MWC Barcelona 2024 | Anand Swamy | HCLTech & Satish Iyer | Dell Technologies

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Anand Swamy

Executive Vice President & Global Head - Exosystems

HCLTech

Satish Iyer

Vice President, Emerging Services

Dell Technologies

Exploring Open RAN and its potential to reshape the telecom sector

The fast-paced world of mobile communications has always brought forth several cutting-edge innovations, each offering improvements in one area or another.The newest of those is open radio access network infrastructure. From cost savings to end-user value creation, what possibilities does the Open RAN standard hold for telecom operators?“If you look at the technology landscape, especially in the telco space, we’re [at] an important tipping point,” said Anand Swamy (pictured, left), executive vice president and global head of ecosystems at HCL Technologies Ltd. “The technology has not changed as much over the last two, three decades as it has done

play_circle_outline The definition and significance of open RAN

play_circle_outline Opportunities and challenges of open RAN

play_circle_outline The Essential Role of System Integrators: Enabling Open RAN Collaboration, Ecosystem Development, and Cloudification

play_circle_outline Verticals showing interest in open RAN, including manufacturing and healthcare

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Anand Swamy | HCLTech & Satish Iyer | Dell Technologies

Anand Swamy

Executive Vice President & Global Head - Exosystems HCLTech

Satish Iyer

Vice President, Emerging Services Dell Technologies

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(upbeat music)

>> Good afternoon, fabulous nerds, and welcome back to MWC here in Barcelona. It's midway through day two of our four days of live coverage here on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-host and analyst, Dave Vellante. Dave, how you feeling it?

>> Feel good. I was just saying we're getting punchy. It's day two.

>> I know, I feel like we're getting a little a little zesty. (Dave laughs) Who knows what's going to happen next, folks? Be sure and stay tuned. This panel is going to be absolutely action packed, and I'm super excited. We are talking about something we have yet to talk about at the show at all. We are talking about Open RAN and our guests, Satish and Anand, two of the most important people to talk to us about it today. Thank you both for being here. You are CUBE legends and veterans over many years. You're on the show almost as much as I am, Satish which is awesome. What is the Open RAN landscape, and Anand I'm going to take this to you first, here at the show? I mean, this has got to be the intersection of all the players.

>> Yeah. Thanks for having us. Really nice being here. If you really look at the technology landscape, especially in the telco space, we sitting in a important tipping point. The technology has not changed as much over the last two, three decades as it has. And the whole disaggregation of the stack, between the antennas and the RUs and the BBUs and the CU, and the disaggregation of the software and the hardware piece of it is completely changing the dynamics, right? It's creating some greater opportunities for telcos, and some challenges as well, right? Opportunities such as, you know, being agile, right? Being flexible. Driving down costs, right? Creating market differentiation, all great opportunities. But when you have a disaggregated track, it drives complexity as well, right? And therefore the need to integrate better, and need to kind of design your networks better, address security challenges, all of that is part of the conversation today, right? And we looking at, in the adoption curve, you know, Open RAN is still in the infancy state.

>> Savannah: Very early, right? That was going to be one of my questions. So actually let's step back just for a second. In case the audience isn't aware, what is Open RAN? I feel like everyone's familiar with radio access networks, but why open? Why is that such a big difference?

>> Well, it is, like Anand was saying, it is about picking the best in class technology desegregation. So to me, this is about cloud and cloud transformations, finding the telco domain, right? And it's been going on for a while. I know our CEO Michael talked about it yesterday. You know, Dave, you were talking to him as well, right? I think it's basically transformation coming into telecom, right? And when we say open, you know, the way I think about this is open basically means pick the best in class tech to solve a problem. And if that means that you have to pick and choose a bunch of things to integrate, so be it. And one of the main things I want to point out is a lot of the technologies are actually coming together, right?

>> Savannah: Yeah, the collaboration is so cool.

>> The silicon diversity is here now, right? We all talk about it now. AI is here now, right? The compute power is here now. The level of way we sophistication of data on cloud is here now, right? So I think in order for some of these transformational things to happen, a lot of these things start to come together, right? So I think this is probably as better time as any, because we can see all these massive changes happening in all this. I think that basically brings, you know, gives the gate opportunity for things like Open RAN.

>> I mean, when you hear the word "open," okay, so "open" you think open, distributed, API, scale,

>> Collaborative. >> Innovation, collaborative. And then there's always a little bit of risk. And that's kind of the dynamic here, right? I mean, the other day I go into work, I had SOS. I'm like, hmm, funny, had to restart. We all sort of, many of us in the East Coast experienced it, maybe across the nation, you know, but it still... And then you heard, well, it was a glitch in the system. You really didn't know. It was sort of opaque. But the reality is, is you really didn't notice. It sort of came back, right? It recovered. The things never down, which is phenomenal. So that is something that is part of the dynamic. It's got to be a no risk environment, but yet all those other things are so alluring. The open, the scale, the innovation, the collaboration, the APIs, the developer, all that piece. So that's a interesting balance, right? So, when? Right? What do you guys see as that adoption curve? Is it a decade long? More?

>> So, I personally think, you know, it's about... I started saying this, you know, I truly believe we are in the infancy state. The first and the most important thing is standardization. Organizations such as, you know, the Open RAN Alliance or the Telco Infrastructure Project, the work that they're doing is going to be fundamental and critical. So if you ask me, I think, you know, we are about, yeah, 8 to 10 years off from a complete adoption cycle. If you draw a curve, you know-

>> It's a journey. >> Yeah. It's a journey.

>> That's a great business, that tells me. It's a wonderful business. You're not going to get the big returns up front. As we talked about this with Michael, but playing the long game. He told a great story. He said, "The telcos came to us and they asked for better hardware, better systems. Cheaper. We said, 'Here you go.' And they said, 'well, no, we need special systems. We need, you know, we have telco special needs.' He said, 'Oh, you didn't tell us that.' So we had to go back, develop those." So that's a long cycle, which means maybe initially the returns aren't there, it's not a quick hit. But long term, it could be a really big, sustainable business for you.

>> I mean the adoption is there, right? I mean, you saw the gentleman from the AT&T standing on the stage with Michael talking about Open RAN, right? So we have big, big operators.

>> Dave: Dish is another one.

>> Yeah, Dish was one of our strategic partners in the US. So Dish has been working with Dell for the last three plus years, building up a Open RAN, open network from the ground up. We also have other big players. We have Telefonica, we have Vodafone, right? We have a lot of big players actually now driving this. Again, the bigger one you saw in the traditional players is AT&T, basically saying that we are committed to Open RAN, and we are going to partner with, you know, Ericsson, we are going to partner with Dell, right?

>> That's big.

>> That's huge. >> That is big.

>> Because Dish you could say, okay, Dish is trying to disrupt. Trying to develop applications. And they have to, 'cause they're coming from a, you know, not AT&T's in a position of strength. They don't have to, but they kind of do have to, don't they? It's like ethernet. You kind of have to.

>> You do.

>> I'm curious, so we talk about building the best in class. That's the reason for Open, which is great. I just thinking about "open." It's not a word we associate with telco very often, which is an interesting, fun game to talk about. What are some of the challenges for you guys in this. I mean, probably new people collaborating, who knows? Anand, I see you nodding, I'm going to you.

>> It's critical to kind of identify what are those challenges. And in my opinion, there are about two or three important things. First of all, open, and therefore, you know, the disaggregated stack means there is complexity. And therefore, you know, just the whole integration, the design of the network, you know, has got to be bang on, right? You know, number one, that's super important. The second, you got to understand the security elements of it. Dave spoke about it, right? You know, the security is going to become super critical. The third is interoperability, right? You know, that's going to be critical as well. And doing all of this, you know, without impacting the quality of service is what is going to be critical to make this, you know, go up the adoption curve.

>> No, I agree. I mean, look, fundamentally when you talk about open, you know, Dave, like you pointed out, right? Companies who are really good at doing what they do will do that really well, right? So then the next question is, somebody has to stitch it all together, Right? Because you are buying best in class of everything in an open ecosystem, right? Best software, best infrastructure, best compute, best radio, right? Then somebody has to say, "Okay, overall the best comes together," right? That is a challenge, right? That's an opportunity for some companies like Dell and HCL to work together.

>> Well, so a really smart CEO that I respect, I won't say his name, said to me one time, "You really want to understand if a market is attractive, look for the SI's. Because when they get in, that means-"

>> There's money there. >> It's big. They also said they like to eat at the trough, which is true. It's a big market, right? (Savannah laughing) I know. I'll never forget that.

>> Whoever said that is a smart guy.

>> Ever since then, I was like, hmm. When the SI's come in, it means it's a meaningful market. And, you know, I'll give you an example. So, for instance, ServiceNow. For years the SI ecosystem was tiny, and then all of a sudden, boom, it came in. And so what role do the SI's play in this?

>> I think SIs are in a very, I would say, central position on this, because all the four or five challenges that I mentioned are absolutely great areas where we can go in and provide services for our customers to overcome, right? So what they're asking an SI such as us, is ability to kind of take the best in class products, help them put that together, and drive an outcome, right? You know, run those operations, meeting those SLAs, right? And you know, large SI's such as us can kind of do that. And that's where the true opportunity is. You know, it's a challenge, but, you know, it's a great opportunity.

>> I heard something today earlier, and I'd never heard it before. 'Cause we talk about outcomes all the time. And this individual from a telco said, "We're driving for an outcome, but we're also trying to make that outcome sustainable as experiences.

>> Yeah. That stuck with me as well.

>> Right? I'd never heard that before. So it's outcome, we all want outcomes. And then it's thinking long.

>> The customer demands a different experience now.

>> Be able sustain outcome.

>> It's that seamless end-to-end experience. They want it fast, they want it now, and they want that same quality of UX that they've had in these silos across systems. Which is really interesting, and actually brings me to my next question. How is the culture of collaboration with the different groups that you're working with?

>> I can go, and then you. >> No, go for it.

>> I think one of the critical elements we've not spoken about yet is ecosystem and collaboration. The power of the ecosystem is going to be super important for Open RAN right? Customers want us to have an opinionated point of view of how the ecosystem looks like, and who in that ecosystem is going to do what, right? And ability to get that together, and clearly drive a program around Open RAN is going to be critical.

Satish? >> No, I agree. I mean, the whole open basically means, it's an open ecosystem play, right? So, you know, telecom companies want to solve a lot of problems about the stack, right? And by bringing in strong system integrator and a strong infrastructure telecom cloud platform provider, then you are actually opening it up for all those application providers to come and validate, test, and bring those outcomes to the table. So I absolutely think consistent experience. See, in the cloud, we always talk about, you know, in the cloud world, right? When you have the hyperscalers, we always talk about how do you bring the cloud experience on-prem, right? So this is very similar. Like, how do you bring the cloud experience Easy Button into a telecom world? I think that's basically what this is.

>> You know, it's interesting.

>> Sorry to interrupt. >> Oh no, please.

>> The cloud came in and sort of disrupted the on-prem legacy businesses with this idea of, how did Jaci say it? Undifferentiated heavy lifting. And what happened was you guys got good, you know, got kind of slapped around in the face and said, well, we got to have a better operating model. And we can do that. And of course, that IP leaked out, that mindset leaked out, and now you talk to IT, they go, "Cloud? We have a cloud right here." It's the same thing, same experience. It's substantially identical. And people can debate that, but it's pretty much the same. That telcos haven't transformed yet, right? And they're largely on-prem, right? And so it's the different dynamic now versus 2010 when the cloud was really taking off. Do you agree with that assessment? Not that the cloud's not going to play a role. It is. But there's more of a balance, I would say.

>> Absolutely. I completely agree with that. You know, if you really look at... I'm just going to take a step back, and to your point, we are now seeing that recalibration of workloads all over the enterprise and telcos, right? Gone are the days where, you know, everybody just said, "Cloud is my only path out." Now today, you know, everybody's looking at the workloads and say, "Tell me what's the best place to run it." Because from a commercial model standpoint, you can kind of make it work, right? And we see the same thing. Again, from a Open RAN standpoint, cloudification is going to be a super important thing. Satish?

>> I'll add to what Anand was saying. But you know, one of the main things we got to think about is Michael talked about yesterday, right? The notion of cloud experience on-prem. One of the main thing is data has gravity, right? And now we all talked about AI. We've been talking a lot about AI, right? We talked about AI has gravity, right? And telco companies have a very important message because telecommunication companies are at the edge, right? When the decisions are to be made at the edge, those decisions are to be smarter. That has gravity, right? So you have to make those decisions there, right? So I think it's truly multi-cloud world, right? We always like to say that decisions are made, like in a very, you know, distributed environment. But I think in telecommunication world, it's even more so important, but it is going to be a very multicloud world.

>> And I'm glad you used the word, I think you said, "Recalibration." You know, a lot of people use the word repatriation. Recalibration is a better term, 'cause that's really what it is. It's not like, oh, we doing from here to here, we're going to move back. It's more, okay, let's balance it out. More of an equilibrium.

>> True, true.

>> And that's what we are seeing across the whole, both enterprise and telcos, where there is a strong point of view around workloads and applications Determining both the network requirements as well as where it's going to reside and what's going to run, right? And especially with generative AI now, you know, and because of security concerns, because of other things, right? You know, governance. Now you know, truly organizations are saying hybrid is the way to go. And even though if you take the current workload numbers, it might be slightly skewed to the hyperscalers, long run, that's what we-

>> Well, it's going to be interesting to see, because we've talked about the power law of gen AI where there's a long tail. You've got a lot of big models that are dominant, but you have a lot of smaller models that are domain specific. Many of those we think are going to be on prem. I think, you know, one of the debates we're having is, okay, but remember the cloud in the early days, everybody said, no way, not going to go to the cloud. It's not secure. Debate is the same thing going to happen here? They initially, they want to do stuff on-prem because it's more safe, it's more secure, it's more trusted, it's sovereign. I think it's different this time because of the data. Michael's point about, you know, data gravity. We talk about that. We throw that term around a lot. Everybody is right when they say we're going to bring the AI to the data. You're probably not going to say, "Okay, let's rip the data out, put it in the cloud, and then bring the AI there." Unless you can't deliver the tooling. So that's the challenge. You've got to be able to deliver the tooling. And that's substantially similar cloud experience and the tooling capabilities and what you're doing with the Coheres and the llamas and, you know, all of the other-

>> Yeah, I mean the processing cleaning and the indexing and the vectoring of the information, right? Unstructured, structured. There is a lot for organization to consume that in a very, you know, meaningful way within an AI model. So to your point, for a lot of the reasons, whether you have a general purpose LLM, but you're going to to make it specific for you, you're going to take your data sets, which you already have within your enterprise and leverage it, for most part, right? And that's where the power of the AI, where it belongs, comes in, right? So it gets closer and closer to where the enterprises are, and that makes it more useful.

>> So I would imagine when we hear a year from now, we're going to have a very similar conversation. And then one of these years, I don't know, maybe it's five or six years from now, we're going to go, "Yeah, we told you it did happen," right? And we're going to have that momentum. That part of the S-curve is really going to be... See that's sort of inevitable. You could see it coming. You know, everybody wants it to come, they know it's coming and it's just, you know, the pace is dictating the pace.

>> I'm curious, you see across verticals. You talk to a lot of different customers between both of you. Are you seeing any remarkable trends that you can share with us of like, who's excited about Open RAN, or say really eager to be one of these ecosystem partners with you?

>> You want to go? >> No, go for it.

>> Okay, so I think few verticals are definitely leading, in my opinion. Manufacturing is right up there. So, number one. Number two, interestingly, we also seeing a lot of interest in life sciences and healthcare, right? We doing a lot of, and this is going back to the whole idea of adoption of Open RAN. We're seeing a lot of requests for doing POCs, right? And ability to have, and I spoke about ecosystems as well, ability to have that whole stack as part of testing it out and figuring out the performance optimization. So, but then manufacturing is a big thing. You know, manufacturing is a big thing, I would say.

>> Oh, it makes sense. I mean, throughput and supply chain and everything else is such a huge topic, and the ability to do it better and more efficient, with all of your edge locations, depending on where your factories are, is a absolute-

>> Exactly, edge, IoT, you know, all of that, and that is kind of really coming together and making sense from a return on investment, business impact, so on and so forth.

>> Savannah: Yeah, Satish, what about you?

>> No, just to add, it's basically around low latency, right? Super or near super high bandwidth, right? And really, really smart, quick, intelligent decision making. That's it, right? So all the use cases are going to be centered around those characteristics, right? It's as simple as that.

>> Is there anyone that gets you particularly excited as a person? Not just as a professional?

>> As a individual, you mean?

>> Savannah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> I like to find restaurants much faster.

>> Yes, oh my gosh. I really want to do a segment while we're here in Spain. Now that I'm saying it, maybe it'll happen. I want to use AI to help us find the best tapas. And have that be one of our little tasting segments.

>> Especially for a vegetarian, I would really like them to know what I want.

>> I love that. What about you Anand? Anything that gets the human inside you, not just the brain.

>> On what I like in, in terms of-

>> What you're most excited about. Like to your point, I love that. Like, I would love to find restaurants faster. That's a great example of how all of this complex text we just talked about is going to enable a wonderful user experience for us.

>> Satish: For me, that's the best place I can get the best-

>> Being on the road like four days a week, anything that'll help my travel make it easier, you know, I think, you know, I'll go with that.

>> Seriously. Amen. I feel you. After 232 days on the road last year, I could not agree with you more. Also, when is my suitcase going to pack itself? Just pack yourself. Just, I don't want to do it anymore. So much of my time spent putting clothing in cubes. Satish, Anand, so wonderful to have you on the show. It's why we bring you back over and over and over again. Dave, fantastic questions, as always. and thank all of you are fabulous CUBE community for tuning in all week here from MWC and Barcelona. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

Anand Swamy | HCLTech & Satish Iyer | Dell Technologies

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(upbeat music)

>> Good afternoon, fabulous nerds, and welcome back to MWC here in Barcelona. It's midway through day two of our four days of live coverage here on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-host and analyst, Dave Vellante. Dave, how you feeling it?

>> Feel good. I was just saying we're getting punchy. It's day two.

>> I know, I feel like we're getting a little a little zesty. (Dave laughs) Who knows what's going to happen next, folks? Be sure and stay tuned. This panel is going to be absolutely action packed, and I'm super excited. We are talking about something we have yet to talk about at the show at all. We are talking about Open RAN and our guests, Satish and Anand, two of the most important people to talk to us about it today. Thank you both for being here. You are CUBE legends and veterans over many years. You're on the show almost as much as I am, Satish which is awesome. What is the Open RAN landscape, and Anand I'm going to take this to you first, here at the show? I mean, this has got to be the intersection of all the players.

>> Yeah. Thanks for having us. Really nice being here. If you really look at the technology landscape, especially in the telco space, we sitting in a important tipping point. The technology has not changed as much over the last two, three decades as it has. And the whole disaggregation of the stack, between the antennas and the RUs and the BBUs and the CU, and the disaggregation of the software and the hardware piece of it is completely changing the dynamics, right? It's creating some greater opportunities for telcos, and some challenges as well, right? Opportunities such as, you know, being agile, right? Being flexible. Driving down costs, right? Creating market differentiation, all great opportunities. But when you have a disaggregated track, it drives complexity as well, right? And therefore the need to integrate better, and need to kind of design your networks better, address security challenges, all of that is part of the conversation today, right? And we looking at, in the adoption curve, you know, Open RAN is still in the infancy state.

>> Savannah: Very early, right? That was going to be one of my questions. So actually let's step back just for a second. In case the audience isn't aware, what is Open RAN? I feel like everyone's familiar with radio access networks, but why open? Why is that such a big difference?

>> Well, it is, like Anand was saying, it is about picking the best in class technology desegregation. So to me, this is about cloud and cloud transformations, finding the telco domain, right? And it's been going on for a while. I know our CEO Michael talked about it yesterday. You know, Dave, you were talking to him as well, right? I think it's basically transformation coming into telecom, right? And when we say open, you know, the way I think about this is open basically means pick the best in class tech to solve a problem. And if that means that you have to pick and choose a bunch of things to integrate, so be it. And one of the main things I want to point out is a lot of the technologies are actually coming together, right?

>> Savannah: Yeah, the collaboration is so cool.

>> The silicon diversity is here now, right? We all talk about it now. AI is here now, right? The compute power is here now. The level of way we sophistication of data on cloud is here now, right? So I think in order for some of these transformational things to happen, a lot of these things start to come together, right? So I think this is probably as better time as any, because we can see all these massive changes happening in all this. I think that basically brings, you know, gives the gate opportunity for things like Open RAN.

>> I mean, when you hear the word "open," okay, so "open" you think open, distributed, API, scale,

>> Collaborative. >> Innovation, collaborative. And then there's always a little bit of risk. And that's kind of the dynamic here, right? I mean, the other day I go into work, I had SOS. I'm like, hmm, funny, had to restart. We all sort of, many of us in the East Coast experienced it, maybe across the nation, you know, but it still... And then you heard, well, it was a glitch in the system. You really didn't know. It was sort of opaque. But the reality is, is you really didn't notice. It sort of came back, right? It recovered. The things never down, which is phenomenal. So that is something that is part of the dynamic. It's got to be a no risk environment, but yet all those other things are so alluring. The open, the scale, the innovation, the collaboration, the APIs, the developer, all that piece. So that's a interesting balance, right? So, when? Right? What do you guys see as that adoption curve? Is it a decade long? More?

>> So, I personally think, you know, it's about... I started saying this, you know, I truly believe we are in the infancy state. The first and the most important thing is standardization. Organizations such as, you know, the Open RAN Alliance or the Telco Infrastructure Project, the work that they're doing is going to be fundamental and critical. So if you ask me, I think, you know, we are about, yeah, 8 to 10 years off from a complete adoption cycle. If you draw a curve, you know-

>> It's a journey. >> Yeah. It's a journey.

>> That's a great business, that tells me. It's a wonderful business. You're not going to get the big returns up front. As we talked about this with Michael, but playing the long game. He told a great story. He said, "The telcos came to us and they asked for better hardware, better systems. Cheaper. We said, 'Here you go.' And they said, 'well, no, we need special systems. We need, you know, we have telco special needs.' He said, 'Oh, you didn't tell us that.' So we had to go back, develop those." So that's a long cycle, which means maybe initially the returns aren't there, it's not a quick hit. But long term, it could be a really big, sustainable business for you.

>> I mean the adoption is there, right? I mean, you saw the gentleman from the AT&T standing on the stage with Michael talking about Open RAN, right? So we have big, big operators.

>> Dave: Dish is another one.

>> Yeah, Dish was one of our strategic partners in the US. So Dish has been working with Dell for the last three plus years, building up a Open RAN, open network from the ground up. We also have other big players. We have Telefonica, we have Vodafone, right? We have a lot of big players actually now driving this. Again, the bigger one you saw in the traditional players is AT&T, basically saying that we are committed to Open RAN, and we are going to partner with, you know, Ericsson, we are going to partner with Dell, right?

>> That's big.

>> That's huge. >> That is big.

>> Because Dish you could say, okay, Dish is trying to disrupt. Trying to develop applications. And they have to, 'cause they're coming from a, you know, not AT&T's in a position of strength. They don't have to, but they kind of do have to, don't they? It's like ethernet. You kind of have to.

>> You do.

>> I'm curious, so we talk about building the best in class. That's the reason for Open, which is great. I just thinking about "open." It's not a word we associate with telco very often, which is an interesting, fun game to talk about. What are some of the challenges for you guys in this. I mean, probably new people collaborating, who knows? Anand, I see you nodding, I'm going to you.

>> It's critical to kind of identify what are those challenges. And in my opinion, there are about two or three important things. First of all, open, and therefore, you know, the disaggregated stack means there is complexity. And therefore, you know, just the whole integration, the design of the network, you know, has got to be bang on, right? You know, number one, that's super important. The second, you got to understand the security elements of it. Dave spoke about it, right? You know, the security is going to become super critical. The third is interoperability, right? You know, that's going to be critical as well. And doing all of this, you know, without impacting the quality of service is what is going to be critical to make this, you know, go up the adoption curve.

>> No, I agree. I mean, look, fundamentally when you talk about open, you know, Dave, like you pointed out, right? Companies who are really good at doing what they do will do that really well, right? So then the next question is, somebody has to stitch it all together, Right? Because you are buying best in class of everything in an open ecosystem, right? Best software, best infrastructure, best compute, best radio, right? Then somebody has to say, "Okay, overall the best comes together," right? That is a challenge, right? That's an opportunity for some companies like Dell and HCL to work together.

>> Well, so a really smart CEO that I respect, I won't say his name, said to me one time, "You really want to understand if a market is attractive, look for the SI's. Because when they get in, that means-"

>> There's money there. >> It's big. They also said they like to eat at the trough, which is true. It's a big market, right? (Savannah laughing) I know. I'll never forget that.

>> Whoever said that is a smart guy.

>> Ever since then, I was like, hmm. When the SI's come in, it means it's a meaningful market. And, you know, I'll give you an example. So, for instance, ServiceNow. For years the SI ecosystem was tiny, and then all of a sudden, boom, it came in. And so what role do the SI's play in this?

>> I think SIs are in a very, I would say, central position on this, because all the four or five challenges that I mentioned are absolutely great areas where we can go in and provide services for our customers to overcome, right? So what they're asking an SI such as us, is ability to kind of take the best in class products, help them put that together, and drive an outcome, right? You know, run those operations, meeting those SLAs, right? And you know, large SI's such as us can kind of do that. And that's where the true opportunity is. You know, it's a challenge, but, you know, it's a great opportunity.

>> I heard something today earlier, and I'd never heard it before. 'Cause we talk about outcomes all the time. And this individual from a telco said, "We're driving for an outcome, but we're also trying to make that outcome sustainable as experiences.

>> Yeah. That stuck with me as well.

>> Right? I'd never heard that before. So it's outcome, we all want outcomes. And then it's thinking long.

>> The customer demands a different experience now.

>> Be able sustain outcome.

>> It's that seamless end-to-end experience. They want it fast, they want it now, and they want that same quality of UX that they've had in these silos across systems. Which is really interesting, and actually brings me to my next question. How is the culture of collaboration with the different groups that you're working with?

>> I can go, and then you. >> No, go for it.

>> I think one of the critical elements we've not spoken about yet is ecosystem and collaboration. The power of the ecosystem is going to be super important for Open RAN right? Customers want us to have an opinionated point of view of how the ecosystem looks like, and who in that ecosystem is going to do what, right? And ability to get that together, and clearly drive a program around Open RAN is going to be critical.

Satish? >> No, I agree. I mean, the whole open basically means, it's an open ecosystem play, right? So, you know, telecom companies want to solve a lot of problems about the stack, right? And by bringing in strong system integrator and a strong infrastructure telecom cloud platform provider, then you are actually opening it up for all those application providers to come and validate, test, and bring those outcomes to the table. So I absolutely think consistent experience. See, in the cloud, we always talk about, you know, in the cloud world, right? When you have the hyperscalers, we always talk about how do you bring the cloud experience on-prem, right? So this is very similar. Like, how do you bring the cloud experience Easy Button into a telecom world? I think that's basically what this is.

>> You know, it's interesting.

>> Sorry to interrupt. >> Oh no, please.

>> The cloud came in and sort of disrupted the on-prem legacy businesses with this idea of, how did Jaci say it? Undifferentiated heavy lifting. And what happened was you guys got good, you know, got kind of slapped around in the face and said, well, we got to have a better operating model. And we can do that. And of course, that IP leaked out, that mindset leaked out, and now you talk to IT, they go, "Cloud? We have a cloud right here." It's the same thing, same experience. It's substantially identical. And people can debate that, but it's pretty much the same. That telcos haven't transformed yet, right? And they're largely on-prem, right? And so it's the different dynamic now versus 2010 when the cloud was really taking off. Do you agree with that assessment? Not that the cloud's not going to play a role. It is. But there's more of a balance, I would say.

>> Absolutely. I completely agree with that. You know, if you really look at... I'm just going to take a step back, and to your point, we are now seeing that recalibration of workloads all over the enterprise and telcos, right? Gone are the days where, you know, everybody just said, "Cloud is my only path out." Now today, you know, everybody's looking at the workloads and say, "Tell me what's the best place to run it." Because from a commercial model standpoint, you can kind of make it work, right? And we see the same thing. Again, from a Open RAN standpoint, cloudification is going to be a super important thing. Satish?

>> I'll add to what Anand was saying. But you know, one of the main things we got to think about is Michael talked about yesterday, right? The notion of cloud experience on-prem. One of the main thing is data has gravity, right? And now we all talked about AI. We've been talking a lot about AI, right? We talked about AI has gravity, right? And telco companies have a very important message because telecommunication companies are at the edge, right? When the decisions are to be made at the edge, those decisions are to be smarter. That has gravity, right? So you have to make those decisions there, right? So I think it's truly multi-cloud world, right? We always like to say that decisions are made, like in a very, you know, distributed environment. But I think in telecommunication world, it's even more so important, but it is going to be a very multicloud world.

>> And I'm glad you used the word, I think you said, "Recalibration." You know, a lot of people use the word repatriation. Recalibration is a better term, 'cause that's really what it is. It's not like, oh, we doing from here to here, we're going to move back. It's more, okay, let's balance it out. More of an equilibrium.

>> True, true.

>> And that's what we are seeing across the whole, both enterprise and telcos, where there is a strong point of view around workloads and applications Determining both the network requirements as well as where it's going to reside and what's going to run, right? And especially with generative AI now, you know, and because of security concerns, because of other things, right? You know, governance. Now you know, truly organizations are saying hybrid is the way to go. And even though if you take the current workload numbers, it might be slightly skewed to the hyperscalers, long run, that's what we-

>> Well, it's going to be interesting to see, because we've talked about the power law of gen AI where there's a long tail. You've got a lot of big models that are dominant, but you have a lot of smaller models that are domain specific. Many of those we think are going to be on prem. I think, you know, one of the debates we're having is, okay, but remember the cloud in the early days, everybody said, no way, not going to go to the cloud. It's not secure. Debate is the same thing going to happen here? They initially, they want to do stuff on-prem because it's more safe, it's more secure, it's more trusted, it's sovereign. I think it's different this time because of the data. Michael's point about, you know, data gravity. We talk about that. We throw that term around a lot. Everybody is right when they say we're going to bring the AI to the data. You're probably not going to say, "Okay, let's rip the data out, put it in the cloud, and then bring the AI there." Unless you can't deliver the tooling. So that's the challenge. You've got to be able to deliver the tooling. And that's substantially similar cloud experience and the tooling capabilities and what you're doing with the Coheres and the llamas and, you know, all of the other-

>> Yeah, I mean the processing cleaning and the indexing and the vectoring of the information, right? Unstructured, structured. There is a lot for organization to consume that in a very, you know, meaningful way within an AI model. So to your point, for a lot of the reasons, whether you have a general purpose LLM, but you're going to to make it specific for you, you're going to take your data sets, which you already have within your enterprise and leverage it, for most part, right? And that's where the power of the AI, where it belongs, comes in, right? So it gets closer and closer to where the enterprises are, and that makes it more useful.

>> So I would imagine when we hear a year from now, we're going to have a very similar conversation. And then one of these years, I don't know, maybe it's five or six years from now, we're going to go, "Yeah, we told you it did happen," right? And we're going to have that momentum. That part of the S-curve is really going to be... See that's sort of inevitable. You could see it coming. You know, everybody wants it to come, they know it's coming and it's just, you know, the pace is dictating the pace.

>> I'm curious, you see across verticals. You talk to a lot of different customers between both of you. Are you seeing any remarkable trends that you can share with us of like, who's excited about Open RAN, or say really eager to be one of these ecosystem partners with you?

>> You want to go? >> No, go for it.

>> Okay, so I think few verticals are definitely leading, in my opinion. Manufacturing is right up there. So, number one. Number two, interestingly, we also seeing a lot of interest in life sciences and healthcare, right? We doing a lot of, and this is going back to the whole idea of adoption of Open RAN. We're seeing a lot of requests for doing POCs, right? And ability to have, and I spoke about ecosystems as well, ability to have that whole stack as part of testing it out and figuring out the performance optimization. So, but then manufacturing is a big thing. You know, manufacturing is a big thing, I would say.

>> Oh, it makes sense. I mean, throughput and supply chain and everything else is such a huge topic, and the ability to do it better and more efficient, with all of your edge locations, depending on where your factories are, is a absolute-

>> Exactly, edge, IoT, you know, all of that, and that is kind of really coming together and making sense from a return on investment, business impact, so on and so forth.

>> Savannah: Yeah, Satish, what about you?

>> No, just to add, it's basically around low latency, right? Super or near super high bandwidth, right? And really, really smart, quick, intelligent decision making. That's it, right? So all the use cases are going to be centered around those characteristics, right? It's as simple as that.

>> Is there anyone that gets you particularly excited as a person? Not just as a professional?

>> As a individual, you mean?

>> Savannah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> I like to find restaurants much faster.

>> Yes, oh my gosh. I really want to do a segment while we're here in Spain. Now that I'm saying it, maybe it'll happen. I want to use AI to help us find the best tapas. And have that be one of our little tasting segments.

>> Especially for a vegetarian, I would really like them to know what I want.

>> I love that. What about you Anand? Anything that gets the human inside you, not just the brain.

>> On what I like in, in terms of-

>> What you're most excited about. Like to your point, I love that. Like, I would love to find restaurants faster. That's a great example of how all of this complex text we just talked about is going to enable a wonderful user experience for us.

>> Satish: For me, that's the best place I can get the best-

>> Being on the road like four days a week, anything that'll help my travel make it easier, you know, I think, you know, I'll go with that.

>> Seriously. Amen. I feel you. After 232 days on the road last year, I could not agree with you more. Also, when is my suitcase going to pack itself? Just pack yourself. Just, I don't want to do it anymore. So much of my time spent putting clothing in cubes. Satish, Anand, so wonderful to have you on the show. It's why we bring you back over and over and over again. Dave, fantastic questions, as always. and thank all of you are fabulous CUBE community for tuning in all week here from MWC and Barcelona. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)