 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Well, never really meant to be a consumer tech event. The rapid ascendancy of smartphones sucked much of the air out of Mobile World Congress over the years, now MWC. And while the device manufacturers continue to have a major presence at the show, the majority of intelligent devices, longer life cycles and the disaggregation of the network stack have put enterprise technologies front and center in the telco business. Semiconductor manufacturers, network equipment players, infrastructure companies, cloud vendors, software providers and a spate of startups are eyeing the trillion dollar plus communications industry as one of the next big things to watch this decade. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we bring you part two of our ongoing coverage of MWC 23 with some new data on enterprise players specifically in large telco environments, a brief glimpse at some of the pre-announcement news and corresponding themes ahead of MWC and some of the key announcement areas we'll be watching at the show on theCUBE. Now last week we shared some ETR data that showed how traditional enterprise tech players were performing specifically within the telecoms vertical. Here's a new look at that data from ETR, which isolates the same companies but cuts the data for what ETR calls large telco. The N in this cut is 196 down from 288 last week when we included all company sizes in the data set. Now remember the two dimensions here and the Y axis is net score or spending momentum and on the X axis is pervasiveness in the data set. The table insert in the upper left informs how the dots and companies are plotted and that red dotted line, the horizontal line at 40%, that indicates a highly elevated net score. Now while the data are not dramatically different in terms of relative positioning, there are a couple of changes at the margin. So just going down the list and focusing on net score. Azure is comparable but slightly lower in this sector in the large telco than it was overall. Google Cloud comes in at number two and basically swap places with AWS which drops slightly in the large telco relative to overall telco. Snowflake is also slightly down by one percentage point but maintains its position. Remember Snowflake overall, its net score is much, much higher when measuring across all verticals. Snowflake comes down in telco and relative to overall a little bit down in large telco but it's making some moves to attack this market that we'll talk about in a moment. Next are Red Hat OpenStack and Databricks about the same in large telco as they were in overall telco. Then there's Dell next that has a big presence at MWC and is getting serious about driving 16G adoption and new servers and edge servers and other partnerships. Cisco and Red Hat OpenShift basically swapped spots when moving from all telco to large telco to Cisco drops and Red Hat bumps up a bit. And VMware dropped about four percentage points in large telco. Accenture moved up dramatically, about nine percentage points in big telco, large telco relative to all telco. HPE dropped a couple of percentage points. Oracle stayed about the same and IBM surprisingly dropped by about five points. So look, I understand not a ton of change in terms of spending momentum in the large sector versus telco overall but some deltas. The bottom line for enterprise players is, one, they're just getting started in this new disruption journey that they're on as the stack disaggregates. Two, all these players have experience in delivering horizontal solutions but now working with partners and identifying big problems to be solved. And three, many of these companies are generally not the fastest moving firms relative to smaller disruptive disruptors. Now, cloud has been an exception in fairness but the good news for the legacy infrastructure and IT companies is that the telco transformation and the 5G build out is going to take years. So it's moving at a pace that is very favorable to many of these companies. Okay, so looking at just some of the pre-announcement highlights that have hit the wire this week, I want to give you a glimpse of the diversity of innovation that is occurring in the telecommunications space. You got semiconductor manufacturers, device makers, network equipment players, carriers, cloud vendors, enterprise tech companies, software companies, startups. Now we've included, you'll see in this list we've included OpenRAN, that logo because there's so much buzz around the topic and we're going to come back to that but suffice it to say there's no way we can cover all the announcements from the 2000 plus exhibitors at the show. So we're going to cherry pick here and make a few call-outs. Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced an acquisition of an Italian private cellular network company called Athanet, Zias Caravalla, wrote about it on Silicon Angle if you want more details. Now interestingly, HPE has a partnership with Solona which also does private 5G but according to Zias, Solona is more of an out of the box solution whereas Athanet is designed for the core and requires more integration and as you'll see in a moment, there's going to be a lot of talk at the show about private network. There's going to be a lot of news there from other competitors and we're going to be watching that closely and while many are concerned about the P5G, private 5G encroaching on Wi-Fi, Caravalla doesn't see it that way. Rather he feels that these private networks are really designed for more industrial and mission critical environments like factories and warehouses that are run by robots, et cetera. Because these can justify the increased expense of private networks whereas Wi-Fi remains a very low cost and flexible option for whatever offices and homes. Now, over to Dell. Dell announced its intent to go hard after opening up the telco network with the announcement that in the second half of this year it's going to begin shipping its infrastructure blocks for Red Hat. Remember it's like kind of the converged infrastructure for telco with a more open ecosystem and sort of more flexible, you know, more mature engineered system. Dell has also announced a range of PowerEdge servers for a variety of use cases, a big, wide line bringing forth its 16G portfolio and aiming it squarely at the telco space. Dell also announced, here we go, a private wireless offering with AirSpan and Exbedo and a solution with Athanet, the company HPE announced it was purchasing. So, yes, Dell and HPE are now partnering up in the private wireless space and yes, hell is freezing over folks. We'll see where that relationship goes in the mid to long term. Dell also announced a new lab and certification capabilities, which we said last week was going to be critical for the further adoption of open ecosystem technology. So props to Dell for putting real emphasis and investment in that. AWS also made a number of announcements in this space including private wireless solutions and associated managed services, AWS named Deutsche Telecom, Orange, T-Mobile, Telefonica and some others as partners. And AWS announced a stepped up partnership specifically with T-Mobile to bring AWS services to T-Mobile's network portfolio. Snowflake, back to Snowflake, announced its Telecom data cloud. Remember we showed the data earlier, Snowflake not as strong in the telco sector, but they're continuing to move toward this go to market alignment within key industries, realigning their go to market by vertical. It also announced that AT&T and a number of other partners are collaborating to break down data silos specifically in telco. Look, essentially this is Snowflake taking its core value prop to the telco vertical and forming key partnerships that resonate in the space. So think simplification, breaking down silos, data sharing, eventually data monetization. Samsung previewed its future capability to allow smartphones to access satellite services, something Apple has previously done. AMD, Intel, Marvell, Qualcomm are all in the act, all the semiconductor players. Qualcomm for example announced along with Telefonica and Ericsson a 5G millimeter network that will be showcased in Spain at the event this coming week using Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset platform based on none other than ARM technology. Of course, ARM we said is going to dominate the edge and it's clearly doing so. It's got the volume advantage over traditional Intel X86 architectures. And it's no surprise that Microsoft is touting its open AI relationship. You're gonna hear a lot of AI talk at this conference as is AI is the now topic. All right, we could go on and on and on. There's just so much going on at Mobile World Congress or MWC that we just wanted to give you a glimpse of some of the highlights that we've been watching which brings us to the key topics and issues that we'll be exploring at MWC next week. We touched on some of this last week. A big topic of conversation will of course be 5G is it ever going to become real? Is it ever going to make money at 5G? There's so much excitement around and anticipation around 5G. It has not lived up to the hype, but that's because the rollout as we've previously reported is going to take years. And part of that rollout is going to rely on the disaggregation of the hard and telco stack as we reported last week in previous breaking analysis episodes. Open RAN is a big component of that evolution. As our RAN intelligent controllers, RIX, which essentially the brain of Open RAN, if you will. Now, as we build out 5G networks at massive scale and accommodate unprecedented volumes of data and apply compute hungry AI to all this data, the issue of energy efficiency is going to be front and center. It has to be. Not only is it a hot political issue, the reality is that improving power efficiency is compulsory or the whole vision of telco's future is going to come crashing down. So chip manufacturers, equipment makers, cloud providers, everybody is going to be doubling down and clicking on this topic. Let's talk about AI. AI, as we said, it is the hot topic right now, but it is happening not only in consumer with things like chat GPT and think about the theme of this breaking analysis in the enterprise. AI in the enterprise cannot be chat GPT. It cannot be error-prone the way chat GPT is. It has to be clean, reliable, governed, accurate. It's got to be ethical. It's got to be trusted. Okay, we're going to have Zia's Caravola in the show next week and definitely want to get his take on private networks and how they're going to impact Wi-Fi. You know, will private networks cannibalize Wi-Fi? If not, why not? We wrote about this again on Silicon Angle if you want more details and we're going to unpack that on theCUBE this week. And finally, as always, we'll be following the data flows to understand where and how telcos, cloud players, startups, software companies, disruptors, legacy companies and customers, how are they going to make money from new data opportunities? Because we often say in theCUBE, don't ever bet against data. All right, that's a wrap for today. Remember, theCUBE is going to be on location at MWC 2023. Next week, we've got a great set. We're in the walkway, in between halls four and five, right in Congress Square stand CS60. Look for us. We've got a full schedule. If you've got a great story or you have news, stop by. We're going to try to get you on the program. I'll be there with Lisa Martin, co-hosting David Nicholson as well and the entire CUBE crew. So don't forget to come by and see us. I want to thank Alex Meyerson, who's on production and manages the podcast and Ken Schiffman as well in our Boston studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hoth is our editor-in-chief over at siliconangle.com. He does some great editing. Thank you. All right, remember all these episodes there are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. All the video content is available on demand at thecube.net or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch, david.malante at siliconangle.com or DM me at dvalante or comment on our LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Mobile World Congress 23 MWC 23 or next time on Breaking Analysis.