 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Mobile World Congress is alive. theCUBE will be there and will certainly let you know if it's alive and well when we get on the ground. Now as we approach a delayed Mobile World Congress, it's really appropriate to reflect on the state of the telecoms industry. Let's face it, telcos have done a really good job keeping us all connected during the pandemic, supporting work from home and that whole pivot, accommodating the rapid shift to landline traffic, securing the network and keeping it up and running, but it doesn't change the underlying fundamental dilemma that telcos face. Telco is a slow growth, no growth industry with revenue expectations in the low single digits. Now at the same time, network traffic continues to grow at 20% annually and last year it grew at 40 to 50%. Despite these challenges, telcos are still investing in the future. For example, the telco industry collectively is shelling out more than a trillion dollars in the first half of this decade on 5G and fiber infrastructure. And it's estimated that there are now more than 205G networks worldwide. But a lot of questions remain, not the least of which is, can and should telcos go beyond connectivity and fiber? Can the telcos actually monetize 5G or whatever's next, beyond 5G? Or is that going to be left to the ecosystem? And what about the ecosystem? How is that evolving? And very importantly, what role will the cloud hyperscalers play in telco? Are they infrastructure on which the telcos can build or are they going to suck the value out of the market as they have done in the enterprise? Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, it's my pleasure to welcome a long time telecoms industry analyst and colleague and the founding director of Lewis Insight, Mr. Chris Lewis, Chris, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. It is really our pleasure. So we're going to cover a lot of ground today. And first thing, we're going to talk about Mobile World Congress. I've never been, you're an expert at that and what we can expect. And then we're going to review the current state of telecoms infrastructure, where it should go. We're going to dig into transformation. Is it a mandate? Is it aspirational? Can telcos enter adjacent markets in ways they haven't been able to in the past? And then how about the ecosystem? We're going to talk about that. And then obviously we're going to talk about cloud, as I said, and we'll riff a little bit on the tech landscape. So Chris, let's get into it. Mobile World Congress, it's back on. What's Mobile World Congress typically like? What's your expectation this year for the vibe compared to previous events? Well, Dave, the issue of Mobile World Congress is always that we go down there for a week into Barcelona. We stress ourselves building a matrix of meetings in 30 minute slots. And we return at the end of it, trying to remember what we'd been told all the way through. The great thing is that the last time we had it live, with around 110,000 people there, you could see anyone and everyone you needed to within the mobile and increasingly the adjacent industry and ecosystem. So it gave you that once a year, big, big download of everything new, obviously because it's the Mobile World Congress, a lot of it around devices. But increasingly over the last few years, we saw many, many stands with cars on them because the connected car became an issue, a lot more software-oriented players there, but always the telcos, always the people providing the network infrastructure, increasingly in the last few years, people providing the software and IT infrastructure, but all of these people contributing to what the network should be in the future, what needs to be connected. And of course, the reach of the network has been growing. You mentioned during lockdown about connecting people in their homes. Well, of course, we've also been extending that connection to connect things, whether it's in the home to all the different devices, monitoring the doorbells and lights and all that sort of stuff. And in the industry environment, connecting all of the robots and sensors. So actually the perimeter, the remit of the industry to connect has been expanding. And so was the sort of remit of Mobile World Congress. So we've seen an awful lot of different suppliers coming in trying to attach to this enormous market of roughly $1.5 trillion globally. Chris, what's the buzz in the industry in terms of who's going to show up? I know a lot of people have pulled out. I've got the Mobile World Congress app and I can see who's attending. And it looks like quite a few people are going to go, but what's your expectation? Well, from an analyst's point of view, obviously I'm mainly keeping up with my clients and trying to get new clients. I'm looking at it and going, most of my clients are not attending in person. Now, of course, we need the GSMA, we need Mobile World Congress for the future for the industry interaction. And of course, like many people, having adopted and adapted to be online, then they're putting a lot of the keynotes online, a lot of the activities will be online. But of course, many of the vendors have also produced their independent content and content to actually deliver to us as analysts. So I'm not sure who'll be there. I like you or you'll be on the ground. You'll be able to report back and let us know exactly who turned up. But from my point of view, I've had so many pre-briefs already. The difference between this year and previous years, I used to get loads of pre-brief and then I had to go and do the briefs as well. So this year I've got the pre-brief so I can sit back, put my feet up and wait for your report to come back as to what's happening on the ground. You got it. Okay, let's get into a little bit and talk about telco infrastructure and the state, where it is today, where it's going. Chris, how would you describe the current state of telco infrastructure? Where does it need to go? Like, what does the ideal future state look like for telcos in your view? So there's always a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to telco, I think going forward. Because the connectivity piece was seen as being table stakes, and then people thought, where can we go beyond connectivity? And we'll come back to that later. But actually to provide the connectivity under the scenario I just described, of people, buildings, things and society, we've got to do a lot more work to make that connectivity extend, to be more reliable, to be more secure. So the state of the network is that we have been building out infrastructure, which includes fiber to connect households and businesses. It includes that next move to cellular from 4G to 5G. It also includes WiFi, wherever we've got that as well. And actually it's been in a pretty good state. As you said in your opening comments, they've done a pretty good job keeping us all connected during the pandemic, whether we're a fixed centric market like the UK with a lot of mobile on top and like the US, or in many markets in Africa and Asia where we're very mobile centric. So the fact is that every country market is different. So we should never make too many assumptions at a very top level, but building out that network, building out the services, focusing on that connectivity and making sure we get that cost of delivery right, because competition is pushing us towards having not ever increasing prices because we don't want to pay a lot extra every time. But the big issue for me is how do we bring together the IT and the network parts of this story to make sure that we build that efficiency in? And that brings in many questions that we're going to touch upon now around cloud and hyperscalers around who plays in the ecosystem? Well, as you know, Telco's not my wheelhouse, but hanging around with you, I've learned and you talked a lot about the infrastructure being fit for purpose. So it's easy from an IT perspective. It's, oh yeah, it's fossilized, it's hardened and it's not really flexible. But the flip side of that coin is as you're pointing out, it's super reliable. So the big talk today is, okay, we're going to open up the network, open systems and open ran and open everything and microservices and containers. And so the question is, is can you mimic that historical reliability in that open platform? Well, for me, this is the big trade-off. And in my great Telco debate every year, I always try and put people against each other to try and literally debate the future. And one of the things we looked at was, is a more open network against this desire of the Telcos to actually have a smaller supplier roster? You know, and of course, as a major corporation, which these are on a national basis, very large companies, not large compared to the hyperscales, for example, but they're large organizations and they're trying to slim down their organizations, slim down the supplier ecosystem. So actually in some ways, the more open it becomes, the more someone's got to manage and integrate all those pieces together. And that isn't something we want to do necessarily. So I see a real tension there between giving more and more to the traditional suppliers, the Nokia's, Ericsson's, Huawei's, Amdox and so on, the Cisco's, and then the people coming in breaking new ground like Mavenir and coming in and the sort of approach that Rakuten and Co have taken in bringing in more open and more malleable pieces of smaller software. So yeah, it's a real challenge. And I think as an industry which is notorious for being slow moving, actually we've begun to move relatively quickly, not necessarily all the way through the organization. We've got plenty of stuff sitting on major, major or mainframe still in the back in the back of the organization. But of course as mobile has come in, we started to deal much more closely and interactively in real time, God forbid, with the customers. So actually at that front end, we've had to do things a lot more quickly. And that's where we're seeing the quickest adaptation to what you might see in your IT environment as being much more continuous development, continuous improvement. That sort of on-demand delivery. Yeah, and we're going to get to that sort of in the cloud space but I want to now touch on telco transformation which is sort of the main theme of this episode. And there's a lot of discussion on this topic. Can telcos move beyond connectivity and managing fiber? Is this a mandate? Is it a pipe dream that's just aspirational? Can they attack adjacencies to grow beyond the 1% a year? I mean, they haven't been successful historically. What are those adjacencies that might be an opportunity and how will that ecosystem develop? So Chris, can and should telcos try to move beyond core connectivity? Let's start there. I like what you did there by saying pipe dreams. You normally pipe is a negative comment in the telecom world that pipe dream gives it a real positive feel. So can they move beyond connectivity? Well, first of all, connectivity is growing in terms of the number of things being connected. So in that sense, the market is growing. What we pay for that connectivity is not necessarily growing. So therefore the mandate is absolutely to transform the inner workings and reduce the cost of delivery. So that's the internal perspective. The external perspective is that we've tried in many telcos around the world to break into those adjacent markets, be it around media, be it around enterprise, be it around IoT. And actually for the most part, they failed. We've seen some very significant recent announcements from AT&T, Verizon, BT, beginning to move away from owning content and delivery, not delivering content, but owning content. And the same is they've struggled often in the enterprise market to really get into that because it's a well-established channel of delivery bringing all those ecosystem players in. So actually rather than the old telco view of we're going to move into adjacent markets and control those markets, actually moving into them and enabling fellow ecosystem players to deliver the service is what I think we're beginning to see a lot more of now. And that's the big change. It's actually learning to play with the other people in the ecosystem. In fact, I always use a phrase that, there's no room for egos in the ecosystem. And I think telcos went in initially with an ego thinking we're really important, we own connectivity. But actually now they're beginning to approach the ecosystem, saying how can we support partners? How can we support everyone else in this ecosystem to deliver the services to consumers, businesses and whomever in this evolving ecosystem? So there are opportunities out there, plenty of them. But of course, like any opportunity, you've got to approach it in the right way. You've got to get the right investment in place. You've got to approach it with the right open API so everyone can integrate with your approach. And an approach, dare I say it with a little bit of humility to say, hey, we can bring this to the table. How do we work together? Well, it's an enormous market. I think you've shared with me it's like 1.4 trillion. And I want to stay on these adjacencies for a minute because one of the obvious things that telcos will talk about is managed services. And I know we have to be careful of that term in an IT context that it's different in talking about managing connectivity but there's professional services. That's a logical sort of extension of their business and probably a safe adjacency, maybe not even adjacency but they're not going to get into devices, right? I mean, they'll resell devices but they're not going to, I would presume not go back to trying to make devices but there's certainly the edge and that's so ill-defined and opaque but it's huge. You know, if there's 5G, there's the IT component and that's probably a partnership opportunity and as you're pointing out, there's the ecosystem but I wonder, how do you think about 5G as an adjacency or indoor opportunity? Is it a revenue opportunity for telcos or is that just something that is really aspirational? No, absolutely it's a revenue opportunity but I prefer to think of 5G as being a sort of a metaphor for the whole future of telecom. So we usually talk at MWC we would normally talk about 5G just as a mobile solution. Of course, what you can get with it you can use this fixed wireless access approach where the router sits in your house or your building so it's a potential replacement for some fixed lines and of course it also gives you the ability to build out, let's say in a manufacturing or a campus environment, a private 5G network. So many of the early opportunities we're seeing with 5G are actually in that sort of more private network environment addressing those very high, very low latency and high bandwidth requirements. So yet there are plenty of opportunities. Of course the question here is, is connectivity enough or especially with your comment around the edge? At the edge we need to manage connectivity, storage, compute, analytics and of course the applications. So that's a blend of players. It's not going to be in the hands of one player. So yes, plenty of opportunities but understanding what comes the other way from the customer base, whether that's you and I in our homes or out and about or from a business point of view in an office or a campus environment, that's what should be driving it, not the technology itself. And I think this is the trap that the industry has fallen into many times is we've got a great new wave of technology coming. How can we possibly deliver it to everybody rather than listening to what the customers really require and delivering it in a way consumable by all those different markets? Yeah, now of course all these topics blend together. We try to keep them separately but we're going to talk about cloud, we're going to talk about competition but one of the areas that we don't have a specific agenda item on is data and AI. And of course there's all this data flowing through the network so presumably it's an opportunity for the telcos. At the same time, they're not considered AI experts. They do, when you talk about Edge, they would appear to have the latency advantage because of the last mile and the proximity to various end points but the cloud is sort of building out as well. How do you think about data and AI as an opportunity for telco? You know, I think the whole data and AI piece for me sits on top of the cake or pie whatever you want to call it. What we're doing with all this connectivity, what we're doing with all these moving parts and gathering information around it and building automation into the delivery of the service and using the analytics whether you call it ML or AI it doesn't really matter but actually using that information to deliver a better service, a better outcome. Now of course telcos have had much of this data for years and years, for decades but they've never used it. So I think what's happening is the cloud players are beginning to educate many of the telcos around how valuable this stuff is and that then brings in that question of how do we partner with people using open APIs to leverage that data? Now, do the telcos keep hold of all that data? Do they let the cloud players do all of it? No, it's going to be a combination depending on particular environments. And of course, you know, the people owning their devices also have a vested interest in this as well. So you've always got to look at end to end and where the data flows are and where we can analyze it. But I agree that analysis on the device at the edge and perhaps less and less going back to the core which is of course the original sort of mandate of the cloud. Well, we certainly think that most of the edge is going to be about AI inferencing and that most of the data is going to stay at the edge. Some will come back for sure. And that is a big opportunity for whether you're selling compute or connectivity or maybe storage as well, but certainly insights at the edge. Everything, yeah, everything, yeah. Let's get into the cloud discussion and talk about the hyperscalers, the big hyperscaler elephant in the room. We're going to try to dig into what role the cloud will play in the transformation of telecoms. On telecom TV at the great telco debate, you likened the hyperscalers, Chris, to dementors from Harry Potter hovering over the industry. So the question is, are the cloud players going to suck the value out of the telcos or are they more like Dobby the elf? They're powerful, they're sometimes friendly, but they're unpredictable. Thank you for extending that analogy. Yes, it got a lot of reaction when I used that, but I think it sort of indicates sort of some of the direction of power shift, and we've got to remember here that telcos are fundamentally national and they're restricted by regulation and the cloud players are global, perhaps not as global as they'd like to be, but there's some regional restrictions, but the global players, the hyperscalers, they will use that power and they will extend their reach and they are extending their reach. You think they now command some fantastic global networks, in some ways they've replaced some of the telco international networks, those, all the submarine investments and now tend to be done primarily for the hyperscalers. So they're building it out. So as soon as you get onto their network, then you'll suddenly become part of that environment and that is reducing some of the spend on the longer distances, we might have called it in the past, approaches from the telcos. Now, does that mean they're going to go all the way down and take over the telcos? I don't believe so, because it's a fundamentally different business digging fiber in people's streets and deliver it to buildings and putting antennas up. So there will be a coexistence. And in fact, what we've already seen with cloud and the hyperscalers is that they're working much more closely together than people might imagine. Now, you mentioned about data in the previous question, Google, probably the best known of the AI and ML deliverers from the cloud side, working with many of the telcos, even in some cases to actually have all the data outsourced into the Google Cloud for analytics purposes, they've got the power, the heavy lifting to do that. So we're beginning to see that and obviously with shifting of workloads as appropriate within the telco network and environment, we're seeing that with AWS and of course, with Azure as well. So Azure, of course, are quite a couple of companies in affirmed and metaswitch, which actually do some of the formal 5G core and the like within the connectivity environment. So it's not clean cuts. And to go back to the analogy, those dementors are swooping around looking for opportunities and we know that they will pick up opportunities and they will extend their reach as far as they can down to that edge. But of course, the edge is where, as you rightly say, the telcos have the control. They don't necessarily own the customer. I don't believe anyone owns the customer in this digital environment because digital allows you to move your allegiance and your custom elsewhere anyway. So, but they do own that access piece and that's what's important from a national point of view, from an economic point of view. And that's why we've seen some of the geopolitical activity but banning Huawei from certain markets, encouraging more innovation through open ecosystem plays. So there is a tension there between the local telco, the local market and the hyperscaler market but fundamentally they've got an absolute brilliant way of working together, using the best of both worlds to deliver the services that we need as an economy. Well, and we've talked about this, you and I in the past where the telcos, the portions of the telco network could move into the cloud and of course the telcos all run big data centers and portions of that IT infrastructure could move into the cloud. But it's very clear they're not going to give up the entire family jewels to the cloud players, why would they? And then, but there are portions of their IT that they could move in, particularly in the front end, they want to build like everybody, they want to build an abstraction layer, they're not going to move their core systems and their backend oracle databases. They're going to put a brick wall around those but they want an abstraction layer and they want to take advantage of microservices and use that data from those transaction systems but their web front end stuff makes sense to put into cloud. So how do you think about that? I think you've hit the nail on the head. So you can't move those big backend systems straight away, gradually over time you will but you've got to go for those easy wins. And certainly in the research I've been doing with many of my clients, that suggests that that front end piece, making sure that you can onboard customers more easily, you can get the right mix of services, you can provide the omnichannel interaction from that customer experience that everybody talks about for which the industry is not very well known at all by the way. So any improvement on that is going to be good from an NPS point of view. So yeah, leveraging what we might, what we call BSSOSS in the telecom world and actually putting that into the cloud, levering both the hyperscalers, but also by the way, many of the traditional players who people think haven't moved cloudwards but they are moving cloudwards and they're embracing microservices and cloud native. So, what you would have seen if we'd been in person down in Barcelona next week would be a lot of the vendors who perhaps traditionally seen as a bit slow moving actually have done a lot of work to move their portfolio into the cloud and into cloud native environments. And yes, as you say, we can use that front end, we can use the API openness that's developed by people at the TM forum to actually make sure we don't have to do the back end straight away, do it over time. Because of course, the thing that we're not touching upon here is the revenue stream is a consistent revenue stream. So just because you don't need to change the back end to keep your revenue stream going, this is an anew, it keeps delivering every month. We keep paying our 50, 40, whatever bucks a month into the telco pot. That's why it's such a big market and people aren't going to stop doing that. So I think the dynamics of the industry, we often spend a lot of time thinking about the inner workings of it and the potential of adjacent markets was actually we keep paying for this stuff. We keep pushing revenue into the pockets of all the telcos. So it's not a bad industry to be in. Even if they were just pushed back to be in the access market, it's a great business. We need it more and more. The elasticity of demand is very inelastic. We need it. Yeah, it's the mother of all golden geese. We don't have a separate topic on security and I want to touch on security here. It's such an important topic and it's top of mind obviously for everybody, telcos, hyperscalers. The hyperscalers have this shared responsibility model. You know it well. A lot of times it's really confusing for customers. They don't realize it until there's been a problem. The telcos are going to be very much tuned into this. How will all this openness, and we're going to talk about technology in a moment, but how will this transformation in your view and the cloud with the shared responsibility model, how will that affect the whole security posture? You know, security is a great subject and I do not specialize in it and don't claim to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination. But I would say security for me is a bit like AI and analytics. It's everywhere. It's part of everything. And therefore you cannot think of it as a separate add-on issue. You know, so every aspect, every element, every service you build into your microservices environment has to think about how do you secure that connection, that transaction? How do you secure the customer's data? You know, sovereignty plays a role in that as well in terms of where it sits. But at every level, at every connection, every hop that we look through, every router jump, we've got to see that security is built in. And in some ways, you know, it seems being a separate part of the industry. But actually, you know, as we collapse parts of the network down, you know, we're talking about bringing optical and routing together in many environments, you know, security should be, should be talked about in the same breath. So when I talked about Edge and I talked about connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, I should have said security as well because I absolutely believe that is fundamental to every chain in the link. And let's face it, we've got a lot of links in the chain. Yeah, 100%. Okay, let's, let's hit on technologies and competition, we're going to blend those together. What technology should we pay in attention to that are going to accelerate this transformation? We hear a lot about 5G, open ran. There's a lot of new tech coming in. What are you watching? Who are the players that we maybe should be paying attention to, some that you really like that are well positioned? You know, we've touched upon it in various of the questions that are preceded there. So, you know, the sort of the cloudification of the networking environment is obviously really important. The automation of the processes, we've got to move away from bureaucratic manual processes within these large organizations because we've got to be more efficient, we've got to be more reliable. So, or anything which is related to automation. And then the open run question is really interesting. Once again, it raises this topic of when you go down an open run route or any open route, it ultimately requires more integration. You've got more moving parts from more suppliers. So therefore the potential security issues there, depending on how it's defined. But everybody is entering the open run market. You know, there are some names that you will see regularly next week, you know, being pushed. I'm not going to push them anymore because some of them just attract the oxygen of attention, but you know, there are plenty out there. What the good news is that the key vendors that who come from the more traditional side are also absolutely embracing that and accept the openness. But I think the piece which probably excites me more apart from the whole shift towards cloud and microservices, is this coming together, the openness between the IT environment and the networking environment. And you see it, for example, in the open run, this thing called the RIC, the RAN Interconnection Controller. We're actually, we're beginning to find people coming from the IT side able to control elements within the remote, the wireless controller piece. Now that starts to say to me, we're getting a real handle on it. Anybody can manage it. So more specialization is required, but understanding how the end-to-end flow works. You know, what we will see, of course, is an analysis about new devices. You know, the big guys like Apple and Samsung do their own thing during the year and don't interrupt their beats with MWC, but you'll see a lot of devices being pushed by many other providers. And you'll see many players trying to break into the different elements of the market. But I think mostly you'll see the people approaching it from a more cloudified angle where things are much more leveraging that cloud capability and not relying on the sort of rigid and stodgy infrastructure that we've seen in the past. Which is kind of interesting, because a lot of the clouds are walled gardens at the same time they host a lot of open technologies. And I think as these two worlds collide, IT and the telco industry, it's going to be interesting to see how the telco developer ecosystem evolves. And so that's something that we definitely want to watch. You got a comment there? Yeah, well, I think the telco developer, they've not traditionally been very big in that area at all, have they? You know, they've had their traditional, you know, if you go back to when you and I were kids, you know, the plain old telephone service was that they were a one-trick pony, right? And they've moved on to that. In some ways, I'd like them to move on and to have the one trick of plain old broadband that we just get broadband delivered everywhere. You know, so there are some issues about delivering service to all parts of every country and obviously the globe, whether we do that through satellite. We might see some interesting satellite stuff coming out during NWC. There's an awful lot of birds flying up there trying to deliver signal back to the ground. Traditionally, that's not been very well received. You know, the change in generation of satellite might help do that. You know, but we've not traditionally had a lot of developer activity in there. What it does bring to the fore though, Dave, is this issue of, you know, players like the Cisco's and Juniper's and all these guys of the world who bring a developer community to the table as well. You know, this is where the ecosystem play comes in because that's where you get the innovation in the application world, working with channels, working with the individual applications. And so it's opening up. It's basically building a massive fabric that anybody can tap into and that's what becomes so exciting. So the barriers to entry come down, but I think it will see a settling down a stabilization of relationship between the telcos and the hyperscalers because they need each other as we talked about previously. You know, then the major providers, the Cisco's, Nokia's, Ericsson's, Huawei's, the way they interact with the telcos and then allowing that level of innovation coming in from the smaller players, whether it's on a national or a global basis. So it's actually a really exciting environment. So I want to continue that theme and just talk about telco in the enterprise. And Chris, on this topic, I want to just touch on some things and bring in some survey data from ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, our partner. And of course the telcos, they've got lots of data centers. And as we talked about, they're going to be moving certain portions into the cloud, lots of the front end pieces in particular. But let's look at the momentum of some of the IT players within the ETR dataset and look at how they compare to some of the telcos that ETR captures, specifically within the telco industry. So we filtered this data on the telco industry. So this is our XY graph that we show you oftentimes on the vertical axis is net score, which measures spending momentum and on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, this data is for shared accounts just in the telco sector. So we filtered on certain sectors like within the technology sectors, cloud networking, and so it's narrow. It's a narrow slice of the 1500. It responds, it represents about 133 shared accounts. A couple of things jump right out. Within the telco industry, it's no surprise, but Azure and AWS have massive presence on the horizontal axis. But what's notable is they score very highly on the vertical axis with elevated spending velocity on their platforms. Within telco, Google Cloud doesn't have as much of a presence, but it's elevated as well. Chris was talking about their data posture before. Arista and Verizon, along with VMware, are also elevated as is Aruba, which is HPE's networking division, but they don't have the presence on the horizontal axis. And you got Red Hat OpenStack is actually quite prominent in telco as we've reported in previous segments. There's no surprise, you see Akamai there. Now, remember, this survey is weighted toward enterprise IT. So you have to take that into consideration, but look at Cisco, very strong presence, nicely elevated as is Equinex, both higher than many of the others, including Dell, but you can see Dell actually has pretty respectable spending in telco. It's an area that they're starting to focus on more. And then you got that cluster below, you're Juniper, AT&T, Oracle, the rest of HPE, Telus, Lumen, which is formerly CenturyLink, Avaya, IBM. Now again, I got to caution you, this is an enterprise IT heavy survey, but the big takeaway is the Cloud players have a major presence inside of firms that say they're in the telecommunications industry. And certain IT players like Cisco, VMware, and Red Hat appear to be well-positioned inside these accounts. So Chris, I'm not sure if any of this commentary resonates with you, but it seems that the telcos would love to partner up with traditional IT vendors and Cloud players and maybe find ways to grow their respective businesses. I think some of the data points you brought out there are very important. So yes, we've seen at Microsoft as you're an AWS, very strong working with telcos. We've seen Google Cloud platform actually really aggressively push into the market certainly in the last 12, 24 months. So yeah, they're well-positioned and they all come from a slightly different background, as I said, Google with its perhaps more data-centric approach in its analytics, tools very useful, AWS with its outpost reaching out, connecting out, and then Azure with its knowledge of the Microsoft business market certainly pushing into private networks as well, by the way. So yeah, and Cisco, of course, in there does have, in its mass scale division, a lot of activity there. They're some of the people collapsing some of that routing and obstacle together. They're big push on silicon. So what you've got here is a sort of cross representation of many of the different sources of supplies who are active in this market. Now they're all telcos are big spenders. The telecom market, as we said, at 1.4 trillion dollar market, they spend a lot. They probably have to double bubble spend at the moment to get over the hump of 5G investment to build out fiber, where they need to build out. So anything that relates to that is of course a major spending opportunity, a major market opportunity for players. And we know you need the infrastructure behind it, whether it's in data centers or in their own data centers or in the cloud to deliver against it. So what I do like about this as an analyst, a lot of people would focus down on one particular piece of the market. So you have people who specialize on handsets, people who specialize on home markets and home gateways. So I tend to sit back and try and look at the big picture, the whole picture. And I think we're beginning to see some very good momentum where companies are building upon, of course, their core business within the telecom industry, extending it out. But the lines of demarcation are blurring between enterprise, telco, and indeed moving down into small business. And you think about the SD1 market, which came from nowhere to build a much more flexible solution for connecting people over the wide area network, which has been brilliant during the pandemic because it's allowed us to A, extend that to home, but B, of course, build a campus ready for the future as well. So there are plenty of opportunities out there. I think the big question in my mind is always about from going into the telco, as I say, whether they want to reduce the number of supplies on the roster. So that was the question mark against some of the open approaches. And then from the telco to the end customer, because of course the telco's 30% of their revenue comes from the enterprise market, 60% plus percent from the consumer market. How do they leverage the channel, which includes all the channels we've talked about, security, all of the IT stuff that you've already touched upon, and the cloud. So it's going to be a very interesting mix and balancing act between different channels to get the services that the customers want. And I think increasingly customers are more aware of the opportunities open to them to reach back into this ecosystem and say, yeah, I want a piece of view, Mr. Telco, but I want it to come to me through my local integrated channel because I need a bit of their expertise on security. So fascinating market. And I think not telecoms no longer considered in isolation, but very much as part of that broader digital ecosystem. You know, Chris, it's very hard to compress an analysis of a $1.4 trillion business into 30 or 35 minutes, but you're just the guy to help me do it. So I got to really thank you for participating today and bringing your knowledge. Awesome. Do you know, it's my pleasure. I love looking at this market. Obviously I love analogies like Harry Potter, which makes it bring things to life. But at the end of the day, you know, we as people, we want to be connected. We as business want to be connected and society we want to be connected. So the fundamentals of this industry are unbelievably strong. Let's hope the governments don't mess with it too much and let's hope that we get the right technology comes through and helps support that world of connectivity going forward. All right, Chris. Well, I'll be texting you from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And many thanks to my colleague, Chris Lewis. He brought some serious knowledge today and thank you. And remember, I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And these episodes are all available as podcasts. You just got to search for breaking analysis podcasts. You can always connect me with me on Twitter at dvolante or email me at David.volante at siliconangle.com. And you can comment on my LinkedIn post and don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Be well and we'll see you next time.