 Thank you, Adam, you're looking great in the studio. Those clouds coming behind you in that beautiful blue sky. Okay, we're excited here at the FEDA in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 21. Yes, it's on. Yes, it's alive. And I'd say it's pretty well. Andri Zelenko is here as the CEO of Porta One and Roman Kalenkov is joining us as well. He's the chief commercial officer of Porta One. Jen, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much for having us. You're very welcome. You're local, Barcelona's now, that's awesome. Came in from Russia, you had this great idea for a company. Tell us about Porta One. Well, Porta One exists for over 20 years and we focus on helping telco operators to deliver services more efficiently or create something new by providing an open architecture platform. And we mostly focus on tier two and three operators. So I think about us as this weapon they can use to fight the Goliaths, the larger telco operators, because they need flexibility and they need ability to get there faster. I mean, I love that, right? And we're going to talk about the cloud is a key part of that because you're now giving the smaller operators the capabilities that the big guys have had but actually doing it a way that may be cleaner and more agile, it's cloud based, they can price differently. It's a whole new ball game, right? I mean, what are you seeing when you talk to customers? What's the initial conversation like? Well, people still, to some extent, are afraid of the cloud but we try to give them different options on premises or in the cloud. It's a software after all. What are they afraid of the cloud? They're afraid of not having a full control and usually people are afraid of things which they don't completely understand. And I guess having us here helps them to overcome that fear. Well, we saw this with the traditional enterprise IT when we used to have financial services executives on the cube, 10 years ago, they go, we will never put our data in the cloud. It's never going to happen. It goes financial services, one of the fastest growing and largest customer segments for the cloud. But you're focusing on, you say, the tier two and tier three. I would think they have a greater motivation, right? Because they see the opportunity to disrupt, right? That's true. I see cloud and other technologies such as SDN, as this great equalizer, because now it doesn't matter that much of a fiber optics you have in the ground, how many base towers you have. The true advantage will come from your platform, from the application and the service you can create. And if there's a company that can create a great service, if it's in the cloud, it can scale to millions of subscribers easily. They just need to find a product market fit. And Roman, you've got almost 500 customers, I believe. Yeah, it's all around the globe. Well, that's the interesting thing. You have like 90 customers or more. And so... 90 countries. No, it's not 90 countries, I mean, 500 customers, 90 countries. So you've got local laws, you've got local politics, public policy, different across those countries. You know, provenance, et cetera, et cetera. How do you see, what's the spectrum like? Are they open to the tier two and tier three disrupting? I mean, I would imagine some countries are trying to protect, you know, their relationships with the big telcos, because it's such critical infrastructure. What's that spectrum look like? Paint a picture of that diversity. It all depends on a specific country. In some countries like South Africa, the market is totally liberalized. You want to become a telco, here you go. In other countries like China, for example, it's only for a very small group of national carriers. So we basically follow the lead of the customers. If there are an opportunity in specific countries, they will pop up like mushrooms. If there is no market liberation, what can you do? Right. Okay, so now talk more about what you guys sell to these customers. You're talking about the BSS systems, and what exactly am I buying from you, and how does that all work? We sell the ability to manage your subscribers, create new services, and then provision and deliver those services to the right of network elements, equipment, through integrations and through connections to various types of apps. And right now with the cloud move, I see this as a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. For a telco who has existing infrastructure, that's a chance to rethink the architecture and approach. Because if they just think, well, cloud, it's some kind of computer where I'm going to run my applications a bit cheaper, they're missing the point. We were born in Soviet Union, and one of my treasures is the jokes from Soviet Union Times. So one of them is a lady writes to the Central Committee of Communistic Party, and she says, I work at the Moscow teapot factory. And I like my job, I like my colleagues, I'm an employee of the month, but what bothers me, I can never buy a teapot in my store. I go there, they never have teapots. Can you do something? And she receives a reply saying, well, we cannot change the way how we distribute goods in the whole country. But as an exception, we allow you to take one part of teapot, you bring it home and you can assemble teapot for yourself. And then two months later, there's now a letter from the same lady saying, dear comrades, I did as you told me. And now in my backyard, I have an intercontinental ballistic missile SS-20, but I still don't have a teapot. So you cannot replicate whatever you had, they just bring it piece by piece into the cloud and expect it's going to be something different, it's going to be better. We call it the lunar landing module, very complex. Okay, let's talk about the move from in the journey, from on-prem, maybe through hybrid, but to the cloud ultimately. And it starts with the customer conversation. First of all, they got to be willing, right? Okay, but what's that journey look like? What are the phases that we should, how should we think about that? Over the last 20 years, we've been offering our platform on-premises and usually with unlimited license. So whatever you can squeeze out of your physical machines is all yours, we don't count that. And that was a pretty straightforward model because you own your servers, we give you the license to the product and it's fully separated. In the cloud, it's not possible by default. You provide both the physical infrastructure and software infrastructure. So we need to change that model and we need to explain it to our customers, first of all. The next step, no telke is the same. So they provide different set of services. They offer their products to different audiences of the end users. So it can be hosted IPPBX or IP centric environments. So we would then price our platform based on the number of active seats. Or it can be a mobile operator, full mobile network operator or virtual mobile operator MV&O or even enabler, MV&E. So in that case, we would price our platform based on number of active scenes. Many, many of our customers prefer to diversify. They want to choose different models, serve different market segments and not only deliver voice but also data messaging value added services. We have a huge customer in Brazil, for example. They don't have a single end user customer because everything what they do is pure IoT. So how do you price the platform because the variety of business models is so huge. We use the idea of billable events. So any call, any message, any data session, subscription or anything which can produce a rateable file can counter against the capacity of what customer uses. So it gives a full transparency for the customer and it's easy to predict the future cost. And you're able to charge accordingly transparently because you've written software to do that in the cloud, I presume. And so you're able to show your customers exactly what you're paying for. And the seat in that instance is somebody who's creating those services or somebody who's administering those services or it's a developer. It's an extension. Somebody who's using the service, so the end user. Ah, right. Yeah, okay. And actually we use our own software to charge our customers for using our software. It's okay. So you need your own dog food or drink your own champagne as people like to say, right? How about from an engineering standpoint going from on-prem to the cloud? How should we think about architecting that? What are some of the roadblocks that we potentially see? The biggest roadblock we see in the developing countries is data centers not being available yet. That customer in Brazil, they were knocking on the doors of the data center at 9 a.m. when it just opened because they've been waiting for so long. We have about 15 customers in South Africa. They still are waiting for proper cloud in the center to be open there. But that's just a question of time. We just have to wait a little bit and this will get improved. And then that's a big thing, that you have your data center, you have your cloud software and then you have your existing operations. You have your systems, so how do you move there? And I'm a proponent of gradual migration and gradual movement because every telco if they were in business for at least three years they have accumulated the right of different systems, legacy, different products, different departments. It's difficult to jump in the cloud in one jump. So let's build a ladder. And with our customers, we use the technological dual version, this radius, it's a gradual migration. You don't move it at once. You first put a pilot batch of customers, observe them, then add more customers, add more customers and you keep going until everybody's on the new version. And it helps tremendously with new technology which is with different user experience because maybe some things which were improved in our perspective. From some users, they don't like the change or they need some adjustments. So we see a way to the cloud. It's starting the small steps and then getting to the cloud and the process doesn't start there because once you get to version one of Clio Cloud software, it's going to be version two and version three and version four. So the first is a gel change in the mentality of Telco. All this constant gradual improvements. You call it gradual or gradual? Gradual, gradual. Gradual, okay, so gradual migration. So when you do a migration and it's gradual, what do you do? Create some kind of abstraction layer so I don't have to freeze everything, right? Or maybe I do freeze it but I can still operate with the pieces that have moved. Exactly. Shutting down my business. That's the problem with migrations, right? I got to freeze it and then so I say, forget it, I don't ever do a migration but technology allows you to hide that complexity. Sound freeze may be required because maybe you should not add a new product or change one which is currently being migrated but to try and minimize the amount of those freezes from a product catalog perspective and the amount of potential inconveniences for the end user while they're being migrated. Let's talk about the business value. We know the before, we know what it's like, it's a hairball, you described that spaghetti code, it's slow, it's not transparent, it's expensive. What are you seeing in the after state with some of your tier two and tier three customers and particularly the ones that are disrupting the good Telcos, what do you see, Roman? It brings value first of all because the scalability is no longer an issue. The ability to migrate, ability to update a system to the new releases is also much more easier in the cloud. So the industry is changing fast. The consumers are instantly moving from one preferred way of communicating to another. So the Telcos need to change as well pretty rapidly. So we are trying to give them that set of tools so they are not being dragged behind by the changes. So update faster, scale faster, introduce new products, faster, configure new subscription and get more customers. And then that leads to compressed time to monetization. Exactly. Better customer satisfaction, we talked in this industry about NPS and how it's so negative. Usually people talk, ah, my NPS is better than Apple's with me in this industry. It's like, we need to improve the NPS, right? She's got a unique approach. Okay, guys, we're almost out of time. Andrea, I'll give you the last word. Put a bow on Mobile World Congress 2021 and how poor the season. Well, I think it's very symbolic this place we are in right now. It's a space which used to belong to a large telecom software vendor and now there's a variety of smaller disruptive companies and I think that's the future. So the days when Telcos would shop for a single huge RFP to solve all fair problems are gone for good because now with the cloud, with integration, with API, you the Telcos have the power to build what they need to pick the solutions to integrate and create something which will deliver value and allow them to have it unique and come down the road. We are tracking the transformation of Telco and it just coincides with the post-isolation, exit of the post-isolation economy. We're really excited to be here in Cloud City. Adam, back to you in the studio.