 theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Hey everyone, welcome back to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE live at MWC 23, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. This is day two of four days of CUBE coverage, but you know that because you've already been watching yesterday and today. We're going to have a great conversation next with Enterprise Web and Red Hat. We've had great conversations the last day and a half about the telco industry, the challenges, the opportunities. We're going to unpack that from this lens. Please welcome Dave Dugow, founder and CEO of Enterprise Web, and Azar Said is here, Senior Director of Solution Architecture at Red Hat. Guys, that's great to have you on the program. Hey guys. Thank you Lisa. Great being here with you. Dave, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of Enterprise Web. What kind of business is it? What's the business model? What do you guys do? Okay, so Enterprise Web is reinventing middleware, right? So the historic middleware was to build vertically integrated stacks, right? And those stacks are now essentially becoming the rate limiters for interoperability for sort of the end to end solutions that everybody's looking for, right? Red Hat's talking about the unified platform. You guys are talking about SuperCloud. Enterprise Web addresses that. We've built middleware based on serverless architecture. So lightweight, low latency, high performance middleware, and we're working with the world's biggest, we're selling through channels and we work through partners like Red Hat, Intel, Fortinet, Keysight, Tech Mahindra. So working with some of the biggest players that have recognized the value of our innovation to deliver transformation to the telecom industry. So what are you guys doing together? Is this an open shift play? Is it... Yeah, so we've got two projects right here on the floor at MWC throughout the various partners where Enterprise Web is actually providing an application layer, so application middleware over Red Hat's open shift. And we're essentially generating operators, so Red Hat operators, so that all our vendors that we onboard into our catalog can be deployed easily through the open shift platform and we allow those vendors to be flexibly composed into network services. So the real challenge for operators historically is that they have challenges onboarding their vendors. It takes a long time. Each one of them is a snowflake. Even though they're standards, they don't all observe or follow the same standards. So we make it easier using models, for in a model-driven process to onboard, or streamline that onboarding process, compose functions into services, deploy those services seamlessly through Red Hat's open shift, and then manage the life cycle, like the quality of service and the SLAs for those services. So Red Hat obviously has a pretty prominent telco business, has for a while. Red Hat OpenStack actually is pretty popular within the telco business. People thought, oh, OpenStack, that's dead, but actually no, it's actually doing quite well. We see it all over the place for whatever reason. People want to build their own cloud, and so what's happening in the industry? Because you have the traditional telcos, we heard in the keynotes that kind of typical narrative about we can't let the over-the-top vendors do this again, we're going to API-ify everything, we're going to monetize this time around, not just with connectivity, but the fact is they really don't have a developer community yet anyway. Then you have these disruptors over here that are saying, yeah, we're going to enable ISVs. How do you see it? What's the landscape look like? Help us understand what the horses on the track are doing. Sure, I think what has happened, Dave, is that the conversation has moved a little bit from where they were just looking at IS, infrastructure, the service with virtual machines, an open stack as you mentioned, to how do we move up the value chain and look at different applications? And therein comes the rub, right? You have applications with different requirements, IT, network that have various different requirements that are there. So as you start to build this cloud platform, as you start to modernize the set of applications, you then start to look at microservices and how you build them. You need the ability to orchestrate them. So some of those problem statements have moved from not just refactoring those applications, but actually now to how do you reliably deploy, manage in a multi-cloud, multi-cluster way. So this conversation around SuperCloud or this conversation around multi-cloud is very real. You can say SuperCloud, that's okay. It's absolutely very real though. The reason why it's very real is if you look at transformations around telco, there are two things that are happening. One, telco IT. They're looking at partnerships with public cloud players to build a hybrid environment. They're also building their own telco cloud environment for the network functions. Now in both of those spaces, they end up operating two to three different environments themselves. Now how do you create a level of abstraction across those? How do you manage that particular infrastructure? And then how do you orchestrate all of those different workloads? Those are the type of problems that they're actually beginning to solve. They've moved on from really just putting that, virtualizing that application, putting it on open stack to now, really seriously looking at how do I build a service, how do I leverage the catalog that's available, both in my private and public, and build an overall service. And by the way, what you just described as hybrid cloud and multi-cloud is, you know, SuperCloud is what multi-cloud should have been. And what it originally became is, I run on this cloud and I run on this cloud and I run on this cloud and I have a hybrid. And SuperCloud is meant to create a common experience across those clouds, thanks to SuperCloud middleware, right? And so that's what you guys do. Yeah, exactly, David. I mean, even the name Enterprise Web, you know, we started from looking from the application layer down. If you look at the last 10 years we've looked from the infrastructure up, right? And now everybody's looking at Northbound saying, you know what actually, if I look from the infrastructure up, the only thing I'll ever build is silos, right? And those silos get in the way of the interoperability and the agility that businesses want. So we take the perspective of high level abstractions, common tools, so that if I'm a CXO, I can look down on my environments, right? When I'm really not, honestly, if I'm a CEO, I don't really care or CXO. I don't really care so much about my infrastructure, infrastructure to be honest. I care about my applications and their behavior. I care about my SLAs and my quality of service, right? Those are the things I care about. So I really want an enterprise web, right? Something that helps me connect all my distributed applications across all of the environments so that I can have one place, a consistency layer, that speaks a common language. We know that there's a lot of heterogeneity down all of those layers, a lot of complexity down on those layers, but the business doesn't care. They don't want to care, right? They want to actually take their applications, deploy them where they're the most performant, where they're getting the best cost, right? The lowest and maybe sustainability concerns, all those. They want to address those problems, meet their SLAs, meet their quality of service, and you know what? If it's running on Amazon, great. If it's running on Google Cloud Platform, great. No, we're doing one project right here that we're demonstrating here is with Amazon, Tech Mahindra, and OpenShift, where we took a disaggregated 5G core, right? So this is like sort of latest telecom networking software, right? We're deploying elements of that network core across Amazon EKS, OpenShift on Red Hat Rosa, as well as just OpenShift for cloud, and we do a single pane of deployment and management. We deployed the elements of the 5G core across them and then connected them in an end-to-end process. That's telco super cloud. So that's an O-RAN deployment? That's an O-RAN deployment. The big advantage of that, pardon me, Dave, but the big advantage of that is the customer really doesn't care where the components are being served from. For them, it's a 5G capability. It happens to sit in different locations and that's, it's about how do you abstract and how do you manage all those different workloads in a cohesive way. And that's exactly what Enterprise Web is bringing to the table. And what we do is we abstract the underlying infrastructure, which is the cloud layer. So if, because AWS operating environment is different than private cloud operating environment, than Azure environment, you have, and the networking is set up as different in each one of them. If there is a way you can abstract all of that and present it in a common operating model, it becomes a lot easier than for anybody to be able to consume. And what a lot of customers tell me is the way they deal with multi-cloud complexity is they go with monocloud, right? And so they'll lose out on some of the best services and best to breed. So that's not, that's not ideal. But at the end of the day, I agree. Developers don't want to muck with all the plumbing. They want to write code. Correct. So I come back to, are the traditional telcos leaning in a way that they're going to enable ISVs and developers to write on top of those platforms? Or are there sort of new entrants and disruptors? And I know the answer is both, but I feel as though the telcos still haven't, traditional telcos, haven't tuned in to that developer affinity, but you guys sell to them. What are you seeing? Yeah, so what we have seen is there are telcos fall into several categories. If you look at the most mature ones, you know, they are very eager to move up the value chain. There are some smaller, very nimble ones that are actually doing something really interesting. For example, they've provided sandbox environments to developers to say, go develop your applications to this sandbox environment. We'll use that to build an edge service with you. I can give you some interesting examples across the globe where that is happening, right? In Asia-Pac, particularly in Australia, A&Z region, there are a couple of providers who have done this in a very interesting way. But the challenges to them, why it's not completely open to public yet, is primarily because they haven't figured out how to exactly monetize that. And that's the reason why. So in the absence of that, what'll happen is they have to rely on the ISV ecosystem to be able to build those capabilities which they can then bring it on as part of the catalog. But in Latin America, I was talking to one of the providers and they said, well, look, we have a public cloud, we have our own quote-unquote public cloud, right? What we want to do is use that to offer localized services, not just bring everything in from the top. But we heard from Erickson's CEO, they're basically going to monetize it by, what I call, gouging the developers to get access to the network telemetry as opposed to saying, hey, here's an open platform to develop it on top of it and it will maybe create something like an app store and we'll take a piece of the action, which to me is a better model. But that's perfect. Our second project that we're showing here is with Intel, right? So Intel came to us, because they are a reputation for doing advanced automation solutions. They gave us carte blanche in their lab, so this is Intel Network Builders. They said, pick your partners, and we went with Red Hat, Fortinet, Keysight, this company KX doing AIML. But to address your DevX, here's Intel explicitly wants to get closer to the developers by exposing their APIs, open APIs over their infrastructure, just like Red Hat has APIs, right? And so they can expose them northbound to developers, so developers can leverage and tune their applications. But the challenge there is, what Intel is doing at the low level network infrastructure is fundamentally complex. What you want is an abstraction layer where this gets to your point there where you just said the developers just want to get their job done or really want to focus on the business logic and accelerate that service delivery, right? So the idea here is an enterprise web, they can literally declaratively compose their services, express their intent. I want this to run optimized for low latency. I want this to run optimized for energy consumption, right? And that's all they say, right? That's a very high level statement. And then the runtime translates it between all the elements that are participating in that service to realize the developer's intent, right? No hands, right? Zero touch, right? So that's now a movement in telecom. So you're right, it's taking a while because these are pretty fundamental shifts, right? But it's intent-based networking, right? So it's almost two parts, right? One is you have to have the open APIs, right? So that the infrastructure has to expose its capabilities, then you need abstractions over the top that make it simple for developers to make use of them. See, one of the demonstrations we are doing is around AI ops. And I've had literally here on this floor two conversations around what I call as network as a platform. Although it sounds like a cliche term, that's exactly what Dave was describing in terms of exposing APIs from the infrastructure and utilizing them. So once you get that data, then now you can do analytics and do machine learning to be able to build models and figure out how you can orchestrate better, how you can monetize better, how you can utilize better, right? So although those things become important, it's just not about internal optimization, but it's also about how do you expose it to third-party ecosystem to translate that into better delivery mechanisms or IoT capability and so on. But if they're going to charge me for every API call on the network, I'm going to go broke and I'm going to get really pissed. I mean, I feel like, I'm just writing down. Oracle, IBM tried it. Oracle, okay, they got Java, but they don't have developer jobs. VMware, okay, they got Aria. EMC used to have a thing called code. IBM had to buy Red Hat to get to the developer community. So I feel like the telcos today have those developer jobs. So they have to partner with guys like you and then be more open and let a zillion flowers bloom or else they're going to get disrupted in a big way. It's going to be a repeat over the top in a different model that I can't predict. Absolutely true. I mean, look, they cannot be in the connectivity business. Telcos cannot be just in the connectivity business. It's, I think, so, you know. You got to fry it in a frozen hand off that. You know, think about it, they almost have to become over the top on themselves, right? That's what the cloud guys are doing, right? They're riding over their backbone that by creating a high level abstraction, they in turn abstract away the infrastructure underneath them, right? And that's really the end game, right? Is because now they're over the top, it's their network, it's their infrastructure, right? They don't want to become big pipes. They can take OpenShift, run that in any cloud, right? You can run that in hybrid cloud. Enterprise Web can do the application layer configuration and management. And together, we're running OSI layers one through seven, east to west, north to south, we're running across the ran, the core, and the transport, and that is Telcos SuperCloud, my friend. Yeah, well, I've been dominating the conversation because I love talking SuperCloud. I knew you would do that. Speaking of Super, Superpowers, when you're in customer or prospective customer conversations with providers, obviously they're in this transformative state right now. What do you describe as the superpower between Red Hat and Enterprise Web in terms of really helping these Telcos transforms? But at the end of the day, the connectivity's there, the end user gets what they want, which is I want this to work wherever I am. Yeah, that's a great question, Lisa. So I think the way you can look at it is most software has been evolved to be specialized, right? So in Telcos, no different, right? We have this in the enterprise, right? All these specialized stacks, all these components that they wire together. In the, you think of Telco as a sort of super set of enterprise problems, right? They have all those problems like magnified, many fold, right? And so you have specialized, let's say orchestrators and other tools for every Telco domain, for every Telco layer. Now you have a zoo of orchestrators, right? None of them were designed to work together, right? They all speak a specific language, let's say quote unquote, for doing a specific purpose, but everything that's interesting in the 21st century is across layers and across domains, right? A siloed static application, those are dead, right? Nobody's doing those anymore. Even developers don't do that. Developers are doing composition today. They're not doing, nobody wants to hear about a six million lines of code, right? They want to hear, how did you take these five things and bring them together for productive use? How did you deliver faster for my enterprise? How did you save me money? How did you create business value? And that's what we're doing together. I mean, just to add on to Dave, I was talking to one of the providers. They have more than 30,000 nodes in their infrastructure. When I say nodes, they are servers. Running, you know, Kubernetes, running OpenStack, running different components. If try managing that in one singleton entity, if you will, not possible. You got a fragment, you got a segment in some way. Now the question is, if you are not exposing that particular infrastructure and the appropriate KPIs and appropriate things, you will not be able to efficiently utilize that across the board. So you need almost a construct that creates like a manager of managers, a hierarchical structure, which would allow you to be more intelligent in terms of how you place those, how you manage that. And so, when you ask the question about what's the secret sauce between the two, well, this is exactly where Enterprise web brings in that capability to analyze information, be more intelligent about it. And what we do is provide an abstraction of the cloud layer so that they can, you know, then do the right job in terms of making sure that it's appropriate and it's consistent. Consistency is key. Guys, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure really digging through Enterprise web, what you're doing with Red Hat, how you're helping the organization transform and SuperCloud. We can't forget SuperCloud. Bonified SuperCloud, guys. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you guys very much. You really appreciate it. For our guests, I'm for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage coming to you live from MWCH 23. We'll be back after a short break.