 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering your Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Well, welcome back to our continued live coverage here, Red Hat Summit 2019. You are watching theCUBE. I'm John Walls along with Stu Miniman. Nice to have you here with us as we head toward the home stretch, day three, of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE. We're now joined by a couple of guys who, they put on their traveling shoes to get here, both hailing from Sydney, Australia. Guillaume Poulay Matisse, who's a senior innovation lead at Optus, and Vasili Chikolkin, who's a principal software architect, also at Optus, which is the second largest mobile phone service provider in Australia. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. Well, thanks for having us. It's a long way to come, right? Yes, it is, but it's probably worth the trip. Excellent. Well, you're both on the keynote stage this morning. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. For folks who might not be familiar with Optus, why don't you tell us a little bit about your footprint in Australia? And what brings you here to talk about Red Hat and OpenShift? Well, as you mentioned, Sir, Optus is a leading telco in Australia. We are lucky that we own our infrastructure, which makes it a fantastic place as a software engineer or infrastructure engineer to work in as we can develop new products and new solutions or innovate within this network. Our roles for Vasili and I at Optus is essentially to identify new opportunities to innovate within our network, so use our core assets to innovate, but not only just do this research and development, also execute on this. So we call this a bit of an applied innovation, where an idea we would work really hard in taking it to a real outcome, leveraging our core assets. So we're having a lot of stories with customers about transformation, and telecommunications is one that's fascinating to look at because you work on software. When I think back to telecom, it was fiber and towers and physical implementation, but software is such a large part of what's going on. Can you tell us some of the changes going on and what's impacting your role in an Optus? It's impacting all telcos actually, but yes, telcos are switching from this old mindset of just fibers, just towers, and with SDN movements and 5G coming, which is driving a lot of changes, people start thinking about virtual network functions and how we can deploy in an edge, how we can help our customers and developers to collaborate on next features, how we can leverage all our technologies and a state we have. I think if you think of software defined network and the move to virtualization, you can now think of this in Australia is a big country. So you can now think of this entire infrastructure as being virtualized and could be made available for other use as well. So it's really changing that sense that it's not closed anymore and it can open to new use cases. You know, you bring up just the point about the pure geography of Australia, huge country, 25 million people, we were jealous here in the States, you have 25 just in the Boston, New York area probably I would think somewhere around there, but how does that factor in just in terms of your operations in general, that you do have nine million subscribers spread out over so much geography and you're trying to deliver these state of the art services? I could take this one. So in terms of distance, there is an important impact, particularly today we were talking about phone calls, but it's essentially managing an infrastructure in such a large country as its challenges, but it's something we're getting very good at as we pushing very hard to be present in regional Australia. So you can think of this beautiful landscape and getting fiber there being a challenge. But the challenges that, the luck that comes with this is that we get to operate a scaled network, maybe not with the scale of subscribers that you have in the US, but with the same challenges. So when it comes to innovation, we get the opportunities to, we find new opportunities. So in the keynote, there was a lot of resonance in the audience when you talked about breaking the language barrier, maybe go in, share with their audience here, just a tidbit as to what you were talking about and how that works from a technology standpoint and roll out. From technology point of view, telephony stack is, it's complex thing and if you want to integrate directly with telephony system, directly with phone call, it's tough job, okay? I did it, it's tough. We did it, I'm never going. So, and as software developers, what we tend to do when we get some complex things to solve, we abstract it away. And for us, it was obvious solution. We need to abstract away all this complex thing, all complex signaling, media handling and provide very simple way of getting additional voice services within phone call. It had additional challenges like distance and we can't just handle audio in the cloud because we need to be close to the customer. Otherwise, it will be very, very bad quality of service. And yeah, and it opens availability to innovate further. We can bring more services, not only voice translation and transcription but just think about it. You've got your voice. We can help you, we can provide new exciting services on plain old telco. So we had translate today and we were here to talk about the technology and also the culture change around if our network becomes more open and if we have these opportunities to leverage this network to try to build new products. And there are plenty of products that we're also working on that are based on this idea that we can build products like people build apps. To build an app, you need a smartphone or you need this environment. We can expose the network in the same digital environment. And translation is very interesting because it's emotional. If you think of communication, language can be a barrier. The idea that we digitize the phone call and that we can then let build products or engineer products that break barriers is very exciting. And so this is why we picked this specific use case for the keynote today. As you mentioned before, it has an emotional feeling to it. But there was, if I got it right and please correct me if I didn't, you were engaged in a real-time phone call, right? And then if we pretended that one of you spoke one language and one of you spoke another, there was an immediate translation from English to French, French to English. And the call was being transcribed in real-time as well. So it could be used in other medium, right? If I wanted to use it in emails or other communications, text, whatever. So you were stuck piling all this capability, right? And through the transcription, but doing real-time voice translation. So the value we add here, so things like translation is something that Microsoft, for example, does really well and many cloud companies do really well. The value we add is to move from having an ad hoc translation request. Can you translate this to Russian? To integrating this in one of the most natural communication channel, which is person to person. The phone call is a perfect place to start because if there is one place where you're going to have a language barrier, as the phone calls are global, you can call anywhere in the world, this is really an exciting environment. Oh, I thought so, I mean. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. I mean, I think kind of history of telecommunications, it's well, every country has their own system, but there needs to be that interconnection so that today I don't think about whether I'm calling across the street, across the country, or across the globe. It takes care of that, and boy, if I could then just plug into some of the available services and do translation, you know, right, you're going to bring the world a little bit closer together. And a phone call is ubiquitous. You don't sign up to a brand, so you do sign up to a telecom, but this is regardless of your device, you can establish a phone call and use these services. I know some teenagers that like to have their conversations translated for me. Really helpful. Oh, you can build it as well. Can't you do work on that, that'd be good. I'll have to think about it. What about 5G? And what is that doing for you? Just from a pure technical standpoint, the opportunities that you see coming with that, I know the rollouts probably still a year or 24 months away from taking place, I don't know what the Australia rollout is compared to the US, but in terms of what that speed is going to do for you, what kinds of possibilities, you think, Vasily exist? I'm a software developer. I'm thinking like from pure software development point of view, it gives perfect opportunity to be, connect customers with developers on an edge on your network. And it's all about latencies and bandwidth, and you can do fascinating things on an edge of network. AI-based things, real-time, virtual reality, augmented reality. 5G will enable it and will kick this development and improve speed of this stuff. And I'm looking forward to have all of this available, not only for me, as I'm working for Telco. I don't want it closed, we're opening network, we're opening Telco to the whole world of wonderful software development, and it's fascinating. 5G is also, if you think of 5G, you got to think about momentum. There is this momentum that we have now to improve our networks, and it's not entirely just 5G. We've got the network function virtualizations, we've got IoT, and that momentum is very interesting because as we improve our network, it becomes more digital, and as Vasily mentioned, as it becomes more digital, it's more open and enables new opportunities for enterprise customers or for startups to innovate in this environment. Okay, so my understanding from what you talked about in the keynote, this is built on OpenShift, what's the importance, why OpenShift, and what does that enable for your business and ultimately your customers? This is actually something we're quite proud of. When we started this journey in the software engineering space, it's in cloud native, it's only natural to build functions in containers, but there was effectively that gap between building new applications in the current state of a network that has a very different approach of operation. So Kubernetes was the right tool for us, but when you operate a carrier network, you need a strong support, and you need to have very firm SLAs because you don't drop phone calls. This is very important in communication, and this is where we had a fantastic relationship with Red Hat to find a way to operationalize this deployment. Yep, Red Hat wasn't only operating this thing, we worked hand-to-hand in the last few years. We helped a lot with designing systems, with best practices. We learned a lot of each other, and it was a fantastic journey. We really enjoyed working with it. It's an extremely professional team. From a timing perspective, our journey came together at the same time as Red Hat started seeing telcos as being where the next big thing or the next something to very much start focusing on. So what's your next big thing? We were talking about 5G and what that's going to open up, and we've read a lot about it here in the States, but from your perspective, what is that going to enable? What kind of services? Because 4G is already blowing everybody's mind in some respects, right? With the data capabilities there, imaging, transactions, those kinds of things. But 5G, in your thought... I think I've previewed innovation cycles. I think 3G, 4G always came in with a pre-baked benefit, often speed. With 5G, it's a little, my opinion is a little bit different. What's happening and what we're doing is an example of this with NFV. You have a new environment, an important environment where new things can happen. And so you're going to see this as an open versus closed. What it means is that the next big thing is not necessarily with 5G or NFV. The next big thing is what software developers will make of this environment. And that might be a startup, or it could be enterprise, it could be a new cooperate. And we are very much, very much open to start conversation with anyone that would like to make use of this. Who's got the next big thing? Who's got the next big thing, yeah. Well, gentlemen, thank you for making the long trip. I know not just to see us, but we do appreciate you're carving out some time for us. Good job this morning and good luck down the road. Thank you for having us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Back with more live from Boston. You're watching theCUBE and you're watching coverage from Red Hat Summit 2019.