 theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. We'll come back to Spain, everyone. Lisa Martin here with theCUBE, Dave Vellante, my co-host for the next four days. We're live in Barcelona, covering MWC23. This is only day one, but I'll tell you, the theme of this conference this year is velocity, and I don't know about you, Dave, but this day is flying by already. This is ecosystem day. We're going to have a great discussion on the ecosystem next. Well, we're seeing the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, and that necessitates an ecosystem. We're going to talk about OpenRAN. We've been talking about it, even leading up to the show. It's a critical technology enabler, and it's compulsory to have an ecosystem to support that. Absolutely compulsory. We've got two guests here joining us, Scott Thambogra, Vice President at Partnerships at Dell, and Scott Walker, Vice President at Global Telco Ecosystem Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you for having us. So you've got some news. This is day one of the conference. There's some news. Gautam, let's start with you, unpack it. Yeah, well, there's a lot of news, as you know, on Dell World. One of the things we're very excited to announce today is the launch of the OpenTelecom Ecosystems community. I think, Dave, as you mentioned, getting into an OpenRAN world is a challenge, and we know some of the challenges that our customers face. To help solve for those challenges, Dell wants to work with like-minded partners and customers to build innovative solutions and join good market. So we're launching that today. WindRiver is one of our flagship partners for that, and I'm excited to be here to talk about that as well. Can you guys talk a little bit about the partnership, maybe a little bit about WindRiver so the audience gets that context? Sure, absolutely, and the theme of the show, Velocity is what this partnership is all about. We create Velocity for operators if they want to adopt OpenRAN, right? We simplify it. WindRiver as a company has been around for 40 years. We were part of Intel at one point, and now we're independent, owned by a company called Aptiv. And with that, we get another round of investment to help continue our acceleration into this market. So the Dell partnership is about, like I said, Velocity accelerating the adoption. When we talk to operators, they have told us there are many roadblocks that they face, right? Like systems integration, operating at scale, because when you buy a traditional radio access network solution from a single supplier, it's very easy, it's works, it's been tested. When you break these components apart and disaggregate them, as we talked about, David, it creates integration points and support issues, right? And what Dell and WindRiver have done together is created a cloud infrastructure solution that could host a variety of RAN workloads and essentially create a two-layer cake. Overall, what we're trying to do is create a traditional RAN experience with the innovation, agility, and flexibility of OpenRAN. And that's really what this partnership does. So this workload innovation is interesting to me because you've got now developers, you know, what's the telco developer look like? You know, it's to be defined, right? I mean, it's like this white sheet of paper that can create all this innovation. And to do that, you've got to have, as I said earlier, an ecosystem, but you've got now, I'm interested in your OpenRAN agenda and how you see that sort of maturity model taking place. Because today, you've got disruptors that are going to lean right in, say, hey, yeah, that's great. The traditional carriers, they have to have a, they have to migrate, they have to have a hybrid world. We know that takes time. So what's that look like in the marketplace today? Yeah, so I mean, I can start, right? So from a Dell's perspective, what we see in the market is, yes, there is a drive towards, everyone understands the benefits of being open, right? There's the agility piece, the innovation piece, that's a no-brainer. The question is how do we get there? And I think that's where partnerships become critical to get there, right? So we've been working with partners like Wind River to build solutions that make it easier for customers to start adopting some of the foundational elements of an open network. The one of the purposes and the agenda of building this community is to bring like-minded developers, like you said, like we want those guys to come and work with the customers to create new solutions and come up with something creative which no one's even thought about that accelerates the adoption even quicker, right? So that's exactly what we want to do as well. And that's one of the reasons why we launched the community. Yeah, and what we find with a lot of carriers, they are used to buying, like I said, traditional ran solutions, which are provided from a single provider like Ericsson or Nokia and others, right? And we break this apart and you cloudify that every infrastructure, there's usually a skills gap we see at the operator level, right? And so from a developer standpoint, they struggle with having the expertise in order to execute on that. Wind River helps them working with companies like Dell, simplify that bottom portion of the stack, the infrastructure stack. So we lifecycle manage it, we test, we're continually testing it and integrating it so that the operator doesn't have to do that. In addition to that, Wind River also has a history and legacy of working with different RAN vendors, both disruptors like Mavinair and Parallel Wireless, as well as traditional RAN providers like Samsung, Ericsson and others soon to be announced. So what we're doing on the northbound side is making it easy by integrating that and on the southbound side with Dell so that again, instead of four or five solutions that you need to put together, it's simply two. And you think about today how you consume telco services or like there's these fixed blocks of services that you can buy, that has to change more like the app stores. It's got to be an open marketplace and that's where the innovation is going to come in. From the developers, top down maybe, how do you see that maturity model evolving? People want to know how long it's going to take. So many questions, when will open RAN be as reliable? Does it even have to be? So many interesting dynamics going on. Yeah, and I think that's something we at Dell are also trying to find out, right? So we have been doing a lot of good work here to help our customers move in that direction. The work with Dish is an example of that. But I think we do understand the challenges as well in terms of adopting the technologies and adopting the innovation that's been driven by open. So one of the agendas that we have as a company this year is to work with the community to drive this a lot further. We want to have customers adopt the technology more broadly with the Tier 1, Tier 2 telcos globally and our sales organizations are going to be working together with Wind Rivers to figure out who's the right set of customers to have these conversations with so we can start driving this agenda a lot quicker than what we have seen historically. And where are you having those customer conversations? Is it at the operator level? Is it higher? Is it both? Well, all operators are deploying 5G in preparation for 6G, right? And we're all looking for those killer use cases which will drive type line revenue and not just make it a TCO discussion. And that starts at a very basic level today by doing things like integrating with Juniper for their cloud router. So instead of at the Far-Edge sales site having a separate device that's doing the routing function, right? We take that and we cloudify that application running on the same server that's hosting the RAN applications to eliminate a device and reduce TCO. Now with Aptiv, which is primarily known as an automotive company, we're having lots of conversations including with Dell and Intel and others about vehicle-to-vehicle communication, vehicle-to-anything communication. And although that's a little bit futuristic there are shorter term use cases that like vehicle-to-vehicle accident avoidance which are going to be much nearer term than autonomous driving, for example, which will help drive traffic and new revenue streams for operators. So, wow, so many other things that's just opened up there too. But I want to come back to sort of the open-ran adoption and I think you're right, there's a lot of questions that still have to be determined but my question is this, based on your knowledge so far, does it have to be as hardened and reliable, obviously has to be low latency as existing networks or can flexibility like the cloud when it first came out, wasn't better than Enterprise IT, it was just more flexible and faster and you could rent it and is there a similar dynamic here where it doesn't have to replicate the hardened stack, it can bring in new benefits that drive adoption. What are your thoughts on that? There's a couple of things on that because Wind River, as you know, where our legacy in history is in embedded devices like F-15 fighter jets or the Mars rover or the James Webb telescope all run Wind River software. So, we know about can't fail ultra reliable systems and operators are not letting us off the hook whatsoever. It has to be as hardened and locked down as secure as a traditional ran environment otherwise they won't do it. That's table stakes. That gets us there and Wind River with our legacy in history and having operator experience running live commercial networks with a disaggregated stack in the tens of thousands of nodes, understand what this like because they're running live commercial traffic with live customers so we can't fail, right? And with that they want their cake and eat it too, right? Which is I want ultra reliable, I want what I have today but I want the agility and flexibility to onboard third party apps. Like for example, this JCNR, this Uniper cloud native router, you cannot do something as simple as that on a traditional ran appliance in an open ecosystem. You can take that workload and onboard it because it is an open ecosystem and that's really one of the true benefits. So, they want the mainframe but they want the flexibility of the developer cloud, right? That's right. They want to have their cake eat it too and not gain weight. Yeah, I mean, I come from the public cloud world. We all don't want to do that. I used to work with the public cloud company and nine years ago public cloud was in the same stage where you would go to a bank and they would be like, we don't trust the cloud, it's not secure, it's not safe. It was the digital natives that adopted it and that drove the industry forward, right? And that's where the enterprises that realized that they're losing business because of all these innovative new companies that came out. That's what I saw over the last nine years in the cloud space. I think in the telco space also something similar might happen, right? So a lot of the new age telcos are understanding the value are looking to innovate by adopting the open technologies but there's still some inertia and hesitancy for the reasons as Scott mentioned to go there so quickly. So we just have to work through and balance between both sides. Yeah, well with that said, if there's still some inertia but that there's a theme of velocity, how do you help organizations balance that so they trust evolving? Yeah, and I think this is where our solution like infrastructure block is this foundational pillar to make that happen, right? So if we can take away the concerns that the organizations have in terms of security, reliability from the fundamental elements that build their infrastructure by working with partners like Wind River where Dell takes the ownership end to end to make sure that the service works and we have those telco grade SLAs then the telcos can start focusing on what's next, the applications and the customer services on the top. Customer service, customer experience. You know, that's an interesting point Gallup brings up too because support is an issue too. We all talk about when you break these things apart it creates integration points that you need to manage, right? But there's also the support aspect of it. So imagine if you will, you had one vendor, you have an outage, you call that one vendor, one necktie to choke, right? Poor accountability for the network. Now we have four or five vendors that you have to work. You get a lot of finger pointing. So at least at the infrastructure layer, right? Dell takes first call support for both the hardware infrastructure and the Wind River cloud infrastructure for both and we are training and spinning them up to support but we're always behind them of course as well. Can you give us a favorite customer example that really articulates the value of the partnership and the technologies that it's delivering to customers? Well, Infoblock is quite new and we do have our first customer which is LGU plus which was announced yesterday out of Korea, small customer but a very important one, okay? And I think they saw the value of the integrated system. They don't have the announced expertise and the leveraging Dell and Wind River in order to make that happen. But I always also say historically before this new offering was Vodafone, right? Vodafone is a leader in Europe in terms of OpenRAN. Been very, Yago and Paco have been very vocal about what they're doing in OpenRAN and Dell and Wind River have been there with them every step of the way. And that's what I would say kind of led up to where we are today. We learned from engagements like Vodafone and I think KDDI as well and it got us where we are today and understanding what the operators need and what the impediments are and this directly addresses that. So those are two very different examples. You were talking about TCO before. So the earlier example, that's an example to me of a disruptor. They'll take some chances, maybe not as focused on TCO. Of course they're concerned about it. Vodafone, I would think very concerned about TCO. But I'm inferring from your comments that you're trying to get the industry, you're trying to check the TCO box, get there. And then move on to higher levels of value, monetization. The TCO is going to come down to how many humans it takes to run the network. Is it not? Is that? Or is it devices as well? The big one now, particularly with Vodafone, is energy costs, right? Oh, of course. Dreaming the networks. Two thirds of the energy consumption in Iran is the radio access network, okay? The OPEX, right? So any reductions, even if they're 5% or 10% can save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So we do things creatively with Dell to understand if there's a lot of traffic at the cell side and if it's not, we will change the C state or P state of the server which basically spins it down so it's not consuming power. But that's just at the infrastructure layer where this gets really powerful is working with Iran vendors like Samsung and Ericsson and others and taking data from the traffic information there, applying algorithms to that in AI to shut it down and spin it back up as needed. Because the idea is, you don't want that thing powered up if there's no traffic on it. Well, there's a sustainability ESG benefit to that, right? Yes, yes. And it's very compute-intensive. Yeah. It's great for Dell. But at the same time, if you're not able to manage that power consumption, the whole thing fails. I mean, because there's really so much data and such an intense requirement. So this is a huge issue. Okay, so Scott, you're saying that in the TCO equation, a big chunk is energy consumption. On the OPEX piece. Now, there's also the CAPEX, right? And open-ran solutions are now what we've heard from our customers today or they're roughly at parity because you can do things like re-purpose servers after the useful life for a lower-demand application, which helps the TCO, right? Then you have situations like Juniper where you can take now software that runs on the same device, eliminating it a whole other device at the cell site. So we're not just taking a server and software point of view, we're taking a whole cell site point of view as it relates to both CAPEX and OPEX. And then once that infrastructure really gets adopted, that's when the innovation occurs. The ecosystem comes in. Developers now start to think of new applications that we haven't thought of yet. Exactly. And that's going to force the traditional carriers to respond. They're responding, but they're doing so very carefully right now. It's understandable, why? Yeah, and I think you're already seeing some news in the, I mean, Nokia has announced many yesterday with the rebranding, et cetera. That's all positive momentum in my opinion, right? What do you think of the logo? I love the logo. I like it too. It was beautiful. I thought it was good. You had the connectivity down below. You need pipes, right? Exactly. But you had this set of cool letters and then the pink horizon or pinkish was like endless opportunity. It was good. It was well thought out. Well, you pick up on an interesting point there and what we're seeing like advanced carriers like Dish who has one of the true open round networks publishing APIs for programmers to build in their 5G network as part of the application. But we're also seeing the network equipment providers also enable carriers to do that because carriers historically have not been advanced in that way. So there is a real recognition that in order for these networks to monetize new use cases they need to be programmable and they need to publish standard APIs so you can access the 5G network capabilities through software. Yeah, and the problem from the carriers is that there's not enough APIs that the carriers have produced yet. So that's where the ecosystem comes in and it's going to 100%. I think there's eight APIs that are published out of the traditional carriers which is, I mean, there's going to be 8,000 for a marketplace. So that's where the open ecosystem really has the advantage. That's right. That's right. So it all makes sense on paper and now you just, you got a lot of work to do. We got to deliver, that's it. Yeah, we launched it today. We got to get some like-minded partners and customers to come together. You'll start seeing results coming out of this hopefully soon and we'll talk more about it over time. Awesome, thanks for sharing with us. Thank you for stopping by, sharing what's going on with Dell and WinWeber and why the opportunities in it for customers and the technological evolution. We appreciate it. You'll have to come back, give us an update. Our pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from MWC23 in Barcelona. theCUBE is the leader in live tech coverage.