 from the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. Hi, everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM 2020. It's the digital IBM 2020, the Think Event Experience. My name is Dave Vellante, and you are watching theCUBE. Steve Canepa is here. He's the global GM of communications or the communications sector for IBM. Steve, how are you doing? Good to have you on. Doing great, Dave. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're very welcome. I mean, communications is sort of a broad term for the stuff you cover, telco, cable, entertainment, broadcast, publishing, satellite, sports, music, games. I mean, social, wow. You run the gamut. It's exciting times. Pretty big role. Yeah, I'll say you got exciting times. There's so much going on in your space. And of course, this pandemic has really hit the communications industry in so many different ways. Some tailwinds, some headwinds, and it's just crazy out there. What are you seeing and what are you guys doing to support clients? Well, first and importantly, our thoughts go out to everyone as we're all dealing with this around the world. I have the opportunity to work with clients in every geography around the globe and each and every one of them is busily dealing with how they make sure their employees are safe, how they're providing services to their customers. And we're right there alongside them, helping them do that as well. For us in the telecommunications space, as you know, it's actually central, it's an essential industry that's helping the world deal with this as we're all going virtual like this session we're having today. So we're working with clients to help them get their resources in place so that they can support their businesses, their network platforms, their media services in a way that they can keep the business running. Our telecommunications customers all around the globe had to get their resources and work at home environments. We worked with many of them in deploying real-time services. We also worked with them in deploying call center chatbot capabilities so that they could answer questions from their customers, from other members of the community as they were coming in. So a tremendous opportunity for us to help them respond to what's happening. It's actually quite amazing the response. I mean, you think about telco, you think about telco infrastructure, what comes to mind is it's hardened, it's reliable, it works and all of a sudden you've got all these remote workers. The pace of the pivot has been actually quite astounding. I mean, your thoughts on that. Yeah, and it actually goes hand in glove in what we've been preparing the industry for generally. I mean, there's been this evolution to digital service providers that's been happening in the industry now for a number of years. And in fact, the center point of what we're doing now to help the telcos virtualize and abstract those networks so that there's software-based services platforms that can respond to these kinds of peak load demand issues not that anyone anticipated COVID, but the ability to have a platform that can scale your business and allow you to respond, move services where they need to be moved to be much more agile in the way you work. These are all playing into the ability to respond to the situation. Steve, I want to ask you about something you said in a recent article in Forbes. You said winners in the 5G and edge era will be those who embrace the hybrid multi-cloud approach. Well, first of all, I want to ask you, I mean, 5G can't get here fast enough, but so you're kind of predicting my inference is a 5G and edge era coming this decade. Like I said, it can't happen soon enough, but what are your thoughts on that's coming era? Yeah, in my view, there's three fundamental things that are happening simultaneously. So first, obviously 5G is emerging. It's showing up now. Most service providers around the world are starting to already deploy their private 5G capabilities. We're seeing it show up in evolution form in consumer marketplace. So 5G is here and we'll continue to scale. The second key transformation that's happening is the telco network itself is becoming a hybrid cloud platform. What I mean by that is, just as we saw when video abstracted as a service and it could be deployed on over the top service platforms, enabling things like our interview that we're doing today to happen, that got loaded on top of now open IT platform. The same exact thing is happening in the network domain where the network services, data service, voice service, multimedia services are being put on an open platform architect that allows you to respond. And then the third key thing that's happening in market is this edge phenomenon. And this is all about the ability to move workloads, to move services out closer to where things happen and take advantage of those key 5G features like ultra low latency, increased bandwidth, and of course the ability to slice the network down to dedicate it to a specific application. This opens up a whole new set of services. Yeah, I mean, as I was sort of alluding to before the reliability of telco network and the hallmark of that infrastructure as we move to this more open sort of standardized environment, Steve, I would imagine that one of the technical challenges is maintaining that level of reliability and predictability, well, at the same time being able to support remote workers, et cetera, low latency workloads, can you comment on that? Yeah, so a couple of key points there. One is, as you may know, IBM acquired Red Hat a little over a year ago. Red Hat has created an open platform for the telcos to modernize their core infrastructure. And the power of that is we can seize this enormous upstream community now and that community can help accelerate the great pace of transformation is happening, bring innovation in. That's really powerful. The second is once we go through an open platform, software-based platform, we can infuse automation, extreme levels of automation and AI for intelligent predictive capabilities. So now think about the network becoming a living, breathing, responding platform where it's based on software so we can deploy services and functions and we can automate those services and functions. That level of intelligence serves as the ability to then get out these services. So Steve, definitely we had a, I think a decent understanding of the Red Hat and the strategy around open shift and the container approach, hybrid, multi-cloud. What I didn't realize is that there was specificity around the telco industry. Can you talk more specifically about what IBM is doing in that regard? Yeah, no, it's a great question. Red Hat has a very significant presence in 120 telcos around the globe. And so not only they're Red Hat Linux, which is kind of a de facto standard in the marketplace, but they're open stack architecture. Now we're moving out to the open shift architecture. And as part of that, the relationship with an enormous upstream community of talent that's building on those platforms. And so we're able to really infuse into Red Hat the kind of requirements that are necessary for their software platform to serve as the platform, the open platform for the telcos as we go forward. So it has been an incredible synergy. I think of it as kind of two puzzle pieces that fit together incredibly well. At IBM we've had the longstanding relationship with all the service providers around the world in helping them transform their business. And now with Red Hat we have the opportunity to really integrate what we're doing from an automation and AI standpoint with all the power of that Red Hat platform. So where do you see the edge fitting in to this hybrid multi-cloud approach? Is it sort of an extension of cloud? Is it a new cloud? You know, we are envisioning this seamless experience between on-prem cloud, multi-cloud and edge. Yeah, I think of it in a kind of simple Venn diagram where you have this virtualized open software-based telco network on one side and you have the edge on the other. And in the middle you have this kind of combination where you do edge in partnership with the telcos. And the idea here is that all industry are going to want to provide a next generation of insights to their customers and to their partners. The ability to move those workloads. So think about a manufacturing shop for us, an example. You know, we've already had IoT centers, hundreds if not thousands of them. Now we can infuse video cameras and take, you know, a huge amount of data through the enhanced bandwidth of 5G and bring that down to an edge platform and analyze that video data in real time, whether employees are in safe zones, maybe with COVID now, even whether or not keeping the proper social distancing and looking at actually looking at everything that's coming off of that platform or manufacturing line, looking at the equipment itself and adding AI to that so that we can analyze it in real time. Edge allows us to take advantage of those 5G attributes and to put it wherever that workload should run, whether it's on the plant floor itself as in proximity to where that equipment is or back in the central office location within a network of a telco. Well, this is huge for the telcos because for years, you know, as I keep talking about their hard network, but their cost per bit has been coming down. They're responsible for putting in that infrastructure, maintaining that infrastructure, and then you got the over-the-top providers, you know, laying out content, growing like crazy, has really disrupted that industry. This is going to change the way in which telcos are able to compete, is it not? It's a great point, yes. If you think about the last generation of evolution, you know, when we went to 4G and a smartphone came out, think about the Apple App Store as an example. Folks started not going to the telcos anymore for those services. They went to that OTT capability to get those applications. Now, think about in this edge world as we essentially are creating platforms for innovation, for businesses in all industries, and they can now innovate on those platforms and create an incredible value in their business. And the telcos now can add beyond just the transport capabilities of 5G, but artificial intelligence, automation, they can expose certain data capabilities that can make those applications smarter, understanding proximity data, that can be applied to things like logistics or pricing or as I said, operations like in manufacturing. So a tremendous new set of value. In fact, most analysts say a trillion dollar value is going to be created here. And the opportunity I see is that the open network platform becomes a way for the service providers to not only capture value for themselves, but to accelerate the value for businesses in all industries. Well, I think we're going to see some huge moves in the chessboard, more M&A. It's going to be a very exciting time. And of course, 5G is at the heart of it, Steve. I wonder if you could give us IBM's point of view in terms of where we are with 5G. I mean, sometimes I see it pop up on my phone and I'm like, come on, that's not real 5G quite yet recently. We heard recently that Apple might somewhat delay, you know, it's new phones, there may be 5Gs involved in that, but it's going to take some time for that infrastructure to roll out. But what's your point of view on sort of that timeframe and the business impact that we can all expect? Yeah, no, it's a good question and we will see it roll out over time. Some things are starting to roll out. Now think about stadiums or other venues, you know, where, you know, you have a manufacturing shop floor as an example, a oil rig off the coast. I mean, you have environments where you could create 5G infrastructure in a private model today. And then of course, consumer models are going to roll out as cities continue to get deployed by the various service providers. But I think the important point, which is what we've spoken about so far, is that as we start to create this platform capability around the edge, and we start to transform those network themselves inside the telcos to platform, we can start to capture those values today in a 4G world. And as 5G comes along, you just essentially evolve into the capabilities that that brings, especially with regards to latency and bandwidth. Now some applications where slicing will be really important. Think about a medical operation where a doctor is consulting on the surgery in a remote location. Now, if I know for sure that bandwidth is going to be there, that doctor no longer has to be in the same location as that robotic as an example. So the ability to have dedicated bandwidth, which will come with 5G will be an important attribute that gets added. I mean, the possibilities are really mind boggling. I mean, you mentioned stadiums. And of course, hopefully at some point, we'll be able to go to football games again. But I mean, you know, the last decade was all about how big can you make the screen in the stadium and versus this screen, right? This is where a lot of the action is going to be now. Replays and just the whole experience of ordering goods and services. And then of course, hardened environment, like oil rigs, et cetera. So really, we're not just going to return to the last decade, we've been talking about a lot here. Last question. Go ahead, please. I'm just going to say, yeah, one of the, an example that I like to mention, just because it kind of brings us all together, think about first response. Now we're in the midst of a COVID thing, but soon in California again, unfortunately we'll probably get close to fire season. Think in a 5G edge world, what that might look like. So the minute that fire starts in some location in California, drones are in the air, sending video down to an edge platform that's being analyzed to understand where that fire is going. And importantly, everything that's in its path and how to best battle it. Sensors coming in from IoT centers in the area, feeding in data, our weather company app, feeding in real-time weather statistics, windpads, temperature changes that are going to influence the way that that fire performed. And now with announcement we made with Samsung just recently, with our edge platform, the ability to have those first responders have sensors on them, Samsung devices that are measuring their vital signs. And with the predictive models that are being built, we'll know whether that first responder's in distress or about to be in distress. The ability to scale our inbound communications capability digitally, so that tap pots can handle this enormous increase in the amount of folks calling in to get information on what's happening in real-time. And of course with the AI in that edge platform, moving all of that physical equipment, the asset, humans, the first responders in the optimal position at all time in order to get that fire out as soon as possible. I think it's a good example of how we can see these capabilities come together in a 5G and Edge world and allow us to get enormous value, saving lives, saving property, responding to an incident like that. It's a great example of how you're going to put innovation into action because you touched all points. Imagine the amount of data now that's being created and that example that you just gave, I mean, it's just going exponential, applying artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, and then the other phrase you use is real-time. We're talking about real-time or near real-time decisions actually being made potentially oftentimes by the machines or in combination with humans so that these actions can be taken. And of course it's all occurring on an infrastructure that's sort of an expanding definition of cloud, not just on-prem, not just hybrid, not just multi-cloud, but now the Edge. It's really going to be an exciting 10 years. You got it exactly right. And importantly, using that example, once that fire is put out, that Edge platform can wind back down to where it was before the incident occurred, but all the intelligence that was gained during that can be taken to the next incident as it happens. So this agility becomes really powerful because we get the cumulative learning that happens in these models going forward. Amazing, so where can people go to get some more information on IBM's Edge approach? Yeah, if you go to ibm.com, you'll see information on both on IBM Edge solutions that we're putting forward into Marketplace and what we're doing specifically with the telecommunications service providers to help them transform their networks to take advantage of this incredible opportunity. Well, Steve, thanks so much for your time. Really a great discussion. Appreciate you coming on and sharing with our community. My pleasure, thank you. And thank you, everybody. This is theCUBE's continuous coverage of IBM Sync 2020, the digital event experience. My name is Dave Vellante, keep it right there, but right back, right after this short break.