 Okay, we're back here at theCUBE. We're in the middle of all the action at Mobile World. We're in Cloud City, physically in onset here. We have the virtual space. People are watching remote, we're doing remote interviews. But now we're in person with Uha Kornhongan, who's a transformational leader, head of innovation in his previous job at Zane, telecom, 50 million customers, big projects. You've seen it all. You know all about the operators and you know about innovation. Those are two great topics that we're going to talk about. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, thank you for having me. So we were talking about on the open with Chloe this morning about the difference between building and operating. And operators, technically it's in the definition, are running large networks. But now the change is here. You've got cloud scale. You've got edge developing with 5G, open ran for standardization and off the shelf equipment that will give more infrastructure surface area, which will bring more innovation. A lot of change, a lot of build out. This is a mindset change. You know, it's like wartime, peacetime. It's not a mature market. It's a growing, turbulent opportunity. And trillions of dollars at stake. Yeah, absolutely. And I believe that we as humans on anything that we do, so much of our learning comes from doing. And whatever you do is what you learn. So what have we as an operator been doing? We have been buying things. So our learning has been on procurement, how to do a business casing, how to get approvals, but not necessarily how to really introduce something new to our customers. And what has led to us as an industry is that all the innovation, and there's been a lot of innovation on communication space, has been done either by the handset people or has been done by the internet people. But not so much as an operator. So I think that's really something that you have to change. But you have to change what you learn. You have to change how you actually do things. It's interesting. You know, I'm very pro telecom. People think I'm not because I tend to criticize and pontificate around the change. But if you look at the telecom, it's been a bunch of dumb pipes and that's been a good thing. And it's been reliable. We've had great connectivity growth. The internet was stable during the pandemic. It literally saved people's lives and changed things that we survived. And it worked great. But now when you have applications and infrastructure as code, new opportunities are going to be forcing that change quicker. So it's not so much, it needs to radically change. It just needs to get more versatile, more dynamic. Get on the program. Get on the program. So if you look what has happened on other industries, how the internet players do it, how does Apple do it, how does Google do it, how does Facebook do it? They are using these new technologies. They are using cloud first approaches. They are building huge scale and they able to innovate. So the way I'm looking at it at US and operator, you need to get on the program. And it's not the question, should I do it? Should I not do it? The question is, how do you do it? It's not the question, when you should do it, you should do it now. The question is, how do you do it? How do you get started? I think that's where the challenge is. I think you're exactly right. In the here and now, we're going to have a exclusive Google news conference later in the day, but you mentioned the cloud players. If you look at the success of, say, Android. Android is a great use case that I think might be something that you can look at to the telecom industry and say, hmm, how open source software changed the handset business. I think there's kind of a movement here in the telcospace and this ecosystem where you hear open, you got the Linux Foundation participating with the software group for O-RAN, you got other things happening where there's open gardens, not walled gardens. Interesting, what's your take on how the innovation from the software side might come in here? Because you want to preserve the legacy operational stability, but bring in new. For you to be able to do new, you need to have those software skills, because that's how the new things happen. You have to build them, you have to program them, but then the issue is that your organization most likely is not good for this. So you don't have the designers, you don't have the software engineers, you don't have how to do customer experience, how to do the planning, you don't have it. So then the challenge is, how are you going to do that? And I'm a big favor of operators starting to build some of the internal teams, have them separate teams, and have them start to trial on these things. Don't be so hard on yourself. Allow yourself to try some things, allow yourself to fail. Don't make them huge programs because then the failure becomes a huge issue also. And then once you learn, once you know how to do it, then scale it up. But yes, these new skills, software, you have to do it. And open is where to go, cloud is where to go. You know, we were talking yesterday about this new world where feature creep used to be a bad thing, but now with Cloud Scale, you can develop rapid features quickly and get data and then abandon those things quickly. The time to do that is now part of the development process. So as software changes are starting to see the human resources configurations where teams are formed differently. What's your take on this? Because end-to-end workloads can have multiple players on an SRE, an operator, a developer, and a UX person all on one team. I agree. And I think the, and this is not something we have to invent as a telecom industry. Let's just go look at what the software guys are doing, right? So for decades, or what a better part of a decade, they have been having agile teams. They're having the agile working model, working on Sprints, all the tools already exist. It's all available for us. So all we have to do is just look at how they are doing that and start to use some of those practices and honor our business. And by the way, we have been trying. This is not very good at it because we tend to kind of take it to the previous way of doing business and then we get ourselves in trouble. You know, it's the classic old playbook. We're good at procuring things. We know how to get that. We're good at checking the list on cost efficiency, drive more revenue, chip away and move the ball down the field slowly. Now the new playbook is agility, economics, software, playbook. So I'm going to have to ask you on that piece of it. How do you think the operators are psychologically right now? Are they the frog in boiling water? Do they know what's happening? Are they open to it? Are they just need more repetition? What's the psychology of the, with the progress bar of the operators relative to the transformation? I think they might be a little bit desperate, right? So telecom people, I like to think they're relatively smart people. They are not dumbing. They know what they're doing. But there's 30 years of history, maybe more. And there's large organizations, maybe thousands of people who they have to work with. So somehow you have to have to figure out, how do you get these new skills? And we're getting older also. I was in 1995 working for telecom when the GSM standard loans. We were young at that point. I'm not young anymore. So this is happening, of course. Your old experience is still handsome, though. I appreciate it. Well, I mean, old is good because now, if you look at, I mean, I would, again, not to bring up ageism, but young guns, they never really loaded Linux operating system before. They never really wired spliced cable. And also there's also the systems thinking. And I think one of the things that's coming out of this show that's clear to us here at theCUBE is, if you're a systems thinker, you tend to do well because the edge springs distributed computing to the table. So I think this experience collision with the young talent is the new formula. I had a program where I actively wanted to bring new talent into the organization. We didn't want to hire just people who have five to 10 years of working experience. No, just give us some guys fresh out of the college. It's fine. We have plenty of telecom knowledge. We can teach them no issues, but we need some of the newer, more open-minded approaches to what we can do and how we can go forward. It's funny, Mark Zuckerberg said once years ago, it's a young man's game, a young person's game. And we were all like, yeah, screw you. But the point was is that now, if you look at all the best players, Amazon has Gosling over there. A lot of these pioneers in the computing industry and the telecom industry are now leaders on the new architecture because there's an architectural change over but it's not a rip and replace. It's a net abstraction. So it's not like it's going away. So the skills are there. So how do you talk about that? Because this is a big untold story, this new architectural shift or tweak. On architecture side, I think we as an operators, we are really focused on building the networks. And our network started site, it's all about standardization, it's all about buying boxes. And unfortunately, a lot of our leaders are then coming, growing up on that thinking. So then they try to do the same thinking on software side and it just doesn't work. So software is a totally different animal. So I think you need to really have a different mindset, different way of looking at that when you start to get on the software side of business. And how do you do your architectures? You need to have this flexibility. GSMA is a standard that evolves in a 10 year cycle. Your software architecture can't evolve in 10 year cycle. It has to move faster than that. Well, your music to our ears, you're definitely going to come back on theCUBE. We're going to have you back because this is the most important story in this industry is the software paradigm. In our minute that we have left, why have you here? What do you think of the show? Mobile World Congress, speeds and feeds, radios, boxes. Now you got chips, software. What is this show turning into? What is this about? I think it's amazing to start to see this year because of the COVID, a lot of the old players are not here. So suddenly that space has been filled more of a newer companies, different kind of thinking. And I think that's really important for this conference. I think it's really important for the industry and it's really good for all of us. It's nice to see something, something new, something else. Yeah, certainly the enablement of EDGE brings up education, healthcare, societal change, cyber defenses, peace, and good. And challenges with that also, security and how to control. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are watching. A lot of people are participating. So great to have you on, great expertise and congratulations on your new roles with transformation leader in Washington DC. And again, we need you there. So you should get up there in the hill and help educate some of those leaders that need to write the new laws. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Okay, we are here in theCUBE. We're breaking down all the action here at the middle of Cloud City. I'm John Furrier of theCUBE. Dave Vellante's on assignment. We're going to send it back to the studio, Adam.