 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. We are here in person in Barcelona, as well as remote, it's a hybrid event. You're going to have the physical space in Barcelona for the first time since 2019, and virtual worlds connecting. I got a great guest here from Google, Charlotte Shukla, Vice President and General Manager of the networking team, Google Cloud. Charlotte, it's great to see you. Thank you for coming on theCUBE for this special presentation from Mobile World Congress. The Edge networking, Core, Edge, Human, Devices all coming together. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much, John. It's great to see you again, and it's always a pleasure talking to theCUBE. I want to also say hello to everybody from Mobile World Congress. Yeah, and people don't know your background. You've a great history in networking. You've been there, many ways of innovation. You've been part of directly big companies that we're now known, big names are all there. But now we haven't had a Mobile World Congress since 2019. Think about that. That's, you know, many months, 27 months gone by since the world has changed in telco. I got to ask you, what is the disruption happening? Because think about that. Since 2019, a lot's changed in telco. Cloud of scale has happened. You've got the Edge developing, it's IT like now. What's your take, Shailesh? Tell us. Yeah, John, as you correctly pointed out, you know, last 18 months have been very difficult, and you know, I'll acknowledge that right up front for a number of people around the world. I empathize with that. Now in the telecom and kind of the broader Edge world, I would say that the last 18, 24 months have actually been transformative. COVID, it turns out, was a very interesting sort of, you know, driver of completely new ways of both living as well as working, right? As we all have experienced. I don't think that I've had a chance to see you live in 24 months. So what we are seeing is the following. Number one, a number of telecom carriers around the world have started the investment process for 5G, right? And deployment process. And that actually changes the game as you know, due to latency, due to all of the capabilities around kind of incredible bandwidth, right? Much lower latency, as well as much higher kind of enterprise oriented capabilities, right? So network slicing as an example, quality of service, you know, by a traffic type and for a given enterprise. So that's number one. Number two, I would say that the cloud is becoming a lot more kind of mainstream. In the broader world of telecom, what we are seeing is an incredible amount of partnerships between telecom carriers and cloud providers, right? So instead of thinking of those two as separate universes, those are starting to come together. So I believe that over a period of time, you will see the notion of kind of cloud native capability for both the IT side of the house as well as the network side of the house is becoming kind of mainstream, right? And then the third thing is that increasingly it's a lot more about enabling new markets, new applications in the enterprise world, right? So certainly it opens up a new kind of revenue stream for service providers and carriers around the world. But it also does something unique, which is brings together the cloud capabilities, right? Around elasticity, flexibility, intelligence and so on with the enterprise customer base that most of the cloud providers already have and with the combination of 5G brings it to the telecom world. And those, I started to call it as kind of the triad, right? The triad of an enterprise, the telecom service provider and the cloud provider all working together to solve real kind of business problems. And it's totally great call out there on the pandemic. I think the pandemic has shown us coming out of it now that cloud scale matters. And you look at all the successes between work play and how we've all kind of adjusted the cloud technologies were a big part of that, those solutions that got us through it. Now you got the edge developing with 5G. And I got to ask this question because when we have CUBE interviews with all the leaders of engineering teams, whether it's in the industry or customers in the enterprise and even in the telcos, the modern application teams have end-to-end visibility into the workload. You're starting to see more and more of that. You're starting to see more open source in everything, right? So, okay, I buy that. You got an SRE on the team, you got some modern developers, you're shifting left, you got DevSecOps, all good, all cloud. However, you're a networking guy. You know this, routing packets across multiple networks is difficult. So if you're going to have end-to-end visibility, you got to have end-to-end intelligence on the networking. How is that being solved? Because this is a critical discussion here at Mobile World Congress. Okay, I buy cloud-native, I buy observability, I buy open source, but I got to have end-to-end visibility for security and workload management and managing all the data. What's the answer on the network side? Yeah, so that's a great question. And the simple way to think about this is first and foremost, you need kind of global infrastructure, right? So that's a given, and of course, Google, with its kind of global infrastructure and some of the largest networks in the world, we have that present, right? So that's important. Second is to be able to abstract a way that underlying infrastructure and make it available to applications through a set of APIs, right? So I'll give an analogy here. Just as, say 10 years ago, around 10 years ago, Android came into the market from Google. In the following way, what it did was that it abstracted away the underlying devices with a simple kind of layer on top of operating system, which exposed APIs northbound so that application developers can write new applications. And that actually unleashed, a ton of kind of creativity around the world. And that's precisely what we believe is kind of the next step, as you said, on an end-to-end observability basis, right? What if you can do an abstraction away from all of the underlying kind of core infrastructure, provide the right APIs, the right kind of information around observability, around telemetry, instead of making, you know, cloud and the infrastructure, the black box, make it open, make it kind of visible to the applications. Bring that to the applications and let the thousand flowers bloom, right? The creativity in each vertical area is so significant because there are independent software vendors, there are systems integrators, there are individual developers. So one of the things that we are doing right now is utilizing open-source technologies such as Kubernetes, right? Which is something that Google actually brought into the market and it has become kind of the de facto standard for all of the container and modernization of applications. So by leveraging those open technologies, creating this common control plane, exposing APIs, right? For everything from application development to observability, you suddenly have the ability to solve business problems through a large number of entities in the systems integrator and the ISV and the developer community. So that's the approach that we are taking, John. I love the Android analogy of the subtractional layer because at that time the iPhone was closed. It still is and they got their own little strategy there. Android went the other way. They went open, went open abstraction. Now, abstraction layers are good and now I want to get your thoughts on this because anyone in operating systems knows the abstractions are great for innovation. How does that apply to the real world on Telco? Because I get how it could add some programmability in there. I get the control plane piece, putting it into the operator's hands. How do you guys see and how do you guys talk about the Edge service offering? What does it mean for the Telco? Because when I get this right, this is going to be in Telco cloud developer play. It's going to be a Telco cloud ecosystem play. It's an opportunity for a new kind of Telco system. How do you see that rolling out in the real world? Great question, John. So the way I look at it, actually even we should take a step back, right? So the confluence of 5G, the kind of cloud capabilities and the Edge is very clear to me that it's going to unleash a significant amount of innovation. We are in early stages, no question, but it's going to drive innovation. So one almost has to start by saying, what exactly is Edge, right? So the way I look at it is that the Edge can be a continuum all the way from kind of an IoT device and automobile, right? Or an enterprise Edge like a factory location or a retail store or kind of a bank branch to the telecom Edge, which is where the service providers have not only their points of presence and central offices, but increasingly a very large amount of intelligent RAN sites as well, right? And then kind of the public cloud Edge, right? Where for example, Google has 25 plus kind of regions around the world, 144 pops, lots of CDN locations. We have a few thousand nodes deployed deep inside service provider networks for caching of content and so on. So if you think about these as different places in the network that you can deploy, compute storage and intelligence at, right? And do that in a smart way, right? For example, if you were to run the learning algorithms in the cloud with its flexibility and elasticity and run the inferencing at the edge, very edge at the point of sort of a sale or a point where a consumer is standing, now you suddenly have the ability to create a variety of Edge applications. So going back to then your question, what are we seeing, right? So what we are seeing is depending on the vertical, there are different types of Edge applications, okay? So let's take a few examples and I'll give you some favorite example of mine which is in the sports arena, right? So in the baseball, right? When you are in a stadium and soon there are people sort of starting to be in stadiums, right? And a pitcher is throwing the pitch, right? The trajectory of the ball, the speed of the pitch, where the batter is, what the strike zone is and all of these things if they can be in a stadium in real time, analyzed and presented to the consumer as additional intelligence and additional insight, suddenly it actually creates kind of a immersive experience. Even though you may be in the stadium looking at the real thing, you are also seeing an immersive experience and of course at home you get a completely different experience, right? So the idea is that in sports, in media and entertainment the power of Edge compute and the power of AI ML, right? Can be utilized to create completely new immersive experiences. Similarly, in a factory or an automotive environment you have the ability to use AI ML and the power of the Edge and 5G coming together to find where the defects are in a manufacturing environment. So every vertical, what we are finding is there are very specific applications which you can call as kind of killer apps, right? In the Edge world that over time will become prevalent and mainstream and they will drive the innovation, they will drive deployment and they also will drive ultimately kind of the economics of all of this. You're laying out essentially the role of the public cloud and the telco market. I'd love to get your thoughts because a lot of people are saying out of the cloud it's all Edge now it's still going back to on-premises. This is not the case. I mean, I've been really vocal on this. The public cloud and cloud operations is now the new normal. So developers are there. So I want you to explain real quick the role of the public cloud in the telecom market and the telecom Edge because now they're working together. You got abstraction, you mentioned that Android-like environment coming. There's going to be an Android-like effect that abstraction, you got O-RAN out there creating these connection points for interoperability for radio signals and the transceivers or the edge of the radios. All this is happening. How is Google powering this? What is the role of public cloud in this? Yeah, so let me first talk about generically the role of public cloud then I'll talk about Google in particular. So if at the end of the day the goal here is to create applications in a very simple and efficient manner. So if you look, put that as the goal, then the public cloud brings three fundamental things. Number one is what I would call as elasticity and flexibility. So why is this important? Because as we discussed earlier, Edge is not one place. It's a variety of different locations. If there is a mechanism to create this common control plane and have the ability to kind of have elastic compute, elastic networking, elastic storage and have this deployed in a flexible manner. Literally, if you think about it like an effortless edge is what we are starting to call it. You can move workload and capability and run it precisely where it makes sense, right? Like I said earlier, training and learning algorithms in the deep cloud. Inferencing at the very edge, right? So if you can make that decision, then it becomes very powerful. So that's the first point. Elasticity and flexibility that the cloud can bring. Second is intelligence, right? The whole notion of leveraging the power of data and the power of AI and ML is extremely crucial for creation of new services. So that's something that the public cloud brings. And the third is this notion of right once deploy anywhere, right? This notion of kind of a full stack capability that an open kind of developer ecosystem can be brought in. Like we talked about Kubernetes earlier. So if there's a way in which you can bring in those developer and ISV ecosystem, which is already present in the world of public cloud, that's something that is the third thing that public cloud brings. And Google strategy very simply is to play on all of these, right? Because Google has incredibly rich deployment experience around the world for some of the largest services on the planet, right? With some of the biggest infrastructure in the networking world. Second is we have a very open and flexible approach, right? So open, as you know, we not only leverage kind of the Kubernetes environment, but also there are many other areas, Knative and so on where Google has brought a lot of open kind of capabilities to the broader market. And the third is the enablement of the ecosystem. So last year, we actually announced 200 applications from 30 ISVs in multiple verticals that were now going to be deployed on Google cloud in order to solve specific business pain points, right? And building out that ecosystem, working with telecom service providers, with systems integrators, with equipment players is the way that we believe Google cloud can make a difference in this world of developing edge applications. We are seeing great traction, John, whether it is in the carrier world, carriers such as Orange, telecom, Italia, Telus, SK telecom, Vodafone, these have all publicly announced their work with Google cloud, leveraging the power of data, analytics, AIML and our very flexible infrastructure. And then a variety of kind of partners and OEM players in the industry, as an example, Nokia, right? Amdox, Netcracker and many others. So we are really excited at the traction that we are getting. And we believe that public cloud is going to be a key part of the evolution of the telecom industry. Charles, great to have you on. Charles Shukas, VP and GM of networking at Google cloud. And I would just add to that final point there that open and this Android like open environment is going to create a thousand flowers to bloom. Those are new applications, new modern applications, new companies, a new ecosystem in the telco cloud. So congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights, Google cloud, you guys are about the data and being open. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. Great to talk to you. Okay. So it keeps coverage of Mobile World Congress. Google cloud featured interview here on the cube, really a big part of the public cloud is going to be a big driver. Call it public cloud, hybrid cloud, whatever you want to call it's the cloud, cloud and edge with 5G, making a big difference and changing the landscape and providing innovation for the telco space. I'm John Furrier, your cube host. Thanks for watching.