 Hello everyone, thank you Adam, appreciate it in the studio. We're here at theCUBE here in Cloud City, TelcoDR's Cloud City, I'm John, we're Dave Vellante. We're here for the next three days, wall-to-wall live coverage. It's a physical event with a virtual program, it's hybrid. We're here with Daniel Royston, he's the CEO of TelcoDR and the acting CEO of Toge, which is announced today, great to see you. It's awesome to see you guys. Awesome to see you, how you doing? How you feeling? I'm feeling great. You did it, congratulations. Right, 101 days ago, I didn't even think, this didn't exist, right? And we got in contact with you guys and we said, we knew there was always going to be a big virtual component and we invited you guys and here we are together, it's insane. Well, we did the preview videos where we were kind of walking through and documenting the early stages. It all came together beautifully spectacular for the folks watching behind us is the most spectacular build-out cloud-stage and ecosystem open concept. It feels like the Apple store meets paradise. Of course, we've got theCUBE here in the set and we've got the studio with all the command and control of that in there. So I got to ask you, with the connected keynote going on right now, the connected world, okay? It's connected, we all know that, everyone knows that. What's different now real quick before we get into the program? What's going on? Yeah, I think a big part of my message is I'm advocating it's more than just the network, right? And I think Telcos forever have relied on, that's all it is, that's what it's about. And I'm like, nope, you guys got to start focusing on your subscribers, right? And so the over-the-top players keep coming in and siphoning away their revenue. And it's time for them to start focusing on us, right? And making the experience great. And so I think that's what this is all about. Awesome, we're going to get to the news, but I want to toss it to Katie, the roving reporter who's going to give it a detail on how it all came together. So Katie, take it away. We're excited to be back in this beautiful city. Over at the convention center, the team is working hard, putting the finishing touches to Telco DR's amazing cloud city booth at MWC Barcelona 2021. I'm sure you know the story of how this all came together as one of the biggest vendors, Ericsson, pulled out of MWC with just over 100 days until the start of the event. When this happened last year, it kicked off a tidal wave of departures and MWC was called off. This year, we all wondered if MWC was going to be canceled again. And that's when Daniel Royston, CEO of Telco DR and to Togi swooped in and took over the booth, all 6,000 square meters of it. The plan, turn the booth into cloud city, the epicenter of public cloud innovation at MWC. Crews have been working around the clock. Over 150 people have been on this construction site for over three weeks with COVID testing every day to prevent outbreaks during the build. And in a hundred days, it's become just that. Cloud city has over 30 vendors presenting over 70 demos with 24 private meeting areas. Cloud city live is a virtual showcase and live broadcast studio featuring 50 guests from cloud thought leaders around the world. They have telepresence robots for a more personalized experience and a cloud city quest game with a chance to win more than $100,000 to gain access to live streams of our nightly concerts with Rosario Flores and rock legend, John Bon Jovi. And don't forget to visit cloudcity.telcodr.com to join in on the fun. Daniel Royston and Nacho Gomez, founder and CEO of Mertz, one of the key vendors in the construction of the booth, gave us a behind the scenes tour of the booth. Nacho! No! We did it! Yeah, we did it. Can't even touch because of COVID. Yeah. But look what we did. No fun, right? Hundred days ago, I called and I said, I'm taking over the Ericsson booth, what did you think? I know you were crazy, but... Just a little bit crazy. I didn't realize that you were more crazy than I thought, so at the very beginning I thought, yeah, she's crazy, but then I couldn't sleep the night. But the next day, then I realized that it was a very good strategy. It's a great idea. Yeah, super smart, so yeah. We're gonna show everyone a tour of the booth. Yeah, let's go. Let's go! So how do we build such an amazing, beautiful building, Nacho? Yeah, so this is... We've made a building inside a booth, so it was very hard to find the glassware of the set. The roof is around 24 tons. Yeah. So it's crazy. It's crazy, but we made it work and it's totally amazing. Yeah. Do you wanna go to Cloud City Live? Do, let's go. Let's go. Okay, so here we are at Cloud City Live. I know, we're producing a whole live streaming TV show. We always knew because of COVID that not everyone would be able to come to MWC and so we wanted to make sure that people could learn about the public cloud. So over here we have the keynote stage where we're gonna have awesome speakers talking all throughout MWC. People from AWS, Microsoft, Google, vendors, companies, so really, really great content. And then over there, we have theCUBE interviewing people. Again, 15 minute segments, live streaming, but also available on demand. And you can find all of this content on cloudcity.telcodr.com and it's available for anyone to use. Wow, a lot of content. And what about the robots? I know, we gotta go check them out. Come on. Yeah, I remember a hundred days ago, we were locked down. So we came up with the idea of having robots for the people who cannot attend in person. I know, right? We always knew that there was gonna be a big virtual component to MWC this year. So we bought 100 telepresence robots. It's a great way to have a more personal experience inside the booth. Just sign up for one on cloudcity.telcodr.com and you can control it yourself, right? So today we have Nikki with us who's dialing in from the Philippines in Manila. Hello, Nikki. We're great, can you show us a twirl? Super cool. Yeah, it is, what an experience. So, Nikki, robots are not the only cool thing we have in cloudcity. We also have super awesome concerts. We have Rosario Flores on Monday who's a Latin Grammy Award winner. We have John Bon Jovi. John Bon Jovi on Tuesday. American Rocker, you can't be changing talcum that a little bit of rock and roll. And that's Tuesday. And on Wednesday we have DJ Official. It's gonna be a super party. Now, if you play our cloudcity quest game on cloudcity.telcodr.com, you can participate in the live streaming concerts. And so I know a lot of people out there who've been on lockdown haven't been able to be going to concerts, seeing from Austin, Texas, which is the live music capital of the world, how to have music in the booth. It would be amazing. Yeah. It would be great. I'm getting hungry. Why don't we go to the restaurant? Let's go eat. Let's go. And here is our awesome restaurant. I know, it's called Cloud 9, right? It's a place to calm and sit down and relax. And Barcelona is known for its great food. And I'm a foodie, so we had to have a restaurant. Should we go check out my secret bar? Let's go. And thank you, Nacho. If you're watching this at home, I'm so sorry you can't join us in person. However, let's not forget this is a hybrid event, meaning we're bringing all the public cloud action right to you, wherever in the world you might be. This includes the Pact Cloud City Live program. We've partnered with the Cube Silicon Angle Media's live streaming video studio to make sure that all of the keynotes, panel discussions, demos, case studies, interviews, and way more are available on demand. So you can watch them whenever and wherever you want. Or you can live stream and enjoy all things Cloud City as and when they happen. So for those of you not able to join us in Barcelona, be sure to log into Cloud City Live and catch all the action. And don't miss the awesome concert Tuesday night with John Bon Jovi, available for free if you participate in our Cloud City Quest game. I'll be here throughout MWC, bringing you reports and updates. So stay tuned. Okay, we're back here on the Cube, on the floor at Mobile World Conference, in Cloud City, Telco DR's Cloud City. We're here with DR of Telco DR, Danielle Royston. Great to see you back. So the keynotes going on, Connected World, the big news here is obviously the open shift that's happening is going open, open ran. It's been a big thing, open ran alliance. You're starting to see the industry come together around this clear mandate that applications are going to be cloud native and that the public cloud is just coming in like a big wave and people are going to be driftwood or they'll be surfing the wave. This is what's happening. Yeah, I think public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend. It's hit every other industry. Regulated industry is like banking, right? Top secret industry is like government. They all use the public cloud. Telco's the last standing old school industry and it's coming. And I don't think we could have had an MWC without talking about open ran. That's the other major shift. And so we're bringing both of those ideas here together in Cloud City. So the big theme is telco transformation. Maybe we could start with the basics, like paint a picture of what the telco infrastructure looks like, particularly the data center stuff. Because they all have big data centers. Because those are the candidates to go into the cloud. Explain to the audience. Well, do you have a time machine? I think if any of us were in tech in the late 90s in the early 2000s, that's what telco's like today. So for people outside of the industry, don't know. They're mostly still managing their own data centers. They're just sort of adopting virtualization. Some of the more advanced telcos are mostly virtualized. Public cloud is this idea that's like this advanced thought. And so yeah, I mean, things are on premise. Things are in silos. Things don't use APIs. They're all integrated with custom code. And so the transformation, we can all see it because we've lived it in other industries. And I am bringing that to telco and say, come along for the ride. It totally works and it's going to be amazing. So it's hardened purpose built infrastructure. Okay, that ultimately parts of that need to go to the public cloud, right? What parts do you see going first? I think all of it. Really? I think when you look at like Dish and AWS, which was an announcement that came out about two months ago, right? I mean, Dish was doing all these RFPs. Everyone knew about it. They were looking for cloud native software. No one knew what they were putting. They knew a big part was OpenRAN, but they're coupling OpenRAN with AWS and deploying their parts of their network onto the public cloud. And the whole industry is like, wait, we thought this was years away, right? Or number two, you're crazy. And I'm saying this is what I've been talking about guys. This is exactly what you can do. Leverage the capex over, let's see, I think Amazon did $100 billion of capex in 2020, right? Leverage that capex for yourself. Get that infinite scalability, right? It's going to- Well, we have a saying here in the queue. We just made this up called DR, that's your initial, tell the DR, Digital Revolution. Yeah, yeah. And there's three Rs. Reset, replatform and refactor. I think the observation we're seeing is that you're coming in with the narrative that everyone's kind of like, they're waking up because they have to reset and then replatform with the cloud but the opportunity is going to be the refactoring. You're seeing the public cloud do that, already do with the enterprise. Enterprise has already refactoring. Already has done that. Already done that. Now Telco's the last area to be innovated by the cloud. Yeah. I think there's old school, big, we're kind of on hallowed ground here in the Ericsson booth that I took over, right? They bailed and I kind of made fun of them. I was like, they don't have anything to say, right? They're not going to go to the show. I'm like, this is a revolution that's happening in Telco. And I don't think the big guys are really interested in rewriting their software that frankly makes them billions and billions of dollars of revenue. And I'm like, to use the public cloud, all of the software needs to be rewritten, needs to be refactored. And you got to start training your teams on how to use it. They don't have any capability, the Telcos in terms of those skills, hire the right people, retrain your teams, move your applications, rewrite them. And I think that's what we're talking about. This is not a short journey. This is a 10-year journey. So let's fast forward to the future a little bit. Because when I look around Cloud City, I see ecosystem everywhere. And so as you well know, the Telcos have generally done a four job of attacking adjacencies. So my question is, can they go beyond, should they go beyond connectivity, or is that going to be the role of the ecosystem? Yeah, I think it's time that the Telcos start to focus on their subscriber. It's been really easy for them to rely on the oligopoly of the network. We live in the United States. We see the 18T Verizon, T-Mobile, 5G network, 5G network. I'm like, what about us? And it's really easy for the over the top players that come in and the Telcos are always complaining about becoming dumb pipes. And I'm like, you don't focus on the customer. We would rather buy from an Apple or an Amazon if they provided a mobile service because the customer experience will be better. They need to start focusing on us. They have great businesses, but they want to make them better. They need to start focusing on the subscriber. So it's a partnership with the ecosystem then for them to go beyond just straight connectivity. Because you're right, those are the brands that we want to do business with. Yeah, yeah. You know, there was a great survey. Peter Adderton, who will be talking as a speaker, I think, I can't remember when he's talking, but he was talking about how there was a survey done of where would you rather get your mobile service from. And it had a couple of big names in Telco. And then, of course, the obvious consumer brand, some ones that we all know, and it was like overwhelmingly, would rather buy from an Amazon or an Apple. And I'm like, this is, if you guys don't change, right? If Telco doesn't change, they keep rolling out 6G and blah, blah, blah, it's about the network. And they don't start making about the subscriber, right? Those revenues are going to continue to erode. And they just sit there and complain about the OTT players. I'm like, it's time to fight back. Own the subscriber relationship. It's a digital revolution. And I think this event really encapsulates, in my mind, this hybrid world here, because it's physical events. Back, it's been since 2019 winter that this event actually happened. Well, no, it was even longer than, well, I guess winter. It was February of 19th, right? And so like, you look at Ericsson and some of the big names that dropped out of the show, the time they come back three years will have passed. Three years. Right, this is how you fill your sales funnel. This is how you connect with your customers, right? Telco's a very global, you know, experience. And so you've got to get in front of people and you've got to talk. A lot of change, too, when this happened. Look at just what public clouds done in two and a half years. Can you imagine three years being just gone? Right, and I think a lot of people, back to Dish and AWS, I think the industry was a little bit surprised by that announcement. So I've been telling executives, if you were surprised by that, if you think that's, you know, if you don't know how that's going to work, you need to come to Cloud City. You need to start meeting all the vendors here. We have over 30 vendors, 70 demos, right? People who are pushing the technology forward. You need to learn what's going on here. We have several Dish vendors here. Come learn about OpenRAN, come learn about public cloud. So we're tight on time today, but we're going to have you back. And we want to get into the tech, get into OpenRAN a little bit, get into what's, you know, 5G and beyond and how we're going to take advantage of that and monetize it and what that all means. Yeah, and also we want to hear what's going on in the hallways. I know you're going to, you're keynoting, you're going to be a lot of events, you've got the yacht, you've got a lot of briefings. Yep, yeah. And I've already had two meetings this morning. I shot a video. I met with one of the world's largest groups and I met with a tiny little super app company, right? So running the gamut, doing everything. You're like a cube reporter now. We could be like our, you know, our roaming reporter. You know, I love, I love talking to execs in telco and getting their perspective on what is public cloud and where are they going? What are they thinking about? And you talk to people who really, really get it and you get people who are just nascent and everywhere in between. And I love MWC, it's going to be great. Danielle Royson, you are a digital revolution. Telco DR, it's amazing. Dave, this has been fantastic. Again, for the folks watching, this is a hybrid event. So there's an online component and we're reaching out with our remote interviews to get people brought in and we're shipping this content out to the masses all over the world. It's going to be really amazing. Cube Coverage is here. It's going to bring rockin'. You guys are doing great. I just want to give you a compliment that you guys just did an amazing job. And of course we got Adam in the studio with the team. So Adam, I'm going to pass it off back to you in the studio.