 Hi, this is your host Apil Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of tier four. Let's talk and today we have with us once again, Nabil Suli, CEO of UBQ. Nabil is great to have you on the show. Thank you very much, stop me, nice to see you again. Yeah, it's my pleasure. You folks recently announced a solution which is aimed at telcos who want to support their enterprise customers deploying applications at the edge. We have been talking about edge a lot. I mean, first of all, what is edge can be a topic and its own, but what I want to hear from you is that when we look at these enterprises deploying their cloud edge infrastructure, what are some of the challenges that you see they're running to? How easy, how difficult it actually is. It's definitely not easy. Let me start with that. And that's one of the things we're trying to solve, one of the issues we're trying to solve with our solution. So, as you said, the edge is a very important topic right now. It probably means different things to different people. But it is an opportunity for enterprise to have their application run closer to where they are, to have it easier to deploy and more cost effective. So it is emerging as a very, very serious contender to the ultra centralized cloud approach we've known for the past decade. So back to your question, I mean, the challenges they would face. And then I'm saying they would face, because at this point in time, it would be unfair to state that edge is massively used as a cloud solution right now by enterprise. I think we're at the beginning of this opportunity, beginning of this market. But one of the things folks are worried about or concerned with is the rising complexity that they will incur if they start to consider the edge as an option for their application to be running. And that's what we think is the most important item to go to look into. I mean, how complex is it going to be for folks to have their application running both in a central location for some of them and others or modules of that very application basically operated from the edge of the network or the edge of the cloud? Is that going to be a no-brainer? Is it going to be easy? Is it going to be streamlined? Probably it would if it is provided by a single provider. But considering that we are also transitioning to more of a hybrid cloud culture, most probably you would have several suppliers and that will mean more complexity on the horizon. Can you also talk about what you are seeing is kind of driving this growth of edge data centers into this world? Well, from my perspective, the initial driver was to have some of the untapped market segments buy into a cloud as an option. If I think of the Fortune 5,000 companies and those having very sensitive applications that are probably latency sensitive that need to be operated within the boundaries of, say, the country, for instance, for compliance reasons, this is an untapped opportunity by the very centralized cloud approach that we've had. So I think that is, from the perspective of a cloud provider, why we probably are seeing this move. Obviously getting closer to the edge will help them be compliant, will help them provide faster access to storage and compute. Now, from an enterprise point of view, I think the drivers remain the same. I mean, ultimately, one will consider to offload some of its application assets onto a cloud provider facility if it is cheaper, if it is more efficient, if it means that they don't need to deal with that, which is not core business for them. And this is outsourced. The reasons remain the same from an enterprise point of view. I think what's holding enterprise back, particularly those, the sophisticated ones, again, the Fortune 5,000 type, is whether or not by going cloud, they are taking any risks. If they are, then they won't do it. And if they haven't done it so far, for most of them, it's because they don't feel safe. Since as most of these enterprise customers are deploying their edge infrastructure, you talked about the challenges. We also talked about what is driving this growth. Talk a bit about what role is Ubiquity playing in helping them with all these deployments, and also how busy, how big this market is, what role you are playing in this market. Right, so let me start with the solution that we're bringing to market. I think the interesting approach we are taking here is that we are looking at the problem from both sides of the fence. As I said, I described the opportunity from a cloud provider point of view or a telecom service provider point of view. But I also try to explain what rationale got enterprise to deploy their applications on the cloud. So similarly, what we decided to do here is to build a solution that right off the bat would be relevant to both parties. So let me explain further. If I'm building, if I'm on the provider side of things and I'm building a cloud at the edge, that cloud at the edge, that architecture will vary over time. Components will change, suppliers and vendors will change and so on and so forth. And I'm gonna have to deal with that. The problem is that contrary to a very centralized approach where I have one big data center or a couple of big data centers and if there's an overhaul to be had, and I do it once and I'm done for years, here as you get to the edge, you're multiplied by the thousands and number of touchpoints. And if there's a change in architecture, the impact is pretty dramatic. You don't wanna have truck rolls or anything equivalent to that happening at the edge of your network. So the way we've approached this is we basically decided to provide these folks with a platform, a middleware that would help them stitch together as they see fit over time, any of the parts of the vendors or the technologies they see would be relevant or more cost effective or whatever for their cloud edge architecture. That's the first component of our solution and it's lies into a product that we've launched several years back called the NOS Activator, which is an automation engine, but through that very abstracted automation approach, it simplifies the dealing with that churning nature of cloud architectures. That's one thing. Now, this being said, I've addressed the anxiety of the service provider, the cloud provider who goes like, okay, I wanna have something that is gonna be future proof for the next three years but remains the one on the other side of the fence, the enterprise, and whether or not they're gonna buy into this edge offering, whether or not they're really gonna deploy their application on the cloud provided by that service provider. And for that to happen, we believe that you have to make it as seamless as possible for the folks who really deploy in applications. Now the folks deploying applications sitting inside IK departments of those 14, 5000 enterprise, they have gazillions of tools that they're already using to build applications, okay? The DevOps industry is loaded with these. And if they are to consume another cloud option, and let's call it the Edge cloud, it's gonna have to be painless. It's gonna have to be seamless. It's gonna have to feel natural for them. Now, if one big telco comes in and focuses, and I'm not gonna name names, but we're seeing this left and right, they focus on designing the best box ever that sits at the edge of the network. That is 5G powered, and it has everything integrated in its storage, compute, whatnot. But the interface of it, what's handed over to the enterprise for them to go and deploy their application is so specific to that service provider, so different from what these guys have been accustomed to. Then my firm belief that this is recipe for failure. So what we designed is we designed a second product, which we called Cloud Cloud, which we discussed in a previous conversation, you and I. And Cloud Cloud really focuses on helping folks on the enterprise side of things to deploy on any infrastructure, any sort of cloud. And that includes the edge of the cloud or the cloud edge. So now by combining Cloud Cloud tightly with MS Activator, here's what I've created. I've created an interface for the end user to seamlessly deploy his applications on any cloud, including the edge cloud. And I've provided the provider himself with a way for him to remain future proof and evolve his architecture over time to stick with the price erosion or cost erosion of the vendor curve and be the most efficient possible at any point in time. That's why we're calling it a solution. But the uniqueness of it all is that it basically caters to both sides. The supplier and the buyer. Can you talk about, you know, when they do make these deployments and rely on hybrid multi-cloud, what are some of the things that they should look at, you know, first of all, reliability, cost efficiency, security can be a big challenge as well at the edge. We are also seeing a lot of layoff, which also means teams are getting smaller, cost cutting is also happening. So how should they look at these things? This is a very complex question and I'm gonna address it with a very simple answer. I think, I think the obsession on the enterprise side of things should be, are you being provided with a tool that will help you deal with change? If you feel that what you're being provided with is something that is very static and that you're gonna be locked with it for the next three years, five years, runaway, because fundamentally, every one of the areas you mentioned that is, you know, all of them are vital for these companies, cost, security, compliance, well, all of them have extraordinary, variability attached to them. I mean, cost changes, you know, compliance rules change over time. Security is an everyday task with, you know, parameter changing every day. So fundamentally, if I'm the IT head inside an enterprise, what I wanna be provided with are basically two things. First, a real ability to handle change, to handle variations of all of these components. Second, I want that easy, because I am not an expert, I don't wanna become an expert, but I want you to make sure, I wanna make sure that you're giving me a way for me to manage the life cycle of all of these very important elements that make the cloud or infrastructure solution you're providing me with. If you're giving me a solution day zero, that is just very, very cost effective, that looks nice and great, but nothing can be changed in it, I know I'm gonna be obsolete in six months, and that is not what I want. So change management is crucial, easy, crucial. Depending on whether you can share the names or not, can you share a story of success for customers where you can give some examples where they leverage your integrated solutions that you already talked about? Forgive me, I'm not gonna name names, but I have an interesting use case that I'd love to share with you guys to illustrate how the solution plays in this case, in a telco context. Fun enough, instead of illustrating the use of the solution with, as I described earlier, a supplier being the telco or the cloud provider and an enterprise being the user, I'm gonna illustrate the user of the very same solution, but this time you have the telco being on the side of the customers and the suppliers is a community of vendors. Let me explain, we have recently built with our MS activator product, which is the automation engine, a data center for a very large telco, which is for those who are familiar with that acronym, Mino compliant. So this is a data center that will basically host all of the virtualized networking functions for this telecom operator. Again, network functions used to be hosted within devices deployed in the field, now they're gonna be centralized, great. So all of these functions are software functions hosted centrally in that Mano data center. So we've basically helped them build that data center with MS activator. And now the next phase of what we're planning on doing is actually the following. In fact, a data center that is a telco data center that is hosting all those virtualized functions coming from different vendors, okay? You have a number of vendors that are supplying that telco with network functions. The question is, how do you make sure that these vendors keep their software or their VNFs for instance, or their CNS or their container base, up to date along the lifecycle of your infrastructure all the time? For that to happen, you have to give them access. They have to have ways to go and update their software, probably upgrade them, fix bugs and so on and so forth. Now, if you have one supplier, it's easy. If you have 10, 20 from different countries in the world, from hitting different segments of your infrastructure, it's a lot more complicated, but all of them have their technology hosted in that very same data center. So here's the model in reverse. Now the same solution, we're gonna use CloudClap, hand it over to these vendors, for them to use CloudClap at every point where they'd like to deploy or upgrade their installed function, they would use CloudClap to go and install that. CloudClap would be preconfigured by the telco itself, so it is already for those vendors, an environment that is approved by the telco over which they're deploying. So the telco keeps control over what's deployed. The vendors have the freedom to go and update over time their technology, both size wins. The telco gets the latest and greatest all the time. The vendors get to basically deploy their innovation as quickly as possible and remain on the cutting edge of innovation. So that's an illustrative scenario where the combined solution MSActivated and CloudClap is used for a very particular supply, managed or continuous supply chain management scenario that I'm illustrating here, but it's pretty illustrative, I believe. Abil, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about, of course, helping telcos deploy Edge. Thanks for all those insights, and as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.