 Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's coverage here on location in Las Vegas for ReInvent 2023. I'm your host, John Furrier with Dave Vellante. It's our 11th year covering ReInvent. We've seen the revolution happening over the years. Step up and function. This year, though, the inflection points generated by AI is cloud-native, Kubernetes mature. As you're starting to see a lot more of the vertical industries really explode with value propositions on new apps, new markets, how data is being formed. We've got a great guest here, Shobhas Namvir, who's the general manager of the Telco Business Unit at AWS. And if you watch theCUBE, you know we love the Telco disruption, the enablement. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you for having me here. Pretty exciting year for us that we've spent a fair bit of time talking about all the changes happening in the Telco business. But if you look at it, our customers are starting to say, how does something like Generative AI start to impact their business? I had a fun conversation with about 20 leaders that are driving innovation across Telcos yesterday. And they're excited, right? And you look around and you see the energy in the business around us. It's a time in the industry where everybody's looking for solutions, where they come in and say, what moves my business? And I think all of the announcements we've had yesterday start to drive it. Let's get into the announcement, but first set the table on the Telco market. It's been kind of like this acceleration building up to a flash point of, the tipping point of adoption of cloud in Telco. You know, going from the old days, okay, we got our own stuff. We got a lot of data, certainly tons of data, great customers, but it's a key part of the edge, it's a key part of cloud life. How are they now from a progress standpoint, from a cloud native standpoint, is the Telco industry in terms of where they're at? Because they've got to see Generative AI coming down the train tracks hard at them. And that's an opportunity for them. Where are they in the progress in your mind? So we've been working with Telcos for about 10 plus years now. As you can imagine, most of it started with more enterprise IT type workloads. I mean, we got a little closer to the network workloads, did a lot more BSS, OSS, and then for some of the early adopters, you started to see the core network workloads start to switch up. It dished networks in the U.S. Obviously, nationwide network rolled out in under 18 months with a fully cloud native stack. So that's an amazing story there. And all of them are starting to think about, great, that disruption is happening across their entire business and across the entire technology stack that we're working with. How does Generative AI have an impact? It's not just a Generative AI story, though, right? It's AI and data. How does it apply to their business to get increased revenues, reduce the cost of serving? And then finally, like adjacencies, is an interesting conversation we're starting to have and they're asking us for help and we're excited to do it. So dish is interesting because they're a disruptor, right? They're looking at the Telco business and saying, hey, we can add apps on top and move fast and then you've got the preservationists, I'll call them, right? They have this fossilized stack and everything's integrated and yet they see the disruption of the cloud. So some are putting their toe in the water, some are still very fearful. It seems like a very bifurcated market still today. How do you see that playing out? I would say it's more journey and as nationally critical infrastructure, it is hard for people to make a decision to completely disrupt. But the early use cases where they're starting to see their peers make these strides, it gives them confidence. And again, yesterday sat down with 20 of these innovation leaders. The conversation was not how do I go slow? It was how do I go bigger? If I have constraints, how do I transform bigger? And I'm pretty excited about it. Thanks for the reinvent news for you guys here. What was the big story? The data obviously is a big part of it. I'm sure that the Telcos got to see the data opportunity. What was the key in news and announcements from your group? You mean the big story outside of Generative Air? Well, that's there. I mean, that's going to be the macro. I mean, Generative Air is going to be the accelerant because it's going to impact developers, it's going to impact how data is organized, how it's collected and served up and all that was laid out beautifully by Adam and Swami. So I got to think that there's going to be much more activity going on from a developer standpoint. Foundation model is going to mature and the Telcos have that edge piece so nailed down too. So try to connect the dots here. What are some of the key news? So that was a big part of the story. Generative AI has been in the news for a while now but Telcos are starting to figure out how to use it and for that they needed access to some key capabilities like protecting the data when they use it. How do they make sure that they can operate at a cost that works for their business? So a lot of the announcements around how do you put the right kind of rules to make sure you're protecting the data that's coming in? How do you put the right kind of agent infrastructure to be able to use something like Bedrock? So the Bedrock set of announcements were interesting for our Telcos. The NVIDIA announcement obviously has been huge so I've seen a lot of inbound interest around that. Overall though I think what I am seeing is a lot of Telcos came in with a checklist of things that said can I use this set of technologies and one of the leaders yesterday mentioned I came in with a checklist, I sat in front of Adam and I checked off everything on the list. That's awesome. That's awesome. I mean that's the whole point about the narrative last year was Dave the transition from Telcos being like a tech company, like how do they operate at scale? Some of these big things. How is that going on in your means with the Telcos? What are some of their big challenges and what are the opportunities? Is it cultural? Is it they can't get the speed, the tech fast enough? What are some of the things that may be slowing them down? It's both, there's a little bit of culture because it requires a fair amount of experimentation and then if you are critical infrastructure experimentation on that is a hard mindset to get into. But working with us and thinking about how Amazon builds things, how AWS builds things, we're helping teach a lot of our Telcos how to operate that way as well, which is exciting for them. So that's one portion of it. There's also like a whole ISV side of the story. A lot of the tech inside Telcos is ISV dependent. We're working with those partners to help them transform and then that actually starts to feed into what the Telcos can do. So both sides need to work. It's such an interesting dynamic because first of all, they're great at connectivity. I mean, this stuff works, right? And it throws off cash, but at the same time, they're very aware that we can't have what happened with the OTT vendors happen again with 5G. We have to monetize 5G. We're putting in all this infrastructure. And then the engineers say, oh, you know, oh, ran. Well, it's not quite there yet. So it's a really challenging dynamic for them. But at the same time, I think they realize and now especially heightened by generative AI that if they don't move fast, the same thing that happened with OTT is going to happen. I think they're moving faster than you think. We've had videos that we put up at a couple of the talks we did where customers have come out and said, for example, that they're working on a connected customer journey with an Amdox company, right? And that shows that it is with FedRock and with Amdox that there is actually a solution that has been deployed. We are in the demo lounge here talking with Cox about how Cox is using generative AI to go look at and query their network footprint and come back and say, where is the challenge we have? And in that querying process, identify opportunities to go react to it and then start to say, proactively, how do I go fix it? So if I challenge that they're not moving fast. So that makes sense to me. And so my question would be, so I buy that, what you just said, especially with gen AI, and there's so many use cases for them. Is it manifesting in the form of disaggregating that fossilized stack with the traditional telcos? That's where I see them not, there's only so fast you can move, but ultimately it has to go to your world. I mean, you're sitting in a, the market's just coming right to the Amazons of the world. We always work backwards from what a customer needs. So I don't think we are arrogant enough to say it's all coming to us. We've got to find the right infrastructure models and innovate on that infrastructure model to give them the scale and the breadth that they need to be able to deploy their solutions. We've got to find the right model for their workloads to run on top of that infrastructure and then innovate there. And then above that, there are like use cases that we've got to help figure out and define, right? And then we talk about adjacencies, things like a telco starting to get into the smart home market. How do we help you with that? And across all of these, we have to provide the right developer experience, we have to provide the right security models, we have to provide the right privacy models for data. These are the enablers that we're going to provide telcos and that stack and the innovation of the stack is what we're hoping they're going to depend on to. Yeah, I think you guys are perfectly positioned on this one. I mean, we've been covering this for a while. Telco's got great network infrastructure and the key part of this show beyond the chips and the GNI is that what's around the chips is Adam when we had a briefing with Adam before the event. He's like, it's not just the chips, it's around them. The NVIDIA news and having been seeing Jensen on stage was a huge checkbox. The GPUs are all there. There's no reason to go anywhere else. But to Amazon, I mean, they can put up there, but that comes down to the question of what are the use cases that you're seeing and how do you break that down in the relationship of the cloud service that they can deploy and their network infrastructure. So there's two threads. I got to use cases, working back from the use case, okay, what cloud services can I use and then how do I leverage my infrastructure? It might be a telco dynamic. How do you see that? I won't say power dynamic, but that's basically you got cloud services and then they have a network infrastructure. It is definitely a partnership. A lot of it is how does the telco improve itself? And that is in things like the customer journey said they're driving, right? How do you get better at it? But there's also like the revenue and the growth story that you have to tell. And in there, what we're seeing is telcos are starting to work with us to say, okay, if I want to provide global infrastructure and I'm not a global player, how do I do that with something like CloudWAN and use AWS backbone to scale out? We did the Kuiper announcement yesterday and I had customers coming in and saying, okay, now this lets me actually meet the needs for enterprises that want to be global and I can build that with AWS and it's not a, part of it is competitive, but part of it is like generating the next set of revenue. You're enabling them. Absolutely. You're enabling them to generate value faster. And then to the day value creation is the opportunity for them to build on top of the cloud by leveraging their existing stuff and new. And we're very excited about figuring out how the industry can grow. That's what we want. They're going to love the low code, no code too. They got to love the interface of what's happening at the developer level. I mean, when Adam laid out the foundation model layer, the new GNI stack, you know, we were saying on theCUBE that it's going to be a feeding frenzy of developers kicking the tires on that, meaning they're going to start jumping in and coding. And then the question that we've been kind of trying to figure out here in theCUBE is, what's the data engineering puzzle look like? Because you got to feed the system because the developers want the same experience of getting with security built in from day one with governance shift left into the pipeline so, or low code, no code. So you got to have a rethinking of the data management model. And that's a big question. What's your reaction to that? First of all, have you played with party rock? I have actually. Yeah, it's fantastic, right? It's a learning tool. But if you think about what telcos really need, it is the built in security and the privacy of that data across the entire stack. And there's, I'd argue that we are the best place for telcos to put that data in and build applications, build capabilities on top of it. Plus, we provide a developer experience now that allows them to take advantage of this and it's all in building. I saw Max Peterson, the keynote, I've been walking by, I know he's got a new role with Sovereign Cloud. That's a huge advantage you guys have in the countries, in the regions and the local zones now with that. How is that playing into your motions and with your customers in terms of, they got to be loving that ability to have that data stay within the environments that they're in. We've always had models where you can do that. So if you think about the cloud continuum that we have, we've got our regions and then we've got local zones and we've got, we announced earlier this year, dedicated local zones where if you have a need, we can place a local zone for you that meets the constraints you have. But for very particular use cases, especially in Europe, because of the regulation there is, we have worked with our customers and the regulators to figure out what the model looks like. It has dedicated infrastructure, it's separated from everything else we have. It is operated by local EU personnel and it unlocks a set of workloads that telcos are really interested in and they probably could not have addressed till this was launched. You got to love the market right now. I mean, is this going to be the year of telco? Is every year the year of telcos? I mean, it really is journey. Every year of telcos. But the market's so giant that that journey can just throw off a lot of opportunity along the way. Every year. Everyone, look, this is the year it's going to happen. But I think there's so much going on with, generally, it's a forcing function. I have to ask you, what do you think the coolest thing's going on in your world right now? If you had to zoom out and saying, the coolest thing that you're most excited about that's happening in your world, what would you say? The coolest thing is, any telco can be a global telco at this point, right? You start to think about what infrastructure do you need? What capabilities do you need that can be programmatically addressed that allow you to now serve customers across the globe without boundaries? You can do that starting today, starting as soon as CloudOne was announced, really. And then as Kuiper starts to become active across the globe, it gives you a whole new set of capabilities. That's the amazing disruption that's coming in. That's why the traditional telcos have to respond and innovate. Yeah, we've heard some other companies, Fax, I interviewed Fax, said a big Amazon customer, and they discovered with Genevieve I that they had existing data that they actually discovered that they're in a different business now. As a result, not a new business, it's an added business. They're bolting on data aggregation. They're actually getting other data into their data to create new data sets for their customers, so they actually realize that their data is so good that they are now integrating in other data. They never did that before. And so there's a wave of use AI to use what you got now, and then it opens up an aperture, potentially, for new business models. And I think that's, to me, what I'm seeing come out of this Gen AI is that there's an opportunity recognition going on around what happens next. Once I'm in with Genevieve I, in that, say, vertical, and so that's an interesting area. Do you see anything around the corner around what could be possible if Genevieve I goes, if you take it to the next level? Okay, let's assume that you're doing the AI wrappers, you got some AI bedrock going on, there's some new reasoning happening. What kinds of things happen next? No, that's a prediction, end of the year prediction, that always comes back to bite you. But I think over a five or a 10-year time horizon, and you say, we're going to start to have agents that are on our person, in our houses, in our at work. And these collect a lot of data, and they have to have the kind of inference that gives you insights over a long period of time. It generates the data, it collects the data, it gives you the inference over time. You then start to say, okay, how do I make sure all of that is protected? It has the right connectivity back into edge infrastructure or cloud infrastructure that you know is going to be dependable? I think that's where telcos are going to be. At scale, and the business apps and the consumer apps that can come out of this, and I think the telcos are like, why should we let Netflix have all the fun? We got to get some of that data. Well, the streaming conversation's a whole nother way. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. We'll see you in Barcelona in a couple months in MWC. Okay, we're going to send it back to Palo Alto, where the studio has more action going on for our special SuperCloud 5 re-invent edition. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after the short break.