 Okay, we're back live. This is theCUBE, this is the Velocity Conference, exclusive coverage from SiliconANGLE and wikibon.org. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. Go to siliconangle.com to get all the blog post coverage of the Velocity Conference. Go to SiliconANGLE's YouTube page, youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE. Of course, our new Twitter handle, theCUBE, our SiliconANGLE TV network. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. And Doug Sillers is here from AT&T, Mobile Optimization Guru, but I want to read his official AT&T title, Principal Architect Mobile Application Optimization AT&T. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Also AT&T, I used to bash AT&T all the time back in the days before the iPhone. Then now I love AT&T because I have my iPhone since 2007 and just, what a transformation. I mean, from a mobile standpoint, at least let's talk wireless. Yes. Just the base station investment, billions of dollars that was invested from 04 through 08 and beyond with LTE has just been phenomenal. Yeah, I know AT&T, I believe last year we spent $20 billion on putting in infrastructure. 20 billion. And I remember the base station days. This is, wireless was just kicking on the scene now with LTE, it's phenomenal. Facebook is going to put a little congestion into your network with their announcement today of the Instagram video app. So again, your job security is pretty much insured. Fixing mobile apps is going to be a job that's going to keep me busy for a very long time. You have a tough job. It's actually a really fun job too. It's a fun, you know, the best jobs are fun and hard, right, the challenges, right? So, you know, mobile is, I mean, it's obviously no secret, mobile, you know, we're obviously at a tech conference so you don't need to pontificate about mobile being the next big thing. It's here, what's really the next big thing is user experience, right? And so you're, think about that. This is what this conference is all about. It's not just a cloud conference. It's got some infrastructure dev ops, but it's really focusing on performance. That's the user experience. So yeah, so at AT&T, what we've done is we've come up with a tool it's called the application resource optimizer. We call it Arrow and it's free and it's open source. So we're giving it away to all developers and we want to help developers use this tool to make their apps run better. So you can run a network trace on your mobile device. It tests how your app is doing and then says against 20 web operations, best practices. Hey, you're not cashing the images that you're downloading. Your app is killing your customer's battery. It's killing your customer's data plan and it's making your app slow. So if you fix that, your app will be fast. Your customers will be happy and it makes the mobile experience that much better. You know, living in, I live in Palo Alto. So one of the benefits of living in Palo Alto is a lot of tech geeks there and a lot of the conversations I have, Doug, is from guys that are engineers at the firmware and then engineers at the app side. So on the firmware side, you know, Android was a great thing. But the problem was is that the battery life and the actual radios were problematic because you had basically error checking, clogging up the network. You had, then you had spectrum issues. So there's a whole range of problems on one end on the carrier side, on the physical side. Then you got the application side. So, I mean, it's a mind boggling engineering task to kind of make that coherent. Can you share any insight on kind of like how you look at that? Cause apps, that's DevOps for wireless basically. So what does that world look like? So from my perspective, working as a mobile developer program is I am working with the mobile developers and I am working with them to make their apps use the battery more efficiently and use the network more efficiently. And you know, I have a theory and other people have made the same theory too that it's really the apps are causing the battery drain and nobody ever blames the sports score app that they have on their phone or their weather app on their phone. They always blame the AT&T on the front or the Apple or the Samsung or the HTC or the LG on the back. No one ever blames the apps. And so if we can make these apps run better, it'll make everybody happier and it'll actually. You guys are highly motivated because you guys take the brunt of the brand issues. AT&T, it's not the carrier. It's what's going on over the wire. And what we're really trying to do is if we make an app run better, it's going to run better on AT&T but it's for the whole wireless community. It's going to run better on our competitors as well. It's like literally, it's like rules of the road. I mean, if everyone drives more efficiently, you get to your destination on time. So with that being said, what do developers need to do? What are you guys doing? What are you guys proposing beyond the app resource optimization? What does a developer need to do? Do you guys providing any kind of sandboxes, any kind of kits? So we have this free tool and it lets you run your network traces. And so for example, we're working with top developers. So my role and my team, we reach out to the top developers, we test their application and say, you know, I'm not giving away a corporate secret if I say Facebook is generating Instagram, Netflix, they generate a lot of traffic on our network. And if we can make those apps run better, we can open up just like on a freeway. If you can pull cars off, it makes everybody go faster. So the idea is to make the network faster by making the apps better. So we just had Tony Parisi on who's an old school guy been doing the VRML for a while, which just goes down just to show how old I am. You know, that he's now on the 3D model. And so on the website, it's pretty straightforward, right? But you can start getting into the mobile, some of my rich user experiences. You know, he's a real proponent of HTML5. I see Facebook abandoned HTML5. They said it was too hard. And we kind of talked about that, but you know, what is, what should developers be using? I mean, you know, this is still early, but everyone has the developer dream right now of mobile. And so there's a lot of people jumping in the deep end that can't swim. I don't mean to put a diss on most of the developers, but there's so much demand. So you know, last year we tested 280 apps with our tool. And of those 280 apps, less than 2% required, no optimization. So this isn't something that's just the guys who don't know anything. These are actually really, really smart developers. They still have room to work with it. So you know, we're really out there trying to show even the best developers, there's room for growth. What's best practice for you? What do you see out there that you can point to and say, hey. One example, we announced this at our developer conference, but we tested Pinterest, their iOS application, and they weren't properly caching images. And so what is Pinterest? There's a lot of images in Pinterest. And so we show them the trace and they went, oh my goodness, we didn't even know this was happening. They added caching within a couple months and we're pulling hundreds of terabytes off our network a year. So it's making Pinterest faster. It's saving Pinterest money because they've lowered their server costs. It's making the network faster and it's helping everybody in the mobile space who uses that application. I know you're from Seattle, but I know AT&T has a foundry in Palo Alto. Seems like an incubator developer place. So you guys are doing a lot of outreach. What information can folks go to? Is there a website? Does she have any coordinates on Twitter or website? Sure. So my Twitter is Doug Sillers, but our developer program is developer.att.com and if you go slash arrow, that's all about application resource optimization and everything that we're talking about today. A-R-O. Yes. Okay. iOS Android. Yes. Open, closed, we're commenting. Actually, I think it's pushed for the Cuba at HP. No, we had GE, we were doing the Industrial Cloud, Internet of Things. We're just going to throw more traffic on the network. Right. The Industrial Cloud and Turbine data, airplane data, it's all going to come in. But we were talking about, Tim Cook basically highlighted Android and his keynote at the Worldwide Developer Conference and that's on Apple-like, that actually points to the competition. So obviously to me that means Android is putting a dent in Apple. Pretty well documented. Just go to the, most of the blogs will cover that. But I got to ask you about Android. Android is a little bit more open. Are you seeing that more dynamic developer environment? Is there more challenges there? iOS, Android, what's your take between the two right now? You know, I think they're both huge markets and they're both still growing and there's still a lot of development being done on both of them. In terms of on AT&T, I mean we see a lot of traffic from both. We have both of those platforms and we both, we support both of them and they're both great platforms. One more than the other. iOS have more traffic than Android? If I knew, I probably wouldn't be allowed to tell you. Go ahead, you tell us. You know, order of magnitude. Apple obviously has more traffic. We've had the iPhone a lot longer than Android. So, you know. All right, well I'm not going to try to pin you now, it's not what theCUBE's all about. But people do want to know. But it's getting back to kind of elementary. I'm a developer. I'm playing with RedS, I'm playing with Amazon, getting my app going out there. Small scale is always pretext of large scale. So, you know, Facebook started out in a dorm room and they built that up and it became huge and then you got some guys who just go large scale right away. What is a developer, if I'm a developer, what do I need to know? I mean, what should I do? I'm an iOS first, Android first. Just forget AT&T, just from mobile experience. Do you go, what would you recommend? I mean, how do I do both? It's a resource constrained environment. What do I do? It's very difficult and it really depends, you have to look at your market and see who you're trying to hit and you know, can you get away with building a web? Because if you do the web, you can hit just about everybody and that's where HTML5 comes in. It can do a really great job and you know, it got a lot of bad press with Facebook leaving HTML5. But there are a lot of people. If you do it natively, there's a lot of dividends for you. There are a lot of people doing it successfully. But you know, building an iOS app, you know, it goes on your strengths. If you're no C, objective C, better than you know Java, well, go the iOS route because it'll be faster, right? I mean, it's all about quickest to market. Yeah, I mean, Java is kind of like my generation, but you know, I talked to a lot of the new developers and they're like, you know, they're rolling their eyes on Java. That's why there's a lot of new opportunities out there. So I got to ask you about velocity. What is the coolest thing you've seen here at velocity, talk, hallway conversation, anything? What I'm really enjoying is I'm seeing there's a lot more focus on mobile and a lot more people worried about how what they're building not only affects the speed and the performance, but also the battery life. Because there are people who are now realizing that on your mobile phone, your most important spec for performance is, how's your battery life? Because if you're not going to make it to the end of the day with your phone, it's just a brick in your pocket and it's not helping you at all. So if you're building an app, make sure that you're not doing anything. So your Twitter hand is Doug Sillers? Yes. Okay. Bellevue Kids, Santa Barbara since 1990s that year. Wrong, wrong, ARS. Okay, that's Sillers, not, oh, I just friended him. So he's protected anyway, I'm just going to say. There you are. Okay, the Cube just friended you. Awesome. Welcome to the Cube. We really appreciate it. Obviously a big fan of what you guys have done. It's been a great story of AT&T. Certainly from a corporate performance standpoint, the iPhone, when an iPhone came out, I basically said this is the Mac of the future what the Mac did for computing. Not just the Apple too, but like the Mac. That changed the personal computer industry. The iPhone has done that. And look what's happened in just, you know, short years. I mean, six years. It's been amazing to see how fast everything is growing. And certainly push, and then with DevOps, it's just, I think it's going to get faster and faster. So, value propositions are all there. It's a perfect storm. This is the Velocity Conference. Doug Sillers, this is AT&T, mobile ops is an Asian guru. I'm John Furrier. This is the Cube. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.