 Okay, thanks, Adam, in the studio. John Furrier, Dave Vellante, back on the Cube set here in the middle of all the action of Mobile World Congress is Cloud City, Telco DR, it's a digital revolution. Michael Sparanza, CEO of ZephyrTelz here with us. Great to see you, thanks for coming on the Cube here. Great, welcome. Thanks for having me, Dave and John, appreciate it. All right, so we're in the middle of the actor. We're just talking while we're waiting to come on camera. East Coast, I'm from California, Dave's in Boston, you're from the New York area. We're back to real life. This is what's happening here. It's a hybrid event, so not fully packed, good showing, a lot of action, so let's get to it. What do you guys do? Take a minute to explain what you guys do real quick and I got some specific public cloud questions for you. Excellent, so ZephyrTelz is a global provider of telecommunication solutions to everyone across the stack, tier one, tier two, and tier three CSPs throughout the world. We've got 300 customers, and I think probably the most interesting part about us as a company is that we actually probably started our lineage in the traditional sense in terms of these on-premise legacy large systems, and we are a provider that has jumped in feet first to the cloud revolution, and we're taking the effort now and the investment to move all of our solutions to the public cloud, and we're super excited to be here and showcase that to everybody. I got to ask you because one of the things that we've been documenting, Dave and I, for the past 10 years is the enterprise transformation. I mean, the digital transformation has been going on for quite some time on the enterprise side. Telco now seems like it's getting tuned up nicely to be disrupted and transformed. You're in the middle of it. You've been on both sides of the table. Now you're on the full throttle transformation. What's your take? Where are we at? Yeah, it feels as though we're at an inflection point. I think the last call of 12 or 18 months, maybe that's been an industry pause where we kind of look back and reflect around what their long-term strategies are, and more and more, just over the last 12 or 18 months, you've seen more announcements, more big names, jump in feet first, be a little bit more public, no pun intended about what their intentions are, what their investments that they're making into the efforts that they're trying to deploy in their networks. And we feel like we're at an inflection point and we're ready for it. It's interesting that Zephyr-Tel had a legacy business, on-prem business in your transitioning. What was the catalyst for that transition and what has it taken to get that journey looked like? Yeah, I think the catalyst is really figuring out how to enable our customers to compete on a ladder that has more rungs to it. If you look at these legacy on-premise solutions, we could pour mountains and mountains of dollars into R&D, and at the end of the day, we would still be struggling to offer them something that really creates a true competitive disadvantage or a competitive advantage for their business. And really, when you make the move to the public cloud and you start leveraging some of the platforms that are out there, it changes your profile dynamically in terms of what you could offer to the customer. So for us, that realization is what happened and we jumped in feet first and just the ability to get products to market, to give them a different cost structure is something that we would have never been able to do with our traditional legacy approach. So how did you do it? Because you have Balancing Act there, you got your existing business, did you sort of fence that off and sort of start with the cloud native approach and what did you find was the sort of before and after and some of the benefits that you saw? Yeah, that's a great question. So it's a difficult conversation with the customer, right? I think you have to go and engage the customer and be our approach has been to be very open and transparent with them. We're not telling them that what they're using is doesn't have a future. We're just telling them that we believe the future is brighter somewhere else and that's what we're choosing to invest in. And they shouldn't even know it. I mean, because the Club of Cloud is bringing in new things. One of the things we've been riffing on the past year is the three Rs. Reset, reboot, days one, you got to reboot things. Then you replatform with the cloud and then all the winners, once they replatform to the cloud, they refactored their operations. And so this seems to be like the secret recipe. Once you get to the refactoring, then you're introducing net new opportunities. So you do some cost recovery, you replatform, you get some things going and then boom, new things are happening. Yes, absolutely. And you have to have a long-term horizon. You can't, if you're trying to make these types of transitions over quarters or even years, it's not something that's easy to do with the business. Did you move the whole house into the cloud? We're working on it. Okay, so when you think about the telco industry, to me anyway, there's some clear workloads that can and should go into the cloud immediately. I think about mainframe downsizing in the day. I mean, anything that could go did go fast, you know? And so is it a similar parallel here? Yes, we've actually got maybe 10 products in the portfolio. We probably have half of them in the public cloud already. It doesn't mean every customer is using them in that dimension, but we have half of them already in the public cloud. As an option. Yeah, absolutely as an option. And then the others, it's really, I think, understand of this paradigm of kind of, when we get into more detail, I got this no feature left behind mindset that you have to challenge where you really have to convince the customer that no industry disruption ever started by making the new innovative product to everything the old one did, right? And they have to kind of take that journey with you and lean into the change and understand what the long-term benefit is. And talk about those, the business, I mean, you remember, John, when we got started, John was driving to the data center and you know, rack and cabling. And then when we went to the public cloud, we were like, wow, we saw the light. So until you do it, sometimes you can't experience it. What are they seeing in terms of the benefits? Yeah, I mean, the two major benefits are obviously costs and agility, right? And you know, you talk about agility and just what it enables them to do from a subscriber experience perspective, deploying new services, adapting those services to the new business paradigms and really improving the customer experience, right? There's no mistake, you look at this industry, it's probably got one of the most depressing statistics around customer experience in NPS of any industry in the world, right? So, cables up there too. Yes, it's hard not to improve that. And the other is costs, right? And that's an undeniable discussion that you can have if you get to the right level in the customer about what the long-term benefits of the cloud are. You know, it's funny, you usually hear NPS in the context of how great the NPS is, but you hear it a lot in this industry in a different context. Yes, yes. Well, one of the things we've been talking about is the big theme we're going to get to tomorrow, the next day, the open side of this. Open, Ransom and Rayleigh Hopp, O-Ran Alliances. Got more and more members, we're reporting on that. As you look at the stack, the tech stack, you got a lot of OT and IT's coming in with, because it's digital, a lot more IP-based systems. So you have this OT legacy culture of just, okay, we have, sometimes regulation drives it, but sometimes it's just old ways of doing things. Is that going to be encapsulated with, like, say containers or does it have to die? Does it have to be let go or can you nurture it? Like, sometimes we still have mainframes. Big banks have mainframes, you don't go away, they do one thing. So is there a coexistence between that old legacy and on top of it abstracting away that nonsense? I think certainly there can be, and we've employed that approach with customers where if they're looking at deploying new services or tackling a new emerging market or rolling out a new tiered service offering that might be under a different brand or label from their core brand, we've certainly approached it that way. The big thing for us is really approaching that discussion with the customer and really talking about what we can do, not what we can do and can't emphasize that enough. And the other piece is really having the right decision makers in the conversation, right? And understand that you're talking to someone who understands the impact on the PNL, not just on the making kind of virtuous technical decisions about the way things are done in the past. Michael, I got to get your thoughts on the agile because obviously cloud, speed, agility, we just heard from Microsoft on the interview I did with him around high density chips and low power that's going to enable more stuff. So there's more stuff coming in the hyperscale with more cloud and you start to see it comes like snowflake built on top of AWS, hugely successful. So this is an enablement market. Agility is key. How, as the CEO, you're looking at this, okay, you're refactoring, you're replatforming. Agility is a benefit. How does that change how you run the business, how you serve customers? Yeah, so it really changes where our investment dollars go. That's probably the number one impact. So if you look at AWS as a platform, it started 15 years ago and had one service. Today it's got over 200. So understanding that these platforms receive billions and billions of dollars of investment every single year, regardless of which one you're aligned to and leveraging that to power the services that we provide, we don't have to build everything. We can leverage the capability that they provide to us, really focus our energy and our dollars in the things that make our application unique to our customer. So that was really one major tradition as leading an organization that you have to make. And then you have to convince the organization to go in that direction. It's different and you have to be very over and transparent with the customer. Well, the early days of financial service, cloud was an evil word and now every financial service organizations are leaning in big time. There's obviously reticence among public telcos and move to the public cloud. There's a lot of discussion about, oh, openness, it's hard to replicate the reliability of the network, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe some of that, you know, rational and founded, but what do you see in terms of the reticence and the risks and how are you helping mitigate those? Yes, my perspective has really just been this kind of cascade of excuses and explanations as to why not to go, right? And it started with, you know, things that could have been legitimate issues at the time of data sovereignty or security. They've been solved, right? You move on and now it's, you know, that notion of no feature or no man left behind. We have to have feature parity, we can't go. We've, you know, every other industry has debunked that myth. And now the one that I think is most important to challenge is this organizational dysfunction where it's really about accessing the right levels in the customer to have that conversation, to neutralize the power or importance of any one dimension of decision making and have an overt business discussion about what are the numbers behind the solution and how you're providing it. You have to include the cost discussion in it and you have to actually get the finance person to really understand the technology and not just outsource that decision to somebody else. Because that person is often faced with making a decision that, you know, could be delatorious to their role, their business, their own organizations and that's something that needs to be arbitrated at a senior level. I think that, we've seen this before. I love it's protecting turf, you know, and just internal politics. And that's what we saw in the financial services business and then the forget it. It's just all the parts. Well, the thing too though with the skill set is not only is there a skill retraining going on, new roles are emerging. So for instance, the SREs we've been covering in a lot of these big companies, you got Site Reliability Engine, a pioneer by Google, that's a new role dealing with infrastructure. And as infrastructure as code comes out, it gets more fuzzy with some of the hood because now you got Lambda, you got Serverless. So that entire programmability is going to put pressure on these old OT stacks. What's your forecast on that? And that's what broke the barrier in a lot of these regulated industries was infrastructure code. All the developers, to your point, wanted in. And that was like the penguins off the iceberg. But does that push the pressure on the OT stacks or does the abstraction at the top drive the innovation? Is it going to be disrupted down here or is it going to be at the top of the stack? What's your take? Yeah, so I think, you know, I've seen that transition in financial services. I actually had a front of a seat in financial services with a different role. And the way I saw it actually unfold was having some sort of role that sits between the CFO and the CTO. Someone who's responsible for the, not only the technical evolution of the architecture but the financial evolution of the architecture that can actually be a compatriot to the CFO making those decisions. So that's how I've seen it really transition. Unless there's buy-in from the top down, it will just be kind of pressure from the bottom up and we'll never see a take hold. If bottom up, bottom up will not work unless top down. So it's got to be top down, bottom up, as you were saying. I mean, what drives that? Does the legal come in and drive that a little bit now because you've got a lot of pressure with cyber? So you've got cyber, you've got regulatory pressure with telcos, I mean, some of these carriers, they get penalized. Or are they still blockers? Is that the legal still a blocking? Yeah, we haven't seen legal really enter the decision-making process for us. And for us, we probably wouldn't involve them unless we needed to. Quite honestly, I think it could be more of a blocker than someone, you know, they can always say no, they can't really say yes, is our view of that. So they're an important person to be on the journey, but probably not someone that we would seek to include in the decision. All right, Michael, I want you to take the last minute to just take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. What's your vision of the company? Obviously, you're on the right wave, the wave's big. You get your surfboards out there, you're going to ride the wave. What are you going to do? What's the big goals? What's your plans? Take them in to put a plug into what you're doing. Yeah, so look, we see the future as a marketplace of cloud-based solutions. We feel that we're someone that's trying to lead that innovation. I think it's fantastic to see what's happening here right now with Cloud City and giving all the disruptive vendors a voice in the industry that they probably did not have before. And we really see the vision as that open marketplace where things are leveraging APIs. All these systems can communicate across the stack and we're going to be part of that journey. We're showcasing solutions here today around subscriber management to drive our pool. We've got solutions for managing the customer experience in the home that will increase retention. And really, everybody has to just open their minds to learn about what's possible with the public cloud and then translate it to how it can actually benefit their business. Are you guys looking to hire anything you want to share? Plug for what? Yeah, look, we're growing. We've got solutions here that we're looking to position the customers across the stack globally. It's here one, tier two, it's end tier three. And please come by the booth and visit us and learn about us as a company. No, John, the big difference between the cloud this decade and the cloud last decade is such an ecosystem now that's built in, it's forming that you can leverage, right? That was kind of really immature last decade and it's not just one company going after this. It is the ecosystem. Well, the problem, the opportunity is is that the telcos are going to get punched in the face with the edge now driving the 5G because now they cannot ignore the fact that you now have a cloud edge that is explosive in functionality, low cost, silicon, high density, it's just a game changer. That consumer technology's coming to the edge and it's going to forcing function. So if they blink, who blinks first? Telcos or cloud? So public cloud's coming like a freight train. Clothes are blinking. It ain't blinking, it's a freight train. The freight train of public cloud is coming into the telco and if people don't adapt to it, they're going to be toast and I think the opportunity is for entrepreneurs and founders and CEOs to drive that innovation. Okay, innovation's here and we're going to continue bringing the coverage and we're going to go right to the studio where Adam and the team are there.