 theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Good, late afternoon from Barcelona, Spain. At the Theater of Barcelona, it's Lisa Martin and Dave Knudelsen of theCUBE covering MWC 23. This is our third day of continuous wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE, and you know we're going to be here tomorrow as well. We've been having some amazing conversations about the ecosystem. We're going to continue those conversations the next. Honorary Lavordette is here, the VP Global Partner Ecosystem Success Team, Telco Media and Entertainment at Red Hat, and Tony Jeffries joined us as well, a Senior Director of Product Management, Telecom Systems Business at Dell. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you. Great to have both of you here. So we're going to be talking about the evolution of the telecom stack. We've been talking a lot about desegregation the last couple of days. Honorary, starting with you, talk about the evolution of the telecom stack. You were saying before we went live, this is your 15th, at least, MWC. So you've seen a lot of evolution, but what are some of the things you're seeing right now? Well, I think the interesting thing about desegregation, which is a key topic, right? Because it's so relative to 5G and the 5G core and the benefits and the features of 5G core around desegregation. But one thing we have to remember when you desegregate, you separate things. You have to bring those things back together again in a different way. And that's predominantly what we're doing in our partnership with Dell, is we're bringing those desegregated components back together in a cohesive way that takes advantage of the new technology at the same time, taking out the complexity and make it easier for our telco customers to deploy and to scale and to get much more, accelerate the time to revenue. So the trend now is, what we're seeing is, two things I would say. One is, how do we solve for the complexity with the desegregation? And how do we leverage the ecosystem as a partner in order to help solve for some of those challenges? Tony, jump on in and talk about what you guys announced last week, Dell and Red Hat, and how it's addressing the complexities that Honorary was saying, hey, they're there. Yeah, you know, our customers or operators are saying, hey, I want desegregation. I want competition in the market. But at the same time, who's going to support all this desegregation, right? And so, at the end of the day, there's going to be an operator that's going to have to figure this out. They're going to have an SLA that they're going to have to meet. And so, they're going to want to go with a best in class partner with Red Hat and Dell in terms of our infrastructure and their software together is one combined engineered system. And that's what we call a Dell Telecom Infrastructure Block for Red Hat. And so, at the end of the day, you know, things may go wrong. And if they do, who are they going to call for that support? And that's also a really a key element of an engineered system is this experience that they get both with Red Hat and with Dell together supporting the customer as one, which is really important to solve this disaggregated problem that can arise from a disaggregated open network situation. Yeah. So, what does the market, the go-to-market motion look like? People have loyalties in the IT space to technologies that they've embraced and been successful with for years and years. So, you have folks in the marketplace who are die hard, died red, red hat folks. Is it primarily a pull from them? How does that work? How do you approach that to your, what are your end user joint customers? What does that look like from your perspective? On a- Well, interestingly enough, both Red Hat and Dell have been in the marketplace for a very long time. Right? So, we have the brand with those telco customers for these solutions. What we're seeing with this solution is it's an emerging market. It's an emerging market for a new technology. So, there's an opportunity for both Red Hat and Dell together to leverage our brands with those customers with no friction in the marketplace as we go to market together. So, our field sales teams will be motivated to take advantage of the solution for their customers as will the Dell team. And I'll let Tony speak to the Dell, go to market. Yeah, you know, so we really co-sell together, right? You know, we're the key partners. Dell will end up fulfilling that order, right? We send these engineered systems through our factories and we send that out either directly to a customer or to a hotel lab, like a intermediate lab where we can further refine and customize that offer for that particular customer. And so, we got a lot of options there, but we're essentially co-selling and Dell is fulfilling that from an infrastructure perspective, putting Red Hat software on top and the licensing for that support. So, it's a really good mix. And I think, if I may, one of the key differentiators is the actual capabilities that we're bringing together inside of this pre-integrated solution. So, it includes the Red Hat OpenShift, which is the container software, but we also add our advanced cluster management as well as our Ansible automation and then Dell adds their orchestration capability along with the features and functionalities of the platform and we put that together and we offer remote automation orchestration and management capabilities that, again, reduces the operating expense, reduces the complexity, allows for easy scale. So, certainly, it's all about the partnership but it's also the capabilities of the combined technology. I was just going to ask about some of the numbers and you mentioned some of them. Reduction of TCO, I imagine, is also a big capability that this solution enables besides producing off-backs. Talk about the TCO reduction because I know there's some numbers there that Dell and Red Hat have already delivered to the market. Yeah, you know, so these infrastructure blocks are designed specifically for core or for ran or for the edge, we're starting out initially in the core but we've done some market research with a company called ACG and ACG is looked at day zero, day one and day two TCO FTE hours saved and we're looking at over 40 to 50% TCO savings over a five year period, which is quite significant in terms of cost savings and a TCO level but also we have a lot of numbers around power consumption and savings around power consumption but also just that experience for our operator that says, hey, I'm going to go to one company to get the best in class from Red Hat until together that saves a lot of time in procurement and that entire ordering process as well. So, you get a lot of savings that aren't exactly seen in the FTE hours around TCO but just in that overall experience by talking to one company to get the best of both from both Red Hat and Dell together. I think the comic book character Charlie Brown once said, the most discouraging thing in the world is having a lot of potential. Right. And so when we talk about disaggregating and then re-aggregating or reintegrating, that means choice. How does an operator approach making that choice? Because yeah, it sounds great, we have this integration lab and we have all these choices. Well, how do I decide? How does a person decide? This is a question for Honoré from a Red Hat perspective. What's the secret sauce that you believe differentiates the Red Hat-infused stack versus some other assemblage of gear? Well, there's a couple of key characteristics and the one that I think is most prevalent is that we're open, right? So open is in Red Hat's DNA because we're an open source technology company. And with that open source technology and that open platform, our customers can now add workloads. They have options to choose the workloads that they want to run on that open source platform. As they choose those workloads, they can be confident that those workloads have been certified and validated on our platform because we have a very robust ecosystem of ISVs that have already completed that process with open source, with Red Hat OpenShift. So then we take the Red Hat OpenShift and we put it on the Dell platform, which is market leader platform, right? Combine those two things. The customers can be confident that they can put those workloads on the combined platform that we're offering and that those workloads would run. So again, it goes back to making it simpler, making it easy to procure, easy to run workloads, easy to deploy, easy to operate. And all of that, of course, equates to, saving time always equates to saving money. Absolutely. Oh, I thought you wanted to continue. No, I think Honor 8 sort of, she nailed it. Red Hat is so dominant in 5G and what they're doing in the market, especially in the core and where we're going into the RAN. Next steps are to validate those workloads, those workload vendors on top of a stack. And that Red Hat, the Red Hat leader in the core is key, it's instant credibility in the core market. And so that's another reason why we Dell want to partner with Red Hat for the core market and beyond, we're going to be looking at not only core but moving into RAN very soon. But then we do, we take that validated workload on top of that to optimize that workload and then be able to instantiate that in the core of the RAN. It's just a really streamlined, good experience for operators that at the end of the day, we want one happy customers in between our mutual customer base and that's what you get whenever you do that combined stack together. We're operators, any operators, and you don't have to mention them, my name involved in the evolution of the infrastructure blocks. I'm just curious how involved they were in helping to co-develop this. I imagine they were at a some degree. Yeah, I could take that one. Yeah, so in doing so, yeah, we can't be myopic and just assume that we nailed it the first time, right? So yeah, we do work with partners all the way up and down the stack. You know, a lot of our engineering work with Red Hat also brings in customer experience that is key to ensure that you're building and designing the right architecture for the core. I would like to use the names, I don't know if I should, but a lot of those names are big names that are leaders in our industry. That, but yeah, their footprints, their fingerprints are all over those design best practices, those architectural designs that we build together. And then we further that by doing those validated workloads on top of that. So just to really prove the point that it's optimized for the core, brand, edge kind of workload. So yeah. And it's a huge added value for Red Hat to have a partner like Dell who can take all of those components, you know, take the workload, take the Red Hat software, put it on the platform and deliver that out to the customers. That's really, you know, a key part of the partnership and the value of the partnership because nobody really does that better than Dell, you know, that center of excellence around, you know, delivery and support. Can you share any feedback from any of those nameless operators in terms of, I mean, I'm even kind of wondering what the catalyst was for the InfraBlock. Was it operators saying, ah, we have these challenges here? Was it the evolution of the Telco Stack? And Dell said, we can come in with Red Hat and solve this problem. And what's been some of their feedback? Yeah, it really comes down to what Andre said about, okay, you know, when we're looking at day zero, which is primarily your design, how much time savings can we do by creating that stack for them, right? We have industry experts designing that core stack that's optimized for different levels of spectrum. When we do that, we save a lot of time in terms of FTE hours for our architects, our operators, and then it goes into day one, right? Which is the deployment aspect for saving tons of hours for our operators by being able to deploy this speed to market is key. That ultimately ends up in, you know, faster time to revenue for our customers, right? So, you know, it's, when they see that we've already done the pre-work that they don't have to, that's what really resonates for them in terms of that, yeah. I want to reiterate, Lisa and I happen to be veterans of the cloud-native space, and what we heard from a lot of the folks in that ecosystem is that there is a massive hunger for developers to be able to deploy and manage in orchestrated environments that consist of cloud-native application infrastructure, microservices. What we've heard here is that 5G equals cloud-native application stacks. Is that a fair assessment of the environment? And what are you seeing from a supply and demand for that kind of labor perspective? Is there still a hunger for those folks who develop in that space? Well, there is, because the very nature of an open-source Kubernetes-based container platform, which is what OpenShift is, the very nature of it is to open up that code so that developers can have access to the code to develop the workloads to the platform. And so again, the combination of bringing together the Dell infrastructure with the Red Hat software, it doesn't change anything. The development community still has access to that same container platform to develop to cloud-native types of application. And OpenShift is Red Hat's hybrid cloud platform. So it runs on-prem, it runs in the public cloud, it runs at the edge, it runs at the far edge. So any of the development community that's trying to develop cloud-native applications can develop it on this platform as they would if they were developing on an OpenShift platform in the public cloud. So in the graduate, the advice to the graduate was plastics, plastics. As someone who has more children than I can remember, I forget how many kids I have. That's right, I have four, that's right. Three in college and grad school already at this point. Cloud-native, I don't know, Kubernetes, definitely a field that's got some legs. Okay, so I can get them off my payroll quickly. Okay, good to know, good to know. Any thoughts on that open cloud-native world? There's so many changes that's going to happen in Kubernetes and services that you've got to be able to update quickly, CI, CD, obviously the topic is huge. How quickly can we keep these systems up to date with new releases, changes? That's the great thing about an engineered system is that we do provide that lifecycle management for three to five years through this engagement with our customers. So we're constantly keeping them up with the latest and the greatest. Well, do those customers have that expertise in-house, though? Do they have that now? Or is this a seismic cultural shift in those environments? Well, you know, they do have a lot of that experience, but it takes a lot of that time. And we're taking that off of their plate and putting that within us, on our system, within our engineered system, and doing that automatically for them. And so they don't have to check in and try to understand what the release certification makes because every quarter we're providing that to them. We're communicating out to the operator, telling them what's coming up latest and greatest, not only in terms of the software, but the hardware, and how to optimize it all together. That's the beauty of these systems. These are five-year relationships with our operators that we're providing that lifecycle management end-to-end for years to come, right? So last question, you talked about joint GTM availability. When can the operators get their hands on this? Yes, yes. It's currently slated for early September release. Awesome, so sometime this year. Yes. Well guys, thank you so much for talking with us today. Thank you. What you're doing to really help evolve the telecom stock, we appreciate it. Next time come back with a customer, we can dig into it. That'd be great. Thank you. Absolutely, that may happen today, actually. We'll see you later, all right? Not to let the cat out of the bag, but good news. All right, well, you're going to want to stick around. Thank you so much for your time. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, this is Lisa Martin of theCUBE at MWC23 from Barcelona, Spain. We'll be back after a short break.