 The Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Welcome back to Fear of Barcelona. It's theCUBE live at MWC 23, our third day of coverage of this great huge event. Continues Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've got Dell and Dish here. We're going to be talking about what they're doing together. Andy Sheehan joins us, Global Director of Telecom Cloud Core and Next Gen Ops at Dell. And Mark Ruan, one of our alumni is back, EVP and Chief Network Officer at Dish Wireless. Welcome guys. Great to be here. Thank you. Great to have you. Mark, talk to us about what's going on at Dish Wireless. Give us the update. Yeah, so we've built a network from scratch in the US that covers the US, which is cloud-based, cloud-native. So from the bottom of the tower, all the way to the internet, this is cloud, distributed cloud. There are a lot of things about that, but it's unique and now it's working. So we're starting to play with it and that's pretty cool. What's some of the proof points, proof in the pudding? Well, for us, first of all, it was to do basic voice and data on a smartphone. And for me, the success would be that you won't see the difference for a smartphone. That's the baseline. The next step is bringing this to the enterprise for their use case. So we have covered, now, we have services for smartphones. We use our brand, our Boost brand, and we are distributing that across the US. But as I said, the real cool stuff is when you start automating the machines and all the data and the applications for the enterprise. Andy, how is Dell a facilitator of what Mark just described and the use cases and what they're able to deliver? We're providing a number of the servers that are being used out in their radio access network, the virtual DU servers. We're also providing some bare metal orchestration capabilities to help automate the process of deploying all these hundreds and thousands of nodes out in the field. Both of these, the servers and the bare metal orchestrator product are things that we developed in concert with Dish, working together to understand the best way to automate based on the tooling that they're using in other parts of the network. And we've been with you guys since day one, really. Absolutely, yeah. And making each other's solutions better the whole way. Mark, why Dell? So the way the network works, you have a cloud and you have a distributed edge. You need somebody that understands the diversity of the edge in order to bring the cloud software to the edge and Dell is the best there. We can ask them to mix and match accelerators, processors, memory. It's a very diverse distributed edge. We're building 20,000 sites, so you imagine the size and the complexity and Dell was the right partner for that. Thank you. So you mentioned addressing enterprise needs, which is interesting because there's nothing that would prevent you from going after consumer wireless technically, right? But it sounds like you have taken a look at the market and said, ah, we're going to go after this segment of the market at least for now. Are there significant differences between what an enterprise expects from a 5G network versus a consumer? They have higher expectations. Maybe number one, I guess, is if my bill is $150 a month, I can have certain levels of expectations, whereas a large enterprise, they may be making a much more significant investment. Are their expectations greater? Do you have a higher bar to get over? So first, I mean, we use our network for consumers, but for us it's an enterprise. That's the consumer segment, an enterprise. So we expose the network like we would to a car manufacturer or to a distributor of goods, food and beverage. But what you expect when you are an enterprise, you expect to manage your services. You expect to control the goodness of your services, and for this you need to observe what's happening. Are you delivering the right service? What is the feedback from the enterprise users? And that's what we call the observability. We have a data-centric network. So our enterprises are saying, yeah, connecting is enough, but show us how it works and show us how we can learn from the data to improve, improve and become more competitive. That's a big difference. What would you say, Mark, are some of the outcomes that you've achieved so far working with Dell? TCO, ROI, CapEx, OpEx, what are some of the outcomes so far that you've been able to accomplish? Yeah, so obviously we don't share our numbers, but we're very competitive, both on the CapEx and the OpEx. And the second thing is that we are much faster in terms of innovation. You know, one of the things that the telco could not do was to tap into the IT industry. So we have access to the silicon and we have access to the software and at a scale that none of the telco could ever do. And for us, it's like, wow. You know, it's a very powerful industry and we've been driving the ecosystem. It's a bit technical, but over the silicon, the accelerators, the processors, the GPUs, the TPUs, and it's like, wow. It's really a transformation. Andy, is there anything analogous that you've dealt with in the past to the situation where you have this true core edge environment where you have to instrument the devices that you provide to give that level of observation or observability, whatever the new word is that we've invented for that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, is there anything, is this unprecedented? No, no, not at all. I mean, Dell's been really working at the edge since before the edge was called the edge, right? We've been selling our hardware and infrastructure out to retail shops, branch office locations, just smaller form factors outside of data centers for a very long time. And so that's sort of the consistency from what we've been doing for 30 years to now. The difference is the volume, the different number of permutations, as Mark was saying, the different type of accelerator cards, the different SKUs, the different server types, the sheer volume of nodes that you have in a nationwide wireless network. So the volumes are much different. The amount of data is much different. But the process is really the same. It's about having the infrastructure in the right place at the right time and being able to understand if it's working well or if it's not. And it's not just about a red light or a green light, but healthy and unhealthy conditions and predicting when the red light's going to come on. And we've been doing that for a while. It's just a different scale and a different level of complexity when you're trying to piece together all these different components from different vendors. So we talk a lot about ecosystem and sometimes because of the desire to talk about the outcomes and what the end users, customers really care about, sometimes we'll stop at the layer where, say, Adele lives. And we'll see that as the sum total of the component when really, when you talk about a server that Dish is using, that in and of itself is an ecosystem or there's an ecosystem behind it. You just mentioned it, the kinds of components and the choices that you make when you optimize these devices, determine how much value Dish can get out of that. How deep are you on that hardware? I'm a knuckle-dragging hardware guy. I'm very deep, very deep. I mean, just the number of permutations that we're working through with Dish and other operators as well. Different accelerator cars as we talked about, different techniques for timing. Obviously, there's different SKUs with the silicon itself, different chip sets, different chips from different providers. All those things have to come together and we build the basic foundation and then we also started working with our cloud partners, Red Hat, Wind River, all these guys, VMWare of course and that's the next layer up. So you've got all the different hardware components. You've got the abstraction layer with your virtualization layer and or Kubernetes layer and all of that stuff together has to be managed, compatibility matrices that get very deep and very big very quickly and that's really the foundational challenge we think of OpenRAN is making sure that all these different pieces are going to fit together and not just work today, but work every day as everything gets updated much more frequently than in the legacy world. So you care about those things so we don't have to. That's right. That's the beauty of it. Well thank you. You're welcome. I want to understand some of the things that we've been talking about. Every company is a data company regardless of if it's a telco, if it's a retailer, if it's my bank, it's my grocery store and they have to be able to use data as quickly as possible to make decisions. One of the things we've been talking about here is the monetization of data and the monetization of the network. How do you, us, don't help like a dish be able to achieve the monetization of their data? Yeah well as Mark was saying before the enterprise use cases are what we're all kind of betting on for 5G right and enterprises expect to have access to data and telemetry to do whatever use cases they want to execute in their particular industry. So if it's a healthcare provider, if it's a factory and agricultural provider that's leveraging this network, they need to get the data from the network, from the devices, they need to correlate it in order to do things like automatically turn on a watering system at a certain time. They need to know the weather around, make sure it's not too windy and you're going to waste a lot of water. All that has to have data, it's going to leverage data from the network, it's going to leverage data from devices, it's going to leverage data from applications and that's data that can be monetized. When you have all that data and it's all correlated, there's value inherent to it and you can even go on to a forward looking state where you can intelligently move workloads around based on the data, based on the clarity of the traffic of the network, what's the right place to put it and even based on current pricing for things like on-demand instances from cloud providers. So having all that data correlated allows any enterprise to make an intelligent decision about how to move a workload around a network and get the most efficient placing of that workload. Mark, Andy mentions things like data and networks and moving data across networks. You have on your business card chief network officer. What potentially either keeps you up at night in terror or gets you very excited about the future of your network? What's out there in the frontier and what are those key obstacles that have to be overcome that you work with? Yeah, I think we have the network, we have the baseline, but we don't yet have the consumption that is easy by the enterprise. For an enterprise they like to say I have a 4K camera, I connect it to my software. Click, click, right? And that's where we need to be. So we're talking about APIs that are so simple that they become a click. And we're all engineers, we have a tendency to want to explain, but we should not. It should become a click, you know? And the phone revolution with the apps became those clicks. We have to do the same for the enterprise, for video, for surveillance, for analytics, for it has to be clicks, right? Balance, while balancing flexibility and agility, of course, because you know that the folks who are fans of CLIs, command line interfaces who hate GUIs, it's because they feel that they have the ability to go down to another level. So obviously that's a balancing act. But that's our job. Our job is to hide the complexity, but of course there is complexity. But it's like in the cloud, an hyper-scaler, they manage complex things, but they're successful if they hide it. It's the same. We have to be an hyper-scaler of connectivity, but hide it, and then so that people connect anything. Well, it's Andy's servers. We're all magicians, hiding it all. It really is. Don't worry about it, just you know. Let us do it. Sit down, we'll serve you the meal. Don't worry how it's cooked. That's right, the enterprises want the outcome. They don't want to deal with that bottom layer, but it is tremendously complex. And we want to take that on and make it better for the industry. That's critical. Mark, I'd love to go back to you. Just I know that you've been in telco for such a long time, and here we are, day three of MWC. The name changed this year from Mobile World Congress, reflecting that mobile isn't the only thing. Obviously it was the catalyst. But what are some of the things that you've heard at the event, maybe seen at the event that give you the confidence that the right players are here to help move dish wireless forward, for example? You know, this is the first time I've been here for decades. It's the first time, and I'm a chief network officer, the first time we don't talk about the network. Isn't that surprising? People don't tell me about speeds or latency or what. They talk about consumption. Apps, video surveillance, analytics. So I love that, because now we're starting to talk about how we can consume and monetize. But that's the first time. We used to talk about gigabytes and these and that. None of that, not once. What does that signify to you in terms of the evolution? Well, you know, we've seen that the demand for the healthcare for the smart cities has been here for a decade, proof of concepts for a decade, but the consumption has been behind. And for me, this is, all this team is waking up to, we are going to make it easy so that the consumption can take off. The demand is there, we have to serve it. And the fact that people are starting to say, we hide the complexity that's our problem, but don't even mention it, I love it. Yep, dropped the mic. Andy, last question for you. Some of the things, we know Dell has a big and burgeoning presence in Telco. We've had a chance to see the booth, see the cool things that you guys are featuring there. Dave did a great tour of it. Talk about some of the things that you've heard and maybe even from customers at this event that demonstrate to you, Dell is going in the right direction with its Telco strategy. Yeah, I mean, personally for me, this has been an unbelievable event for Dell. We've had tons and tons of customer meetings, of course. And the feedback we're getting is that the things that we're bringing to market, whether it's in for blocks or purpose-built servers that are designed for the telecom network, are what our customers need and have always wanted. And we get a lot of wow's, right? Wow, we didn't know Dell was doing this. We had no idea and the other part of it is that not everybody was sure that we were going to move as fast as we have. And so the speed at which we've been able to bring some of these things to market and part of that was working with Dish, a pioneer to make sure we were building the right things. And I think a lot of the customers that we talk to really appreciate the fact that we're doing it with the industry, not at the industry. And that comes across in the way they're responding and what they're talking to us about now. And that came across in the interview that you just did. Thank you both for joining Dave and me talking about what Dell and Dish are doing together. The proof is in the pudding. You did a great job explaining that. Thanks guys, we appreciate it. Thank you. All right, our pleasure. Here are our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from MWC 23 Day 3. We'll be right back with our next guest so don't go anywhere.