 The CUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. We're back, this is Dave Vellante for our live coverage of MWC23, Silicon Angles wall-to-wall four-day coverage. We're here with Greg Manganiello, who's from Fujitsu. He's the global head of Network Services business unit at the company. And Ryan McMenamin is the director of product management for the open telecom ecosystem. We've been talking about that all week, how this ecosystem has opened up. Ryan's with Dell Technologies. Gents, welcome to the CUBE. Thank you, Dave. Good to be here. Greg, thanks for coming on. Let's hear Fujitsu's story. We haven't heard much at this event from Fujitsu. I'm sure you got a big presence, but welcome to the CUBE, tell us your angle. Thanks very much. So, Fujitsu, we're big O-RAN advocates, open radio access network advocates. We're one of the leading founders of that open standard. We're also members of the OpenRAN policy coalition. I'm a board member there. We're kind of all in on OpenRAN. The reason is it gives operators choices and much more vendor diversity, and therefore a lot of innovation when they build out their 5G networks. And so that's an entry point for Dell as well. I mean, obviously you guys make a lot of hay with servers and storage and other sort of hardware, but O-RAN is just this disruptive change to this industry, but it's also compute-intensive. So, from Dell's perspective, what are the challenges of getting customers and carriers to adopt O-RAN? How do you de-risk it for them? Right, I mean O-RAN really needs to be seen as a choice. And that choice comes with building out an ecosystem of partners. Working with people like Fujitsu and others helps us build systems that the carriers can rely upon. Otherwise it looks like another science experiment in a sandbox, and it's really anything but that. So what specifically are you guys doing together? Are you doing integrations, reference architectures, engineered systems, all of the above? Yeah, so I think it's a little bit of all of the above. So we've announced our cooperation. So the engineering teams are linked and that we're combining our both sweet spots together from Fujitsu's virtual CU-DU and our OpenRAN radios and Dell's platforms and integration capabilities. And together, we're offering a pre-integrated bundle to operators to reduce that risk and kind of help the overcome some of the startup obstacles by shrinking the integration cost. So you've got green field customers, that's pretty straightforward, white sheet of paper, go, go disrupt, you know, drive. And then there's traditional carriers, you've got 4G and 5G networks and sort of, you know, hybrid, if you will. And then in this integration there, where do you see the action now? I presume it's green field today, but isn't it inevitable that the traditional carriers have to go open? It is a couple of different ways that they need to go and they want to go, might be power consumption. It might be the cloudification of their network. They're going to have different reasons for doing it and I think we have to make sure that when we work on collaborations like we do with Fujitsu, we have to look at all of those vectors. What is it that somebody maybe here in Europe is dealing with high gas prices, high energy prices in the US or wherever it's expansion? They're going to be different justifications for it. So power must be an increasing component of the operating expense, you know, with energy costs up and it's a power hungry environment. So how does OpenRAN solve that problem? So that's a great question. So by working together, we can really optimize the configurations. So on the Fujitsu side, our radios are multi-band and highly compact and super energy efficient so that the TCO for the carriers much, much lower. And then we've also announced on the R app side, power savings, energy savings applications which are really sophisticated AI enabled apps that can switch off the radio based upon traffic prediction models and we can save the operator 30% on their energy bill. That's a big number. I mean, that intelligence that lives in the, because they live in the RIC, is it? And the app right above the RIC, absolutely. Okay, so it's a purpose-built app to deal with that power. It's a multi-vendor app. It can sit on anybody's O-RAN system and one of the beauties of O-RAN is there is that open architecture so that even if Dell and Fujitsu only sell part of that or none of the system, an app can be selected from any vendor including Fujitsu. So that's one of the benefits of whoever's got the best idea, the best cost performance, the best energy performance, customers can really be enabled to make the choice and continue to make choices, not just way back at RFP time but throughout their life cycle that can keep making choices. And so that's really meaning that, hey, if we missed a buying cycle then we're closed out for five or 10 years. No, it's constantly being reevaluated and that's really going to, that's really exciting the whole ecosystem. But what we really want to do is make sure we partner together with key partners, Dell and Fujitsu, such that the customer, when they do select us, they see a bundle, not just every person for themselves. It de-risks it and we get a lot of that integration headache out of the way before we launch it. I think that's what's different. We've been talking about how, you know, we've kind of seen this move before in the 90s, we saw the move from the mainframe, vertical stack to the horizontal stack. We've talked about that but there are real differences because back then you had, I don't know, five components of the stack and there was no integration and it even converged infrastructure, it was kind of bolts that brought that together and then over time it's become engineered systems. When you talk to customers, Brian, is the conversation today mostly TCO? Is it how to get the reliability and quality of service of traditional stacks? Where's the conversation today? It's the flip side of choice, which is how do you make sure you have that reliability and that security to ensure that the full stack isn't just integrated, but it lives through that whole life cycle management. What are, if you're bringing in another piece in our app or next app, how do you actually make sure that it works together as a group because if you don't have that kind of assurance, how can you actually guarantee that O-RAN in and of itself is gonna perform better than a traditional RAN system? So overcoming that barrier requires partnerships and integration activity. That is an investment on the parts of our companies, but also the operators need to look back at us and say, yeah, that work has been done and I trust, as trusted advisors for the operators, that that's been done and then we can go validate it. Help our audience understand it. What point in time do you feel that from a TCO perspective there'll be parity or it doesn't even, my opinion doesn't even have to be equal. It has to be close enough and I don't know what that close enough is because the other benefits of openness, the innovation, so there's that piece of it is the cost piece and then there is the reliability and I would say the same thing. It's got to be, now maybe good enough is not good enough in this world but maybe it is for some use cases. So, really my question is around adoption and what are those factors that are going to affect adoption and when can we expect them to be? It's a good question, Dave and what I would say is that the closed-run vendors are making incremental improvements and if you think in a snapshot, there might be one answer but if you think in kind of a flow model, a river over time, our O-RAN like-minded people are in a monster innovation curve. I mean the slope of the curve is huge. So, in the open-run policy coalition, 60 like-minded companies working together going north and we're saying that let's bring all the innovation together so you can say TCO, reliability but we're bringing the innovation curve of software and integration curve from Silicon and integration from system vendors all together to really out-innovate everybody else by working together. So that's the model. I like that curve analogy Greg, because you got the O-Give or S-Curve and you're saying that O-RAN is entering maybe even before the steep part of the S-Curve, so you're going to go hyperbolic whereas the traditional vendors are maybe trying to squeeze a little bit more out of the limit. One, two percent and we're making 30% or more quantum leaps at a time, innovation. So what we tell customers is you can measure right now but if you just do the time-based competition model as an organization, as a group of us, we're going to be ahead. Is it a Moore's Law innovation curve or is it actually faster because you've got the combinatorial factors of Silicon, certain telco technologies, other integration software? Is it actually steeper than maybe historical Moore's Law? I think it's steeper, I don't know Ryan's opinion but I think it's steeper because Moore's Law, well-known in Silicon and it's reaching five nanometers and more and more innovations but now we're talking about AI software and machine learning as well as the system and device vendor so when all that's combined, what is that? So that's why I think we're at an O-Rain conference today. I'm not sure we're at MWC. But it's true, it's funny, they changed the name from Mobile World Congress and that was never really meant to be a consumer show but these things change that, right? And so I think it's appropriate at MWC because we're seeing really deep enterprise technology now enter so that's your sweet spot isn't it? It really is but I think in some ways it's the path to that price performance parity which we saw in IT a long time ago, making its way into telecom is there but it doesn't work unless everybody is on board and that involves players like this and even smaller companies and innovative startups which we really haven't seen in this space for some time and we've been having them at the Dell booth all week long and there's really interesting stuff like Greg said, AI, ML, optimization and efficiency which is exciting and that's where O-Rain can also benefit the industry. And as I say, there are other differences to your advantage. You've got engineer systems or you've been through that in enterprise IT kind of learn how to do that but you've also got the cloud, public cloud for experimentation so you can fail cheaply and you got AI, right? Which is, you know, really didn't have AI and then now you had it, nobody used it and now you're like everybody's using chat GPT. But now what's exciting and the other thing that Ryan and we are working on together is linking our labs together because it's not about the first time system integration and connecting the hoses together and okay, there it worked but it's about the ongoing lifecycle management of all the updates and upgrades and by using Dell's hotel lab and Fujitsu's MITC lab and linking them together, now we really have a way of giving operators confidence that as we bring out the new innovations it's battle tested by two organizations and so two logos coming together and saying, you know, we've looked at it from our different angles and then this is battle tested. There's a lot of value. I think the labs are cute. But it's interesting, you know, the point there is by tying labs together there's an acknowledged skills gap as we move into this ORAN world that operators are looking to us and probably Fujitsu's saying help our team understand how to thrive in this new environment because we're going from closed systems to open systems where they actually again have more choice and more ability to be flexible. If you can take away that plumbing even though they're good plumbers. All right guys, we've got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you much. It's great to have you. Appreciate it. Okay, keep it right there. Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson will be back from the FIEDA in Barcelona on theCUBE. Keep it right there.