 And welcome to our special Mobile World Congress 17, hashtag MWC17, I'm John Furrier here inside the Cube Studio. Breaking down all the analysis, we're going to be covering Mobile World Congress. We kind of know some news is coming out, that's Monday and Tuesday, all day coverage. We're here with at RUV Roof Cohen, entrepreneur I've known for years. Going back to my first met in the cloud days, back in the 08 timeframe, 09 when Dev Ops was really the beginning of the movement. You've been an entrepreneur, you've sold multiple companies, multi-time successful entrepreneur. But you've been deep in the cloud game. Welcome to the Cube special coverage of Mobile World Congress. Thanks for inviting me, I'm happy to be here. The other thing too is we just tried to get the periscope thing working, so we have our little periscopes going here. But this is really the media landscape that's going to be one of the themes at Mobile World Congress, that certainly will be a front and center that these service providers have to have a business model. Media entertainment has been on their to-do list. Just a lot of the plumbing hasn't gotten done. And the new trend that's going to be really front and center is AI, we were joking about that, but seriously, you're doing a lot of discusses around AI. And then Intel's 5G announcement, which they pre-announced this week prior to Mobile World Congress with 5G, is their position is a step up game changer. So you've got 5G overlay network, you have real plumbing that's getting done with NFE network function virtualization. You have the app market exploding. Will the service providers ever make it? Will the telcos actually figure out a business model? Well, you know, there are always the pipes and you're always going to need pipes. There's an endless amount of opportunities for those people figuring out what to do with those pipes. You know, I don't know. It's just the question we've been asking for 20 years. Do they want to be more than dumb pipes, right? Well, they have to find a business model. I mean, I think one of the things I was looking at the Intel announcement was, you know, is 5G a technology looking for a problem? Or does it really actually create a step up function in terms of capability? I mean, 4G is just an evolution of 3G, LTE is getting some speeds there. But I mean, my family hits their caps on all the data we're doing. People are hitting their data caps. We need more data. So the question is, is that going to be ready for prime time? Your thoughts on? Well, there's almost like a Moore's law of data, right? The more data you have available to use, the more things you can do with it. You know, Periscope's a prime example, right? Now they're doing a whole variety of different video related things. Facebook lives, you know, there's YouTube lives. Everyone wants to do live. And all that requires massive amounts of data, especially if you want to do sort of high definition, really related things. We were actually trying to set up a Periscope before the broadcast this morning. And one of the first things that came apparent was we had to limit our bit rate to 800 kilobits, which is, you know, relatively small when you think about it. Yeah, that's the bandwidth issues. I mean, at the end of the day, it comes down the last mile as we always say. But let's get into some of the analysis of Mobile World Congress. And let's get down under the hood. Is cloud truly ready for prime time? When I say cloud, I mean, obviously full stack infrastructure. Cause network virtualization has been one of those kind of shifting sands, if you will, NFVs, has been one of those things that's been kind of evolving. OpenStack has seen to be much more of a telco use case and some of the OpenStack summits we've covered. Your thoughts on the progress of cloud ready telcos? You know, it comes down to, if you're going to build an application, whether you're an enterprise, whether you're an individual developer or something in between, you're probably not going to build it in your own data center, whether that's a closet in the back of your office or your own, you're probably going to go and build something that's quick and fast and efficient. And that really is starting to look like things that are serverless, things that are event driven. And that isn't really sitting in your own data center anymore. So what's your take on the ecosystem? Do you think that the ecosystem play for the Mobile World Congress is going to shift at all? I mean, I was commenting to Dave Vellante just last week and Jeff Frick here in the CUBE team that CES, which we don't go to anymore because it's gotten too big, but this year we did cover it here in the studio like we're doing with Mobile World Congress. It just seems that CES is no longer a consumer electronics show. It's more of a car show. Autonomous vehicles are obviously in front of the center. That's the glam, that's the eye candy. Mobile World Congress doesn't seem to be a device show anymore. Or it's shifting away last year, Mark Zuckerberg gave a keynote speech and he saw that shift. I mean, what's Mobile World Congress turning into in your opinion? It's an app show. So where CES still sort of has this focus on the actual physical things that you can touch and build the mobile apps of the world are now the things that dominate mobility, right? It's a phone interesting. Not really. What you do on your phone is definitely interesting. It's interesting to look at also and talking to folks on mobile. Mobile World Congress is one of those shows where it's a biz dev show too. A lot of people who fly over to Barcelona don't really go for the pure content. There's more business deals going on. All the top executives or the big technology companies go there. Your thoughts on the landscape of the vendors out there that are suppliers to this new consumerized market. You see any deals happening that you think would be interesting? I mean, where do you see the formation of the industry lining up? Obviously, some things have to get done at a technical level. 5G is great, great hope for that. Some companies are trying to transform. Look at Cisco. It comes like Cisco. It comes like Eulah Packard Enterprise, VMware, AWS, Google, Intel, Qualcomm. I mean, there seems to be a feeling of posturing in a reef set, if you will. 2017 so far is shipping out to be a year of Snapchat, if you ask me, with a pending IPO. They're saying that their revenues are gonna be increasing 5X. It looks like everything we've been talking about, the app-based world, is sort of culminating in the Snapchat thing. So the question is, is Snapchat gonna live up to all the hype that's surrounding them as the sort of next generation of the next Facebook, the next Google, the next whatever? What's interesting, the Snapchat brings up the conversation of kind of people who have their head in the sand versus people who are kind of riding this wave. Facebook was totally poo-pooed during the IPO. I remember leading up to the IPO. It was like, oh my God, there's no way they can do it. They can never be the next Google. That was kind of the comparison. Google was compared to Microsoft, and then Facebook was compared to Google. And everyone's like, no freaking way that's gonna happen. Why would anyone want to see that company as social college kids, and now some adults are coming on. And then look what happened, right? So the world changed. Snapchat's the same way. So it was interesting. It's not what you think the core competency shifts and the user consumption becomes democratized. So the question is, what does Snapchat mean for telcos? Does that mean that they're just pipes? Or what do they do? How do they get in front of this? You got Netflix and got Amazon out there with now the video stuff. People want content. They want it fast. They want it in high quality, and they want it on the go. So that is the question, I think, that the challenge that a lot of these telcos are having is the fact that they still have a bit of a monopoly in many parts of the world, and they use that monopoly to inflict quite a bit of pain. So I don't think that that's something that they're going to be able to get away with very much longer. So what's your take on AI? Since you've been doing a lot of AI, and obviously AI's been around in the 80s. I've only got my CS degree. Lisp was out there, neural networks, object-oriented program was hitting the scene. You had this kind of mindset, and still AI was this elusive academic mental model and some coding. Now it's all the rage. When you look at autonomous vehicles, and you look at IoT, drones, a new landscape is here, connected consumer. Your thoughts on where AI is at, right now I'm certainly at his height, we all agree on that. There's been several iterations of AI over the last 40 years. Every time technology appears, you hear about AI. In the 70s, you saw things like space odyssey, and there was this sort of rush to AI-related activities around the first generation of computing. Then that sort of, we realized that, well, it wasn't really possible, and it disappeared for 25 years. Then it reemerged in the early days of internet, oh, was still too early. So now 15, 20 years later again, we are in another dawn of AI, but there is some critical differences. Now there are tooling that allows you to do the sorts of things that we had only dreamt of before, whether it's natural language processing, generation of information, and other various forms of analytics. So all these things are culminating in these opportunities that were really never possible until now, including things like cloud computing. Machine learning certainly is the center that I love the machine learning range, but machine learning's been around for a long time as well. I mean, machine learning isn't necessarily new. It's mostly software that has to do with algorithms, but now you have data and compute. I mean, this is the new thing, right? I mean, data's available and you've got tons of compute. Yeah, it was hard. It was really, really hard. And anyone that's actually tried to go out and do a machine learning system neural net realized quite quickly that you had to be a PhD to figure out how to use these tools. So now all these tools are being put together into platforms and end user applications. So no longer do I have to go and try to put together a Lego rector set of stuff. I can go, I can get mostly everything I need to solve a problem and I can be off to the races quite quickly. So what's your upwork you're doing now, Rube? You've been an entrepreneur. Give us the latest update on what's in your world right now. You were obviously instrumental in a lot of cloud ventures and also you've been in the industry, certainly as an influencer as well. We get the little blue check on Twitter, which I don't have yet, Twitter rejected me twice. I got to get to the, Stu has it, Stu Miniman on our team. But it's all seriousness. This is a new world and you're on the front lines, both as a media producer, you've got a great podcast, but also you're in the industry. And where is cloud going and where's that top of the stack action? Because that's really, as you mentioned, apps. That's where the action is right now. What do you see happening and what are you up to these days? Well, you know, it's a couple of areas. One of the things they don't tell you is after you sell your business, you lose a little bit of your purpose. First world problem for sure. You make some good cash, so put it in the bank there, bank some cash. Yeah, so after Anomaly and Virtus. Dream exited, there was this period where I get to do kind of things that I want to do. And that investing in other startups was the thing that apparently you do. I focused heavily on AI related companies. Actually, I just recently did an investment in a company called Zoom.ai, which is really doing some cool stuff around enterprise-focused AI work. Also, I've got a day job as well outside of that. I've recently joined a company here in San Jose that focuses on security for containerized environments, so sort of policy-based security, very low-level stuff, but... At the orchestration layer or at the docker layer, or where would you... It's even lower than that. It essentially orchestrates the policy around things like system calls and networking itself. So rather than having to focus on the complexities of all the various parts of an environment, what we do is we basically say, hey, look at the tags that exist in things like Kubernetes. And then those tags define the policies in which things can communicate with one another, let's say it's a layer three network, or what has reader-write access to the system calls themselves. What, is that new company for you? Is that you guys launched? Yeah, well, we're in the process of launching. So stealth. It's stealthy. I'm telling you about it right now. What's the name? Appareto. Appareto. Launching on theCUBE here on Periscope. Pre-recorded for our Mobile World Congress special coverage. All right, so this is basically, this is the cloud native goes to full-scale cloud for apps. Exactly. So containers, we've come full circle. Anyone that's been around for a while knows containers. It's certainly not a new trend. You know, Solaris 25 years ago doing containers. The implementation of it around microservices and the tooling around DevOps and Docker and other various Kubernetes types deployments have made it much more readily attainable in terms of using it within an enterprise or around the mill application. We were talking with a lot of folks leading up to Mobile World Congress prep for our special coverage and microservices comes up heavily and microservices as an integration layer. And one of the things that we're seeing I want to get your thoughts on this is you see IBM just announced this week here in San Francisco at their IBM Connect event. Oh, it's our Lotus, Domino and Verft which is their collaborative software. But the key to all this collaborative software, even to the oracles of the world and to Amazon is integration with third-party apps. And microservices and containers become a critical component of that. So for entrepreneurs and or app developers, a new kind of third-party developers emerging, you know, and they need to integrate. What is the role microservices play in all this? This is a really key point and because this will point right at the telcos because whoever can embrace an ecosystem of app developers from an integration standpoint, it will win in my opinion. Your thoughts, do you see the same way and how does microservices and all this stuff play into that? Is it the glue layer? Yeah, it's really glue. Lego is again kind of the thing that pops in my mind. There are these two sort of battling schools of thought. One is microservices, which allows you to easily plug and play these various components. The other is serverless. You know, this things that are very event-driven, you know, they're transient. They allow you to again act as a kind of glue that puts everything together. One's based on a predominantly the idea of containers, you know, which is kind of a lightweight OS and the other is basically saying I don't need an OS. All I need is the functions that I need when I need them and I put them together and I'm off to the races. I think that most applications aren't ready for a whole choice of just doing one or the other. It's kind of a combination. So the exciting thing now is you can, you know, do what used to take weeks or months in a matter of days with these types of technologies. So your final thought on Mobile World Congress, what do you expect to see in the hype cycle? Noise and where's the signal? Where do you see this event happening? What's your thoughts? I think we're gonna see a lot more in the focus of things like media and the convergence. I think video related activities is certainly gonna remain to be hot. I think the tooling around enabling that type of, you know, high definition video focus is gonna be a priority for a lot of these companies and the tooling around that will be a priority. All right, we're here at Roo, breaking down the Mobile World Congress analysis and preview and all what's happening in the news. I'll see Intel with the 5G big announcement. I think they opened the curtain, raised the curtain early. Obviously they're competing with Qualcomm, which has a different licensing agreement than Intel, which is, you know, you see Apple as a big customer of Qualcomm and Intel. Interesting because, you know, as the price of the hardware goes down, the chip guys want more cash. Qualcomm wants more cash than Intel. Very interesting dynamic. I think this ecosystem is gonna be something that's gonna watch. I think there's gonna be a battle. I'm predicting that Mobile World Congress will see a battle of the ecosystem. You're gonna see whoever can make the market and shift the game will be the winner. Roo, thanks for spending the time, appreciate it. This is SiliconANGLE broadcasting here in Palo Alto for Mobile World Congress, 17 special coverage. Thanks for watching.