 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE TV's live production of theCUBE at IBM Edge 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Really excited to have with me two guests from Vodafone coming from Spain. It's Alicia Montaño and Juan de Santiago. Thank you both for joining us and thank you for coming all the way to share your story. Thank you. Thanks to you as well. All right, so Juan, let's start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about your role there, your alliances direction with Vodafone? What's your role there and what's your division of Vodafone do? Yeah, I'm in Vodafone Spain. I work at Vodafone Spain and I'm in charge of the partners program, our partners program and alliances in the European Enterprise Business Unit in Vodafone Spain. And Alicia, you're the corporate product and solution senior manager. Same thing, tell us a little bit about your role and what you do at Vodafone. Yeah, I work for the technology part of the Vodafone and very close to the EVU, the Enterprise Business Unit, helping them to find new solutions for their corporate customers. All right, so most people are quite familiar with IBM. Of course, everybody knows who IBM is, but they really have the SmarterPlanet initiative and one of the highlights of the show here has been the SmarterCities initiative. We actually had one of the mayors on from one of the winning cities yesterday. Can you talk a little bit about how does Vodafone play into the All SmarterCities initiative? Okay, Vodafone has realized that buying infrastructure for each of the cities is really expensive and most of smaller towns can't afford it. So we realize that and we have found a way of offering these SmarterCities services as a cloud model, pay as they use it, and then we have partnered with IBM for doing this and we are proposing a standard, our sort of set of standard modules for these smaller cities from 20,000 to 200,000 inhabitants. All right, so yeah, I mean, it's such a huge challenge. I mean, I think I've worked with governments throughout my career and right, everybody, they have their budget and they have their thing they have to worry about and infrastructure, of course, is something that typically spans municipalities, spans across it, so it's great to hear of a technology solution that's helping get beyond that. Juan, do you have some commentary you want to add on the initiative? Yeah, we think that is, as Alicia said, it's very important to get close the initiative to small towns and small cities in Spain because they can afford and they can use a technology like we are trying to put into service because the budgets are so tight and even after the economic crisis, it's very complicated to get that kind of services. And that's one of the main reasons. We also try to introduce the technology in this kind of cities because we think that it's very important that the citizen takes part of the life of the city and can help to make decisions to the town halls and so on. Yeah, so often, I mean, technology can be hard but sometimes the technology's easy but it's working through the finances, working through the politics, working through all the people issues. Maybe can you give a little color, explain to us what's been kind of the biggest challenges and how has the Smarter City initiatives helped change what was a problem in the past? At the moment, we are doing a trial with two cities and we have found two different ways of convincing the town halls that these Smarter cities are important to them. One is through efficiency and cost-effective initiatives, for example, saving electricity or saving petrol or time of their workers. And then a second row of initiatives that are focused on making easier life to their citizens and revitalizing some parts of the cities that were becoming more, I don't know, less reliable, for example, the city centers. So we have proposed these two cities a set of five, what we call verticals, to test if they like them and from there we have to develop other services that may be of interest to them. Yeah, please. No, I think one of the main challenges is to help the city to make decisions because we not only try to gather information from different sources, if not integrate that information, that's the reason why it's so important, the platform. If the city don't make decisions, we only have a database city, we don't have a Smarter city. Yeah, so I'm curious, one of the big themes that we've discussed in technology is we need to move from point products, little things that fix things, to platforms. And Smarter cities really sounds like a platform to me. There's lots of different entry points that people could consider and there's a variety of problems. How does IBM help with bringing this solution? As you said, you're working with two different cities, there's different entry points and different ways that they have to do it. Yeah, our proposal is basically based on IOC, IBM IOC, and we are getting our IOT platform, Vodafone IOT platform, and sort of gathering data from that and integrating them with IBM IOC, so this is how they can help us. And they are also helping us in some of the, developing the verticals, the applications for running into the IOC. All right, can you talk, starting with two cities, what's your expectation on, how does rollout like this happen? How do you learn and iterate based on what's happened so far? What? We are going to start with two cities in NWC, in the south of Spain, and our expectation is to design with them the basic services and the AIDOT services and in order to propose these solutions to another cities, so we don't have yet clear expectations about the business volume and so on, but I think in a few months we will have the design made and the proposal. Okay, can you share what's the kind of the life cycle, how long does it take from when you have to propose things, I'm curious how long that takes and then kind of the rollout from kind of the beginning through the end, can you walk us through how long that takes and what some of the key milestones are along the way? Yeah, it's very different because public administration has its own rules when you are talking about contracts, but I think we can talk about from six to 12 months. Okay. And the advantage of our proposal is that once we have developed all these services and once the town hall decides to go with our proposal it will be really short time delivery because most of the things are already developed, we need only to make some adjustment to the parameters, install the sensors and that's it. So it will be really short time to develop to any city that is repeating the same thing again. All right, how does this whole initiative fit in with the rest of Vodafone's business? Is this green field, is this an extension of some of the things that you're already doing with municipalities? It's a value added services, but it's very strong related with our core business because the communications is a must if we are talking about gathering information from different points of different sources we need to carry all of these data into the platform. So we think that today's value added services to our core business, but it's very, very related with our business. I would add that Vodafone is a strong player in machine to machine IoT services and we have a strategy of growing on the value added services of machine to machine. For example, we bought Cobra for automotive business, automation business last year and this is not the same but it's related with growing your value added in your core business as Juanjo said, yeah. Great, so my last question for both of you is how's the week been for you? What's your experience been at IBM Edge? What of your peers have you been talking to? What's been the value for you coming to this event? I think it's very important to share what we are doing with, not only with another customer but with IBM people from other countries because we think that it's a very singular initiative and it's very good and this is an excellent forum to do it. Yeah, on top of that I would say that it's amazing what it's, we have been doing here and we will see what IBM is able to do. So for me it's a really good experience. All right, well, Juan and Lisha, thank you so much for coming all the way here to Vegas, share your story, network with your peers, really appreciate that. I can tell you theCUBE, we do Vegas a lot, we're happy to come to Madrid any time. You know, a lovely place here. Vegas has certain charms but after many times, absolutely. So thank you for joining us. We'll be back with lots more here from IBM Edge after this quick break. Thanks for joining.