lot of enterprise infrastructure, a lot of opensource, and a lot of applications. But really there's three key components to why people bring theCUBE and what we deliver when we're there. One of them is just great content. The format that we have, the conversational tone, the way that it all works, we just get people to say stuff that you wouldn't ever ask them to say, especially on the customer reference ones. So the content is great and, you know, conferences are looking for more great content. The second really is our community and our distribution. You know we are a media company, we're super active in the community, we leverage a lot of social tools. We try to ask interviews and get information that's topical and evergreen and can be used often and over and over, and really run that out through a number of different channels and different formats. And then the third thing, which we didn't use to talk about as much, but we really do now, it's really the theater of our presence. There's something to bright lights and cameras when theCUBE is at an event. It's like, oh, theCUBE guys are here. And we hear it all the time, theCUBE guys are here. >> Everyone likes to be a star. >> Everybody wants to be a star. And it does a little bit of, I won't say validates for the greater good, but certainly within our community when we're at an event it's a signal that something's going on, something's exciting here, theCUBE guys are here, and we're covering it. And we hear that over and over. We have people stop us literally in an elevator to say, I look at your guys' upcoming sheet to make some decisions as to where I should plan my schedule time. And, or we've also heard, you know, I just wait and watch theCUBE all day, I can't go, I just have theCUBE running in the background. And get a taste of not necessarily what happened in all the breakouts and all the keynotes and all the other stuff, but we generally get all the same people who run all the keynotes. You're getting those same folks, but you're getting them in a conversational tone, talking often about many of the similar topics, it's just a different way to get that message across. >> So how do you grow the community further? So you talk about the community you have, you talk about the community that's at large right now. How are you looking to grow your user base and your community further? >> Right, so it's really kind of along two angles. One is kind of this natural bundling of subsets within our existing community. And that's like our Women in Tech coverage that we started years ago. Honestly, you know things were kind of slowing again in November, so we're like, you know, there's some great women, they're not getting highlighted, let's go out and do some Women in Tech interviews and integrate that. So that's kind of more of a horizontal play if you will. In terms of more vertical plays, we're trying to get a little bit out of the application infrastructure space and more into the app space. So autonomous vehicles, autonomous drones, commercial drones, we've done a lot of just app shows as companies do their own shows versus more of an industry show. So like I said, I mentioned QuickBooks Connect was fun. So really getting into some of these other areas that are more application specific and not just kind of infrastructure, per se which is the roots. >> So when you so application specific, are you looking at for example, you know Microsoft for example is a very large company. They have application space. Is that what you're looking for? >> Love to do some Microsoft shows, yeah, we have a Microsoft build and Ignite, they have a number of shows. >> What about Salesforce? Salesforce is doing some really interesting stuff around applications and community and the whole nine yards. >> Right, so before we didn't really go after Salesforce per se, 'cause it was just really big and we were just really small, we were trying to get a lot of our processes and structure in place. Since then we actually covered one Salesforce lightly a couple years back. A friend of mine, Lynn Voinovich, was a CMO and we covered the kick off. >> I love Lynn. >> You know Lynn? But we need to get back to Salesforce, that's one that we should be at, it's an important show, we should be there. >> Great, so let's have, let's kind of end here with a fun fact. So tell me a fun fact about your job or something that you do that perhaps people don't know about. >> A fun fact about my job. Just, it's just a lot. >> Lauren: Let's make it fun, not a lot of work. >> Basically our job is kind of like the proverbial duck, right? When we run production, we do about a hundred shows a year. There is, I always tell people it's like catering. There's about a thousand details that you kind of have some idea about, and there's a thousand ideas, there's a thousand issues that you have just no control. So being able to dance, being able to be like that proverbial duck that looks smooth, and cool, calm, and collected on top, but it's really pumping pretty hard underneath, you know we've got a lot of people, we've got a lot of back end processes, we have a lot of dancing that happens to try to make it really smooth for the guests, really smooth for the consumer. And we screw up and things happen. But I think we're pretty good, and we're constantly trying to improve our process. >> Great, thank you so much, and thank you for being here again. >> Thank you. >> I really appreciate your time. And we'll be back shortly on theCUBE with something that is coming up in about 15 minutes. (techno music)

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from Silicon Valley, it's "the Cube," covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Mintel. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Palo Alto, California, covering Mobile World Congress, which is later in Spain right now, in Barcelona, it's gettin' close to bedtime, or, if you're a night owl, you're out hittin' the town, because Barcelona stays out very late, or just finishing your dinner. Of course, we'll bring in all theCube coverage here. News analysis, commentary, and of course, reaction to all the big mega-trends. And our next two guests is Guy Churchward who is the President and CEO of Data Torrent, formerly of EMC. You probably recognize him from theCube, from the EMC world, the many times he's been on. Cube alumni. And Phu Hoang, who's the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Data Torrent. Co-founder, one of the founders. Also one of the early, early Yahoo engineers. I think he was the fourth engineer at Yahoo. Going way back on the 90s. Built that to a large scale. And Yahoo is credited for the invention of Hadoop, and many other great big data things. And we all know Yahoo was data-full. Guys, welcome to theCube's special coverage. Great to see you. >> Thank you so much. So I'm psyched that you guys came in, because, two things. I want to talk about the new opportunity at Data Torrent, and get some stories around the large scales experience that you guys have dealing with data. 'Cause you're in the middle of where this is intersecting with Mobile World Congress. Right now, Mobile World Congress is on the collision course between cloud-ready, classic enterprise network architectures with consumer, all happening at the same time. And data, with internet of things, is that going to be at the center of all the action? So, (laughing) these are not devices. So, that's the core theme. So, Guy, I want to get your take on, what attracted you to Data Torrent? What was the appeal for the opportunity? >> You mean, why am I here, why have I just arrived? >> I've always data-obsessed. You know this. From the days of running the storage business on their data protection, before that I was doing data analytics and security forensics. And if you look at, as you said, whether it's big data, or cloud, and the immersion of IOT, one thing's for sure, for me. It was never about big data, as in a big blob of stuff. It was all about small data sprawl. And the world's just getting more diverse by the second, and you can see that by Mobile World, right? The challenge then you have is, companies, they need to analyze their business. In other words, data analytics. About 30 years ago, when I was working for BA Systems, I remember meeting a general of the army. And he said the next war will be one in the data center, not on the battlegrounds. And so you really understand-- >> He's right about that. >> Yeah. And you have to be very, very close. So in other words, companies have started to obsess about what I call the do loop. And that really means, when data is created, and then ingesting the data, and getting insight from the data, and then actioning on that. And it's that do loop. And what you want to do, is you want to squeeze that down into a sub-second. And if you can run your analytics at the pace of your business, then you're in good shape. If you can't, you lose. And that means from a security perspective, or you're not going to win the bids. In any shape or form. That's not a business-- >> John: So speed is critical. >> Yeah, and people say, speed and accuracy. Because what you don't want to do is to run really really fast and fall off a cliff. So you really need to make sure that speed is there and accuracy is there. In the good old days, when I was running security forensics, you could either do complex end processing, which was a very small amount of information coming in and then querying it like crazy, or things like log management, where you would store data at rest, and then look at it afterwards. But now with the paradigm of all the technology catching up, so whether that's the disk space that you get, and the storage and the processing, and things like Hadoop with the clustering, you now break that paradigm. Where you can collect all the information from a business and process it before you land the data, and then get the insight out of it, and then action. So that was my thing, of looking and saying, look, this whole thing's going to happen. In last year -- >> And at large scale, too. I mean, what you're talking about in the theoretical side makes a lot of sense, but also putting that into large scale, is even more challenging. >> Yeah, we had, when I was going through the processes, dating, you know, to see whether was a company that made sense, I chatted one of our investors. And they're also a customer. And I said, why did you choose Data Torrent? And they said, "We tested everything in production, we tested all the competitive products out there, and we broke everything except Data Torrent. And actually, we tested you in production up to a billion events per second, and you didn't break. And we believe that that quantity is something that you need as a stepping stone to move forward." >> And what use cases does that fit for? Just give me some anecdotal (snaps fingers) billion transactions. At that speed, what's some use cases that really take advantage of that? >> They were mastering in, what I would call, industrialization of IT. So in other words, once you get into things like turbines, wind generation, train parts. We're going to be very very soon, looking out of a window and seeing -- >> John: So is it flow data? Is it the speed of the flow? Is it the feed of all the calculations, or both? >> It's a bit of both. And what I'll do, is I'll give Phu a chance, otherwise, we'll end up chatting about it. >> John: Phu, come on, you're the star. (laughing) When you founded this company, you had a background at Yahoo, which you built from scratch, but that was a first-mover opportunity, Web 1.0, as they say. That evolved up and then, everyone used Yahoo Finance. Everyone used Yahoo Search as a directory early on. And then everything just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and then you had to build your own stuff with Hadoop. >> Yeah. >> So you lived it. The telcos don't have the same problem. They actually got backed into the data, from being in the voice business, and then the data business. The data came after the voice. So what's the motivation behind Data Torrent? Tell us a little bit more. >> It's exactly what you say, actually. Going through the 12 years at Yahoo, and really, we learned big data the hard way. Making mistakes month after month, about how to do this thing right. We didn't have the money, and then we found out that, actually, proprietary systems of the shelf system that we thought were available, really couldn't do their jobs. So we had to invent our own technology, to deal with the kind of data processing that we had. At some point, Yahoo had a billion users using Yahoo at any given point in time, right? And the amount of impressions, the amount of clicks, the amount of activity, that a billion users have, onto the system. And all of the log files that you have to process to understand what's going on. On the other side of that, we need to be able to understand all of those activities in order to sell to our advertisers. Slice and dice behaviors and users, and so on. We didn't have the technology to do that. The only thing we knew how to do was, to have these cheap racks of cheap servers, that we were using to serve webpages. And we turned to that to say, this is what we're going to need to do, to solve these big data problems. And so, the idea of, okay we need to take this big problem and divide it into smaller pieces, so that we can run on these cheap servers, sort of became the core tenant of how we do distributor processing that became Hadoop, at the end of the day, right? >> You had big data come in because you were, big data-full, as we say. You weren't building software to solve someone else's problem. You had your own problem, you had a lot of data. You were full with data. >> Exactly. >> Had to go on a data diet, to your point. (crosstalk) >> And no one to turn to. >> And no one to turn to. >> All right. So let's spin this around or Mobile World Congress. 'Cause the big theme is, obviously, we all know what device is. In fact, we just released here on theCube early this morning Peter Burris pre-announced our new research initiative called IOTP. Which stands for Internet Of Things And People. And so now you add the complexity of people devices, whether that's going to be some sort of watch, phones, anything around them. That adds to the industrial aspect of turbines and what not. Internet of Things is a new edge architecture. So the data tsunami coming, besides the challenges of telcos to provision these devices, are going to be very challenging. So the question I want to ask you guys is, how do you see this evolving, because you have certainly connectivity. Yeah, you know, low latency, small little data coming from the windmills or whatever. Versus big high-dense bandwidth, mobility. And then you got network core issues, right. So how does this going to look like? Where does the data piece fit in? Because all aspects of this have data. What's your thoughts on this, and architecture. Tell us about your impressions, and the conversations you've had. >> First of all, I think data will exist everywhere. On the fringe, in the middle, at the center. And there's going to be data analytics and processing in every path of that. The challenge will be to kind of figure out what part of processing do you put on the fringe, what part do you put at the center. And I think that's a fluid thing that is going to be constantly changing. Going back to the telcos. We've had numbers of conversationw with telcos. And, yes we're helping them right now with their current set of issues around capacity management and billing, all those things. But they are also looking to the next step in their business. They're making all this money from provisioning, but they know they sit on top of this massive amount of really valuable data, from their customers. Every cellphone is sending them all of this data. And so there's a huge opportunity for them to monetize, or really produce value, back to their customers. And that could come in form of offers, to customers. But now you're talking about massive analytics targeting. That is also real-time, because if you're sending an offer to someone at a particular location, if you do that slowly, or in batch, and you give them an offer 10 minutes later, they're no longer where they are. They're 10 minutes away, right? >> Well, first two questions to follow up on that. One, do they know they have a data advantage opportunity here? Do they know that data is potentially a competitive advantage? >> From our conversation, they absolutely do. They're just trying to figure out, so what do we do here? It's new to them. >> I want to get both your perspectives. Guy, I want you to weigh in on this one, 'cause this is another theme that's coming out of the reporting and analysis from Mobile World Congress. This has come also from the cloud side as well. Integration now, is more important than ever, because, for instance, they might have an Oracle there, there might be Oracle databases outside their network. That they might want to tap into. So tapping other people's data. Not just what they can get, the telcos. It's going to be important. So how do you guys see the integration aspect, how we, top of the first inning, national anthem going on. I mean, where are we in this integration? There's a pregame, or, what inning are we in on this? >> Yeah, we're definitely not on the home run on it. I think our friend, and your friend Steve Manly, I sat down with him, and I gave him a brief, you know, what we were doing, and he was blown away by the technology and the opportunity, but he was certainly saying, but the challenge is the diversity of the data types. And then where they're going to be. Autonomic cars. You know each manufacturer will tell the car behind it, what it just experienced, but the question is, when will a Tesla tell a Range Rover, or tell a BMW? So you have actually -- >> They're different platforms, just different stats, it's a nightmare. >> Right. So in other words, >> And trackability. And whether it's going to be open APIs, whether it's technologies like Kafka. But the integration of that, and making sure that you can do transformation and then normalize it and drive it forward. It's kind of interesting, you know. You mentioned the telco space, and do they understand it. In some respects, what Phu went through with Yahoo, in other words, you go to a webpage, you pull it up, it knows you because of a cookie and it figures out, and then sells advertising to you on that page. Now think about you as a location, and you're walking past a Starbucks, and they want to sell you a coffee for ten cents less than they would normally do. They need to know you're there then. And this is the thing, and this is why real-time is going to be so critical. And similarly, like you said, you look out the window and you see DHL, or UPS, or FedEx drones out the window. You not only have an insight issue. You also have a security issue, you have a compliance issue, you have a locational issue. >> I think you're onto something. And I think I actually had this talk today with Steve Manly EMC World last year, around time series data. So this is interesting. Everyone wants to store everything, but it actually might not be worth anything anymore. If the drone is delivering your package, or whatever realtime data is in realtime, it's really important right there in realtime, or near realtime. It might not be worth anything after. But yet a purchase at a store, at a time, might be worth knowing that as a record to pull in. You get what I'm saying? So there's a notion of data that's interesting. >> And I think, and again, Phu's the expert. I'm still running up onto it. It's just a pet hobby, an obsession of mine. But the market has this term ETL. In other words, Extract, Transform, Land. Or load. But in essence, it's always talked about in that (mumbles) batch. In other words, I get the data, transform it, drop it, and then I have a look at it. We're going upside-down. So the idea now is to actually extract, transform, insight, action, then landing. So in other words, get the value at the fresh data, before it's the data late. Because if you set the data late, by default, it's actually stale. And actually, then there's the fascination of saying, if you're delivering realtime data to a person, you can't think fast enough to actually make a live decision. So therefore, you've almost got any information that comes to you, has to tier out. So it comes to a process. You get that fresh use of it, and then it drops into a data lake. And so I think there's using both, but I think what will you see in the market, and, again, you've experienced the disk flash momentum that happened last year. You're going to see that from a data source from at-rest, advanced, to real-time data streams on our applications next year. So I think the issue is, the formative year, and back to your, you know, get it right, get the integration, but make sure your APIs are there, talking to the right technologies. I think everything's going to be exciting this year and new and fresh and people really want to do it. Next year is going to be the year where you're going to see an absolute changing of the guards. >> And then also the SLA requirements, they'll start to get into this when you start looking at integration. >> You're absolutely right. Actually, the SLA part is actually very very important here. Because, as you move analytics from this back world, where it has, you do it once a day, and if it dies, it's okay, you just do it again. To where it is now continuous, 24 by 7, giving you insight continuously about your business, your people, your services, and so on. Then all of a sudden, it has to have the same characteristics as your business. Which is, it's 24 by 7, it can never go down, it can never lose data. So, all of a sudden you're putting tremendous requirements on an analytics system, which has, all the way from the beginning of history 'til now, been a very relaxed batch thing, to all of a sudden being something that is enterprise-grade, 24 by 7. And I think that that's actually where it's going to be the toughest nut to crack. >> So tell about some of the things that you've learned. And pretend for a second, let's pretend that you, as a co-founder at Data Torrent, and Guy, and you are teamed up. You guys run this telco. Let's just make one up, Verizon. Or AT&T, or pick one. And you sit there saying, okay, you've got the keys to the kingdom. And you can do whatever you want (laughing). You can be Donald Trump, or you can be whoever you want. You can fire everybody, or you can pick it over and run it. What would you do? You know you've got IOT. So this is business model innovation opportunities. I want you to put the technical hat on, plus knowing what you know around the business model opportunities. What do you do? You know IOT's an opportunity. Amazon is going after that heavily. Do you bolt a cloud together? Do you go after Amazon? Do you co-op with Amazon? Do you co-integrate? Do you grab the IOT? Do you use the data? I mean, given where we are today, what's the best move if we were consulting with this. >> You know, I will be the last person to be talking about giving advice to a telco. But since we are, we own our own telco here, and then we're pretending, I would say the following. IOT is going to happen, right? Earlier, when I say a billion people, that's just human beings. Once you now talk about censoring, you can program how many times they can send you data per second, then the growth in volume is immense, right? I think there's a huge opportunity, as a telco, in terms of the data that they have available and the insight that they could have about what's going on. That is not easy. I don't think that, as a telco, in the current DNA of a telco, I can go ahead and do all that analytics and really open up my business to the data insight layer. I would partner, and find a way-- >> Well, we're consulting, we're going to sit around and say hey, what do we have? We have relationship with the consumer, big marketing budgets. We can talk to them directly, we have access to their device. >> But you'll bifurcate the business. We're in the boardroom here, this is nothing more than that. But I would look at it and say look, you've got a consumer business, the same as in IOT. There's really, for me, there's three parts of IOT. There is the bit that I love which, you can geek out, which is basically the consumer market, which, there's no money in for a large-scale tenant, right, enterprise. And then you have the industrialization of IOT, which is I've got a leaky pipe, and I want a hardened device, ruggedized, which is wifi, so, now as a telco, I could create a IOT cloud, that allows me to put these devices out there, and in fact, I use Arlo, the little cameras. And they've got one now, where I can basically float it with its own cellular signal. So it's its own cellphone. That's a great use of IOT for that. And then you step to the consumer side of, I've got a cellphone, and then what I'll do is literally, in essence, riff off what Yahoo did in the early days and say, I'm now the new browser. The person's the browser. So in other words, follow the location, follow where he is, and then basically do locational-based advertising. >> By the way, you have to license the patent from our earlier guest, he'll say will he leak, 'cause he's got th6e patent on personal firewall for personal server. He's built a mobile personal server. >> Yeah. >> But this is the opportunity around wireless. Why I love the confusion, but the opportunity around wireless right now is, you can get bandwidth at high capacity. You have millimeter wave four, that doesn't go through walls, but you have other diverse frequencies and spectrum for instance, you can blend it all together to have that little drip signal, if you will, going into the cloud from the leaky pipe. Or if you need turbine, full-fat pipe, you maybe go somewhere. So, I think this is an interesting opportunity. >> And they're going to end up watching the data centers as well. There's still the gamut of saying our customer is going to continue to support their own data centers, or are there going to be one to a hundred data centers out there? And then how does selling a manufacturer or a telco play into that, and do they want to be that guy or not? >> Guy, Phu, thanks for coming in. I want to give you guys a chance to put a plug in for Data Torrent. Thanks for sharing some great commentary on the industry. So, what's up with you guys? Give us the update. Are you hiring? You growing? What are you guys doing? Customers? What's the update? Technology, innovations? >> So we've got a release coming out tomorrow which is a momentum release. I can't talk too much about the numbers, but in essence, from a fact base, we have a thing called a patchy apex. So it's open sourced, so you can use our product for free. But that's growing like gangbusters. From a top-level project, that's actually the fastest-growing one, and it's only been out for seven months. We just broke through 50,000 users on it. From our product, we're doing very well on the back of it. So we actually have subscription for the production side. >> So revenue is a subscription model. >> Yeah, and we meet both sides. So in other words, for the engineer who writes it, you've got the open source. And then when you put it into production, from the operations side, you can then license our products to enable you to manage an easy-- >> So when it gets commercialized, you pay as you go, when you use it. >> And you don't have to, if you don't want to. You've got all the tools to do it. But, we focus for our products group of, time to value, total cost of ownership. We're trying to bring Hadoop and real scale, realtime streaming to the masses. So what's the technology innovation? What's the disruptive enabler for you guys? >> I think we talked about it, right? You've got two really competing trends going on here. On one side, data is getting more and more and more massive. So it's going to take longer and longer to process it. Yet at the other side, business wants to be able to get data, have insight, and take action sub-second. So how do you get both at the same time? That's really the magic of the technology. >> Thanks for coming in. Great to meet you, Phu. I'd love to talk about the old Yahoo days, a total throwback, Web 1.0, a great time in history, pre-bubble bursting. Greatness happening in the valley and all around the world, and I remember those days clearly. Guy, great to see you. Congratulations on your new CEO committee. And great to have you on theCube. This is theCube bringing the coverage, and commentary, and reaction of Mobile World Congress here, in California. As everyone goes to bed in Barcelona, we're just gettin' down to the end of our day here in the afternoon in California. Be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering mobile world congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're here live in Palo Alto for day two of two days of Mobile World Congress special coverage here in Palo Alto, where we're bringing all the folks in Silicon Valley here in the studio to analyze all the news and commentary of which we've been watching heavily on the ground in Barcelona. We have reporters, we have analysts, and we have friends there, of course, Intel is there as well as SAP, and a variety of other companies we've been talking to on the phone and all those interviews are on YouTube.com/siliconANGLE. And we're here with Chuck Tato, who's the marketing director of the data center of communications with Intel around the FPGA, which is the programmable chips, formerly with the Alterra Group, now a part of Intel, welcome to theCUBE, and thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. So, actually all the rage Mobile World Congress Intel, big splash, and you guys have been, I mean, Intel has always bene the bellweather. I was saying this earlier, Intel plays the long game. You have to in the chips games. You got to build the factories, build fabs. Most of all, have been the heartbeat of the industry, but now doing more of less chips, Most of all, making them smaller, faster, cheaper, or less expensive and just more power. The cloud does that. So you're in the cloud data center group. Take a second to talk about what you guys do within Intel, and why that's important for folks to understand. >> Sure. I'm part of the programmable solutions group. So the programmable solutions group primarily focuses on field programmable gate array technology that was acquired through the Alterra acquisition at Intel. So our focus in my particular group is around data center and Coms infrastructure. So there, what we're doing is we're taking the FPGAs and we're applying them to the data center as well as carrier infrastructure to accelerate things, make them faster, make them more repeatable, or more terministic in nature. >> And so, that how it works, as you were explaining beforehand, kind of, you can set stream of bits at it and it changes the functionality of the chip. >> Yes. So essentially, an FPGA, think of it as a malleable set of resources. When I say that, you know, you can create, it's basically a fabric with many resources in an array. So through the use of a bit stream, you can actually program that fabric to interconnect the different elements of the chip to create any function that you would like, for the most part. So think of it as you can create a switch, you can create a classification engine, and things like that. >> Any why would someone want that functionality versus just a purpose-built chip. >> Perfect question. So if you look at, there's two areas. So in the data center, as well as in carrier infrastructure, the workloads are changing constantly. And there's two problems. Number one you could create infrastructure that becomes stranded. You know, you think you're going to have so much traffic of a certain type and you don't. So you end up buying a lot of purpose-built equipment that's just wrong for what you need going forward. So by building infrastructure that is common, so it kind of COTS, you know, on servers, but adding FPGAs to the mix allows you to reconfigure the networking within the cloud, to allow you to address workloads that you care about at any given time. >> Adaptability seems to be the key thing. You know kind of trends based upon certain things, and certainly the first time you see things, you've got to figure it out. But this gives a lot of flexibility, it sounds like. >> Exactly. Adaptability is the key, as well as bandwidth, and determinism, right? So when you get a high bandwidth coming into the network, and you want to something very rapidly and consistently to provide a certain service level agreement you need to have circuits that are actually very, very deterministic in nature. >> Chuck, I want to get your thoughts on one of the key things. I talked with Sandra Reddy, Sandra Rivera, sorry, she was, I interviewed her this morning, as well as Dan Rodriguez, and Caroline Chan, Lyn Comp as well. Lot of different perspectives. I see 5G as big on one hand, have the devices out there announcing on Sunday. But what was missing, and I think Fortune was the really, the only one I saw pick up on this besides SiliconANGLE, on terms of the coverage was, there's a real end-to-end discussion here around not just the 5G as the connectivity piece that the carriers care about, but there's the under-the-hood work that's changing in the Data Center. And the car's a data center now, right? >> Yeah. >> So you have all these new things happening, IOT, people with sensors on them, and devices, and then you've got the cloud-ready compute available, right? And we love what's happening with cloud. Infinite compute is there and makes data work much better. How does the end-to-end story with Intel, and the group that you're in, impact that and what are some of the use cases that seem to be popping up in that area. >> Okay, so that's a great question, and I guess some of the examples that I could give of where we're creating end-to-end solutions would be in wireless infrastructure, as you just mentioned. As you move on to 5G infrastructure, the goal is to increase the bandwidth by 100X and reduce the latency by orders of magnitude. It's a very, very significant challenge. To do that is quite difficult, to do it just in software. FPGA is a perfect complement to a software-based solution to achieve these goals. For example, virtual switching. It's a significant load on the processors. By offloading virtual switching in an FPGA, you an create the virtual switch that you need for the particular workload that you need. Workloads change, depending on what type of services you're offering in a given area. So you can tailor it to exactly what you need. You may or may not need6 high levels of security, so things like IPsec, yo6u know, at full line rate, are the kind of things that FPGAs allow you to add ad hoc. You can add them where you need them, when you need them, and change them as the services change. >> It sounds like, I'd never thought about that, but it sounds like this is a real architectural advantage, because I'd never thought about offloading the processor, and we all know we all open up or build our PCs know that the heat syncs only get bigger and bigger, so that people want that horsepower for very processor-intensive things. >> Absolutely. So we do two things. One is we do create this flexible infrastructure, the second thing is we offload the processor for things that you know, free up cores to do more value-added things. >> Like gaming for, my kids love to see that gaming. >> Yes. There's gaming, virtual reality, augmented virtual reality, all of those things are very CPU intensive, but there's also a compute-intensive aspect. >> Okay, so I've got to get your take on this. This is kind of a cool conversation because that's, the virtual reality and augmented reality really are relevant. That is a key part of Mobile World Congress, beside the IOT, which I think is the biggest story this year, is IOT, and all the security aspects of it around, and all that good stuff. And that's really where the meat is, but the real sex appeal is the virtual reality and augmented reality. That's an example of the new things that have popped out of the woodwork, so the question for you is for all these new-use cases that I have found that emerge, there will be new things that pop out of the woodwork. "Oh, my God, I don't have to write software for that, There's an app for that now." So the new apps are going to start coming in, whether it's something new and cool on a car, Something new and cool on a sensor, something new and cool in the data center. How adaptive are you guys and how do you guys kind of fit into that kind of preparing for this unknown future. >> Well, that's a great question, too. I like to think about new services coming forward as being a unique blend of storage, compute, and networking, and depending on the application and the moment in that application, you may have to change that mix in a very flexible way. So again, the FPGA provides you the ability to change all of those to match the application needs. I'm surprised as we dig into applications, you know, how many different sets of needs there are. So each time you do that, you can envision, reprogramming your FPGA. So just like a processor, it's completely reprogrammable. You're not going to reprogram it in the same instantaneous way that you do in software, but you can reprogram it on the fly, whatever you would like. >> So, I'm kind of a neophyte here, so I want to ask some dumb questions, probably be dumb to you, but common to me, but would be like, okay, who writes bits? Is it the coders or is it someone on the firmware side, I'm trying to understand where the line is between that hardened top of kind of Intel goodness that goes on algorithmically or automatically, or what programmers do. So think full-stack developer, or a composer, a more artisan type who's maybe writing an app. Are there both access points to the coding, or is it, where's the coding come from? >> So there's multiple ways that this is happening. The traditional way of programming FPGA is the same way that you would design any ASIC in the industry, right? Somebody sits down and they write RTL, they're very specialized programmers However, going forward, there's multiple ways you an access it. For one, we're creating libraries of solutions that you can access through APIs that are built into DPDK, for example on Xeon. So you can very easily access accelerated applications and inline applications that are being developed by ourselves as well as third parties. So there's a rich eco system. >> So you guys are writing hooks that go beyond being the ASIC special type, specialist programming. >> Absolutely. So this makes it very accessible to programmers. The acceleration that's there from a library and purpose-built. >> Give me an example, if you can. >> Sure, virtual switch. So in our platform for NFE, we're building in a virtual switch solution, and you can program that just like you know, totally in software through DPDK. >> One of the things that coming up with NFE that's interesting, I don't know if this y6our wheelhouse or not, but I want to throw it out there because it's come up in multiple interviews and in the industry. You're seeing very cool ideas and solutions roll out, and I'll give, you know, I'll make one up off the top of my head, Openstack. Openstack is a great, great vision, but it's a lot of fumbling in the execution of it and the cost of ownership goes through the roof because there's a lot of operation, I'm overgeneralizing certain use-case, not all Openstack, but in generally speaking, I do have the same problem with big data where, great solution-- >> Uh-huh. >> But when you lay out the architect and then deploy it there's a lot of cost of ownership overhead in terms of resources. So is this kind of an area that you guys can help simplify, 'cause that seems to be a sticking point for people who want to stand up some infrastructure and do dev ops and then get into this API-like framework. >> Yes, from a hardware perspective, we're actually creating a platform, which includes a lot of software to tie into Openstack. So that's all preintegrated for you, if you will. So at least from a hardware interface perspective, I can say that that part of the equation gets neutralized. In terms of the rest of the ownership part, I'm not really qualified to answer that question. >> That's good media training, right there. Chuck just came back from Intel media training, which is good. We got you fresh. Network transformation, and at the, also points to some really cool exciting areas that are going on that are really important. The network layer you see, EDFE, and SDN, for instance, that's really important areas that people are innovating on, and they're super important because, again, this is where the action is. You have virtualization, you have new capabilities, you've got some security things going down lower in the stack. What's the impact there from an Intel perspective, helping this end-to-end architecture be seamless? >> Sure. So what we are doing right now is creating a layer on top of our FPGA-based SmartNIC solutions, which ties together all of that into a single platform, and it cuts across multiple Intel products. We have, you know, Xeon processors integrated with FPGAs, we have discreet FPGAs built onto cards that we are in the process of developing. So from a SmartNIC through to a fully-integrated FPGA plus Xeon processor is one common framework. One common way of programming the FPGA, so IP can move from one to the other. So there's a lot of very neat end-to-end and seamless capabilities. >> So the final question is the customer environment. I would say you guys have a lot of customers out there. The edge computing is a huge thing right now. We're seeing that as a big part of this, kind of, the clarity coming out of Mobile World Congress, at least from the telco standpoints, it's kind of not new in the data center area. The edge now is redefined. Certainly with IOT-- >> Yes. >> And IOTP, which we're calling IOTP app for people having devices. What are the customer challenges right now, that you are addressing. Specifically, what's the pain points and what's the current state-of-the-art relative to the customer's expectations now, that they're focused on that you guys are solving. >> Yeah, that's a great question, too. We have a lot of customers now that are taking transmission equipment, for example, mobile backhaul types of equipment, and they want to add mobile edge computing and NFE-type capabilities to that equipment. The beauty of what we're doing is that the same solution that we have for the cloud works just as well in that same piece of equipment. FPGAs come in all different sizes, so you can fit within your power envelope or processors come in all different sizes. So you can tailor your solution-- >> That's super important on the telco side. I mean, power is huge. >> Yes, yes, and FPGAs allow you to tailor the power equation as much as possible. >> So the question, I think is the next question is, does this make it cloud-ready, because that's term that we've been hearing a lot of. Cloud-ready. Cause that sounds like what you're offering is the ability to kind of tie into the same stuff that the cloud has, or the data center. >> Yes, exactly. In fact, you know, there's been very high profile press around the use of FPGAs in cloud infrastructure. So we're seeing a huge uptick there. So it is getting cloud-ready. I wouldn't say it's perfectly there, but we're getting very close. >> Well the thing that's exciting to me, I think, is the cloud native movement really talks about again, you know, these abstractions with micro services, and you mentioned the APIs, really fits well into some of the agilenesss that needs to happen at the network layer, to be more dynamic. I mean, just think about the provisioning of IOT. >> Chuck: Yeah. >> I mean, I'm a telco, I got to provision a phone, that's get a phone number, connect on the network, and then have sessions go to the base station, and then back to the cloud. Imagine having to provision up and down zillions of times those devices that may get provision once and go away in an hour. >> Right. >> That's still challenging, give you the network fabric. >> Yes. It is going to be a challenge, but I think as common as we can make the physical infrastructure, the better and the easier that's going to be, and as we create more common-- >> Chuck, final question, what's your take from Mobile World Congress? What are you hearing, what's your analysis, commentary, any kind of input you've heard? Obviously, Intel's got a big presence there, your thoughts on what's happening at Mobile World Congress. >> Well, see I'm not at Mobile World Congress, I'm here in Silicon Valley right now, but-- >> John: What have you heard? >> Things are very exciting. I'm mostly focused on the NFE world myself, and there's been just lots and lots of-- >> It's been high profile. >> Yes, and there's been lots of activity, and you know, we've been doing demos and really cool stuff in that area. We haven't announced much of that on the FPGA side, but I think you'll be seeing more-- >> But you're involved, so what's the coolest thing in NFE that you're seeing, because it seems to be crunch time for NFE right now. This is a catalyst point where at least, from my covering NFE, and looking at it, the iterations of it, it's primetime right now for NFE, true? >> Yeah, it's perfect timing, and it's actually perfect timing for FPGA. I'm not trying to just give it a plug. When you look at it, trials have gone on, very significant, lots of learnings from those trials. What we've done is we've identified the bottlenecks, and my group has been working very hard to resolve those bottlenecks, so we can scale and roll out in the next couple of years, and be ready for 5G when it comes. >> Software definer, Chuck Tato, here from Intel, inside theCUBE, breaking down the coverage from Mobile World Congress, as we wind down our day in California, the folks in Spain are just going out. It should be like at 12:00 o'clock at night there, and are going to bed, depending on how beat they are. Again, it's in Barcelona, Spain, it's where it's at. We're covering from here and also talking to folks in Barcelona. We'll have more commentary here in Silicon Valley on the Mobile World Congress after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by Intel. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Here, live, in Palo Alto, California, the Silicon Angle Studio for the Silicon Valley coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. I'm John Furrier. We're in theCube. We're here with Cube alumni and one of our favorite guests, Alan Cohen, the Chief Commercial Officer of Illumio, hot security startup, coming in to share his commentary on Mobile World Congress. Alan's a veteran in the industry. Great to have you. Been in the Silicon Valley Friday Show a few weeks ago. Great to see you. >> Thrilled to be back. Beautiful environment. You know, party. >> It was great to see you on the Silicon Valley Friday Show because after our segment the New York Times ran that story Friedman had that the cross where they took our content. >> We're going to Freeport next. >> Exactly. (laughing) And great content, we're serving it up. So I want to say thank you, it was great coverage. Thanks to the New York Times for picking up our content, taking it to the next level. Always great to have a conversation. You've got a good way to put the finger on the pulse. Mobile World Congress, two days of coverage for us. I'll just give you a quick Reader's Digest summary of what we're seeing. It's a bipolar show. It's a device show and a telco trying-to-figure-things-out show. Then in the middle is a lot of money to be had by whoever can help sort out the counseling of the telco business. Intel certainly is a big player in that with 5G. And there's a lot of under the covers stuff. SDN, NFV, new networks and new paradigms of how to configure these architectures. Not much mention of security, but that's essentially what's going on. You've got everyone's working out the devices, the new LG, the Yahweh, all this stuff's going on. Then you get the telcos well speeds and feeds and build out and business models. So what's your assessment? >> I've been to the Mobile World Congress 10 times. We never talked about this, but I actually worked the cellular carrier in the 90s. To me the show is the same every year. It's drones, clones, and phones. That's what people really focus on, right? So the 11,000 versions of the Android phone, even though Apple's still taking 89% of the profit at the industry so it actually only one phone you have to pay attention to on one side. Then more bits, less money side of being on the carrier, because what is being an ISP, wireless ISP or a wired ISP. Every year I give you more bits and I make less money. I'm going to make it up in volume. And I keep pouring all this capital into this. So to me, they haven't really yet completely broken out of that paradigm. The key thing is that the mobile network is the primary network. So all the profitability in telco is in the mobile network. Nobody says hey, I'm going to get up and build a wired network and pull some more copper to your house, right? So that is the principle way that people are using it and we have now an entire generation that don't know you can actually plug a phone into a wall or an ethernet connection. I think that's the kind of competitive dynamics that people go with. >> And that's under pressure though, because now the carrier's always in the operating, always controlled the relationship to the user via the contract. Did you buy an iPhone lately? There's no more relationship. You just buy whatever device you want. The subsidy ended ... I'm not talking about subsidy. I'm talking about like I have a contract with AT and T, I can certainly change it to Verizon, so I can certainly swap. But for the most part the carrier views me as a subscriber. Pretty much that's it. They bill me, I'm not really getting anything extra from AT and T. Maybe I'll get some hotspots. But I mean come on, what value? >> You are just our poo. >> Where does it go from here? We had the guys from Datatron on who had an interesting proposition. They had a ton of data. So there really has been this struggle institutionally, as you know, I mean core competency has been provisioning, truck roll, and billing. So what else can they do? What's your thoughts, okay let's change the mental, here's the exercise. We get elected to be the CEO of the biggest telco. >> You're Verizon, I'm A T and T. >> We own the telcos, and what do we do? Do we fire everybody? Do we do what Donald Trump does and just fire everyone and run it the way we want to run it? Or do we build it? What would we do seriously, what would we do if we were telcos and we want to put our business hat on? >> I think you have to kind of deconstruct the value chain of that. So what telcos do is they offer up content, for the most part. These devices, I've had to teach my kids that you can make a call with it. But aside from a call mostly what people do is use some form of internet application. They don't get any other money for the internet application. They don't get any money for hosting it, they don't get any money for managing it. They don't get very much money for making it perform. So to me, the biggest challenge of the telcos is actually Amazon because if you think about it, Amazon is now becoming the supply chain for so much internet delivery content. If the telco wants to be something other than the last mile and the wires connecting that last mile, it takes a lot of wires to build a wireless network, people forget that. They're going to have to start to figure out can I, whether it's cash and data center, can I turn profitable services to the people who are all competing at the edge of that universe and applications. I don't think they really have done that. I mean they are some of the largest data center operators in the world, but they haven't really thought it through. I was in a studio in L.A. a couple weeks ago and it's one of the large national studios. It's an Illumio customer and they've now moved all their content distribution into Amazon. So they don't send the content from their network to the affiliates. They put it in Amazon, and Amazon delivers it. How much longer is it going to before there's actually studio that works out of Amazon? >> Yeah, I mean the head end's dead. This cable is kind of changing. That's the media piece, but also you have all these new use cases, the fantasy autonomous driving cars which you can say it's a data center on wheels, yes I could buy that. Is it going to be uploading data every half mile? Where's the wire? So you have this new construction. Smart cities is another one, smart homes is an echo in there. >> I made my living out of making data centers more secure. But the data center is going to completely evolve. The share perfusion of data that's going to come out of these devices, and a lot of people have talked about the edge architecture, is going to blow up the idea of back hauling it to a centralized server. Process it in a bunch of ways and spit it back out. For me, if I wanted to write a smart or autonomous car management system, let's say I was the city of Palo Alto and I'm responsible for now instead of just the traffic lights, I'm also responsible for how autonomous cars go through Palo Alto, I'm not sending something back to some data center in Virginia for Amazon. I'm going to have to figure out how to process all that data closest to where those cars are. Make intelligent decisions about them while at local, and then send back out instructions. What I think you're going to do is you're going to see a shift from this central model to a much more distributed model and I'm going to have to have mini data centers. So instead of having 10 mega data centers I might have 1,000 mini mega data centers that's going to make all of these things happen. I don't think a lot of people have paid attention to that architectural shift. If you're in the process of, business of selling server networks you're still thinking client-server back haul it into the giant data center next to the nuclear power plant. But it's all going to have to move a lot closer to where something, because I only care about that decision right now with the 50 cars coming down middle field and the streets that feed into it. >> But there's a bigger architecture thing that the Mobile World Congress is trying to point at, which is an ecosystem. Let me take a step back. Is Mobile Congress a relevant show, or is it becoming a CES sideshow, Biz Dev show? I mean Cy Gerli was on yesterday saying look, it's where everyone goes, who's who goes there. It's essentially a Biz Dev show that happens to have a trade show running with it. >> It's the agora, right? The Greek term for marketplace. You go there to do business with people. It's like RSA two weeks ago, right? You guys were up at RSA. It's like is it really fun to walk through 14,000 vendor booths, or is it like everybody who make decisions on buying and selling security stuff happened to be in the same two-square miles of San Francisco. I don't think that part goes away, but I do think ... >> It's a super important part. >> Yeah, but I think the architecture of who plays is going to change. The the question you've got to ask is who's going to be the Amazon of the mobile world and disrupt the network model? The network is now just something glued together with software. I mean years ago they had the same thing, it didn't really work out, that they called the cloud where I would rent my access point in London to people and I'd use their wifi. The stuff that glues it together is always much more important than the infrastructure itself. So if Mobile World Congress can be important there's going to be a track on the people actually glue all of that stuff all together. >> All right, so I've got to get your take on the business conversation, the marketplace that runs there. What are some of the conversations that you could imagine that was happening at Mobile World Congress? I know we're not there, I mean we've been seeing and hearing some of the hallway conversations. Obviously 5G's the big story. What are some of the marketplace hallway conversations or business meetings that are going on in your mind's eye if you had to make a guess on what's happening? >> What are the most important content that people like to use today? Pop quiz, do you know this? >> Yeah, video. >> Video, right? So to me, one of the conversation Netflix was having and Amazon Prime was having because they're not just waiting for you to be in your TV, to consume, right? People are consuming increasing amounts of video content on mobile devices. So I think there's the Hollywood influence or the studio or what is it? The National Association of Programming Executives, NAPE right? What you're doing, if you're a content producer you're looking for eyeballs and people to pay for it. There's nothing more ubiquitous than that piece of glass we're all carrying in front of our nose 17 hours a day. I think that's a big set of business discussions. Your partner was talking about this, is okay, is there just a dramatically different way to build this network? 5G is going to give you the promise, more is a lot of work. The physics are I'm getting a lot more bandwidth. What am I going to do with it? Well people are going to fill it up. >> There's different use cases. There's the mobility and then with dense areas. Then things that are moving at a hundred miles an hour, 50 miles and hour, planes, trains. >> I think there's an element of that. I think there's the internet of things discussion. I still think five years will take the internet whatever things, right? I call the IOWT, right, because it's like nobody's, it's not really about connecting your lightbulb to the network, but there are a lot of things in motion that people want to better manage. >> We just introduced a research agenda this morning with Peter Burroughs, IOT, IOT people. Things and people. >> Have you gone back to the Furrier family and counted up how many IP addresses you have as a family? The Cohen family has 111 IP addresses. >> John: IPV6 for you. (laughing) >> Yeah, we need a gateway man for the network router that comes into the house. But that is actually ... >> We just bought the new Google access points, the ones that have that little mesh instrument. >> But yes, I'm just kidding you. So there are a lot of things. The other thing is that there is the interaction of the mobile, actually I think Google is a great example. If you think about Google produces the wifi at Starbucks and a lot of retail. They're interested in what's going on. Today we think about the mobile network as a mobile network and we think about the broadband fixed network as a different network. And like the interplay between those two, it's like there's a lot more than Foursquare and Facebook. >> Sure fibers of the home is very capital intensive. We knew it would cost us to do a truck roll, the trench, and connect to the home which we did. Overlay wireless, fixed wireless would be fantastic there. >> So you have the overlay and then when I know that you're coming by, right, because the fixed network is now actually a wifi network, I mean it has wires. So you have the mobile network, you have the wifi network, and you have people moving in and out of those environments. I think I'm seeing a lot of companies getting funded. People actually trying to say how do we monetize that experience? This is obviously was Foursquare and those other location guys started years ago. I mean, look at something like Wayce. Wayce went from a GPS app with social interaction to a car sharing, ride sharing going after Uber, this Google company. >> Well we had an NTD Delcomo VC, Chris McCoo, talk about mapping as a huge app for these telcos. >> Mapping is the killer app. Almost everything on your phone local works off a map which, by the way, is paid for by us as taxpayers. The GPS comes from the United States government. It's free. The most powerful utility in mobility is location, and GPS is free. >> All right, final question. Bumper sticker from Mobile World Congress from your perspective this year. Yawner, golf clap, or standing ovation? >> I say golf clap because more bandwidth is good and I think there's an insatiable demand. We're a long way from ending the bandwidth drought, and there is a bandwidth drought. I think the other thing is there aren't camps anymore. I think people will coalesce very quickly on 5G. So good time to be in that business. One hand clap maybe. >> Yeah, not a hole in one. Certainly more golf analogies coming on theCube. Alan Cohen here, Chief Commercial Officer, Illumio. We didn't get to security, but we'll do that next time. I'm John Furrier, I'll be right back with more Mobile World Congress coverage after this short break. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> [Announcer] Live, from Silicon Valley, it's The Cube Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> [John] Welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Palo Alto, California for a special two days of Mobile World Congress. We're on day two of wall to wall coverage from eight a.m. to six p.m. Really breaking down what's happening in studio and going to our reporters and analysts in the field. We'll have Pete Injerich coming up next and we're going to get on the ground analysis from the current analysis, now with global data. But next we have a segment where, I had a chance this morning early in the morning my time top of the morning Tuesday in Barcelona which was hours ago, I had a chance to speak with Caroline Chan and Dan Rodriguez. I wanted to get their opinion on what's happening and I asked Caroline Chan, "What's the biggest story coming out of Mobile World Congress?" This is what she had to say: >> [Caroline Chan] So last year this time, the people coming in asked a lot of questions about 5G technology. Is it real? Can we really pull it off? You know, 3G, 4G, it's a little bit ho-hum. But this year, I would say when I look around, not just in Apple, everybody else is good. I'm also hoping to, people talk about it as a faithful, I went to a panel last night with Orange, and AT&T, and Telefonica. I think the conversation switched from will there be a 5G to solutions. So, I look around in our booth and next door in Verizon there's a lot of cars, autonomous driving. We had network 5G enable smart city, it's in our homes, It becomes from technology to solution, and then in the last discussion about this iteration of 5G, there was an announcement about the 5G in our loan, Whole bunch of talk about acceleration. It's really becoming how can we quickly get out there. And then the other thing I've read is about AI. How does AI now because 5G becomes an enigma. AI and the cloud, there's all these analytics, so 5G can actually now be able to bring that into the cloud. So AI becomes a buzzword. I just read the SAT CTO Was all NWC live TV at the venue, I talked about AI and 5G transforming the mobile industry, so it really becomes much more of a solution oriented. >> [Dan] No, I can't agree with Caroline more there. Tremendous amount of excitement around 5G as well as network transformation in the show and the two things are really becoming linked. So Caroline mentioned a few of the use cases out there on 5G, so again, lots of autonomous driving, lots of smart home, lots of smart city. I personally had a great time hanging out in our smart home demonstration earlier, but I think the key linkage of all those use cases is that the network needs to become more intelligent, more flexible, and definitely more agile to be able to support this wide variety of use cases. And we're seeing it being really echoed back by not only operators, but a lot of the OES and telecommunication equipment factors, really rallying behind NSE and truly the path to 5G. >> [John] Take a minute, guys, to explain the 5G revolution and why it's not just an evolution from 4G. What's the difference? What is the key enabler of 5G and what is Intel have that's different now than it was before. >> [Caroline] So you imagined 3G is all about getting better voice and also a little bit of SMS, and 4G is a literal 3G on steroids. Now 4G has all these, you can go on the internet and download all kind of things. 5G takes that to the next level. So 2G, 3G, and 4G is about network building for the masses If you think about it it's like a general network. So when you build it and somebody vertical says I want to make this my private network for my enterprise it's a best effort basis, so either too hot or too cold. So what that means is it operates under a wirenut either giving you way too much, unable to recuperate your investments or if it gives you not enough, you wind up with a bad user experience. 5G fundamentally changes this. Why does it change in the standard itself that's undergoing in the 3G PP. As you have a different type of schedule with them, you must predict the different use cases. For example, if you're doing a mission cryptic IOG versus a massive connector IOG, you get a different protocol. You strip out some of the heavy amount of signaling that is typically needed for mission critical for something that's just there like smart city, like traffic light changes, that kind of information you don't need that to generate a whole bunch of bandwidth. So you see something with a different, natively different in the protocol itself so that's a fundamental shift from the mindset that we always had. So that is technology enabled. And the second thing is that the network today, thanks to all the network transformation journey that everybody is on, it's much softer and flexible, it moves away from a single part purse, a belt, power to something that is much more flexible, such that you can enable something like the network driving So a prize for enhanced mobile program for ARPR would be different from something for autonomous driving. So it makes the network fundamentally different, the interface itself is much more flexible for different types of applications, and then not to mention that we have different types of spectrums on the traditional 3 GHz to 6 And now two millimeter waves we open up a whole swathe of the spectrum to allow for a much, much bigger bandwidth and things like camera applications. It really changed the game. >> [Dan] Thanks, Caroline. So I think at a high level, what Caroline was pointing out is that the wide variety of use cases with 5G will stretch and pull the network in all sorts of directions. Essentially, there will be different use cases that require blatant fact network speed, but maximum amounts of bandwidth, but some use cases also require very low latency. So when you think about all the variety of use cases, the best way to truly insure you're meeting the user experience and also delivering the right economic value for the industry is to move to more intelligent and a flexible network. And as Caroline mentioned, it is going to be software-defined. And when you think about some of the products that we're investing in, and the status in our group for networking of course you think about our Intel Xeon processors. These processors can be found in a number of servers around the globe, and customers are using these for a variety of virtual network functions, really everything ranging from the core network to the access network to newer use cases such as virtual TV. In this bit, we did announce some additional products that will be made available later in the year. This is the Atom C3000 series as well as the Xeon D1500 network series. Both of these are SoC, and when you think about 5G, you do think about the mix of centralized and distributed to plan it, and you think about that network edge becoming smarter, so these types of SoCs are very critical because they provide excellent performance density at the right power level so you can have a very intelligent edge of your network. >> [John] Great point. Just to follow up on that, it's interesting, we had a conversation yesterday in The Cube around millimeter waves, CBMA, all the different types of wireless, and I think what's interesting is you have some use cases where you have a lot of density and some cases where you need low latency, but you also have an internet of things. A car, for example, you could say, we were discussing a car is essentially going to become a data center on wheels, where mobility is going to be very important and might not need precise bandwidth per se, but in more mobility in some cases you'll need more bandwidth. And also as an internet of things comes on, whether they're industrial devices that the notion of a phone being provisioned once and then being used is not the same use case as, say, IOT, which you could have anything connected to a network, these devices are going to come on and offline all the time, so there's a real need for dynamic networks. What is Intel's approach here, because this seems to be the conversation that most people are talking about that's happening under the hood, that's the true enabler around bringing out the real mobile edge. >> [Caroline] The couple things that we're doing, number one we use a concept called flex term, flex core which is a server-based platform that works on a variety of technologies applied to it lots of these real time visualizations, dynamic resource sharing and reconfigurations, we're able to support what you just described and provide a flex support team for different types of scenarios. And then the other thing that builds into the 5G support network Splicing allows you to splice up to the pairs of light resources for a variety of cases, Including the coarse part of it, so for example, HP here in this room is demonstrating what looks a server, walks like a server and is a server and it has the RAM, virtual PC, it has orchestration, it has mobile edge computing, it's really become a network in a box. So the fact is the ultimate freedom to support the service providers and enterprises and to apply all the 5G to different scenarios. >> [John] The final question, guys, is market readiness through partners and collaboration. Intel obviously is the leader, Intel Inside who was the main story we've been hearing at Mobile World Congresses end to end, fortunately a great piece with Intel CEO talking about the end to end value in the underlying architecture, it all runs on Intel, it works better, it brings up the notion of market readiness in the ecosystem. What are you guys doing to make the ecosystem robust and vibrant, because Intel can't do it alone, you're going to need partners. Thoughts on how you guys are accelerating it, and really the market readiness for 5G and just timing in your mind when all the fruit comes off the 5G tree, if you will. >> [Caroline] We started with the trials this year, so 2017 we're going to be able, we're working closely with partners, like Ericsson, Nokia, and Cisco and we should be seeing early performance coming up and I really think the wide spread of commercial publicly is more like 2019, 2020 timeframe because of some of the standardization, would you say? >> [Dan] Yeah, so that's a great summary, Caroline. I think the key thing that we're really seeing at Mobile Congress and things that we're investing in, diverse as you mentioned. It definitely takes a village to pull off this network transformation and the movement to 5G, and I think the great thing is about the network size is the network is becoming much more pliable, more software to find, more resilient, more agile, and it's out there to find. You can really invest in many of these innovations we've been discussing today now. So we're seeing a lot of folks start investing in Flex-Core, Network in a Box, mobilized computing, et cetera, so you transform your network now, utilizing network function virtualization, and then you have a sturdy foundation when all the 5G use cases come online in the next years. >> [John] Guys, final question. What power demos are you showing? You guys usually have great demos on the floor, Mobile World Congress, lot of glam, lot of flair at the show. >> [Dan] Great question. We have a number of super demos here, we have a smart and connected home, which showcases all sorts of intel, wireless technology out of the gateway as well as other devices we're showing a smart city, as you know, with 5G, and its lightening fast speeds to pass the lower latencies. It's truly going to change the urban landscape. And we're also showing augmented virtual reality in a few different demonstrations and one definitely caught my eye and I was pretty excited about it. In our Flex Ren demo, we were showcasing augmented virtual reality, actually viewing a skier going downhill and it was pretty exciting. I had a great time, I can't wait to when, in a few years when 5G is out there and I can use augmented virtual reality to watch a number of sporting events ranging from college football to my favorite sport, which is surfing. >> [John] What's next for 5G? How are you guys going to roll this out, what's the big plans post Mobile World Congress? >> [Caroline] Like I mentioned, we have trial plans with our partners through 2017, and then we're also participating in the Winter Olympics showcase, again through our customers. There's activities happening in China now, so I think we can be in a lot of places. You can see us in 5G. >> [John] Winter Olympics, expect to get the downloads and all the video in real time on 4K screens, thank you very much. (laughs) We expect to see some good bandwidth on the Olympics, I'm sure. >> [Dan] Hey thanks, John, this was great. >> [Caroline] Thanks, bye! >> [John] Thank you. Caroline Chan and Dan Rodriguez, from Barcelona, calling in with all the details, I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more live coverage from the Mobile World Congress after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley. It's The Cube. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay welcome back everyone. We're here live in Palo Alto for The Cube's special broadcast presentation and coverage of Mobile World Congress. Which is happening in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John Furrier here with The Cube. And of course we're covering it here in Palo Alto. Bringing in experts and friends who have been following all the action. As well as have commentary and opinion on what's happening. We're going to roll up the news. It's the end of the day in Barcelona. We're just getting our sea legs here for day two of 8AM to 6PM coverage inside The Cube. And of course we want to break down the content. Our next guest is Val Bercovici who is the CTO at Solify also a governing board member of the CNCA the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, CNCF. Which was CubeCom which is now part of the Linux Foundation. Which if you know The Cube you know we've been covering that like a blanket. All these shows, The Cube has been there. This is in the world of Dockercon et cetera et cetera. Val, a CTO, 19-year veteran at NetApp of course knows the stories business, knows the converge infrastructure, know the Cloud. Val great to see you thanks for coming in. >> Thanks for having me back on after all these years. >> Yeah I mean it's great to have you on. We see each other at some of the parties, at Georgianna's place in particular. Georgianna brings all the storage and Cloud together but you and I had conversations a few years ago about where Cloud was going. And you can almost kind of connect the dots. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but I think we were right that the cloud was what we thought it would be. And probably more. For me I think I underestimated certainly the Amazon impact. >> Me too. >> But you look at what's happening in Mobile World Congress. You have a bi-polar show. You have a device show. Rah-rah look at the fancy devices. And the other show you have a Telco show that's trying to figure out their future. And that's interesting because the Telco's power the big networks that everyone's using the devices for. So you have a consumer market. But the real conversation is 5G IoT. You have a collision course of enterprise issues, enterprise data center, enterprise technology, colliding with a Telco infrastructure, AKA mobile. Head on. So it's not just more wireless. 5G's certainly the story we talked to folks like Intel and others around that but you have essentially all these core problems that are going to scale up this next generation use cases, are enterprise-like. This is your wheelhouse. So are you looking at this saying hm I've seen this movie before. What's your thoughts? >> I actually haven't. And that's what's so exciting right. As you said, there's so much innovation happening. For me probably the big story is what's not in the headlines at Mobile World Congress. Which is the back office work to support a 5G rollout. And I've had a lot of experience particularly on the side most recently. Speaking with all the big Telecos globally, and the implementations. Now what's interesting is they're all going through a gen two, or a re-architecture right now. A lot of first-generation MFE was done based on tradition or legacy now clad architecture which very VM based. And all of them are now architecting and implementing microservices based implementations. And a driver for that is just the explosion that 5G will enable in terms of connectivity between devices. So the least interesting stat to me is how fast I can download a movie off of 5G. The most interesting is how many hundreds of thousands or millions of devices within my domain are going to be communicating with each other on 5G. >> We had Saar Gillai who's going to come back today. He's also a guest, former HPer. He built their communications group while at NFE. I'd like it if he was commenting on the same thing, he made a point I want to bring up which is I don't really need more gigabit data, I want more battery life. So he's kind of being a pedestrian but that really is kind of the consumer issue. You're pointing about things that are going to be harder to do. In NFE you mention one of them. Can you explain the NFE's current situation? Also we've been doing a lot of the open stag all the open shows since it started. That has become kind of a Telco, NFE storage show as well. >> Val: Absolutely. >> So what is the real issue with NFE and why is it important and relevant to the service providers right now? >> So if you take a look at all the services we depend on on our phones nowadays. There's obviously the basic connectivity. There's additional services around location mapping for GPS, related services on top of that in terms of the collaborative apps that we use and depend on every day. Sometimes on S3 which is not always available as we're reporting right now. There's a lot of layers there. And from an NFV perspective from a back end data center perspective. Everything amounts to a session. So even though it's packet switch it's still a logical session you have to set up. So for every session, and imagine this happening millions of times at every tower, and more than millions of times at every regional or central data center. You got to have a session set up where you got to authenticate actually Who the user or the device is, make sure they have permission to be on the network and accessing certain things. You've got to authorize them to do certain things. You've got to log what's happening. Then you've got to slap some firewall or security around them. Then you've got to layer in access to all the other resources you're trying to combine into a service back to the end user. There's a lot of things going on. And we have to set up these sessions for every connection. And if you try to set up a VM, for every connection, you would have to fund a multi-billion dollar data center Google can't even afford. So this is where microservices are becoming essential right now. And a 5G hyper-connected world is where you have to have much more efficiency, in the speed with which you set up these sessions, the efficiency of number of sessions per server. And the cost, the processing of these transactions. >> This is interesting. I want to just kind of translate a little bit for the folks that aren't CTO's out there. Essentially when you think about mobile we've all been, you know, since the iPhone in 2007, we've seen this just accelerate. You know with data and whatnot. You've been at a concert, you've been in a stadium, you've got signal but you can't connect. >> Right. >> That is essentially the base station saying I can't get a session. Now as a user you have a phone, so you've been provisioned by the Telco, so they know who you are. So you have a phone, you have a device, you just can't connect a session to the radio connector and then get to the internet. That's a known problem. Now when you think about IoT, internet of things and now people, your watches, your wearables, sensors on the airplanes, industrial equipment to traffic lights. Those are devices that are going to be provisioned and turned off and on. So it's like a new phone every time. So you've got the complication of not knowing the devices that are coming on, and then trying to establish the connections. And figuring all this out. This is kind of a really hard problem. >> It is. >> This is a really really hard problem of scale at many levels. So to me what we're hearing at Mobile World Congress is you need a dynamic network. >> Val: Absolutely. >> What are some of the tech involved? What's the real enabler. You mentioned microservices, we know about containers. Linux Foundation's opening up their kernel for a lot of variety of new configurations. You got solid state memory and you got new memory architectures. What are some of the key things from a technical perspective that are going to change that complexity to be seamless for users? >> Probably the most fascinating trend to me and we're just beginning to see some stories emerge around this is the rise of edge computing. I kind of hark back to when I started my career, I'm dating myself now but the client server era that succeeded from mainframes, we've seen a huge pendulum shift towards Cloud computing. And centralizing a lot of processing. Well back to 5G, back to millions if not billions of connected devices right now. There is no way Einstein introduced his problem for the speed of light. There is no way to process the exponential amount of data we're dealing with right now at the core. And still provide useful feedback at the edge. So the rise of edge computing has a bit of a counterbalance to Cloud computing. And having more powerful, more intelligent processing at the edge, filtering a lot of data 'cause we can't possibly store the exit bytes and yadabytes of data. >> This is a paradigm shift. What you're talking about is a new paradigm shift. Because it used to be a centralized computer, and then a master slave or connected device terminal then you had smart terminals, business clients, and then PCs and then smart phones, so what you're bringing up is an interesting architecture that is an enterprise data center thing. And we were talking yesterday, and then I was telling the Intel folks, I pressed them on this 'cause they're obviously in the data center business, that a car that's fully instrumented like a Tesla or a future autonomous car is essentially a moving data center. So it changes the notion of data. >> Yes. >> This is a paradigm shift. You agree with that. >> Moreover. IoT is maybe the first technology buzzword that takes a lot of this digital world that we've been talking about. It's really been largely abstract and virtual for the common person. And it makes it physical and real. So the impact of IoT is an actuator changing your traffic light. You know, it's whether you're getting water, you're getting electricity at your house. Whether you're finding your way to your location via GPS. That's especially impacting your physical world it's no longer just a virtual thing. So that's where IoT's going to become really really significant in our lives. >> And the software program that needs to be created. This is an opportunity for entrepreneurs certainly. Peter Burris and I were talking yesterday morning about the edge computing. He's got a slew of research on this. He goes by IoT and p, IoT, things and people. And we were also talking yesterday about the relationship of the people to technology. So for instance in Telco's they view the phone as the relationship that's coupled to the carrier. And the premise we put out yesterday was that that's going to be an uncoupling. It's going to be a person's relationship to multiple carriers if you will. So the question is how does business extract value out of this? And this is something again that Peter Burris was digging into. Which is the business value of technology. In the paradigm we just talked about which seems pretty obvious, how we get there not so obvious, but people are working on that. How should companies think about getting value out of this massive shift? A lot of moving parts. >> The examples are already there. Let's talk about one of the most talked-about companies around here. Uber. And not because of the reasons they're attracting right now, but some of the classical disruption they enabled. Take a look at the fundamentals of what they do technically. It's interesting. It's somewhat impressive, but it's not revolutionary. What made them revolutionary is digitizing the transportation relationship you and I have with our transportation providers. And when they tapped into that they realized the potential for that is limitless right now. 'Cause we're all physical beings, we still have to move ourselves and our food, our packages around. But digitizing transportation is really you know a great example of any industry. Whether it's a 100-year-old industry or a brand new industry when you digitize the distribution, and when you actually add digital efficiencies in the back end, you end up with that 100 x effect, more than a 10 x effect. And truly earned the term disruptor. >> Give us more examples that you've seen. I know you talk a lot of Telco's but what other use cases. Because the whole notion of 5G and this new architecture is really coming down to use cases. And certainly the sexy ones. The car, the smart cities, I mean there's a lot of policy, societal impact issues that need to be thought through. But just generally, what's the low-hanging fruit right now? >> You know instead of low-hanging fruit let me give you the most pedestrian example I can think of. Which is when I meet with some of the waste management companies years ago I took them for granted. There was no innovation here. It's going to be an old enterprise discussion with some conservative tech leaders. I'm not even going to, I'm not trying to phone this is. I show up to meet with them, and they were truly innovating because they realized the whole customer experience of putting out your trash bin, your recycle bin, your organics bin, and so forth, your compost bin, can actually be improved. And the efficiencies added when you put GPS trackers on all the trucks. When you figure out when they have to go to the dump because there's an inordinately high amount of garbage put out early in the route one morning. And the ability for you to know when your bins are picked up. So you can actually go and pick up those bins. Put them out minutes before instead of the night before. Bring them back minutes after. Just reinventing that very pedestrian mundane experience tells me that there are opportunities for innovation everywhere in our lives. >> So really pick a spot to make efficient. Is probably easiest. Great, great feedback. Thoughts on developers. 'Cause it's something that we didn't, and we'd love to bring you back for more time on this but the CNC the Cloud Native Compute Foundation which is now part of the Linux Foundation, you mentioned microservices, orchestrations, there's a lot of software around composability, whether that's an artisan light developer, or the hardcore developers down lower on the stack. How does autonomous vehicles and this new future use case whether it's programming drones or writing cool software, to what's going on in the developer community? Can you share any color on trends around what's being done in traditional classic developing? >> Autonomous vehicles is already a perfect example because CNCF fundamentally is about what we call Cloud native technologies and applications. In a typical Cloud native architecture is container packaged not VM packaged. And it's dynamically orchestrated. So we say it's basically declarative as opposed to opinionated to use back end speak technical developer speak. But what does that mean? Autonomous cars are not interesting if one car is autonomous. Autonomous cars are interesting when dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of cars along your route those are autonomous. The interaction between them, and making sure they don't all try to occupy the same space at the same time. That's pretty essential. But also keeping traffic flowing smoothly and preventing unnecessary traffic jams. So it's the coordination of multiple processes, multiple things. That's what really make Cloud native computing happen at scale. So CNCF actually is five projects right now. Most people know it as the Kubernetes project and it is very much that. I think a year ago no one knew how hot Kubernetes would be but certainly it's taken off right now. Thanks a lot in part to Google. We've got new technologies around monitoring. So you've got a monitor your app obviously in the Cloud world to see what are the efficiencies performances for the end user. Around logging, distributed logging and monitoring. We've got new projects around actually debugging at scale. So debugging one process is simple as any developer knows. Debugging multiple concurrent threads or processes, that's still a black art. And so we've got open tracing technologies around that, and there's a new style of project, something known as link or d. But it's around now and the IoT context the most important thing to me discovery of context. What other devices, what other sensors are out there. >> It sounds like an operating system to me. You got linkers, you got loaders, you got all this orchestration. This is a global operating environment. >> It's a great insight. It's not an operating system. >> Not in like a classic sense. But there's some systems... >> It is a new operating environment. In the Cloud native world, operating system still connotates one PC, one device or one host on a data center. It really is a coordination of services. New modern high-end services. >> And declarative thing with containers is essentially assembly based, you can manage things component-wise, those kinds of concepts. And you see that as a key part of enabling these new use cases. >> There's actually no economies of scale if you don't go Cloud native nowadays. As 5G networks become more prevalent, as IoT becomes more mainstream, it doesn't play without microservice. >> And the trade-offs for not being Cloud native is what? >> Being disrupted. It's literally you know there's some great recent blogs. You've heard this title before, the coming SaaSpocalypse. So the disruption of the legacy SaaS vendors. The economics of them force you to basically have fixed subscription models with your customers. And whether you're using you know your CRM map once a day or 100 times a day. It costs you the same. These new Cloud native architectures are going to enable disruption in an industry because they only consume resources as a sessions for an app and the licensing and business model can now be that much more efficient. People are actually willing to be charged per use as opposed to per subscription. >> Now you know, I've gotten to know you over the years, and a great guest to have on The Cube. Thanks for sharing that insight. But it is an exciting time. You had a great run at NetApp. I mean you look at what NetApp's been doing, I mean they were the darling of Silicon Valley. Classic success story. Multiple reinventions, great founding team, great investors, just a classic run that they've had. As you look back now going forward, looking back and now looking forward, what are some of the things that get you jazzed up right now in terms of things that are that next wave that's coming. What do you see that's exciting and what would you share for folks for insight? >> I'd say the most exciting thing to me at a high level is the opportunity that 5G IoT enables. I think there's a whole new market segment. Some people might call it the real evolution of HCI. Which is edge computing, and all these really fast workloads. That are not going to be necessarily virtual desktops in terms of running or operating your business. But entirely new revenue streams, entirely new services, and all sorts of companies, digital or analog can offer. That excites me. And of course we've talked about the back end of the shift towards away from fast storage. Fast storage toward persistent memory. That in itself is going to open up a whole new category of apps that we've yet to see. >> Yeah we got to get that Linux rewritten and opened up. All kinds of new stuff. Great great commentary Val. Thanks for coming on The Cube to share. We certainly want to have you back. And really unpack and drill down and double down on what Cloud native impact means, and certainly edge and IoT computing. Really is going to be a fascinating run I think. I think that's going to open up a huge can of worms and an opportunity for really changing the game and creating great value and risk too. I mean Amazon S3's down as we speak. We're joking but you know we see insecurity problems out there and we'll stay on top of it. Of course The Cube has got you covered. And that's the hot themes really that's not being reported about Mobile World Congress that we're reporting. Which is the surge in IoT relevance. But that gives a mental model. This is the story of Mobile World Congress. 5G as a fabric connecting in with hard enterprise data center-like technologies. End to end for dynamic experiences. This is the challenge for Telcos. And someone will get it done. Let's see who it will be. Of course we'll be watching it. This is The Cube with more coverage of Mobile World Congress after this short break.

(intel sound logo) >> [Announcer] Live from Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by INTEL. >> Okay welcome back everyone to our special two days of coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. I'm John Furrier, here in the Palo Alo Studios covering what's happening in Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Of course this is our day two of wall to wall coverage. Eight a.m. to six p.m. for two days and of course, as we kick off our day two and get early morning here in California or mid morning, they're ending the day in Barcelona and all the news is dropping. Again, it's continuing the theme of 5G, IoT and the notion of the super demos, all the flare and glam around IoT, AI and everything else. On the phone right now in Barcelona, Spain, is our friend and analyst with the Futuriom Group, Scott Raynovich, who will also be co-hosting with the CUBE at ONS, Open Networking Summit. Longtime industry analyst, guru in the space around mobile, certainly SDN and what's going on. Scott, welcome and thanks for taking the time to call in from Barcelona. >> [Scott] Thanks, John. Great to be here, and also I might add some color to one thing you said, when you said the day was winding down. (John laughs) Apparently in Barcelona the day never ends. It just goes all the way through. >> Well the show is ending but now the real action happens, all the hallway conversations at dinner and certainly we know that you take a nap around this time and go out and get ready to burn the midnight oil 'til three in the morning. We have many stories of Barcelona, but let's get down to it. What's happened today in Barcelona? What's the big story? What are you seeing on the ground there? What's the vibe? Give us some insight into what's happening, the experiences you're having and what's the big stories today coming out of Mobile World Congress. >> [Scott] Yeah sure, John. Well there's, as you know, there's a lot of hype about a lot of buzz words, so you got to throw all the buzz words out there: IoT, 5g, self driving cars, VR, AR, augmented reality. If you run through the halls you see a lot of those gizmos and gadgets and I would say the scene has shifted a lot in recent years. As you know a couple years ago it was all about Samsung's big tablet or the latest phone and now it's more about these kind of more advanced technologies, they call them interactive technologies that we're going to see coming down the road the next few years, so there's lots of stuff. >> The show has been very telco orientated and still really is a device and telco show basically. The device guys had their moment in the sun on Saturday and Sunday, but Monday kicked off really the telco show. This is really about ... The telco is trying to figure out their future. Their core competency over the years has been how to provision subscribers and billing, and been trying to figure out the over the top, and now as you look at the software that's coming out with the 5g plus the end to end, some of the things happening at the network transformation area. There's some real action happening. I want to just get your thoughts on is this the time where we're starting to see the needle move on the progress of really bringing the kind of networks that are going to power the cool technologies and promises of use cases, whether it's e-sports up to driving cars that are essentially data centers. Huge amount of data problems, huge amount of network reconfiguration, is this the time where there is an inflection point? What's your thoughts? >> [Scott] Yeah, that's a great point. You have the service providers for a number of years have felt a little bit - I don't know what the word is - spurned by success. They created all this plumbing and they put this massive investment into LTE, broadband, that really enabled all these applications, but it was more people like Apple and Netflix and Amazon that kind of stole the show by leveraging that bandwidth for these new services. Cloud services, music services, of course Netflix, the most popular internet service in the world, and so the service providers kind of feel like 5G is another opportunity that they don't want to squander and so they're being very careful about how to position that. But to your point, they have realized that they absolutely need to virtualize their network because what's going to addle a 5G is you have this massive amount of bandwidth but you need to splice it up into different - they called them actually network slices - so that you can provide all these advanced services, and that's where the service providers want to figure out how they're going to monetize that. So it's certainly a launchpad for the technology and the somewhat maligned technology known as NFV, Network Function Virtualization, but I think that the pressure to get 5G out is going to accelerate their investment in NFV because they need that cloud platform to kind of serve up all these next generation services. >> Is the telco's NFV efforts going to make them more cloud ready in your mind? Is that the sentiment? Is it that, do they have to kind of do a lot of things right now? And the question is, what are the use cases if they are cloud ready and if they can get their act together, the network layer to power these aps that are going to be running on 5G, so you know? >> [Scott] Yeah, yeah. I think so, I mean they're progressing. AT&T makes periodic announcements that they've virtualized whatever it is, 30 or 40 percent of the network, and Verizon has a pretty interesting company Radisys, which recently got a 70 million dollar contract from Verizon to install NFV infrastructure. Now that's not ... 70 million dollars is a drop in the bucket in terms of capital spending for a small virtualization platform like Radisys, but that's a pretty big move and so I think you're seeing this stuff finally becoming real, and they are going to have, within a few ... We'll wait for them because they're a much more flexible platform. It's based on the cloud web scale model, where you snap in a bunch of servers and all the networking is virtualized and you can move things around in the cloud and they want to take advantage of new services they can offer, whether that's a virtualized enterprise security service, you know security service in the cloud where you go into the Verizon Data Center and you order it up and you have a cloud security model that it will protect you, or other what we call Virtual Network Functions, another hot area you've probably heard of SD-WAN. There are a lot of SD-WAN services being rolled out >> Cool >> and that's a virtualized WAN solution that doesn't require you to, say you have a bunch of branch offices around the world, you don't have to ship them all routers and then hook them up with expensive leased lines. You can kind of close them in with the cloud if you will, and there are a bunch of hot companies in that area, including Aryaka Networks, Velo Cloud, Viptela, which are all mentioned as active acquisition targets these days, so there's definitely still a lot of virtualization thought going on but I will say it took a backseat to, this year it took a backseat to 5g and IoT. >> Yeah great commentary. I got to say, I talked with Intel with an exclusive interview with Sandra Rivera from Intel GM, with Communications Network Platforms Group, and we were talking about the dynamics and I think the big IoT thing has been autonomous vehicles. Obviously smart cities is, you've got some surveillance, you've got cameras and stuff in towns and cities, and certainly the smart home. You can't move an inch in the industry without hearing about echo and google in the home, kind of voice activated automation. Then you've got media entertainment, you mentioned Netflix. You know all these things are essentially coming back to rear its data center environment. This is like the data center meets consumer, and we were commenting that the autonomous vehicle is essentially a data center on wheels and that there's going to be trade offs between low latency high bandwidth and true mobility. You know car is not going to be dictated by millimeter wave technology because they might have different frequencies, so this brings up this diversity of network. And so I'll get your thoughts on how you see the market evolving with the pressure for open source software, you mentioned SD WAN it's software defined, WAN software defined radio, software defined networks, software defined data center, the whole world is software defined so the role of open standards both on open source software as well as open wireless if you will, meaning not one vendor is going to own it, how do you grok that? How do you pull that picture together and how do you advise your clients on what this actually means for them and their impact? >> [Scott] Yeah that's a great question. Well, you kind of hit the nail on the head with the question, because I spent much of the show looking at all of the ... If you want to break it up into two buckets of things here, you talked about cloud and WAN, so the infrastructure that builds the data center but as you pointed out, this is a service provider show, so a lot of the discussion is around connectivity standards of course, and it's really amazing John. It's amazing. You know we can boil these things down into these neat little buzz words >> IoT and 5G - but just today, I talked to people about at least five different forms of IoT standards and of course 5G today was a super controversial topic. So let me just break those off one by one. With IoT connectivity, you have something called LoRaWAN, which is a open standard, an IoT open standard, and there's about 500 members signed onto the LoRaWAN alliance, including Cisco and IBM and China Electric, so that has a fair amount of momentum. It has certain characteristics. Very low bandwidth, and not in real time so it's, I'll just give you one example. If you want a connected cow, John, I saw a connected cow, and the idea is that is be large. When a massive operation wanted, you want to track your livestock, so you need a very low cost device that does that. That's an example. You also have so called MBIOT, which Cisco's pushing pretty hard narrow band IoT, with another standard that's going to be used for IoT applications. You have the 3GPP working on LPWAN, which is kind of like a 2G recycled for IoT. The characteristics of IoT have to be really cheap there has to be really low power, so you can't use LTE right? So that's another one. Then you have a couple of hot private companies. SigFox, which has over 100 million dollars funding, and it might even be hundreds of millions of dollars at this point, based in France. Another company called Ingenu, which is spun out of east San Diego qualcon hotbed with a lot of really interesting IT and they have a technology called RPMA, so those two companies are building networks worldwide based on proprietary standards. They've said, "We're going to build an IoT network, "a radio network for IoT all over the world, "and it's going to be based on our proprietary technology, "'cuz it works better," so that ... I just gave you IoT, right? Okay, and then you have 5G, which dozens of service providers (incoming call beep) all have different things about that and actually argued about 5G doesn't exist right? Right so you have Verizon rolling out a pretty standard 5G trial and then you have something called 5GNR, New Radio, which is a multi spectrum flavor of 5G that Qualcomm and are fooling around with, and then you have people like Nokia saying, "Woah, woah, woah slow down. We can't push 5G "before its time. We don't want it to fragment, you know? (vibrating phone) "We don't want it to just "splinter all over the place," >> Yeah. >> [Scott] You know, pull like an Android. So I don't know, that was a mouthful but if you- >> So what does it mean? Is it ... >> You get the idea of how these buzzwords, when you unpack them, they get really complicated. >> Is it forking? Is 5G essentially a land grab right now, or is this all part of the evolution in your mind, because it does seem that you need a catalyst. Obviously Intel's taking a leadership position. They've done a deal with Nokia. You've seen some Ericcson announcement but then you've got Qualcomm on the other side with Snapdragon and you know the competition between Intel and Qualcomm is at an all time high, certainly on the handset side. But at the end of the day, the network is the key at this point, and so the question is, is 5G going to be broken down by the forking? >> 5G is a hype grab, it's totally a grab. >> It's a hype grab. (laughs) >> [Scott] Because 5G will not exist for at least ... They won't be rolling it out 'til 2020 and I heard several people argue today that it's really 2021, so it's not a land grab until it actually exists, right? So it's all about positioning your marketing around it, but just to give you an example of one of the controversies today was accelerating. Should we accelerate to 5G? You know and then BT came out and said, "Well we have to be careful because it's really expensive." 5G is actually going to be more expensive than LTE. If you don't have the return on investment, you know you're going to kill yourself, so people are confused. >> Scott, Intel claims they're going to have 5G in Winter Olympics in Korea. That is what they told me on the record. Not sure if that is a trial network or is that going to be just some data stations? >> [Scott] Yeah they'll have some form of 5G. I mean what I'm trying to point out with all these things is when somebody says the buzz word, it doesn't mean one thing, right? >> Yeah. >> [Scott] It means like yeah, it means several things. And it'll certainly be pretty standard 5G trials. I'm just saying right now we don't even know what that is. Nobody has even settled on what the spectrum is for 5G. There's like been four different announcements about different spectrums and then you have this 5GNR thing which is a multi spectrum technology, so it's really hard to say. I'd be shocked if anybody at Intel definitively knows what 5G looks like at this point. >> Well certainly it begs a question for a follow up conversation around what is 5G. Certainly people will argue what that means in terms of bandwidth, but the question we had on The CUBE yesterday was, "What aps are even ready for a gigabyte "and what does that mean?" Is that fixed wire, is that true mobility, is that latency versus bandwidth, and et cetera et cetera. You know the debate will rage on. Honestly I just want to see more bandwidth. I love connectivity so. Alright Scott, thanks so much for taking the time. I got to ask you a final question. You know, what's the best party so far in Barcelona? What's the best tapas you've had? What's the scene like in and around town? What's some of the buzz? >> [Scott] (laughing) Well I haven't been to any big parties to tell you the truth, I've mostly been to private dinners. The food is amazing and so is the wine. >> Yeah. >> [Scott] It's pretty hard to go wrong in Barcelona. It's probably like a foodie's paradise I would say. >> Yeah it certainly is. When we were there last time it was amazing. Great gothic vibe there, great little restaurants. Scott Raynovich here inside the CUBE and Scott you got some new credentials here. You're still at rayno on twitter but you now have a new firm called Futuriom - F-u-t-u-r-i-o-m Research. Congratulations. >> [Scott] Futuriom, yep. >> Futuriom. So appreciate it and thanks for taking the time, want to give you a shout out for the new gig and you'll be hosting for the CUBE at the Open Networking Summit, ONS, coming up. Appreciate that and thanks for calling in and sharing the insight, what's happening in Spain and Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. Thanks so much. >> [Scott] Thanks, John. It was geat. Thanks for having, that was great stuff. >> Great. We'll be back with more after this short break. This is special two days coverage inside the Studios of Palo Alto live, here in California, breaking down what's happening in Barcelona with all the news, the analysis.

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley it's theCUBE! Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Palo Alto for special Mobile World Congress 2017 coverage. Mobile World Congress is happening in Barcelona, Spain and we are covering it here in Palo Alto and covering all the action as day two of Mobile World Congress winds down. We have reporters, analysts in the field in Barcelona calling in, we have Peter Jarich coming up soon, a call in. We've had Scott Raynovich, analyst, called in earlier. We have reports: go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the action. Go to Cube365.net/MWC17, that is our new Cube365 software, a digital hub to aggregate all the top stories, all the signal from the noise at Mobile World Congress and that site is sponsored by Intel. I want to thank Intel for allowing us to do 30 great interviews here in studio as well as a variety of great content that we're getting in from phone-ins and friends on the ground in Barcelona to get you all the top stories, and of course we'll bring you commentary and analysis here inside theCUBE. I had a chance to talk to Intel at 1:30 this morning, in California time, early morning Tuesday time here, Tuesday time in Barcelona. Had a chance to talk with Sandra Rivera, who's the Corporate Vice President/General Manager of Intel's Network Platforms Group. She is in charge of the Intel Technology Group that brings the end-to-end transformation. Really getting 5G ready, part of the Intel brain trust and the leader and really taking the world by storm. 5G obviously the top story and underneath the hood of 5G is the network transformation. I had a chance to ask some very pointed questions, like, "Is 5G ready for prime time?" and, "What's it going to take to change the game "to bring a new business model to power "all the new use cases like autonomous vehicles, "smart cities, a new kind of media and entertainment "landscape as well as smart homes "and smart businesses?" So, let's hear what Sandra had to say, and here's my interview from this morning in Barcelona." >> Sandra: Well, I would certainly say it's revolution not evolution. If you look at all the previous generations of radio technology, 2G, 3G, 4G, it was largely driven by connecting people to other people, and of course the voice era with the 2G and 3G, came the app revolution, and us connecting with our loved ones over social media and all of the new capabilities that we found on the Internet. 4G then became about more capacity and coverage and faster upload and download speeds. With all of the, again, social media and video and media processing. But 5G is fundamentally different because it really brings together the computing and communications paradigm. It is truly that convergence of both computing and communication, and so, in addition to the billions of people that we've been connecting and all the other generations of radio technology, we are now connecting tens of billions of things in that era of 5G. And a lot of what we're seeing here on the ground is just some of those use cases are starting to merge in terms of once you really converge computing and communications, what is possible? What is possible to do? >> John: The big conversation that we've been having yesterday on theCUBE was the confluence between consumer technology and enterprise technology from a business model standpoint. We hear the word "digital transformation," that's the business model for pretty much the global business landscape, but really there's a lot of stuff going on under the hood around, you guys are calling, network transformation. Your CEO was talking on Fortune before the show started about this end-to-end architecture. >> Sandra: Yes, so when we talk about end-to-end, we do talk about every every point of either accessing or delivering information at the end either between people or between things. So it's from the jump-on point, if you will, on the network and the access layer and so of course it's all the new radio technologies up to the edge of a network where a lot of the decision points and the data analytics live and exist, up to the core of the network, which again, is the workhorse of where things are routed and where traffic is steered and what is the different types of traffic that you're trying to get from the source to the endpoint, and then of course back into the data center in the cloud, which is the place where most of the content is either originated or stored or served up. So when we talk about end-to-end, we do talk about every point in that continuum, and the need to have programmable, intelligent computing and communications capability which is very very different from what we've had historically from a network infrastructure perspective. So network transformation is all about embracing server-based technologies and the volume economics benefits that that brings for its relation technology and the fact that you can pool assets and use 'em across many different users and use cases, and of course cloud as both a technology and a business model and the idea that you can lease an asset and afford to lease almost unlimited compute capability, and then release it when you're done. So that end-to-end view and that transformation of the underlying infrastructure is really what we talk about when we talk about network transformation and because 5G requires that programmable computing capability all across that continuum, and in particular being closer and closer to those endpoints, whether they're the autonomous car, or they're drones, or robots, or of course the things that we're quite familiar with in terms of tablets and laptops and smartphones, that is really what we're now enabling under that umbrella of network transformation and 5G is accelerating. >> John: And for the folks watching and listening, we had a great interview with Lynn Comp, who went and did a drill down on NFE and some of those cool tech behind that. On the business model, kind of the landscape question, you mentioned drones, certainly hot. People can look at drones, they see the autonomous vehicles. This is an environment where these new applications and use cases are emerging. So there always seems to be the challenge, and we had an expert discussion this morning in theCUBE here in Palo Alto, around the trade-off between bandwidth and true mobility, and sometimes there is some trade-offs. And not one technology or partner will win it, and you guys are a big part of that. What is your view and Intel's view on the kinds of robust, diverse technologies that are needed to balance the many use cases, and at the same time, create an open ecosystem around fostering this new future growth, which seems to be a big wave we haven't seen since the iPhone in 2007. This is a really game changer. How do you guys view this multitude of technologies and diverse ecosystem and how do you guy foster that? >> Sandra: As Intel, we are a technology innovator and a technology leader and of course that clock never stands still, right? So you need to innovate (laughs) on the technology front and bring out new capabilities, and in particular as that computing and communications world come together, we know that we need to integrate more of the network and wireless IP into the standard roadmap of processors and capabilities that we bring to the market, both in hardware and software ingredients. But as we do that, we are trying to protect the software investment that the developers make in bringing new and emerging applications to market. So while we have, of course, huge CPU assets within Intel, we also have SCGA assets for use cases that would involve changing algorithms, whether they're security algorithms that are deployed differently in different parts of the world, different countries, or of course artificial intelligence, which is again an emerging field with new algorithms and new computational requirements, or on the radio side where the 5G wireless standards are going to be taking route and solidifying over the next several years and continue to evolve. You want to have that programmability so the SCGA assets come into play. And then we leverage that even further with some of the ASIC competency that we have, where you really do work in a hardened piece of silicon, on the ability to run very very fast calculations, many many times over, and to do it in as efficient possible way, both from a cost and count perspective. But all of that underlying hardware and silicon architecture choice really needs to be served up to a broad ecosystem through a software framework that is consistent and undeterministic in where you have a very robust toolchain which is really what Intel invests in. So we invest in robust and comprehensive software tools and frameworks so that we can tap into the very broadest application developer ecosystem that exists in the world. And that's how we see the capabilities that we bring to market tapping into our technology innovation in silicon and software ingredients, but then tapping into, again, something that we believe deeply in, which is a broad ecosystem, and the more market participation you have, the faster that innovation curve that you can drive. >> John: "Rising tide floats all boats," I love that saying, I think that seems to be the case here. Sandra, I want to get your thoughts on the business model on telcos and the industry. People know Mobile World Congress is the big show, but it's also where everyone who's anyone in the business goes, it's a lot of business conversations. I'm sure you're backed up between meeting and meeting after meeting because you got a lot of customers there. Take us through some of the hallway conversations you're having or specific business conversations that you're meeting with customers. What's the buzz in the hallways and what specific conversations are you having with the customers around commercializing, not just accelerating, but commercializing the business models that are going to emerge from these new use cases? >> Sandra: Yeah, well you know actually that's a great question because I've been coming to Mobile Congress for many many years and a lot of the network transformation discussions, and a lot of the discussions even around NFE and FEN in years past, have been rooted in the desire to try to achieve the lower cost point, a total cost of operation that was lower, when you move from fixed-function, purpose-filled, can't reprogram, reprovision the hardware to do anything other than what it was originally designed to do, even though the asset utilization on that investment was very low, 20% maybe 30% at best. So it was this desire to move to, again, volume economics and server-based technology and the benefits of virtualization and pooling. So it started in a cost-optimization type of conversation, but the map moved in the last year, certainly with 5G, into much more, "Well how do we innovate "services faster? "How do we bring new capabilities to market? "And how do we really help to grow the top line, "not just manage our costs?" And I think that's what you're seeing at this event this year, is the excitement around virtual reality and augmented reality, the excitement around a smart home and all the capabilities that you'll have in your appliances and in your infrastructure in your own home and how you run your household. Seeing all of the innovations that we've got in smart cities, so smart lighting, smart water systems, smart meters, and smart parking, another thing that we're seeing here in terms of a set of use cases that we're enabling. Of course, no trade show event that you're talking about in terms of new use cases and new experiences is complete without an autonomous car, so we have a beautiful BMW 7 Series auton. vehicle that we're showcasing here, but again, this is part of what we're enabling in terms of new use cases when you have virtual unlimited computes being brought to the edge of the network with all new radio technologies to address a lot of that bandwidth, a lot of that latency, highly sensitive type of ultra-reliable capability that you need for an autonomous car. So what you're seeing is these smart cities and virtual reality and autonomous driving and smart home, and how all of the underlying technologies make that possible. And from a business perspective, all those new services are clearly what the communication service providers are trying to deliver to the market and trying to do it in a way that embraces cloud business models but also working with all of the enterprises and that traditional business, whether it's an automotive industry or whether it's an industrial automation industry or even all of the appliances that go into your home. All these traditional businesses really disrupting themselves to embrace technology and to bring many more capabilities that, again, have never been possible before. >> John: Yeah the car really brings this data center to the edge in full light for the consumer. It's a moving data center, needs to talk to a base station, needs to talk to the network. And really, this is the new normal. You see Alexa in the home and the voice activation, all the coolness going on there. And a lot of folks have criticized the telcos in the past for being very good at turning on subscribers and billing them as their core competency. But now with IOT, you have literally, you know, provisioning that's happening so fast and so dynamic, you have literally anything with a SIM card is now on the network. This kind of changes the notion of a subscriber. So, moving from that bill to operational in this new thousands of things and people on the network, it's not as clean as it was in the old days. Are the telcos on this? Do they get this concept? I mean, this changes the requirements for the network to be more dynamic and manage the technologies. >> Sandra: It's a fundamental transformation that they're going through, rooted in an urgent business problem that they have, which is that the more data that is created and consumed, the more they have to build out the capacity, but they have to do that in an affordable way, and they can't do it when they're provisioning new services and capabilities and hardware, and particularly in hardware that only does what it was originally intended to do, and they're now moving to a model that is software-defined, where you are able to innovate and provision and deploy at the speed of software, not being anchored in hardware. But they really are absolutely welcoming that opportunity, again, to bring those new services and capabilities to market when they can create a network infrastructure that becomes a platform of innovation, where they can attract developers to imagine new use cases and applications and capabilities that they themselves have the DNA to do but they have such unique assets. They have spectrum, they have contextual information about network bandwidth and conditions. They have customer profile information. They have a billing relationship. >> John: They need security, too, as well. >> Sandra: They have security and reliability, and I mean, all of those assets, if they can tap into that and serve that up, as again, a platform upon which innovation can happen, then that's really their endgame. So while, to your point, they may have been criticized as being kind of slow moving, we really do see them embracing fully this idea that, in order to grow their top lines, and in order to innovate faster in terms of services that, embracing again this fundamental different architectural model of computing and communication converging the server-based and cloud-based technologies, is the wave of the future. And you know 5G just put the nice bow on it, right, because it just makes everything go faster given that all these new use cases that we're looking to enable. >> Producer: Hey John, you only have one question left, so key money question if you want. >> John: Great, my final question. Sandra, my final question is: what's the bumper sticker this year for Mobile World Congress?" If you had to put the bumper sticker on the car, what would it say this year to encapsulate Mobile World Congress? >> Sandra: So for me, it's "5G Starts Today." Because, in order to be ready for all those drones and robots and autonomous cars and all of those immersive experiences in your living room, you really have to transform the network infrastructure today, and that composability of the network infrastructure of the ability to capture a slice of the network and optimize it in realtime for your use case, all that requires programmable, scalable, flexible computing that is secure, that's reliable, and that embraces cloud architectures and cloud business models. And so that is happening today to get ready for 2018, 2019, 2020, when you see many more of those endpoints, those end devices, and those use cases come to be realized, you need to get started today. So 5G is absolutely on its way, and we're very very excited to be a key enabler of that vision. >> John: Sandra Rivera, thanks so much. Corporate Vice President/ General Manager of the Network Platforms Group at Intel. Really bringing the end-to-end technology enabling communications service providers to take their networks to the next level. Getting ready for 5G and bringing the performance to the edge of the network. Thanks for taking the time on theCUBE, calling in from Barcelona, really appreciate it. Have a great day. >> Sandra: Thanks, John, you too! (pulsing music)

>> [Voiceover] Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Palo Alto, California inside theCube's new studios, 4500 square feet in Palo Alto, just opened up last month and excited to be here. Breaking down Mobile World Congress all day, from 8 a.m. to 6, today and tomorrow. As their day ends, we're going to pick up the coverage, do the analysis, get some commentary and reaction to all the news and also the big trends and my next guest here in the studio is Saar Gillai, friend of the Cube, Cube alumni, and former HPE Senior Vice President GM of the teleco business. Ran the cloud, then a variety of things with Meg Whitman at HPE, now he's independent board member and in between gigs on the beach, clipping coupons as we say, Saar, great to see you, looking good. >> Great to be here, nice studio. >> I'm excited that you could come in, this is exactly why we're having our show here in this new studio because a lot of folks that don't take the big trek to Barcelona who don't have to can come in and talk to us and you've been a veteran of Mobile World Congress for many years. Again, you ran, and actually built the cloud biz and also built the, I won't say NFV biz, but essentially the teleco communications division for HPE so you know a lot about what's happening in the industry and more importantly Mobile World Congress. This is the year that all the accelerant is coming to the table, all the rocket fuel is being poured out on to the bonfire, the matches are going to be lit, it's called 5G, it's called IOT, internet of things, internet of people, the devices look good, they all want to be Apple, they all want to be over the top, running entertainment, smart cities, cars, 5G is the holy grail, we're done. But seriously, where is the meat on the bone on this thing? Is it real, is this transformation hype or reality at Mobile World Congress? >> Yes. (laughing) >> Yes, hype or yes, it's real? >> There's a lot of hype, but there's some reality. I mean I think first of all, 5G is the latest thing, it used to be LTE, now it's 5G. What does 5G actually mean? Really, for people, what 5G means is you should have a lot more capacity, right? So 5G talks about even up to one gigabit in certain cases, lower latency and so forth. Now the thing about wireless is you know, there's no secrets in wireless, okay? It's not like... >> It's a physics game. >> ...Yeah, it's physics, it's not like ethernet, where you can go from one meg to 10 meg then all you have to do is run more line and you're good. If that was so easy in wireless right now, we'd all be getting one gigabyte right, but we're not. So the only way you increase capacity in wireless is through smaller cells, and there are some mimo technologies and so forth. You know, 5G talks abouts technologies that will enable you to do that, but it's much more of an evolution than revolution and people need to understand that. There's no fundamental shift, what they're talking about in 5G is adding a lot more bandwidth. Today, most of the frequencies being used are sub five gigahertz, those are great frequencies to go through walls, they're not that great in terms of capacity and there's not that much of them. Like AT&T might have 60 megahertz, that's the entire capacity they have in the U.S. And that's not much. And so they're talking about using millimeter waves, other things like 27 gig, 28 gig, 60 gig. Now, those do have a lot more capacity, they have other problems, they don't go through walls. So, I think instead of thinking about 5G, we need to think about, okay, what problems are we trying to solve? Like, what problems is this going to solve? I think in some sense, it's... ...while everyone wants more broadband, some of it is a solution looking for a problem. >> [John] Yeah, it's a field of dreams too dynamic, build it, they will come. That has been a network operator concept, right? And then we know the operators, and you and I have talked about this on theCube many years, the operators are having business model challenges, problems, challenges, there are opportunities, but at the same time there is a bigger picture I want to get your thoughts on. So in a vacuum, there's limitations, there's physics, but now, you're looking at a connected network, and this is the end to end concept, so under the covers of wireless, assuming wireless has its topology, architectural things you could do, smaller cells, different frequencies, how it's going through walls is preferred, longer distance, longer latency through walls, that's the ideal scenario. But I think there's a bigger picture around the different types of wireless networks, but there's cars, there's mobility, actual true mobility, 60 miles an hour in a car versus walking down the street or sitting in a stadium or at home. These are use cases. How much of it is a wireless problem versus another problem? NFV, end to end, virtualization, help us parse that through, how should we think about this? >> There's two issues, there's a wireless problem, we can talk about the different segments that make sense and don't make sense or how much they have to evolve to make sense. And then fundamentally, the networks are very... ...they're not that agile as we know. Which is why NFV really, if you remove NFV, and you just... ...NFV's about creating agility, and yes their doing for virtualization and yada yada, but it's about creating agility, creating automation, right? You can't have these... ...a lot of these networks were designed years ago even 3GPP, this is a decade old. And so yes, there's a lot of work that has to be done and creating much more agility in a network because the network isn't built for that. Just if you think about even simple things like number of subscribers that can go on and off, right? Okay, if you have a cell phone. Like today, if you look in the world there might be 80 billion subscribers, lets say. If you look at the number of cell phones and so forth. But once you start IOT, you might have 100 billion because every device will be a network. That's a different management system, right? Also, those devices may go on and off every day, right? Because you buy a new device, you plug it in the wall. Okay, phones, you don't start a new phone every day, right? People buy a phone to use it, so, the network becomes much more dynamic, the back end has to be more dynamic, that has a side effect and so there's a lot of work that has to be done on the backend to make it more dynamic. That's the backend problem and then, you know, they are working on it. >> [John] And the bright spots there are what? What are the bright spots happening today, this week at Mobile World Congress and the trends around the backend? >> Well, you know, I mean Mobile World Congress is a show, right? And these are not sexy things, so we probably won't hear a lot about them, but you hear about orchestration, automation, network virtualization, basically moving all this through the cloud paradigm, where you have a lot more flexibility. I mean if you think about what's happening NFV these days for example, you don't hear a lot about it, but what is happening a lot is onboarding work. Okay, we've talked a lot about it, from that hype, now we're into build-out, right? So you hear less about it, but stuff is actually happening. >> [John] So it's operational. >> [Saar] It's operational stuff. >> Yeah >> [Saar] They're modifying the system so that they can be ready to work when you get to that point. On the radio side, I think the important thing to understand is like you said exactly, there's multiple use cases for 5G. The most interesting and immediate one, potentially is to use wireless to compete against cable. Which is fixed wireless access. You know, there, the telecos for years have wanted to do it, there was this whole discussion about fiber, then it turned out fiber's expensive. >> [John] Yeah, you've got to trench it, you've got to provision it to your home, you've got to roll a truck. >> Took Google a few years to figure that out, but even for Google, it's expensive. >> [John] People who have done that said you're crazy, but Google's has had so many deep pockets and Facebook does the same thing with their kind of R&D projects. >> They figured it out, there are technologies, millimeter wave is a bit hard because it doesn't go through walls, but I think when we talk about capacities, it's not for your mobile phone, it's for other things, it's mostly for fixed wireless access. There's a whole discussion about cars, I personally, because we're talking about opinions here, I don't understand the problem so much because the reality is the car's going to be a mobile data center. So 90 percent of the data that's generated by the car will be kept in the car and the car will be sending analytics and metrics up so it doesn't need gigabits. It's not like every time you turn you need to get it an instruction. Maybe that's what the network guys want you to believe because then you need like zero latency. But you don't need that, it's much easier to invest in a better system in the car. So the car's not going to figure out... >> [John] The car is a computer, it's not a peripheral. >> Yeah, it's a peripheral. >> [John] It's a data center to your point. >> [Saar] It's a full data center. It's the edge that computes, so I don't think that's an issue, I think the car will need coverage and so forth. >> But that's a different thing, cars are great examples so let's take on this one. 'Cause this is a perfect mental model. A car is going to have all this capacity like a big computer >> [Saar] It's a data center. >> [John] Or a data center. >> [Saar] A mini data center. >> A lot of things, a lot of instrumentation, a lot of software, glue. >> [Saar] It's going to have 10 computers, big systems, it's like a little data center. >> But it also moves fast, so it's a true mobile data center. So it needs mobility. So mobility has trade-offs, right, with the wireless piece at least. Depends on how you're uploading. >> Again, it depends on the capacity. Mobility has certain elements when you get into Doppler Effect and so on. It's always a capacity trade off. All of you have talked on your cell phone or used data on your cell phone in your plane, we know this. When the plane's landing, that's 150 miles an hour when the plane lands, okay, and it works pretty well. >> We all cheat, don't turn on your cell phones, we're landing. >> [Saar] Yeah, exactly. >> We've all done it. >> So again, if you want to run a gigabit, it's a problem, if you want to run less it's not such a big deal if a car's going 60 miles an hour. So it depends. Now if you define the use cases, I need a gigabit for every car, there's a million cars, that's a problem. If you define the use case, as something else it's not a big problem. There is a problem though, and I think that is something that the 5G is trying to address in terms of more on the backend of density. >> Density in terms of signal, or density in terms of... >> In terms of support, so for example, the one place you can never use a cell phone is in a conference, because too many people are trying to get on at the same time. It's a statistical model. >> [John] A-station issues. >> It breaks, and so with a car also, you're going to have high density because if you have a traffic jam, all these cars are talking or receiving, so that's a bigger issue. And 5G does talk about that as well, but that's a bigger issue than pure capacity. Pure capacity, great, I'll give you this much megahertz... >> [John] I agree with that. >> You can do that on WiFi today. >> [John] I totally agree with that. So let's take a step back I want to get a little color on Mobile World Congress. Talk about what's going on right now. So it's dinner, people at parties, what goes on? People want to always ask me, John what always happens? First of all, Barcelona is a great city as you know, we've been there together for some HP events, as well as for Mobile World Congress. What's happening, you always make the comment it's a Biz Dev show which means it's business development going on. All the top executives go there, deals are being cut, but it's also a large trade show as you will for mobility. >> I think like you said, from my experience, the biggest value of Mobile World Congress is not the show itself, with all due respect to the show, it's the fact that everybody and anybody who is somebody is there, that's why we're not there. So you can meet people. And so if you want to meet a bunch of people, teleco leaders and so forth, that's what you do. This is the place. You all say, okay, we'll meet at Mobile World Congress. So like for example, when I was down there I would basically go back to back from in the morning until 10 at night, in meetings, dinners, whatever with CEOs of various telecos or CEOs of partners and so on. Everybody's there, and I never actually got to see the show because I never got out of a meeting. And most of what happens there is that. That's amazing because again, everybody's there. >> [John] There's a huge ecosystem involved. Talk about that ecosystem because this is the dynamic. And first of all, we don't have to go there because we've got theCube here so we're there virtually, digitally, and that's what we do now. This is great, in the studio, we save ourselves the three day flight to go to Barcelona. It is crazy there, but it is about the community there, because you have that opportunity to get the feedback, do deals. >> [Saar] A lot of deals around there. >> [John] A lot of deals happening, also feedback, trying to connect the dots and having the right product strategies. What are some of the things that you think is happening right now from a business standpoint in these meetings, right now? Are people still scratching their heads on over the top, is it the classic problems, what's the current state of the union? >> Well, you saw Vimpel Com change their name to some other thing, so I think what you're seeing right now, is there's still sort of multiple dynamics going on. One dynamic is there's people maneuvering around how 5G ends up closing and there was some discussions about that, there was some release done about hey we should speed it up and then Enrique said no this is silly. So there are some discussions, there is some maneuvering going on like any time when you're doing a spec, when does it freeze, when does it not freeze? Some of the telecos want this, and so forth. That's sort of in the background going on. They're still trying to figure out, you know, business model is still an issue. The people are experimenting and you're going to see a lot of that, experimenting with apps, experimenting with these monetization strategies. So there's a lot of that going on, trying to figure out, okay, how do we monetize the network in a better fashion? >> What do you think the best path is from your perspective? Just putting your industry hat on, if you had to kind of lay down some epic commentary to the teleco bosses, hey you got to cannibalize your own, get out in front, what would you advise them in terms of what to get out in front of, what to double down on? >> I think some of them are actually doing this, but I think first of all, I think they should forget about worrying about the technology. I mean, technology is very important, we need to take care of that, but really, they need to know what are they good at? What are they strong at? So their strong at a customer relationship, they have customers that they quote unquote have as partners, those customers, and they're very strong so what can you do with that partnership as opposed to all kinds of other random stuff. Now, if you look at what they're doing, they're doing different things. Some of them are like buying different media companies, so there's no easy path, but they're going to have to use their strength as opposed to try to become somebody they're not. They're not going to become Google, they're not going to become Amazon, they're not going to become one of those guys. They do need to become more cloudified just to be efficient, but that's because that's sort of the... ...just to play, you have to pay that card, but they're not going to be better than the existing, but they do have a very strong relationship with customers, they could probably sell them more things if they focus on good customer service. Customers are happy to work with them if they get a good deal and a frictionless environment. So, I would certainly encourage all of them, and I know many of them are focused on this, to improve your frictionless interaction for the customer. If the customer has a frictionless interaction and gets a good deal, they'll do business with them. >> Are you worried about the teleco's customer relationship when they have this decoupling trend kind of happening where the consumers want to take their phone or device and uncouple it from the network and just add more mobility across networks. So if there's better connectivity, I could be able to hop between Verizon, AT&T, whoever, that seems to be something that a lot of folks technically are saying from an architectural standpoint, having that personal centric view versus a network centric tie-in. Is that on the radar at all? Or is that still kind of in a way, fantasy? >> It's like people are still using AOL, right? >> [John] Who? Who? (laughing) >> They voted for Trump then, huh? >> I'm not going there right now, we can discuss that later. The point is, the primary area where there's problems in that area is roaming. And there's a lot of discussion about roaming. 55 or 60 percent of people turn off data when they go overseas because the roaming fares are so incredibly expensive which makes no sense. Why would I have a longer cost because I happen to have an AT&T contract in Europe, I'm not using more data than somebody in Europe and it's going through the backend of the internet anyways. So I think there... >> [John] It's a great way to jack the user with more fees. >> But that's not sustainable. >> Of course. >> I think there, you're going to see pressure of people and there's some companies who provide apps, and cards and sim cards, but there's now soft ways of doing it, there you're going to see pressure and I think eventually that will go the way of the messaging, where... >> [John] Like WhatsApp >> Yeah, they'll come up with something that will allow you to have data at a much cheaper rate, I don't know, does it make sense to switch carriers in the local market if you have a good price? I mean, what's the point? So again it all comes back to, do they give you a frictionless service? If they give you a frictionless service that is at reasonable cost, then you'll use it. So you've got to look at places... ...where their going to have people leave them is where they don't do that. And there are places they don't do that, roaming is one of those places. >> [John] So I've got to ask you about IOT, obviously it's the hottest trend, AI's more of the mental model that people get their arms around, they see virtual reality, augmented reality, they call that AI, it's more of a mental model, it's really not AI, but IOT is really where the action is. People see networks, where devices as you mention are coming on and off, you just don't provision those as static devices. They're very dynamic. Your take on the IOT market, what's your view on that? Because a lot of action happening there. >> I've been involved in IOT and different people have different names for what T means, I won't go there here. >> [John] T and P, things and people. Let it be watch... >> [Saar] Well T could mean things, it could mean other things too, but the point is, IOT ...I was working in a company that was doing IOT when we called machine to machine, if we had called it IOT, it would have been better. The point is IOT is, this is extremely fragmented, it's a super super fragmented market. And it has different ecosystems. The more complex part of IOT is not the front end, it's the backend of how do you manage devices how do you tie them to some app, how do you configure them, provision them? >> [John] 'Cause of the backend, infrastructures are different. Some are IT based... >> Think about it, you've got all these devices how do you upgrade them? How do you make sure they don't start a denial of service attack on their own? How do you provision them, how do you manage their life cycle? HPE has some product in that area, a global connectivity platform, but other people as well. So, this is a bigger problem. The backend is a much bigger problem than the front end. What's the problem? Hypothetically, I can stick a SIM card into anything and it's now a device. Most of these things do not have a high bandwidth. Low bandwidth coverage is pretty good in urban centers, not if you go to Utah, but other places. So, the biggest problem is backend. Now obviously there's a lot of advancements that can be done on the front end too, because of power issues. The biggest problem with IOT is depending what you want, you have a power issue. For example, we used to do this back in the day, you built these little devices, you stick them on containers, and then you can find out where the container is at any given moment. That's great, but how long does this thing last? I think IOT is a very big thing that's happening, I think most of the problem in IOT is not in the front end, it's in the back. >> [John] Yeah, I would agree with that. Also it allows you to get more data too. Another problem is storing up more data which is security, data, IT management, basic stuff. >> [Saar] Very basic stuff, and that stuff is hard to fix because again usually IOT is not a green field that are going to connect to something that exists. You're just augmenting it with IOT like if it's a power meter or something so now you have this existing ecosystem that has to interact with something that is brand new and so there are various companies who build interfaces and how to solve it, there's management issues. But I think IOT is real. >> [John] So let's talk about cloud. So cloud you also had your hand in at HP as well, you had a wireless background, the folks might not know that, going back before then. The cloud really is an opportunity, we see that with Amazon and then Microsoft's now got their stock up and so obviously cloud, it's a bigger game, it's hybrid, it's happening and then you have all these other fringe things developing around the mobility piece. How is the cloud changing the Mobile World Congress game? Because now it's a show that kind of blends. It feels like CES on one hand, it feels like Cloud World on another. It feels like IOT and teleco world, and all these things are kind of in a melting pot. >> Well I think to me, when I look at Mobile World Congress, I think of okay, it's teleco world, really because whatever the telecos happen to be doing is what the show is about, right? If you think about the telecos, we're talking about companies that have a capital like I think AT&T spends like 20 billion dollars a year or something in that range. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of capital budget and whatever those folks are interested in is what shows up in that show. >> [John] So it's still a Teleco show dominant, you don't see that changing at all? >> No, but what teleco is, is changing, right? I mean they have broadcast, so what I'm saying is whatever the telecos are interested in is what shows up in that show. Drones, cars, telecos have their hands in all these things. And that's why it shows up in the show. Because ultimately the show is about the telecom space and the primary players. If you go down there, the booths that are as big as a country club, you know the Ericssons and so forth, it's a teleco show and people who want to be relevant like Intel as they want to be more relevant in wireless is building a bigger and bigger booth over there. But what teleco is really is about connecting things and as there's more things to connect, telecos get involved in other things. If they see a business opportunity, for example drones, lets go back to talk about that because there's a whole drone day and all this other stuff there. I mean drones need higher... ...I don't think they need so much bandwidth although it depends what kind of video you want to do. But they do need reliable connectivity. It's something useful, right? And today, you could argue connectivity it's not super reliable, it's pretty reliable, but we all have dropped calls every five minutes, right? I mean if a drone drops a call, that may not be that easy. There's use cases around these things >> [John] And back to your earlier point, I think this is the most important for the folks to listen to and hone in on is that there's a use case in every corner depending on the view of the market. Drones is one. Take virtual reality, augmented reality, that's another. IT, enterprises connecting, entertainment over the top, smart cities, these are all kind of nuanced areas. >> But when people want to understand, separate the hype from the non-hype, see if you can understand the use case. If you can't understand the use case or if the use case seems out there, then the technology is probably out there. Technology on it's own is fascinating, but if there's no use case that makes sense right here right now like again, for example, if I got a gigabit to my phone right now, would it make a difference in my life? An extra 20 hours of battery life would make a difference in my life more than a gigabit. >> That's a good point, right now battery life is more important than connectivity, but as the network transformation which is a big buzz word for this show is coming to the surface, that's an end to end architecture with software. So we think about traversing cloud, software, delivering of apps and services that's different. Now the apps have more headroom in that case, but then to your point, the backend's got to be... ...under the hood has to be smarter. Or is network transformation not yet there? >> Well I think what's happened is that the OTT, the OTTs started developing 20 years later, and surprise surprise, when you develop 20 years later, you have advantages, doesn't matter who you are, so their backend is a much further generation than the teleco's backend and so that's why when you connect to OTT services, it's consumer experience, it feels seamless and so forth, when you connect to the telecos backend, it's sort of a mismatch. And so they need to sort of fix that and that's part of the NFV transformation they're working on and again it's not because they had any limitations its because they had existing stuff, it's much easier to build from scratch. >> Final comment on Mobile World Congress this year, and outlook for the next year, your thoughts? >> We need to parse out what actually comes out of there. It's still early, I think 5G, 5Gs going to be what people are going to talk about, this is the thing. It means multiple things, but that's because the entire teleco world, if you think about it, if you look at the revenue of the suppliers and so forth who have been in a holding pattern ever since 4G sort of, in China, they finished 4G deployment and so the next big capital spending is going to be 5G, and so you're going to see the providers push anything to get that going. That's just the bottom line. >> Great. Saar Gallai, final comment, what are you working on now? Obviously we got to know you at a personal level with HPE, I've seen your roles, and the last one was really handling that teleco business which you grew up from a handful of people to hundreds of people, thousands of people. You're a land grabber, kingdom builder, empire builder. What are you up to now, what are you looking at for opportunity? I know you're doing some investing, you have some independent boards, what's your world like now here in Silicon Valley, what's your activities look like, and what's your thoughts on the valley in general and entrepreneurship and your activities? >> First of all, what I'm doing, the good news is I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley and so I'm very busy doing various interactions with bbcs, with startups, consulting, looking at different businesses, there's so much interesting things going on. Every morning you can look at new things that people bring over. Whether they're teleco related or not teleco related. Just some amazing things going on. Something from new wireless protocols to cloudification and so on, and I also sit on a few boards so I'm spending a lot of time doing that, looking at different things. >> [John] What's exciting for you right now? What's getting you jazzed up? >> There's so many different things, like I said, I think... >> [John] What's the coolest thing? >> The coolest things, some of the most cool things are.. >> [John] Confidential? >> Yeah, stealthy, I would say. I'm looking at some wireless stuff that's pretty revolutionary that I think could be new protocols that sort of change the whole dynamic of how wireless works, that's pretty interesting. And then I'm looking at some other things that are just how you apply cloud to different problems in the world. If you look at the cloud paradigm, it's existed for a fair amount of time now, but although we talk about it all day, most of the things in the world, most of the apps, most of the problem sets are not leveraging any in the cloud. They're still at best using >> [John] Recycled IT. >> Recycled IT, or sometimes even Windows 98 for all you know, right? In Africa, Africa went to wireless directly, they never did wired. So there may be a lot of industries that never go from Windows to proper data centers. They just go straight from basic Windows directly to the cloud. There's lots of opportunities that are interesting there. I'm looking at a few CEO options. But it's very exciting, there's so much going on. There's just so many things happening. >> [John] Well let's get into that tomorrow, you're going to come by tomorrow at 4:30, folks watching tomorrow at 4:30 Pacific Time, Saar will be back in the studio, we're going to dig in to the entrepreneurial landscapes, I think one of the things that you highlighted that we were talking about earlier is that sometimes you have technology looking for a problem, and the reality is that most of the game changing opportunities come out of left field that no one sees, these are the revolutionary game changers, the new technology, the hard stuff, not just some app that gets built, it's the real hardcore tech that could be applied to some of these real problems. And I think that's going to be the key. Saar Gallai here inside the studio, breaking down Mobile World Congress with theCube here in Palo Alto covering what's happening in Barcelona. We got some still phone-ins, late night in Barcelona, we're going to make those shortly, be right back with more coverage after this short break. (soft music)