 Well, welcome to theCUBE's coverage for Mobile World Congress 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here in person as well as remote. It's a hybrid event. We're on the ground in Mobile World Congress Green, all the action here. We're remote with Amal Padka, who's the Managing Director of the Telecom Industry Solutions Team at Google Cloud, a big leader and driving a lot of the change. Amal, thank you for coming on theCUBE here and the hybrid event for Mobile World Congress. Thank you, John. Thank you, John. Thank you for having me. So hybrid event, which means it's in person. We're on the floor as well as doing remote interviews and people are virtual. This is the new normal. Kind of highlights where we are in this telecom world because last time Mobile World Congress actually had a physical event was winter of 2019. A ton has changed in the industry. Look at the momentum at the edge. Hybrid cloud is now standard. Multi-cloud is being set up as we speak. This is all now the new normal. What is your take? It's pretty active in your industry. Tell us your opinion. Yes, John. I mean, the last two years have been seismic to say the least, right? I mean, in terms of the change that the CSP industries had had to do. You know, John, in the last two years, the importance of a CSP infrastructure has never become so important, right? The infrastructure is paramount. I'm talking to you remotely over a CSP infrastructure right now and everything that we're doing in the last two years, whether it's working or studying or entertaining ourselves, all on that CSP infrastructure. So from that perspective, they are really becoming a critical national global information fabric on which the society is actually depending on. And that we see at Google as well in the sense that we have seen up to 60% increase in demand, John, in the last two years for that infrastructure. And then when I look at the industry itself, unfortunately, all of that huge demand is not translating into revenue, right? Because as an industry, the revenue is still flatlining. In fact, the forecasted revenue for globally, for all the industry over the next 12 months is three to 5% negative on revenue, right? So one starts to think, how come there is so much demand over the last two years post pandemic? And that's not translating to revenue. Having said that, the other thing that's happening is this demand is driving significant CAPEX and OPEX investments in the infrastructure as much as eight to $900 billion over the next decade is going to get spent in this infrastructure from our perspective. Which means it's really a perfect storm, John, right? We have massive demand, massive need to invest to meet that demand, yet not translating to revenue. And the crux of all this is customer experience because ultimately all of that translates into not having that kind of radically disruptive or transformational customer experience, right? So that's a backdrop that we find ourselves in the industry. And that really sets a stage for us to look at these challenges in terms of how does the CSP industry as a whole grow top line, radically transform TSTCO at the same time reinventing the customer experience and finding those capital efficiencies. It's almost an impossible problem to solve. Yeah, it's a perfect storm. The waves are kind of coming together to form one big wave. You mentioned CAPEX and OPEX, that's obviously changing the investments are there, post pandemic growth and change in user behavior and expectations. The modern applications are being built on top of the infrastructure that's changing. All of this is being driven by cloud native and that's clear. And you're seeing a lot more open kind of approaches, IT and OT coming together, whatever you want to do, this is just, it's a collision, right? It's a collision of many things. And this positive innovation coming out of us. I have to ask you, what are you seeing on the solutions that are showing the most promise for these telco industry leaders? Because they're digitally transforming, so they got to refactor their platforms while enabling innovation, which is a key growth for the revenue. Yes. So John, from a solution standpoint, what we actually did first and foremost as Google Cloud was look at ourselves. So just like the transformation we just talked about in the CSP industry, we are seeing Google being transformed over the last two decades or so, right? And it's important to understand that there's a lot Google did over the last two decades that we can actually now externalize all of that innovation, all of that open source, all of that multi-cloud was originally built for all the Google applications that all of us use daily, whether it's YouTube or mail or maps, same infrastructure, same open source, same multi-cloud. And we decided to sort of use the same paradigms to build the telecom solutions that I'm going to talk about next, right? So that's important to bear in mind that those assets were there and we wanted to externalize those assets, right? There are really four big solutions that are resonating really well with our CSP partners, John. Number one, to your point is how can they monetize the edge? All of this happens at the edge, all of this gets converged at the edge. If we believe with 5G acting as the brilliant catalyst to really drive this edge deployment, CSPs would be in a very strong position partnering with cloud players like ourselves to drive growth, not just for their top line but also to add value to the actual end enterprises that are seeking to use that edge. Let me give you a couple of examples. We've been working with industries like retail and manufacturing to create edge solutions in the post pandemic world. Solutions like contactless shopping or visual inspection of an assembly line in a manufacturing plant without the need for having a human there because of the digitization of workforce which meant these kind of solutions can actually work well at the edge driven by 5G but of course they can't be done in isolation. So what we do is we partner with CSPs, we bring our set of solutions and we actually launched in December 30 partners that are already on our Google cloud solutions. And then we partner with the CSPs based on our infrastructure and their infrastructure to ultimately bring this all to life at the end customer which often tends to be an enterprise whether it's a manufacturing plant or a retail giant. Yeah, you guys got some great examples there. I love that edge story. I think it's huge. I think it's only going to get bigger. I got to ask you while I got you here because again, you're in the industry you're the managing director so you have to oversee this whole telecom industry but it's bigger, it's beyond telecom, right? Now telecom is just one other edge network piece of the pie and the sugar computing as we say. So I have to ask you, one of the big things that Google brings to the table is the developer mojo and open source and scale obviously the scales unprecedented as everyone knows everyone knows that but ecosystems are super important and telcos kind of really aren't good at that, right? So, you know the telco ecosystem was, I mean, I'd say okay but mostly driven by carriers and moving bits from point A to point B but now you got a developer mindset, public cloud, developer ecosystem. How is this changing the landscape of the CSP and how are they changing? How is it changing this cloud service providers ability to execute? Because that's the key in this new world. What's your opinion? Absolutely, John. So there are two things there, two dimensions to look at. One is when we came to market a couple of years ago with Anthos, we recognized exactly what you said, John which is the world is moving to multicloud hybrid cloud. We needed to provide a common platform that the developer community can utilize through microservices and API. And that platform had to by definition work not just from Google cloud but any cloud. It could work on any public cloud can work on CSP's private cloud and of course it works on Google cloud, right? The reason was once you deploy Anthos once as a seamless application development platform you could put all kinds of developer apps on top. So I just talked about 5G Edge, John, a minute ago. Those apps can sit on Anthos but at the same time, IT to your point, John. IT apps could also sit on the same Anthos paradigm and network apps. So as network start becoming cloud native whether it's RAN, whether it's ORAN whether it's 5G core, same principle. And that's why we believe when we partner with CSP's we are saying, hey, you give this Anthos to an ecosystem of community whether that community is network whether that community is IT whether that community is Edge apps all of those can reside seamlessly on this sort of Anthos fabric, John. Yeah, and that's going to set the table for multi cloud which is basically cloud words for multi-vendor, multi-app. Amal, I got to ask you all you have here. First of all, thank you for coming on and sharing your insights. It's really great industry perspective and obviously Google cloud has got huge scale great leadership and again, you know the big cloud players are moving in and helping out and enabling a lot of value. I got to ask you, if you don't mind sharing if someone asked you, hey, Amal tell me about the impact that public cloud is having on the telco industry. What would you say? What's the what's the answer to that? Cause a lot of people are like, okay public cloud, I get it. I know what it looks like but now everyone knows it's going hybrid. So everyone asks you, we'll ask you the question what is public cloud doing for the telecom sector? Yeah, I think it's doing three things John and great question, by the way. Number one, we are actually providing unprecedented amount of insights on data that the CSP traditionally already had but have never looked at it from the angle we have looked at, whether that insights are at a network layer, whether those insights are to personalize customer experiences on the front end systems or whether those insights are to drive care solutions in contact centers and so on and so forth. So it's a massive uplift of customer experience that we can help on, right? So that's a very important point because we do have a significant amount of leadership John at Google Cloud on analytics and data and insights, right? So and we offer those to our CSP partners. Number two is really what I talked about which is helping them build an ecosystem because let's take retail as an example as a minimum there are five constituents in that ecosystem John, there is a CSP there is Google Cloud, there is actual retail store there is a hardware supplier there is a software developer all of them as a minimum have to work together to build that ecosystem which is where we give those solutions, right? So that's a second part. And then the third part is as they move towards cloud native we are really helping them change their business model to become a DevOps a cloud native mindset not just a cloud native network or IT but a cloud native mindset that creates unparalleled agility and flexibility in how they work as a business. Those are the three things I would say as a response to that question. And also the retail is a great vertical for Google to go in there given the Amazon fear out there people want this for certainly low hanging fruit. I think the DevOps piece is going to be a big winning opportunity to see how the developers get driven into the landscape. I think that's a huge point. Amal, that's really great insight. Final question for you while I got you here if someone says, Hey, what's happened in the industry since 2019? We last time we had Mobile World Congress they were talking speeds and feeds now the world has changed we're coming out of the pandemic California is opening up there's going to be a physical event the world's going hybrid certainly on the event and certainly cloud. What's different in the telecom industry from many, many months ago over a year and a half ago from 2019? I would say primarily it's the adoption of digital everywhere which previously there were all these inhibitions and oh, would this work? Would my customer systems become fully digital? Would I be able to offer AR VR experiences? Ah, that's a futuristic thing, you know and suddenly the pandemic has created this acceleration that says, oh, even post pandemic half my customers are always going to talk to me via digital channel only which means the way they experience us has to be through these new experiences whether it's AR VR whether it's some other type of applications. So that has been accelerated John and the CSPs have therefore really started to go to the application and to the services which is why you're seeing less on speeds and feeds because 5G is here, 5G is being deployed. Now how do we monetize 5G? How can we leverage the application on top? So that's the biggest change. There's down stack and then there's a top of the stack for applications and certainly there's a lot of assets in the telecom landscape, a lot of value a lot of refactoring going on and new opportunities that are out there. Great, great conversation. Thank you, Padka, managing director, telecom industry solution. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Thank you John, thank you for having me. Okay, Mobile World Congress here in person and hybrid and remote. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thank you for watching. We are here in person at the Cloud City Expo community area. Thanks for watching.