MWC Barcelona 2024 | Paul Savill | Kyndryl

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Paul Savill

Global Practice Leader for Networking and Edge Compute

Kyndryl

Kyndryl partners with HPE in private 5G strategic alliance for expanded connectivity

Kyndryl Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. have joined forces to provide managed edge-to-cloud services for multinational customers.The two major companies announced an alliance on Monday to develop and deliver LTE and private 5G wireless services. The alliance between the firms is designed to provide customers with an ability to enhance the integration of private 5G and Wi-Fi networks with expanded connectivity across campuses, industrial locations and public transportation sectors

play_circle_outline Focus on leveraging AI for IT services and transformation journeys

play_circle_outline Kyndryl Bridge initiative for better insight and optimization of infrastructure using AI operations

play_circle_outline Importance of partnerships and ecosystem integrations in delivering value to customers

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Paul Savill | Kyndryl

Paul Savill

Global Practice Leader for Networking and Edge Compute Kyndryl

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(upbeat music)

>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's Live coverage here in Barcelona, I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE. We've got Dave Vellante, Savannah Peterson, Shelly Kramer, the whole team is here. This is theCUBE and SiliconANGLE's team coverage. We've got some great guests, four days of live coverage. Paul Savill is here, Senior Vice President, Global Practice Leader, Network, and Edge at Kyndryl, one of the leading companies out there helping customers transform. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE.

>> Thanks, things have been really great, yeah.

>> So let's set up, let's just get a quick overview of Kyndryl real quick, one minute, what do you guys do? What's the status of the company? Actually, big firm, big success.

>> Yeah, yeah so Kyndryl is one of the world's largest IT infrastructure managed services providers in the world. And so we really, where we specialize is in being able to support large multinational corporations with running their entire IT technology stack.

>> We've been covering you guys since you came out of IBM, again, big from the beginning. And then you keep growing and innovating and the market's been great for you guys 'cause you got the expertise on transformation and now the transformation is even more accelerated because you got the AI gift coming.

>> Yes. >> And so what AI has done, AI native applications and that effort, is it really highlights that there's some efficiencies that you can get out of it and new benefits in terms of capabilities. So we're seeing that kind of impact, at least from a mindset standpoint, people are starting to re-look at their transformation journeys to digital so it's been super exciting.

Okay- >> Paul: Very, yes.

>> That being said, you're the Global Practice Leader for Network and Edge, we're here at Telecom World, Mobile World Congress, this is where all the action. It's a telecom show but it's really kind of a cloud data show at the end of the day.

>> Yeah. >> It's distributed computing. In your world, AI's coming fast and it's actually going to be an accelerant. What do you see with that acceleration? What are the... What's the big stories that you're involved in now that's happening in this world? Because this is moving fast now and this world has been inching, inch by inch, over the past couple decades. Now, it just seems it's moving fast.

>> Yeah, so at Kyndryl, we really feel like we've got a significant role to play in the whole AI revolution that's happening. And it's not so much in that we're actually creating AIs but that we're helping our customers make that... Leverage them to incorporate them into their IT services, into their portfolio capabilities and so we've been building competency around that. We actually have a practice that focuses on AI at Kyndryl and does that. But my practice or the network and edge practice, AI impacts that as well because we believe that what we're going to start seeing is AI is deployed at the edge and that's part of what we do in the network and edge group. And so for instance, we're already working in situations where we're looking at how do we place in say, factory environments, manufacturing environments, how do we place AIs in the edge in those environments to optimize certain processes? And it could be a manufacturing process, it could be the power level management in a factory. And we think that that's going to be a real exciting potential for AI.

>> You know, Paul, one of the things that's exciting, I get the nerd out on this and geek out, is that the edge has a lot of data and there's different kinds of needs. And then we had that old OT-IT transition, I call it old technology, operating technology. But with AI, you can abstract away these complexities, okay, and do new things. Okay, I get that vision but the real thing that's going on is that the implementation approaches are starting to change as well. So can you highlight what you guys are working on right now with customers? There's investments, they're going to... They're a little low right now in AI but still going up, but still the operational impact's there. What are some of the AI investments that your customers are making? And what are some of the implementation things that you guys are doing with customers?

>> Yeah, so yeah, the investments that we see customers making in AI space is that in these areas where there are a lot of concerns around ESG, around managing the, like power efficiency at factories, for instance, that we can deploy these, use this technology on the edge to monitor that and to tweak, fine tune, the factory operation in a way that really drives that kind of efficiency.

>> On the hybrid side, we're seeing a lot of hybrid activity. You guys have some stuff going on around private-public wireless with SIMs.

>> Paul: Right. >> Explain what this is and what the excitement around that is. What's that announcement?

>> Yeah, so we made that announcement this morning and we're really excited about bringing out a unified SIM service that has global reach that can flip between different carriers in many countries around the world based upon the performance or the cost structure that our enterprise customers are trying to drive. But we've integrated that with private wireless networks so that now for instance, you could have a... Let's say that you've got a manufacturing facility and you're running a private wireless network in that manufacturing facility to do things like machine control and to collect data to instrumentation. And, but in the past, those environments have been like a walled garden, right? We have provided the services where we help those customers integrate to the cloud or tie that to their wide area networks or to other things. But what we've lacked is the ability to integrate it with mobility. So now, say for instance, those devices, once you produce something, you could... You can attach a SIM to it and track it as it moves out of the environment, out of the factory, to anywhere that it moves around the world. You can have instrumentation on it, to take like temperature readings, to do tracking on it, to send... To communicate it that as you need to and so these things make a lot of... Really start to make these types of networks where you're taking a private wireless network and merging it with worldwide mobile coverage in a way that allows customers to do things they've never done before and very easily.

>> They get a, basically, a connection visibility

across those networks. >> Paul: Yes.

>> Something that you have to stitch together in the past. Sometimes there's gaps or holes in the network and then it's not there, no coverage.

>> Paul: Yes. >> You lose signal, lose data. So is this for data-centric applications? I imagine obviously things are moving, it's mobility, right?

>> Yeah and it is data-centric. And voice is not part of what we do with this, but it is moving the data between the devices back to... Needs to communicate with these private wireless networks. And one of the great things about it also, is just the global reach that it has, which really appeals to our customer set who are large... Usually large multinational corporations and it's the ability to also choose, if you want to make that switch between carriers based upon cost optimization or based upon performance. So there are a lot of use cases also, say for instance, with a... Where we can tie this together with a local area network that has a land... Has terrestrial access into it to reach the internet. We can now back that up with multiple wireless companies so for failover situations that can flip back and forth. If one carrier fails like we see sometimes happens.

>> Who's the customer for you? Is this businesses that would take advantage of that service? And because, you know, we saw 5G was heralded as, "It's wireless for business." Which actually it is secure, it's ultra secure. So you get the private 5G, you got your SIM solution, which allows for moving, mobility, having data be mobile across whatever you got going on. What is this... Who's the customer? I mean, is it just businesses now? Or is there a specific type of use case that you're targeting?

>> Yeah, well for Kyndryl in particular, our customer base, we focus on large multinational corporations. And that makes a lot of sense for Kyndryl because we've got a, you know, large workforce, we're 85... You know, we're kind of a startup company but we've got 85,000 employees spread all over the world. They speak the local language, they're on the ground with our customers. But what that allows us to do is to offer a consistent experience for our customers across their entire footprint. And that's why Kyndryl is so valuable for multinationals because when they're looking to deploy this kind of technology, they don't want to deploy one thing in the US, and another thing in Germany, and a different thing in Brazil for instance. That creates, you know, more operational complexity and they can't scale as well with the technology when they do that. So what our global footprint enables them to do, is to do that on a consistent basis. And that's part of the value we bring is that way to unify that technology and take a lot of that headache off of their operations teams that would have to try to, you know, do things very similar.

>> You know, it's interesting to see how much progress we've made on the mobility piece, because you think about that use case, it should be, "Oh, that's common sense." But it's hard, it's been hard to do. Now you're doing it, so this brings back the question of like, where, when... What's the next innovation? What's next for you guys in this space? Because edge is only going to get faster, smarter, and less expensive from a device standpoint. Inference is at the edge, is being discussed as one of the hottest areas around AI.

>> Right, right. >> Even training models, but also compute at the edge. You're going to have, you know, 20 billion parameters on your foundation model soon on your phone or your device. So, you know, we're living in a world where, you know, it's not IoT anymore, it's just everything.

>> Yeah. >> Everything's connected. So what is the next innovation? Where does this go? What do you guys talk to customers? What's the headroom that you're selling or sharing with them that they can take advantage? What's the next capabilities?

>> Yes, yeah so I, you know... And I would go back to AI, I mean, that's really where we're going to be, where we see the next great innovation. And one of the things that we're doing, we're developing an intellectual property around the ability to manage AIs that are sitting on the edge and kind of police the communication with those AIs, like who gets to access that AI? It's like a... You can think of it almost like a firewall that fronts an AI that acts as a gatekeeper as to what information is able to communicate with that AI and that private wireless environment. Who is able to talk to it? Ask questions of it, pull information from it, and what it can connect to in the outside world.

>> It's interesting, I was talking with Antonio Neri earlier, I mentioned that earlier, I said, "IT is changing." But also, it's getting better, the whole AI technology stack is going to actually help augment the human skill gap problem, because being a platform engineer right now is the most coveted skill set. So you got the whole skill gaps coming on so the sooner we get this operational abstraction, dashboarding, whatever service, whatever operating model-

>> Paul: yes.

>> In place, the more it's going to be easier to provision, manage, and conduct business operationally.

>> Paul: Yeah, that's right.

>> And that's always been a hard thing at the edge, the operational piece. What's your vision on that?

>> Yeah, we actually have a whole initiative that we started from the very beginning of the company whenever we separated that we call Kyndryl Bridge, and its essence is essentially going right out what you're talking about there. When you think about what Kyndryl does and all of the vast... The entire IT stack that we have visibility to that we manage and for many of our customers, there is a tremendous amount of information that's created that we're just not... Our customers are not mining it, they're not using it, right? And so what Kyndryl Bridge is about, is to be able to pull all of that information together and put AI operations on top of it to allow our customers to get much better insight as to what's going on and how they can optimize their infrastructure, how they can do predictive fault analysis, and how they can start to bring in and lay on these AI tools into managing their infrastructure much more efficiently.

>> Yeah and I see that that's definitely going to be table stakes in the future but getting there's going to be fun. I got to ask you about private 5G, everyone's got, everyone's talking about it.

>> Yeah.

>> What is the Kyndryl position with private 5G? What does that mean? What does private 5G mean for Kyndryl?

>> Yeah, so what we... The role that we play in the private 5G space, obviously we're not a carrier but what we do is we help customers to adopt this technology and to make it work in their environments efficiently. So, you know, we're not about private 5G for the sake of 5G being a cool technology. We're really about going into a customer environment, helping them to evaluate the different wireless connectivity options that they have. And so we may go into a customer environment and say, "Hey, look, Wi-Fi works perfectly fine for your situation. That's going to be the most cost effective and for the security levels that you need, that can work just fine." But what we're seeing is that more and more, as these environments become very security sensitive, as they become more performance sensitive, that these private 5G implementations fit the bill more often. And also they, we see that the private 5G implementations work in large industrial environments much better than you could support with Wi-Fi. So we help our customers understand those trade-offs and then we help those customers consistently build out that technology infrastructure around private 5G in their businesses and do that in a consistent way across the world.

>> You know, we've been covering Kyndryl, the company's been a great partner helping companies get to where they need to be. Whether it's at the edge for your team or Bridge, and other technologies, you guys help people put it together.

>> Paul: Right.

>> We were talking about in our opening segment here at Mobile World Congress, MWC, this morning about some of the key top news. One of them was the role of partnerships, okay? And integration, implementations. So, I mean obviously that's a broad statement, but partnerships, sure, Telco's got a partner, network's got a partner. You guys are in the partnership business. You have to deal with a lot of people on both sides of the table. You got your customers and you got your partner ecosystem that you work with on this side and you're bringing things together. We're at probably one of the most complex times

in human history. >> Paul: Yeah.

>> And things are getting better, obviously with AI and things we're excited about. But integrations are huge right now, 'cause people are integrating with each other's platforms. API economy, now you're going to have AI native stacks and applications. What does that look like for you guys? How does Kyndryl view the role of ecosystem partnerships? And what should customers be aware of in your experience in being successful with multi-vendor, multi-cloud, multi-interoperability? Cause you know, you got to be multiple vendors, you got to inter-operate from, whether it's private wireless, public wireless, like you're doing.

>> Yes. >> To other things, API's got to talk to each other.

>> Right, right. >> What's your... What's Kyndryl's experience? What does it tell you and about how customers can partner with integrations and the role of partnerships?

>> Yeah, yeah for Kyndryl and the work that we do for our customers, partnerships are key. I mean, it is... Our alliance relationships are at the heart of what we do as a business. And so the role that we play really is taking all of those different technologies and part of our value is to look at this to continually evaluate the technology landscape for those technologies that we think are emerging, that are the most valuable to our customers. And then when we see those, then we basically start working with that company and build up our skill sets and those 85,000 employees that we have around the world, we start training them on those specific technologies. We start integrating them with our tool sets. We start working them in with things like Kyndryl Bridge, the AI-Ops tooling platform that we've been building out. And we start introducing those to our customers and saying, "Hey, you know, I know you've been doing this one thing, but we've been working with this partner and this company, and we really believe that what we're seeing from them is something that can create a lot of value for your business operations." And so that's really the role that Kyndryl plays in how we view.

We really, you know- >> At the end of the day, it's about innovation for the customer. They need an innovation strategy, one that's going to have legs for multiple decades to come.

>> Yeah, that's right, that's right. We have a consulting business that really acts as that starting point for customers to help them look at the different technology choices that are out there. We like to say that we're agnostic but we're not unbiased, okay? We know we like... (John laughs) We're totally good with where customers want to go with their technology evolution, but we also have our opinions that we think that are valuable to our customers, that we share, that we help them with.

>> And that opinionated view is needed because, you know, you want to take a position on things and not be whitewashing in whatever the customer wants because sometimes it may not work. I mean, this is why I want to ask you this question about investments, where are the customers investing? Because at the end of the day, if they have an investment and a strategy to innovate and it doesn't pan out... So where are your customers investing right now? Most in the edge, network area? What are the investment areas that you see most of the activity? Obviously, AI's hyped up now, the reality is matching the hype so there's movement there.

But- >> Yeah.

>> It's still low, relatively speaking on the AI side. But generally speaking, where's the investments coming from?

>> Well, the investment is just going up and up in the IT infrastructure space and it's in multiple areas. And so we already talked about AI, everybody's talking about AI and the enterprise, how do we use it? So I won't go into that much, but you know, there's still a lot of companies that are moving things back and forth between the cloud. I mean the cloud and their own, you know, infrastructure. We help customers there without investments being made there. Big investments being made around the security space. You know, and that's something that is going to become, I think even bigger and bigger as we go along with some of the regulation that's moving through that's going to drive that. You know, formally security was a lot about data security from a personal information perspective. But what we see is that that's going to start shifting more and more to regulatory rules around security for infrastructure, the IT infrastructure itself. With the environment that we're working in today, the geopolitical environment that's going on, protecting, you know, a nation's... The enterprises in a nation, their assets, their IT assets is becoming more and more part of what's important to the nation.

>> Yeah, it's funny, it's not the shiny new toy, but believe me, security's got everyone's attention. It's still the number one area, security. Awesome, well, we got, you know, one minute left. Thanks for coming on, Paul. Really appreciate your opinion. Obviously, Global Practice Leader in the network and the edge. Real quick comment as we finish out here, the role of data, whoever manages their data, I've been saying on theCUBE, data wins in the new paradigm of AI enabled, AI native because the network becomes important, the data that the Telecom operators and networks have is they own it. If you own your data, you have proprietary value in the data that's going to be goodness. Whether it's a business model opportunity or operational efficiency, two areas.

>> Yeah and that data foundation is actually extremely important to get right when you're... To fully leverage AI, you know? And so that's another big part of what we talk to customers about as they... That they have to do, to really get ready and leverage AI.

>> Yesterday's data management strategies might not be appropriate for the going forward scenario.

>> Well, and they very rarely are. (both laughing) So...

>> Paul, great to chat, we could go on an hour. I love this topic, I love the edge. Edge is going to explode in value, it's going to look different, but it's going to be what we all want it to be.

>> Yeah.

>> I want to find my bag if it's lost, I want to get my device to be smarter, I want to help...

Me a better life. >> Yeah.

>> You know, so life is good with AI edge. Thanks for coming on theCUBE.

>> Okay, thank you.

>> Paul Savill, Senior Vice President, Global Practices, Network, and Edge at Kyndryl. I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE here in MWC in Barcelona. Thanks for watching, we'll br back with more live coverage. Four days, this is day one, we'll be right back. (inspirational ambient music)

Paul Savill | Kyndryl

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(upbeat music)

>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's Live coverage here in Barcelona, I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE. We've got Dave Vellante, Savannah Peterson, Shelly Kramer, the whole team is here. This is theCUBE and SiliconANGLE's team coverage. We've got some great guests, four days of live coverage. Paul Savill is here, Senior Vice President, Global Practice Leader, Network, and Edge at Kyndryl, one of the leading companies out there helping customers transform. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE.

>> Thanks, things have been really great, yeah.

>> So let's set up, let's just get a quick overview of Kyndryl real quick, one minute, what do you guys do? What's the status of the company? Actually, big firm, big success.

>> Yeah, yeah so Kyndryl is one of the world's largest IT infrastructure managed services providers in the world. And so we really, where we specialize is in being able to support large multinational corporations with running their entire IT technology stack.

>> We've been covering you guys since you came out of IBM, again, big from the beginning. And then you keep growing and innovating and the market's been great for you guys 'cause you got the expertise on transformation and now the transformation is even more accelerated because you got the AI gift coming.

>> Yes. >> And so what AI has done, AI native applications and that effort, is it really highlights that there's some efficiencies that you can get out of it and new benefits in terms of capabilities. So we're seeing that kind of impact, at least from a mindset standpoint, people are starting to re-look at their transformation journeys to digital so it's been super exciting.

Okay- >> Paul: Very, yes.

>> That being said, you're the Global Practice Leader for Network and Edge, we're here at Telecom World, Mobile World Congress, this is where all the action. It's a telecom show but it's really kind of a cloud data show at the end of the day.

>> Yeah. >> It's distributed computing. In your world, AI's coming fast and it's actually going to be an accelerant. What do you see with that acceleration? What are the... What's the big stories that you're involved in now that's happening in this world? Because this is moving fast now and this world has been inching, inch by inch, over the past couple decades. Now, it just seems it's moving fast.

>> Yeah, so at Kyndryl, we really feel like we've got a significant role to play in the whole AI revolution that's happening. And it's not so much in that we're actually creating AIs but that we're helping our customers make that... Leverage them to incorporate them into their IT services, into their portfolio capabilities and so we've been building competency around that. We actually have a practice that focuses on AI at Kyndryl and does that. But my practice or the network and edge practice, AI impacts that as well because we believe that what we're going to start seeing is AI is deployed at the edge and that's part of what we do in the network and edge group. And so for instance, we're already working in situations where we're looking at how do we place in say, factory environments, manufacturing environments, how do we place AIs in the edge in those environments to optimize certain processes? And it could be a manufacturing process, it could be the power level management in a factory. And we think that that's going to be a real exciting potential for AI.

>> You know, Paul, one of the things that's exciting, I get the nerd out on this and geek out, is that the edge has a lot of data and there's different kinds of needs. And then we had that old OT-IT transition, I call it old technology, operating technology. But with AI, you can abstract away these complexities, okay, and do new things. Okay, I get that vision but the real thing that's going on is that the implementation approaches are starting to change as well. So can you highlight what you guys are working on right now with customers? There's investments, they're going to... They're a little low right now in AI but still going up, but still the operational impact's there. What are some of the AI investments that your customers are making? And what are some of the implementation things that you guys are doing with customers?

>> Yeah, so yeah, the investments that we see customers making in AI space is that in these areas where there are a lot of concerns around ESG, around managing the, like power efficiency at factories, for instance, that we can deploy these, use this technology on the edge to monitor that and to tweak, fine tune, the factory operation in a way that really drives that kind of efficiency.

>> On the hybrid side, we're seeing a lot of hybrid activity. You guys have some stuff going on around private-public wireless with SIMs.

>> Paul: Right. >> Explain what this is and what the excitement around that is. What's that announcement?

>> Yeah, so we made that announcement this morning and we're really excited about bringing out a unified SIM service that has global reach that can flip between different carriers in many countries around the world based upon the performance or the cost structure that our enterprise customers are trying to drive. But we've integrated that with private wireless networks so that now for instance, you could have a... Let's say that you've got a manufacturing facility and you're running a private wireless network in that manufacturing facility to do things like machine control and to collect data to instrumentation. And, but in the past, those environments have been like a walled garden, right? We have provided the services where we help those customers integrate to the cloud or tie that to their wide area networks or to other things. But what we've lacked is the ability to integrate it with mobility. So now, say for instance, those devices, once you produce something, you could... You can attach a SIM to it and track it as it moves out of the environment, out of the factory, to anywhere that it moves around the world. You can have instrumentation on it, to take like temperature readings, to do tracking on it, to send... To communicate it that as you need to and so these things make a lot of... Really start to make these types of networks where you're taking a private wireless network and merging it with worldwide mobile coverage in a way that allows customers to do things they've never done before and very easily.

>> They get a, basically, a connection visibility

across those networks. >> Paul: Yes.

>> Something that you have to stitch together in the past. Sometimes there's gaps or holes in the network and then it's not there, no coverage.

>> Paul: Yes. >> You lose signal, lose data. So is this for data-centric applications? I imagine obviously things are moving, it's mobility, right?

>> Yeah and it is data-centric. And voice is not part of what we do with this, but it is moving the data between the devices back to... Needs to communicate with these private wireless networks. And one of the great things about it also, is just the global reach that it has, which really appeals to our customer set who are large... Usually large multinational corporations and it's the ability to also choose, if you want to make that switch between carriers based upon cost optimization or based upon performance. So there are a lot of use cases also, say for instance, with a... Where we can tie this together with a local area network that has a land... Has terrestrial access into it to reach the internet. We can now back that up with multiple wireless companies so for failover situations that can flip back and forth. If one carrier fails like we see sometimes happens.

>> Who's the customer for you? Is this businesses that would take advantage of that service? And because, you know, we saw 5G was heralded as, "It's wireless for business." Which actually it is secure, it's ultra secure. So you get the private 5G, you got your SIM solution, which allows for moving, mobility, having data be mobile across whatever you got going on. What is this... Who's the customer? I mean, is it just businesses now? Or is there a specific type of use case that you're targeting?

>> Yeah, well for Kyndryl in particular, our customer base, we focus on large multinational corporations. And that makes a lot of sense for Kyndryl because we've got a, you know, large workforce, we're 85... You know, we're kind of a startup company but we've got 85,000 employees spread all over the world. They speak the local language, they're on the ground with our customers. But what that allows us to do is to offer a consistent experience for our customers across their entire footprint. And that's why Kyndryl is so valuable for multinationals because when they're looking to deploy this kind of technology, they don't want to deploy one thing in the US, and another thing in Germany, and a different thing in Brazil for instance. That creates, you know, more operational complexity and they can't scale as well with the technology when they do that. So what our global footprint enables them to do, is to do that on a consistent basis. And that's part of the value we bring is that way to unify that technology and take a lot of that headache off of their operations teams that would have to try to, you know, do things very similar.

>> You know, it's interesting to see how much progress we've made on the mobility piece, because you think about that use case, it should be, "Oh, that's common sense." But it's hard, it's been hard to do. Now you're doing it, so this brings back the question of like, where, when... What's the next innovation? What's next for you guys in this space? Because edge is only going to get faster, smarter, and less expensive from a device standpoint. Inference is at the edge, is being discussed as one of the hottest areas around AI.

>> Right, right. >> Even training models, but also compute at the edge. You're going to have, you know, 20 billion parameters on your foundation model soon on your phone or your device. So, you know, we're living in a world where, you know, it's not IoT anymore, it's just everything.

>> Yeah. >> Everything's connected. So what is the next innovation? Where does this go? What do you guys talk to customers? What's the headroom that you're selling or sharing with them that they can take advantage? What's the next capabilities?

>> Yes, yeah so I, you know... And I would go back to AI, I mean, that's really where we're going to be, where we see the next great innovation. And one of the things that we're doing, we're developing an intellectual property around the ability to manage AIs that are sitting on the edge and kind of police the communication with those AIs, like who gets to access that AI? It's like a... You can think of it almost like a firewall that fronts an AI that acts as a gatekeeper as to what information is able to communicate with that AI and that private wireless environment. Who is able to talk to it? Ask questions of it, pull information from it, and what it can connect to in the outside world.

>> It's interesting, I was talking with Antonio Neri earlier, I mentioned that earlier, I said, "IT is changing." But also, it's getting better, the whole AI technology stack is going to actually help augment the human skill gap problem, because being a platform engineer right now is the most coveted skill set. So you got the whole skill gaps coming on so the sooner we get this operational abstraction, dashboarding, whatever service, whatever operating model-

>> Paul: yes.

>> In place, the more it's going to be easier to provision, manage, and conduct business operationally.

>> Paul: Yeah, that's right.

>> And that's always been a hard thing at the edge, the operational piece. What's your vision on that?

>> Yeah, we actually have a whole initiative that we started from the very beginning of the company whenever we separated that we call Kyndryl Bridge, and its essence is essentially going right out what you're talking about there. When you think about what Kyndryl does and all of the vast... The entire IT stack that we have visibility to that we manage and for many of our customers, there is a tremendous amount of information that's created that we're just not... Our customers are not mining it, they're not using it, right? And so what Kyndryl Bridge is about, is to be able to pull all of that information together and put AI operations on top of it to allow our customers to get much better insight as to what's going on and how they can optimize their infrastructure, how they can do predictive fault analysis, and how they can start to bring in and lay on these AI tools into managing their infrastructure much more efficiently.

>> Yeah and I see that that's definitely going to be table stakes in the future but getting there's going to be fun. I got to ask you about private 5G, everyone's got, everyone's talking about it.

>> Yeah.

>> What is the Kyndryl position with private 5G? What does that mean? What does private 5G mean for Kyndryl?

>> Yeah, so what we... The role that we play in the private 5G space, obviously we're not a carrier but what we do is we help customers to adopt this technology and to make it work in their environments efficiently. So, you know, we're not about private 5G for the sake of 5G being a cool technology. We're really about going into a customer environment, helping them to evaluate the different wireless connectivity options that they have. And so we may go into a customer environment and say, "Hey, look, Wi-Fi works perfectly fine for your situation. That's going to be the most cost effective and for the security levels that you need, that can work just fine." But what we're seeing is that more and more, as these environments become very security sensitive, as they become more performance sensitive, that these private 5G implementations fit the bill more often. And also they, we see that the private 5G implementations work in large industrial environments much better than you could support with Wi-Fi. So we help our customers understand those trade-offs and then we help those customers consistently build out that technology infrastructure around private 5G in their businesses and do that in a consistent way across the world.

>> You know, we've been covering Kyndryl, the company's been a great partner helping companies get to where they need to be. Whether it's at the edge for your team or Bridge, and other technologies, you guys help people put it together.

>> Paul: Right.

>> We were talking about in our opening segment here at Mobile World Congress, MWC, this morning about some of the key top news. One of them was the role of partnerships, okay? And integration, implementations. So, I mean obviously that's a broad statement, but partnerships, sure, Telco's got a partner, network's got a partner. You guys are in the partnership business. You have to deal with a lot of people on both sides of the table. You got your customers and you got your partner ecosystem that you work with on this side and you're bringing things together. We're at probably one of the most complex times

in human history. >> Paul: Yeah.

>> And things are getting better, obviously with AI and things we're excited about. But integrations are huge right now, 'cause people are integrating with each other's platforms. API economy, now you're going to have AI native stacks and applications. What does that look like for you guys? How does Kyndryl view the role of ecosystem partnerships? And what should customers be aware of in your experience in being successful with multi-vendor, multi-cloud, multi-interoperability? Cause you know, you got to be multiple vendors, you got to inter-operate from, whether it's private wireless, public wireless, like you're doing.

>> Yes. >> To other things, API's got to talk to each other.

>> Right, right. >> What's your... What's Kyndryl's experience? What does it tell you and about how customers can partner with integrations and the role of partnerships?

>> Yeah, yeah for Kyndryl and the work that we do for our customers, partnerships are key. I mean, it is... Our alliance relationships are at the heart of what we do as a business. And so the role that we play really is taking all of those different technologies and part of our value is to look at this to continually evaluate the technology landscape for those technologies that we think are emerging, that are the most valuable to our customers. And then when we see those, then we basically start working with that company and build up our skill sets and those 85,000 employees that we have around the world, we start training them on those specific technologies. We start integrating them with our tool sets. We start working them in with things like Kyndryl Bridge, the AI-Ops tooling platform that we've been building out. And we start introducing those to our customers and saying, "Hey, you know, I know you've been doing this one thing, but we've been working with this partner and this company, and we really believe that what we're seeing from them is something that can create a lot of value for your business operations." And so that's really the role that Kyndryl plays in how we view.

We really, you know- >> At the end of the day, it's about innovation for the customer. They need an innovation strategy, one that's going to have legs for multiple decades to come.

>> Yeah, that's right, that's right. We have a consulting business that really acts as that starting point for customers to help them look at the different technology choices that are out there. We like to say that we're agnostic but we're not unbiased, okay? We know we like... (John laughs) We're totally good with where customers want to go with their technology evolution, but we also have our opinions that we think that are valuable to our customers, that we share, that we help them with.

>> And that opinionated view is needed because, you know, you want to take a position on things and not be whitewashing in whatever the customer wants because sometimes it may not work. I mean, this is why I want to ask you this question about investments, where are the customers investing? Because at the end of the day, if they have an investment and a strategy to innovate and it doesn't pan out... So where are your customers investing right now? Most in the edge, network area? What are the investment areas that you see most of the activity? Obviously, AI's hyped up now, the reality is matching the hype so there's movement there.

But- >> Yeah.

>> It's still low, relatively speaking on the AI side. But generally speaking, where's the investments coming from?

>> Well, the investment is just going up and up in the IT infrastructure space and it's in multiple areas. And so we already talked about AI, everybody's talking about AI and the enterprise, how do we use it? So I won't go into that much, but you know, there's still a lot of companies that are moving things back and forth between the cloud. I mean the cloud and their own, you know, infrastructure. We help customers there without investments being made there. Big investments being made around the security space. You know, and that's something that is going to become, I think even bigger and bigger as we go along with some of the regulation that's moving through that's going to drive that. You know, formally security was a lot about data security from a personal information perspective. But what we see is that that's going to start shifting more and more to regulatory rules around security for infrastructure, the IT infrastructure itself. With the environment that we're working in today, the geopolitical environment that's going on, protecting, you know, a nation's... The enterprises in a nation, their assets, their IT assets is becoming more and more part of what's important to the nation.

>> Yeah, it's funny, it's not the shiny new toy, but believe me, security's got everyone's attention. It's still the number one area, security. Awesome, well, we got, you know, one minute left. Thanks for coming on, Paul. Really appreciate your opinion. Obviously, Global Practice Leader in the network and the edge. Real quick comment as we finish out here, the role of data, whoever manages their data, I've been saying on theCUBE, data wins in the new paradigm of AI enabled, AI native because the network becomes important, the data that the Telecom operators and networks have is they own it. If you own your data, you have proprietary value in the data that's going to be goodness. Whether it's a business model opportunity or operational efficiency, two areas.

>> Yeah and that data foundation is actually extremely important to get right when you're... To fully leverage AI, you know? And so that's another big part of what we talk to customers about as they... That they have to do, to really get ready and leverage AI.

>> Yesterday's data management strategies might not be appropriate for the going forward scenario.

>> Well, and they very rarely are. (both laughing) So...

>> Paul, great to chat, we could go on an hour. I love this topic, I love the edge. Edge is going to explode in value, it's going to look different, but it's going to be what we all want it to be.

>> Yeah.

>> I want to find my bag if it's lost, I want to get my device to be smarter, I want to help...

Me a better life. >> Yeah.

>> You know, so life is good with AI edge. Thanks for coming on theCUBE.

>> Okay, thank you.

>> Paul Savill, Senior Vice President, Global Practices, Network, and Edge at Kyndryl. I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE here in MWC in Barcelona. Thanks for watching, we'll br back with more live coverage. Four days, this is day one, we'll be right back. (inspirational ambient music)