 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and it's our seventh year doing theCUBE. This year, of course, it is a digital event which means we are reaching all the community members where they are around the globe. Really excited to bring the program, first time guest and a first time to Red Hat Summit, Vishant Vora. He's the Chief Technology Officer of Vodafone Idea, joining me from Mumbai, India. Vishant, nice to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here, Stu. I'm looking forward to this interaction. All right, so as I said, I've been at Red Hat Show for many years. The telecommunication space, service providers are some of the more interesting in a technology space. You talk about scale, you talk about change, you talk about software eating the world, all of those discussions are ones I've had for many years. But I think many people know Vodafone, maybe Vodafone Idea, if you could just shape for us the organization and of course you've got the CTO at. So what that means inside your organization. Sure, so Vodafone Idea is a company that came to game as a result of a merger about 18 months ago. The number two and number three operators in India, which was Vodafone and Idea, came together to create a telco serving over 300 million subscribers. And we've been integrating the networks over the last 18 months and consolidating and doing one of the largest integration in the world of two networks, comprising over 200,000 sites and carrying more than 50 billion MB of traffic per day, serving more than 40 million voltage customers. And we have been duplicating the network, very, very busy with that. And we've taken down so far almost 100,000 base stations, which is equivalent to the size of a large operator in US. So that's about the kind of, that is about the scale of the operator that Vodafone Idea is and what we've been busy with for the last day. Yeah, well, Vashant, of course, the reason we're doing this event online is because right now with the global pandemic, the vast majority of the population, they're at home. So healthcare, of course, one of the major concerns I actually have done interviews with some of the power and energy companies, critically important at this time, but telecommunications, one of the top of the list in normal times for what people need, but today it's the only way that we can all keep connected. So tell us a little bit about what the current situation, the impact and importance this really highlights of your business. Yeah, so just as the rest of the world, India is also in a lockdown and India actually has one of the largest, the largest lockdown in the world, putting all 1.3 billion people in a lockdown across the entire country. So within that context, the telecom network is crucial to make sure that the life goes on, the essential services are delivered, the industry continues to still operate as the best it can, and all of that is made possible because of a stable and reliable network that we offer. So a huge, huge impact on the society always has been, but in this current context, it is even more and more critical and crucial. So what we do is we make sure that we are the invisible layer. You talked about healthcare workers and emergency services. Well, we are the invisible essential service that probably many people don't see, but we are the ones who are really helping this country survive this crisis. And so far, we have seen 25, 30% increase in traffic in a single day. In one week, we experienced the same amount of traffic growth we would have experienced in the entire year. So scalability is very, very critical in our networks and we've been able to keep up with that kind of a growth and continue to serve the communities and this crucial juncture. And all of this to large extent has been made possible because of a large scale deployment of cloud technologies that we have done over the last 18 months, which has really helped us scale up a lot of our capabilities in the back. Yeah, I'd love if you could explain a little bit more on that. Challenging times, I'm curious, the amount of people that are using your services probably haven't changed, but the demand and how much they're using it has changed a lot. So cloud obviously gives you scalability, but are there concerns about what this does to profitability, how you maintain things? How much of this is a temporary change and how much will this be? I know in the United States there's a lot of talk about how much work from home will become more of a standard than it had been before this pandemic. So short-term, what's the impact on your business and what are you and other telecommunication companies thinking about what long-term impact this will have? Stu, I think that's a very, very interesting question. I think even for me and my organization, what we have been able to do working from home is amazing. I never would have thought that it was possible to do as much as we've been able to do, just staying with most of the workforce staying at home. And that has really, I think, happened across the industries, across the entire country. I think many organizations have now realized that work from home or work from anywhere, which is the other term, is gonna become quite possible and prevalent going forward because people have realized that you can just get, you can get just as much productivity out, you can get so many things done working from home and it gives so much more personal flexibility to the individuals. So I see when I look back at our organizational experience, I see our productivity has been actually quite good, actually better than probably even in the office days. So I think that is definitely one thing that is gonna come out as a global change across all industries. I think the second thing that is gonna happen is data analytics. I think there's gonna be far more analysis of data to understand patterns and understand trends and how to take advantage of that. I think, of course, the immediate application is in the healthcare and the spread of the pandemic, but I think this will spur a lot of other analytics. I think the third thing it's gonna do is the adoption of digital as the primary mode. Digital was already something that most companies were working on as a top priority, but I think going forward is gonna become very evident to people that it is actually essential. Just talking about my business, I can tell you today, all the stores, all the shops, every place that we used to sell our recharge vouchers are closed. So the only place we are able to get any revenue from is our digital channel. And only place where customers have been able to recharge their prepaid subscriptions, et cetera, has all been through digital. So I think digital will also become a massive, massive requirement. So in that context, I think telecom will be seen as a critical backbone. I think to a large extent, it has been seen by many in the past as more of an essential commodity, but I think many organizations will realize that this is actually a value creator. So I think it's a great, exciting opportunity for us to take advantage of those new business opportunities that will come and at the same time, be a very, very important player in the digital economy that every nation around the world is going to pursue. Well, Vishan, really appreciate some really good commentary there. We've been talking for years about customers going through their digital transformation. It's really about the data and how they leverage that. And if you're data driven, then you really have gone through that transformation. And you kind of described what we call the new innovation cocktail. You're leveraging cloud, there's data. You put those all together as to how you drive your company and you can drive innovation. Oftentimes when we think about what results we're going to get from playing cloud and using these types of new technologies, we think we know what we're going to get, but the reality of how your company is dealing with things today, of course, proves what you were hoping to build for here. Help us understand, we're talking here as part of Red Hat Summit this week. What's Red Hat's role in this piece and how did the reality of rolling this out and then how it has helped you in the current global situation impacted your business? Sure. So I would say actually the three words that I used, digital, cloud and analytics. To me, they're actually inseparable because I do not believe that you can have a digital business that is not based on cloud or that is not good at data analytics. I think if you want to really have a successful cloud offering, it implies that automatically that you are a digital business and you're going to do extensive amount of data and analytics and build those capabilities. I think those are three inseparable terms. Now speaking specifically about Red Hat, I would say that Red Hat has been a very, very critical partner for us right from the beginning. 18 months ago, when the two companies two came together to create this network, we knew that we had to do several things. Number one was actually to have a completely rationalized cost structure, which was around extracting the synergies from the merger. But beyond that, we needed to build a telco of the future, technology company of the future, which will let us transform the business and create capabilities that will give us a step ahead, a leapfrog ahead of our competition. And cloud was a very, very essential part of the journey. And we knew we needed to build a cloud based on open systems because we did not want to get into a proprietary lock-ins with anybody. And we are at very large business, we have sufficiently large scale to really be able to build a very large cloud. So we started working with Red Hat about two years ago and in the last two years, we have deployed 80 plus cloud locations, distributed cloud locations across the country. And all of these clouds, our vision is to orchestrate them as a single cloud. Our vision is to build a cloud, that is a universal cloud. Actually, that is a word we use when we talk about cloud. It's a universal cloud. What does that mean? That means that cloud will carry not only the traditional telco workloads, but it will also carry IT workloads. It will also carry a lot of the enterprise offerings we have. So for the end user, for our enterprise clients and all of those capabilities have to be accommodated with a platform that is versatile, that is scalable, and that is gonna give me enormous amount of flexibility and control as a organization. So Red Hat has been a very important part of the journey and on the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud today, I have NFVs working from any major supplier you can think of. I have NFVs working from Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE, even some smaller players like Mavineer. So we have demonstrated that this is possible. We've been able to break the lock-in that the traditional NEPs have had on their cloud offerings, which were really more of a virtualized offerings rather than a cloud. It is a truly universal cloud on the back of the technology provided by Red Hat. Well, that's fantastic, congratulations on that. I love the result of what you're calling universal cloud is the promise that we talked about for a number of years. Is that nitty gritty networking piece, it was like network functions, virtualization, NFV, sitting on OpenStack and everybody's like, well, OpenStack, am I trying to build a cloud to compete against the public cloud providers? It was like, no, what you said exactly, there's services that you want to be able to deliver. And it's not just about, oh, we're getting away from hardware appliances, it's just like most people today, they're used to whatever smart device they're doing, I want to be able to turn on channels and access new things. That's, you're now reducing that barrier to, for Vodafone idea to deliver that to your users. Have I captured that properly? That is correct. As a matter of fact, I'll just give you one proof point. My Vodafone app is the app that we have for our consumers. And that app is currently running on my telco cloud, what used to be called the telco cloud. So on that platform, we are running my packet core, actually there are about 40 NFVs or virtualized traditional telco applications running alongside with an IT application, a digital application. Okay, so one of the things that I'd like to understand there that what you've deployed there over the last couple of years sounds like a significant shift. So, you're talking about apps, you're talking more of a developer type of environment, bring us inside a little organizationally, what new skills of new people had to learn? Have there been new people added to the organization? Have there been any restructures? What is this whole initiative to get to Universal Cloud meant for your organization? Sure, so I look after both the network and IT pieces of the part of parts of the company. And we traditionally were in the past legacy, we have had a IT cloud and we have had in telco cloud. What we are now creating is a single Universal Cloud. But either of the two workloads are gonna be facilitated. So for that, actually the two parts of the organization need to come together and start to really work as one. Now, it is very important that the telco guys understand the scale and the 5.9s required in running a network. But at the same time, IT guys also understand very much what all of the, the flexibility that the business requires and the responsiveness required for the enterprise. So bringing those two talents together, I think in infusing that to create a single organization is one of the biggest challenges I think any telco has. We also face it, that is one aspect of it. The second aspect of it is that they're just earned to many cloud experts in the world. And we have been struggling with that. I think scale shortage is a clear challenge for us. Now we try to address it using variety of means. We of course try to upscale, rescale a lot of the traditional network core engineers that we have had. We also try to use talent available from consultants. And then we also try to use our vendors. So one of the concepts we've been working with our vendors is a concept of a resident engineer. So we try to actually get them to second some of their engineers to work with us. And at the same time, we've been now working with both IBM and Red Hat to create a program to really go out and create a community around us of developers who can really work with this cloud and therefore we will have enough of skills available to leverage all of the potential benefits that are there in the platform, but can only be unleashed if I have the right skills and the right people. You touched on a very important issue. It is a challenge, but we are working our way through it and so far we've made good progress. All right, well Vishan, I can't let a CTO go without looking a little bit into the future. So I want to help understand, we talked about some of the technologies, we talked about the transformation of what's happening in your business, what's happening in your organization. There's some big waves coming. Cloud is still in early days. 5G of course, is expected to have massive impact on everyone's environment for this. So what is the winning formula for the telecoms going forward? Well, I think 5G is an exciting world. We are a 4G network today. The 5G spectrum hasn't been auctioned in India, but what we are building today is what I call a 4G plus network, which means a lot of the architectural principles of 5G we have already applied in my core networks today and in my transport network. In that world, I think IoT is going to play a very, very big role. And if you want to do things like IoT, and if you want to do things like blockchain, then I think telco cloud has a huge role to play because we are the telcos are traditionally the only ones in a country anywhere in the world who have experiences in operating in very far-flung places. Dealing with a lot of the infrastructure challenges, especially if you're in a developing country, you know that you have to work with a poor power availability, poor transport, et cetera. I do not see any of the big guys, the big cloud players really having those capabilities today. I think telcos are going to play a very big role in enabling that 5G IoT world. And it is going to be an exciting journey for telcos. I think telcos will very soon be called tech companies. That is one thing that I strongly believe in. I think also many of the things that depend on blockchain will require the kind of cloud that telcos will create because a telco cloud is far more demanding than a traditional IT application in many ways. For example, latency, or for example, throughputs. Now all those things are very important in blockchain type of applications. So I think that's another exciting opportunity for telcos really is to get into that. And of course, there are discussions about smart cities, smart government. And because of COVID crisis, I think many governments are going to explore new ways of organizing societies, new ways of governing economic activities. And the backbone for a lot of those things is going to be telecom networks and the cloud distributed clouds to the edge that we create. So I think it will create many, many exciting business opportunities as a consequence of some of those technological innovations. Yeah, Vishant, I can't remember who said it. As they said, don't waste a crisis. But Vishant Vora, CTO of Vodafone Idea. Pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for joining us. Hope you enjoy the Red Hat event as it is distributed this year. And definitely look to be able to meet you sometime at a future physical event back when we have those in the future. Thank you, Stu. It's been a pleasure meeting you virtually and look forward to the event. All right, lots more coverage from theCUBE's Red Hat Summit 2020 activity. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching.