 Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by Intel. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE here, live in Palo Alto Studios for special two days of coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. The hashtag is MWC17. Get on Twitter, tweet us at theCUBE. We'll be answering questions. I'm John Furrier with Peter Barrises, next two days, breaking down Mobile World Congress. A great bunch of guests coming in. We'll be covering all the action here in Palo Alto, 8 a.m. through the whole day. As the day winds down in Barcelona, we'll be covering all the top news, all the analysis here on theCUBE. So stay with us multiple days. Go to thecube365.net slash MWC17. If you're watching this, that's where the live broadcast will be, also will be on Twitter. Peter, good to see you. Two days getting geared up. Mobile World Congress is changing as a show from phone to IoT, AI, autonomous vehicles. Certainly a lot of action to talk about Saturday and Sunday. The pre-show releases is all phones all the time. They kind of get in the phone stuff out of the way earlier and now they're in the throes of the show and it should be exciting. Well, yeah, because the use cases that the industry's following right now require or presume that significant amounts of processing can happen virtually anywhere. The Internet of Things and People, which kind of brings together the idea of what can you do in your phone if you're a human being and what can you do within a device or a machine somewhere with a bunch of sensors, demands that we have very high speed, secure, low latency networks and that's what 5G is promising. Well, we're super excited for the folks watching. We are now going to be having our new studio here in Palo Alto. We just moved in in January, 4,500 square feet where now we can cover events. We don't have to be there with theCUBE. We will not be there. There's not enough room in Barcelona and it's a long flight, but we do have people on the ground and we'll be covering it here in the studio and we'll be calling folks on the ground this morning and tomorrow morning to get the lay of the land that'll be coming back from their dinners from their parties and find out what the vibe is. Certainly we have all the action at cube365.net slash mwc17. So check it out there. And again, the top news again, this is all sponsored by Intel. Want to give a shout out to Intel. This would not be possible without Intel sponsorship. They're certainly on the ground as well as support from SAP Cloud with their news that they're being renamed from HANA Cloud. So I want to give a shout out and thank Intel and thank SAP. Check them out. They've got a huge transformational demos. Intel really leading the charge out there. So I want to make sure that we give a thanks to Intel. Peter, the big story I want to get your thoughts on is just jump right in. Saturday and Sunday, you saw a combination of tones setting up leading into the weekend and through the weekend. One was 5G. 5G is the key enabler for wireless, bringing in gigabits of speed to the phone. Are the apps ready? That's the question we're going to find out and we're going to dig into. Is 5G ready for prime time? And certainly all the glam and sizzle was the new phones. LG had a good announcement. Samsung had a big announcement, although they're not going to be at the show. But surprisingly, Nokia and BlackBerry, two old guard phone guys kind of rebooting. BlackBerry trying to put out their keynote product and also with Nokia, they rolled out the three, the six, three, five and six products for new phones to try to get into the Apple game. And now the 3310, which is the old school phone. So you saw the phones. And then the other player that announced the phone and watch was Huawei. And they're also in the infrastructure game. So 5G wireless connectivity and phones. And then in the middle, we have yet to hear some of the things. So as you look at the market and your research that you're covering, digital business, the business value of technology, what's your take on this? Well, John, the industry for the past, probably 15, 20 years has been driven by what you do in the consumer markets. That's where you get the volumes that drive down or generate economies that drive down costs that make new volumes possible. And so 5G is going to be the Mobile World Congress is a representation of that symbiotic relationship between the consumer and the enterprise world. So that on the one hand, you have the consumer markets with the phones driving a lot of the volumes that are going to dictate the rate at which a lot of this stuff happens. On the other hand, you have enterprises which are aggressively considering those new use cases about IoT and as we say, IoT and P and other considerations that are in many respects really where some of those first adoptions are going to be. So it's an interesting dance between consumer and enterprise now where one fuels the growth in the other even if the actual applications are not linked. By that, I mean, we do say IoT and P, Internet of Things and People, which presumes that there's going to be a lot of sensors on your phone. There's going to be a lot of sensors on your body that are tied to your phone, et cetera. But that's not necessarily the thing that's going to dictate the new application architectures that happen within the enterprise around some of these other things. That's going to be driven by what we call the edge. I love this IoT and P, P for people, but things are people, so Internet of Things is the big trend. And for the mainstream people, IoT is kind of the nuance, it's kind of an industry discussion. But AI seems to encapsulate that. People see the autonomous vehicles, they see things like smart cities that kind of gives folks a touch point or a mental model for some of the real meat on the bone that the real change that's happening. Talk about the IoT piece in particular because when you talk about the people aspect of it, the edge of the network used to be an IT or technology concept, a device at the edge of the network. You talk to it, data gets sent to it, but now you got watches, you have more of an Apple-esque-like environment mentioned to the consumer. But there's still a lot of stuff in between, under the hood around IoT that's going to come out. It's called network transformation and industry parlance. Where's the action there? What's your take on that? You guys do a lot of research on this. Well, the action is that data has real costs and data is a real thing. Just very quickly, on the distinction between IoT and IoT and P, the only reason why we draw that distinction, and this is important to think about what happens in that middle, is that building things for people and building things for machines is two very, very different set of objectives. So the whole notion of operational technology and SCADA, which has driven what's been happening a lot in IoT over the last 20 years, there's a legacy that we have to accommodate, has been very focused on building for machines. The building for people things is going to be different and that's what the middle is going to have to accommodate. That middle is going to have to accommodate both the industrial implications or the industrial use cases, as well as the more consumer or employee or human use cases. And that's a non-trivial challenge because both of those can be very, very different. One, you're focused a little bit more on brutal efficiency, the other one more on experience and usability. I don't know the last time that anybody really worried about the experience that a machine had, the machine experience of an application, but we have to worry about that all the time with people. So when we think about the edge, John, there's a number of things we've got to worry about. We have to worry about physical realities that takes time to move something from point A to point B, even information, the speed of light is reality and that pushes things out more to the edge. You have to worry about bandwidth. One of the things that's interesting about IoT or about 5G as it relates to IoT is while we may get higher bandwidth speeds, for the most part it's 5G is going to provide a greater density of devices and things, that's where the bandwidth is probably going to go. And so the idea is we can put a lot more sensors onto a machine or into a phone or into some use case and drive a lot more sources of data that then have to get processed somewhere and increasingly that's going to be processed at the edge. So Peter, I want to get your thoughts on one of the things for the folks watching is I spent a lot of time this week with you talking about this show and looking at the outcome of what we wanted to do and understand the analysis of what is happening at Mobile World Congress. Yes, it's a device show, it's always been about the phones, 4G and there's been this inch by inch move the ball first in 10 move the chains to use a football analogy. But now it seems to be a whole new shift. You go back 10 years, iPhone was announced in 2007. We seem to be in a moment where we need a step up function to move the industry. So I want to get your thoughts for the folks that you're talking to, IT folks or even CXOs or architects on the service provider side. There's a collision between IT, traditional business and service providers who have been under the gun, the telcos who have been trying to figure out a business model for competing against over the top and moving from the phone business model to a digital business model. So your business value of technology work that Wikibon has been doing is very relevant. I want to get your thoughts on what does it take? Is the market ready for this business value of technology because 5G gives that step up function? Are the apps ready for prime time? Are the people who are putting solutions in place for the consumers, whether it's for business or consumers themselves, service providers, telcos or businesses with IT in the enterprise. Is the market ready? Is this a paradigm shift? What's your thoughts and how do you tease that out for the folks that are trying to implement this stuff? Well, is it a paradigm shift? Yeah, as the words should be properly used, but the paradigm shift is, there's a lot of things going to that. So what we like to say, General, we've talked to large users about what's happening. We like to say that the demarcation point we are in the middle of right now, now is a period of maximum turbulence. And before this, it was I had known processes, accounting, HR, even supply chain, somewhat falls into that category, but the technology was unknown. So do I use a mainframe? Do I use a mini computer? What kind of network do I use? What software based do I use? What stack do I use? All of these were questions that it took 50 years for us to pretty well work out. And we've got a pretty good idea of what that technology set's going to look like right now. There's always things at the margin. So we know it's going to be cloud. We know it's going to be very fast networks like 5G. We know there's going to be a range of different devices that we're using. But the real question is, before it was known process, unknown technology. Now it's unknown technology, or unknown process and known technology, because we do know what that base is going to look like, but those stacks are broadly going to look like. But the question is, how are we going to apply this? What does it mean to follow a consumer? What does it mean from a privacy standpoint to collect individuals' information? What does it mean to process something in a location and not be able to move data or the consequences of that processing somewhere else? These are huge questions that the industry's going to have to address. So when we think about the adoption of some of this stuff, it's going to be a real combination of what can the technology do, but also what can we do from a physical, legal, economic, and other standpoint? And this is not something that the computing industry has spent a lot of time worrying about. Computing has always focused not on what should we do, but what can we do? And the question of what should we do with this stuff is going to become increasingly important. And the turbulence point is even compounded by the fact that the devices themselves and the networks are becoming more powerful. Look at what the cloud is doing with compute. If you look at some of the devices, even just the chip wars between Intel and say Qualcomm, for instance, Intel had a big announcement about their new radio chips. Qualcomm has a Snapdragon. We know Qualcomm is in the Apple iPhone. Now Intel has an opportunity to get that kind of business. It's got Huawei trying to- I think they're both in the Apple iPhone right now. But I think your point is- But Huawei is trying to beat on Apple. You look at their announcements, they're going very Apple-like and they have network gear. So we know them from the infrastructure standpoint, but everyone wants to be Apple, seems to be the theme. But again, the devices also have power. So you have process change, new value chains are developing and the device will be more popular. So again, this is a big turbulent time and I want to get your thoughts on the four areas that are popping out in the overall Congress. One, autonomous vehicles. Two, entertainment and media. Smart cities and smart homes. Seems to be the four areas that have this notion of combining the technologies and the power that are going to generate these new expectations by consumers and users and create new value opportunities for businesses and telcos around the world. Your thoughts. Those are four great use cases, John. But they all come back to a single notion. And the single notion, this is something that, as you know, we've been focused on at Wikibon for quite some time. What is digital business? Digital business is the application of data to differentially sustain and create customers. So what you just described, those four use cases, are all how are we going to digitize, whether it be the city, the home, the car, or increasingly entertainment? And what will that mean from a business model, from a consumer standpoint, from a loyalty standpoint, et cetera, as well as a privacy and legal obligation standpoint? So, but all of them have different characteristics, right? So the car is gonna have an enormous impact because it is a self-contained unit that either does or does not work. It's pretty binary. Either you do have an autonomous car that works, or you don't. You don't wanna see your, yes, it works in a ditch somewhere. Entertainment's a little bit more subtle because entertainment is already so much digital content out there, and there's only gonna be more, but what does that mean? Virtual reality, augmented reality. When we start talking about- Which is, by the way, a big theme of the Samsung announcements, all this is all teasing out the VR, virtual reality, and augmented reality. Absolutely, and that's gonna have, look, this is, because it's not just about getting data in, you also have to enact the results of the AI in the analysis. We call that systems of enactment. You have to then have technologies that allow you to, like a transducer, move from the digital world back into the analog world where human beings actually spend our time. We don't have digital transducers. Well, that's a great point. The virtual reality use case that Samsung pointed out, and this is the low-hanging fruit, is in hospitals. Doctors can look at VR and say, hey, I wanna have that. We've heard football players like Tom Brady who uses VR to look at defenses and offenses and to get a scheming kind of thing. And there's no question we're gonna see VR and AR augmented reality in entertainment as well. But a lot of the more interesting use cases, at least from my perspective, are gonna be how does that apply in the world of business? When we think about connected cities, now we're starting to talk about the relationship between all three. What does it mean, where is the edge in an autonomous car? Is it in a car, or is it in some metropolitan area? Or some cell-like technology? And the connected city, in part, is gonna be about how does a city provide a set of services to its citizenry so that the citizen can do more autonomous things while still under control? It changes the relationship between the person, consumer, and the analog metaphor. So for instance, whether it's a car or the city, a town or city has to provide services to residents. In an analog world, that's garbage, that's street cleaning, et cetera, having good roads. Now this could be passed for autonomous vehicles, and autonomous vehicles is interesting. I just shared a post on the 365, cube365.net slash MWC17, where Autoblog ran a post that said, Silicon Valley is failing in the car business, but they looked at it too narrowly. They looked at it from the car manufacturing standpoint, not from the digital services that is impacting transportation. This is the new normal. Look, you and I talked about this in the cube a year ago. Was a car going to be a peripheral, or was a car going to be a computer? And it's become pretty clear that the car is going to be a computer. And anybody who argues that Silicon Valley has lost that has absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Let's be honest. You're going to put more processing in a car. Love Detroit, love what's going on in Japan, love elsewhere in the world, but the computers and the chips are going to come from the Silicon Valley company. Yeah, and I would agree with that. And software. Well, again, transportation doesn't change, but the device does. So final thought I want to get before we end the segment is, as we say in the cube, and as Dave Vellante used to say, to squint through the noise or all the action at Mobile World Congress, how do you advise folks, and how do you looking through all this action, how would you advise tours out there? People who are trying to make sense of this. What should they be squinting through? What should they be looking for for reading the tea leaves of Mobile World Congress? I'd say the first and most important thing is there's so much turbulence that IT professionals have built their careers on trying to have the sober, be the ones who had the sober outlook on what technology could do. When we look at the amazing things that you can do with technology, it almost looks like magic, but it's not. These are still computers that fail if you give them the wrong instructions and that's because you build the wrong software, et cetera. And I think the real important thing that we're telling our clients is, focus on the sober reality of what it means to create value out of all this technology. You have to say, what's the business want to do? What's the business use case? How am I going to architect it? How am I going to build it? What's the physical realities? What's the legal realities, et cetera? So it's tried to get a little bit more sober and pragmatic about this stuff. Even as we get wowed by what all this technology can do and ultimately will mean. And the sober reality comes down to putting the value equation together, synthesizing what's ready, what's prime time. And again, it's an app world right now. I think the show is interestingly turning into an app show for business IT enterprise and telco service providers. So we're going to bring all the action. We've got some great guests. We've got entrepreneurs with the Roof Cohen who was a founder of Virtustream. We've got SAP coming on. We've got a call in to Lynn Komp who's at Intel. She's going to be on the phone with us from the commentary and giving us some commentary on what's going on at Mobile World Congress. From under the hood, in the network, all the action, we have more analysis with Peter. We have the global vice president of the cloud platform at SAP coming in. Tom Joyce, the technology executive. Willie Lu is the chairman of the 6G talking about the impact of the wireless. That's transformation in Sargalai who's former HPE executive who built out their NFV function for the communications group commentating on what's real and what's not. Stay tuned for more CUBE coverage for two days for Mobile World Congress here in Palo Alto bringing you all the action and analysis. We'll be right back with more after this short break.