 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona for MWC24. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, my co-host from day one, 14th season Dave. We've got Savannah's here, we've got Shelley. theCUBE team's expanding with theCUBE research, formerly Wikibon growing. We've got theCUBE team continuing to expand and of course SiliconANGLE, more traffic there than ever before. As the world goes next level cloud, cloud has changed the game. Now it's changing telecom. We've got a great guest here, Dr. Ishwar Parulkar, who's the chief technologist of the telecom edge cloud for AWS, Amazon web services. Dr. Ishwar, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Cloud has made it and penetrated and infiltrated the ethos of telecom, finally. Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. So you got a telecom background, give us your background and how you got here and what you do at AWS, and we'll get into good chat. So I've been at AWS for about eight years now in the role of the chief technologist for this vertical. I spent several years before coming to AWS in this industry. Around 2014, 15, there was a lot of talk about 5G virtualized networks, APIs, and edge cloud as well, mobile edge computing, what's called MEC Mac. And I was convinced that the cloud had a big role to play in these technology transitions, which is what brought me to AWS in 2016. It's been a journey, it's taken a few years to really afford the cloud to understand what the telco industry does and what could be done. And vice versa, it's taken some time for the telco industry to understand what the cloud could do. But we're here now at Mobile World Congress, it's been, it's our third year. So it's quite evident now that the cloud is the central part. It's not even a lot of Amazon, Dave and I both have done a lot of AWS interviews. Clint Crozier and I joked last time he was on theCUBE, there's no edge in space, because the world's, where does it stop? You know, you got space, you got earth, you got networks merging. So obviously connectivity is driving this show. Cloud has come in and changed the game because developers are in the cloud. They're using APIs as you guys that pioneered, we talked many times. But what your blog post wrote last week and what you're doing here at the show is interesting because you're saying that the telco is an API, I'm oversimplifying it, but if the telco is an API, then the developers who know APIs, they're the users. And therefore the developer conversations already built in to all the real critical work being done now on transit, 5G, seamless mobility, these new abstractions. Is that right? What is your vision? Explain the telco API and how that impacts developers, ultimately where the applications are going to come from. So if you look at what the cloud is, it's a large scale, multi-tenanted compute and storage infrastructure. And over the 18 years, we've built a large business out of it by creating this infrastructure, creating services on top and abilities for developers to write applications. But all of that stuff, all of the innovation, all of the technology is offered and consumed through APIs. So we have 240 services built using thousands of APIs and all the developers see, all that our cloud users see are APIs. It's a sea of APIs. And one piece that was missing was the connectivity piece. So we have compute, we have storage, we have databases, we have machine learning stack. And now what this is bringing to the equation to the developers is the connectivity piece. Now they can use all of these other services that we have and telco, connected from telco, all through APIs to build applications that are network aware and applications that were not possible before. So I think that's really the value to developers. As the telcos see the value of data, which they have a lot of and they have a device access, the edge now becomes very interesting with cloud enabled edge. So okay, you public cloud, I have a lot of stuff in AWS, I'm a customer. But I have my on premise, which is a big edge and the edge itself where the telcos are providing services, private 5G, business 5G. What's the connection point for AWS? How do you guys bring that together with the telcos, make money and you guys expand your cloud operation footprint? Yeah, so there's different notions of edge. And around 2017, 16, 17, there was a lot of movement around hybrid edge and conversations around what does hybrid edge mean on prem versus cloud. And we took our time to really understand what was really needed in this space. And the way we have approached the edge is about bringing the cloud to the edge. It's not just servers sitting in an edge location. It's not just a rack of servers that you have to put together a cobble software and get it going. It's actually a piece of the cloud coming to the edge. And what that means is from day one when you turn the power on, all the services that are available in our large regions and data centers are available at the edge. So it's a reflection of the cloud at the edge. What that allows you to do is firstly run the same applications that run in the public cloud in the regions on the edge seamlessly. There's no change. What runs in the regions and the big data centers runs in the edge. You can move things around. You can migrate things from the edge to the region. You can build applications which have a dual mode. Like if you look at most machine learning applications, there's training which needs to be done in large, needs large compute capacity and there's inference which can happen at the edge. So you can build this bimodal applications where part is in the public cloud part is in the edge. So that's our approach to the edge which is really bringing the edge cloud, not just putting servers at the edge. So how does that relate to the hardened telco stacks? You got this, you know it well, the telco stacks been pretty robust but inflexible for years. As it disaggregates, how does that evolve? Is it the BSS and OSS systems that are going first? Other parts of the stack that are moving to the cloud on the edge help us to paint a picture of that. So cloud adoption is a journey and we see this in all other verticals as well. When a company adopts a cloud you phase it based on the workloads that make the most sense that are the right ones to start understanding or applying cloud principles and so forth. In the telco space, what we see is the OSS, BSS one workloads are the first ones to get adopted because they are more similar to enterprise workloads. They can be run in the large central data centers. So they have characteristics that make them the first candidate typically in terms of adoption. Then we have the IMS and the packet core and we've seen traction on that now. I mean, in the last couple of years we've seen more adoption of that. And lastly is the radio access network as well. Now radio access network is quite performance demanding. It requires accelerators. It's also very distributed, it requires a far edge. So as you move from centralized to distributed, as you move from relatively not as performance intensive to requiring performance, that's kind of the adoption journey we see from more centralized to more distributed and from workloads that look similar to enterprise workloads to very, very telco specific workloads. And so it's a journey, so it doesn't happen overnight. But the key challenges was we see it and we've been talking about it now for a couple of years is to be able to replicate that stability because while we sometimes, John talks about the glacial pace of telco, but it works. They do good at connectivity. How, where are we on the spectrum or the curve of that maturity with sort of the distributed, more open network being as reliable? Are we just getting started? Are we well on the way? So the cloud was built with some fundamental principles. Security is one of them, you know. If you go back to the early days of the cloud, enterprises would not trust their data, their managing the control over their servers to anybody else. So we had to focus tremendously on making sure these were secure from grounds up, right? That is what lend to the trust of these IT organizations to run the workloads in the cloud. Reliability is the same thing. We had to be, we had to make sure that we build the infrastructure grounds up right from the bottom most layers of the stack to the top most layers to be very, very reliable. Otherwise, enterprises would not have moved the workloads to the cloud. So we have constructs like availability zones. We call them availability zones, which are for, you know, multiple data centers which comprise of- Not just one data center. We know. Not just one data center, right? So it's in many ways much more reliable than something that an individual enterprise can afford, right? They do some level of reliability at hardware redundancy, but we have actually multiple data centers. And we can, they don't have to incur all the cost of four or five copies of these things because we are multi-tenanted. We are large-scale. We use elasticity to manage this. So it's a much more reliable model at a lower cost that we can offer from the cloud. So coming back to your developer question. You know, the old days, everybody developed their own applications. And before SaaS it was COTS, remember COTS commercial off the shelf software. And then that became, you know, SaaS. Who were the developers today? You mentioned the applications on top of the network. Are these sort of new applications that are going to be SaaS or are they more internal that is sort of new invention within companies that are more, you know, bringing competitive advantage? Thinking, again, back to the pre-COTS days. Yeah. No, so it's going to be all flavors of software deployment. It could be SaaS. It could be other models of deployment. But these are just applications that developers writing today. They can be enhanced with network or telco APIs. And then there could be applications which we've not thought about, which will come up because once you put the APIs in the hands of the developers, right? So my, the analogy I give is the iPhone, right? Nobody would have imagined the type of apps and the number of apps that were developed when the SDK was opened up, right? It's the same thing with developers. You have to put it in their hands and the creativity will be unleashed. But we are already seeing the early seeds of what's possible. So we anti-fraud, we announced an anti-fraud solution. And this was, this is for banking financial services where they use biometric data, but they can use additional data from the telecom networks through APIs to know whether the swim, the SIM has been swapped in the phone is the mobile number, the right mobile number associated with that person. So it just makes the security and the anti-fraud detection even stronger, right? So you will see a class of applications which exist today, but which can be made better with network information. And then there will be a class of applications which are completely new, which were not possible before. So on those examples, is that part of the open gateway initiative that these APIs are going to be available? Is that just Telcos having their own APIs? Can you like parse the difference between the nuance there? Yeah, so Telcos will offer their own APIs as well. What open gateway is doing is standardizing them across Telcos. So one key thing that we need to understand and appreciate in this is that application developers write an application and they want it to run anywhere, anywhere, everywhere. They don't want the application tied to a particular operator. So if you're running a banking app, you could be a customer of one operator or you could be some other person could be a customer of another operator. And the same application needs to run with all of them. So you need standardization of these APIs. So even though it's coming from a different operator, it has to be the same API, same format that can be integrated into the application. So what open gateway is doing is creating that standardization across operators. So they can come together and agree on that API which connects to their network. Are you behind open gateway? You involved in that process? Yes, absolutely. So what's the status of that? Because we were debating that, we were discussing, is it how real is it? Who's involved? I saw the announcement 47 now. Net operators are on it. That comprises over 200, close to 250 networks. So it's growing, it's growing very fast in terms of the membership of the operators. The open gateway initiative has made progress in terms of defining a reference architecture so that telcos can partner with other channels like hyperscalers to expose their APIs to their developer system. So we can now use these APIs from multiple telcos and expose them. It's operational. Well, it's an architecture which the operators are agreeing on so that they can offer these APIs in a standardized common manner to one channel. So just so I get the progression where we are, they've got architecture. The next step would be they're rolling them out and making them available, absolute developers which is not yet available. Well, they are available today, not in the form of aggregation, but if you follow the announcements, there's already announcements. My blog is about that. Because it is about offering these APIs from multiple operators through AWS. So that's starting to happen now. So what are the low-hanging fruit white space here as you'll see developers jumping in on? You mentioned some of the SIM cards swapping. Yeah. Actually security would probably be a big one, right? Yeah, so to me there are three areas which are low-hanging fruit or ready to be adopted and already be seeing traction from application developers. One is the space around security, anti-fraud, user authentication. There are some APIs that help in that. Financial Services is one key area where that plays a role. User identity in virtual environments is another one. So that's one space. The other space is around quality on demand API which is the API that allows some level of controlling of bandwidth and slicing in the network. A lot of the video streaming, media, gaming type of applications need that. So we're seeing applications in that space starting to use that. And the third one is around location. Location services and getting the location of the device through an API with autonomous vehicles, with our asset tracking systems that we use in our supply chain for retail. We're seeing definitely an adoption there. So that would be used for the mobility seamless, private network between public networks. Is that what the seamless mobility piece comes in? There is a seamless mobility piece. So that's in private networks also, there is an application. But as I said, in terms of APIs, it's the authentication, security, anti-fraud related APIs, the quality on demand API and the location APIs which are getting the most traction right now. What's the monetization? I mean, I get how AWS makes money. How do the developers make money? Do they pay for that sort of data? Is it, are they building kind of new services on top of that? I mean, the ones that you've mentioned are actually very kind of network centric. You know, the telemetry and understanding sort of the patterns, the data patterns, the fraud detection, obviously. So those are services that will layer on top of the cloud that somebody's going to pay for. Maybe the bank, maybe the consumer, but it sounds like not necessarily. Yeah, it's like any other application, right? I mean, there is the application developer, the group of folks that who are going to develop the applications are going to make money because they're developing applications. The consumers, depending on the application, you know, will have some role to play there. The key question here is how do telcos monetize it? And a lot of the discussions in the operator community right now is how do you monetize them? How do you price these APIs? This is something we've done over 18 years now. We've learned a lot in this. There are APIs that developers are willing to pay a lot for. There are APIs they expect for free. It just depends on what the API does, what the outcome of the API is. And that value will be determined as we put these out and developers get to use them, right? Amazon turned the data center into an API, so the value is very obvious, right? I need storage, I need compute. I think the telcos saw that and said, I don't know if we want to be turned into an API yet. But they got a good monetization with their data. And I think application developers will probably come in at the infrastructure, fill in the white spaces, then go after the apps for user experience, probably some sort of value I'd imagine there, like any app market, you know. Yeah, it's a large pie and there's enough to go on for everybody. It just depends on how it's going to play out, right? We have to see, you have to put it out in the hands of the developers, see what the applications are, really test out and understand where the value is and you know, that will determine the economics here. Ishwar, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time coming on, sharing the perspective. Quick, we got 30 seconds left. What's next for you? What's going to happen with AWS and telco? What's on your agenda? What events do you go to? What's, take us through, what's the next year look like for you? Obviously, reinvents in December, we'll be there. Yeah, so yeah. We think cloud has a big role to play in terms of helping telcos transform from connectivity providers to digital service providers. We are well on that journey by running networks on the cloud, working on these APIs, exposing them. AI and artificial intelligence and machine learning is going to be a big transformative technology. So we're looking at how we can apply generative AI and our other artificial intelligence and machine learning services to help telcos really transform their businesses. Not only help with the customer interface, but also network operations and other business processes. It's going to be a really exciting journey for the cloud and the telcos coming together. Yeah, timing's perfect, acceleration's going to go fast. The pace of play will be much faster than it was in the past couple years. It has to, because the world needs to get connectivity. Edge is going to be a big part of this inference. So we're going to be following it. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Okay, we'll be right back. More CUBE coverage in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break.