 The Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. We're back in Barcelona at the fair. My name is Dave Vellantum. Here with David Nicholson. We're live at MWC 23. Day four of the coverage. The show is still rocking. You walk the floor, it's jamming. People are lined up to get in the copter, and it's amazing. Planes, trains, automobiles, digitization of analog businesses. We're going to talk private wireless here with Dell. Sarvesh Sharma is the global director for Edge and Private Mobility Solutions Practice at Dell, and John McCready is the senior director for 5G Solutions and Product Management at Dell Technologies. Guys, good to see you. Likewise, likewise. Private wireless, it's the buzz of the show. Everybody's talking about it. What's Dell's point of view on that? So Dell is obviously interested in the private wireless game, as it's a good part of the overall enterprise IT space, as you move more and more into the different things. What we announced here is sort of our initial partnerships with some key players like Airspan and Expedo, and Affinett, players that are important in the space. Dell is going to provide an overall system integration, solution wrap, along with our Edge BU as well, and we think that we can bring really good solutions to our enterprise customers. I got to ask you about Affinett. So HPE pulled a little judo move. They waited until you announced your partnership, and then they bought the company. What's your opinion on that? You're going to dump Affinett? You're going to keep them? No. We're helping the ecosystem. Yeah, it's an open ecosystem. We announced these are our initial partners. We're going to announce additional partners. That was always the case. There's a lot of good players in the space that bring different pros and cons. We got to be able to match the solution requirements of all our customers, and so we'll continue to partner with them and with others. Good answer, I like that. So some of these solutions are sort of out of the box. Others require more integration. Can you talk about the spectrum of your portfolio? So I'm glad you brought up the integration part, right? I mean, if you look at private wireless, private mobility, it is not a sell by itself. At the end of the day, what the enterprise wants is not just private mobility. They're looking for an outcome, which means from an integration perspective, you need somebody who can integrate the infrastructure stack, but that's not enough. You need somebody who can bring in the application stack to play and integrate that application stack with the enterprises ITOT. And that's not enough. You need somebody to put those together. And Dell is ideally suited to do all of this, right? We have strong partners that can bring the infrastructure stack to play. We have a proven track record of managing the IT and the enterprise stack. So we are very excited to say, hey, this is the sweet spot for us. And if there was a right to win the edge, we have it. Can you explain, I mean, people might be saying, well, why do I even need private wireless? I got wifi. I know it's kind of a dumb question for people who are in the business, but explain to folks in the audience who may not understand the intersection of the two. Don't you? So I think wireless is a great technology, pardon me, wifi is a great technology for taking your laptop to the conference room. It's effectively wireless LAN. Where private 5G and before that private LTE come into play is where there's a number of attributes of your application, what you're using it for, for which wifi is not as well-suited. And so that plays out in different verticals in different ways. Either maybe you need much higher capacity than wifi, better security than wifi, wider coverage like outdoor, and in many cases a more predictable reliability. So cellular is just a different way of handling the wireless interface that provides those attributes. So I think at the beginning, the first several years, wifi and 5G are going to live side by side in the enterprise for their different roles. How that plays out in the long term, we'll see how they evolve. But I think anybody can relate to that. I mean, wifi's fine. You know, we have our issues with wifi. I'm having a lot of issues with wifi this week. But generally speaking, it works just fine. It's ubiquitous, it's cheap. Okay, but I would not want to run my factory on it and rely on it for my robots that are shipping products. So that really is kind of the difference. It's really an industry 4.0 type of thing. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, manufacturing's an important vertical, but things of energy and mining and things like that, they're all outdoor, right? So you actually need the scale that comes with a higher power technology. And even just basic things like running cameras in a retail store and using AI to watch for certain things, you get a much better latency performance on private 5G and therefore are able to run more sophisticated applications. So I could be doing real-time inference. I'm going to imagine, Dave, I got an ARM processor. I'm doing some real-time inference AI at the edge. You know, you need something like 5G to be able to do that. You can't be doing that over wifi. You nailed it. I mean, that's exactly the difference, right? I mean, if you look at wifi, it grew up from an IT-enabled mode, right? You got to replace an ethernet. It was an IT extension, a LAN extension. Cellular came up from the mode of, hey, when I have that call, I need for it to be consistent and I need for it to be always available, right? So it's a different way of looking at it. Not to say one is better, the other is not better. It's just a different philosophy behind the technologies and they're going to coexist because they meet diverse needs. Now, you have operators who embrace the idea of 5G, obviously, and even private 5G, but the sort of next hurdle to overcome for some is the idea of open standards. What does the landscape look like right now in terms of those conversations? Are you still having to push people over that hump to get them beyond the legacy of proprietary closed stacks? Yeah. So I think, look, there are still people who are advocating that and I think in the carriers, core networks, it's going to take a little longer. They're main macro networks that they serve the general public. In the private network though, the opportunity to use open standard and open technology is really strong because that's how you bring the innovation and that's what we need in order to be able to solve all these different business problems. You know, the problems in retail and healthcare and energy, they're different. And so you need to be able to use this open stack and be able to bring different elements of technology and blend it together in order to serve it. Otherwise, we won't serve it and we'll all fail. So that's why I think it's going to have a quicker path in private. The only thing to add to that is if you look at private 5G and the deployment of private LTE or private 5G, right? There is no real technology debt that you're carrying. So it's easy for us to say, hey, the operators are not listening, they're not going open, but hey, they have a technical debt. They have 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G systems, right? But the reason we are so excited about private 5G and private 4G is right off the bat. When we go into an enterprise space, we can go open. So what exactly is Dell's role here? How do you see? Obviously you make hardware and you have solutions, but you got to open ecosystems, you got labs. What do you see your role in the ecosystem? You're kind of a disrupter here when I walk around this show. Well, a disrupter, also a solution provider and system integrator. Sarvesh and I are part of the telecom practice. We have a big edge practice in Dell as well. And so for this space around private 5G, we're really teamed up with our cohort in the Edge Business Unit. And think about this as, it's not just private 5G. It's what are you doing with it? That requires storage, it requires compute, it requires other applications. So Dell to bring that entire package. There definitely are players who are just focused on the connectivity. But our view is that that's not enough to ask the enterprise to integrate that all themselves. I don't think that's going to work. You need to bring the connectivity and the application to storage compute the whole solution. Explain telecom and Edge. They're different but they're like cousins in the Dell organization. Where do you guys divide the two? You're saying within Dell? Yeah, within Dell. So if you look at Dell, right? Telecom is one of our most newest business units. And the way it has formed is like, we talk Edge all the time, right? It's not new. Edge has always been around. So our enterprise Edge has always been around. What has changed with 5G is now you can seamlessly move between the enterprise Edge and the telecom Edge. And for that to happen, you have to bring in a telecom systems business unit that can facilitate that evolution, the next evolution of seamless Edge that goes across from enterprise all the way into the telco and other places where Edge needs to be. Same question for the market because I remember at Dell Tech World last year I interviewed Lowe's and the discussion was about the Edge. What they're doing in their Edge locations. So that's Edge. That's cool. But then I had another discussion with an agriculture firm. They had like the massive greenhouses and they were growing these awesome tomatoes. Well, that was Edge too. It was actually further Edge. So I guess those are both Edge, right? There's a spectrum there. And then the telecom business now you're saying is more closely aligned with that. Right. Depending on what you're trying to do, the appropriate place for the Edge is different. You nailed it exactly, right? So if you need wide area low latency, the Edge being in the telecom network actually makes a lot of sense because they can serve wide area low latency. If you're just doing your manufacturing plan or your logistics facility or your agricultural growing site, that's the Edge. So that's exactly right. And the reason why there are close cousins between telecom and that is you're going to need some connectivity, some kind of connectivity from that Edge in order to execute whatever it is you're trying to do with your business. Nature's Fresh was the company. I couldn't think of Nature's Fresh. Great, Keith, awesome, awesome Cube guest. Do you mention this mix of Wi-Fi and 5G? I know it's impossible to predict with dates certain when this, how is this going to develop? But can you imagine a scenario where at some point in time, we don't think in terms of Wi-Fi because everything is essentially enabled by a SIM? Or am I missing a critical piece there in terms of management of spectrum and the complicated governmental situation? Am I missing something? It seems like a logical progression to me but what am I missing? Well, there is something to be said about spectrum. If you look at Wi-Fi, as I said, the driver behind the technology is different. However, I fully agree with you that at some point in time, whether it's Wi-Fi behind, whether it's private 5G behind becomes a mood point. It's simply a matter of where is my data being generated, what is the best technology for me to use to ingest that data so I can derive value out of that data. If it means Wi-Fi, so be it. If it means cellular, so be it. And if you look at cellular, right? The biggest thing people talk about SIMs. Now if you look at 5G standard, in 5G standard you have EAPTLS, which means there is a possibility that SIMs in the future go away for IoT devices. I'm not saying they need to go away for consumer devices, they probably need to be there. But who's to say, going ahead for IoT devices, they all become SIM-free. So at that point, whether you're Wi-Fi or 5G, it doesn't matter. By the way, on the spectrum side, people are starting to think about the concept. You might have heard this NRU, new radio unlicensed. So it's running the Wi-Fi standard, but in the unlicensed bands like Wi-Fi. Okay. And then the last piece is, of course, the cost. The reality is 5G is still new technology. The endpoints, what would go in your laptop or a sensor, et cetera. Today that's more expensive than Wi-Fi. So we need to get the volume curved down a little bit for that to really hit every application. I would guess your vision is correct, but who can predict? Yeah. So explain more about what the unlicensed piece means for organizations. What does that mean? That's more of a future thing. So just the idea- No, no, right, but let's put on our telescope. Okay, so it's true today that Wi-Fi traditionally runs in the bands that have been licensed by the government. And it's a country by country thing. Right, what we did in the United States with CBRS is different than what they've done in Germany where they took part of the third C-band and gave it to the enterprises. The telco's not involved. And now that's been copied in Japan and Korea. So it's one of the complications, unfortunately, the market is that you have this different approach by regulators in different countries. Wi-Fi, the unlicensed band is a nice global standard. So if you could run NR just as 5G, right? It's another name for 5G. Run that in the unlicensed bands, then you solve the spectrum problem that Dave was asking about. Which means that the market really opens up. It would be a real name one, exactly. The only thing I would add to that is, right, there are some enterprises who have the size and scale to kind of say, hey, I'm going the unlicensed route, I can do things on my own. There are some enterprises that still are going to rely on the telco's, right? So I don't want to make a demon out of the telco's that you own the spectrum, no. They will be offering a very valuable service to a massive number of small, medium enterprises and enterprises that expand regional boundaries to say, hey, we can bring that consistent experience to you. The primary value proposition has been connectivity. We can all bring on that. And you hear different monetization models. We can't allow the OTT vendors to do it again. You know, we want to tax Netflix. Okay, we've been talking about that all week. But there may be better models, right? And so where does private network fit into the monetization models? Let's follow the money here. Actually, you've brought up an extremely important point, right? Because if you look at why haven't 5G networks taken off, one of the biggest things people keep contrasting is what is the cost of a Wi-Fi versus the cost of deploying a 5G, right? And a portion of the cost of deploying a 5G is how do you commercialize that spectrum? What is going to be the cost of that spectrum, right? So the CSPs will have to eventually figure out a proper commercialization model to say, hey, listen, I can't just take what I've been doing till date and say, this is how I make, because if you look at 5G, the return of investment is incremental. Any use case you take unless, let's take smart manufacturing, unless the factory decides I'm going to rip and replace everything by a 5G, they're going to introduce a small use case. You look at the investment for that use case, you'll say, I'm not making money, but guess what? Once you've deployed it and you bring use case number two, three, four, five, now it starts to really add value. So how can a CSP acknowledge that and create commercial models to enable that is going to be key? Like one of the things that Dell does in terms of Azure service solutions that we offer, I think that is a crucial way of really kickstarting 5G adoption. It's Metcalfe's law in this world, right? The first telephone in, not a lot of value, second in. I could call one person, but you know, if I can call a zillion, now it's valuable. Now you got data. Yes, you used a phrase, rip and replace. What percentage of the market that you are focusing on is the let's go in and replace something versus the let's help you digitally transform your business. And this is a networking technology that we can use to help you digitally transform. The example that you guys have with the small breweries, perfect example. You help digitize, digitally transform your business. You weren't going in and saying, I see that you have these things connected via Wi-Fi. Let's rip those out, put Sims in. No. So, you know. That's exactly right. It's enabling new things that either couldn't be achieved before or weren't. So from a private 5G perspective, it's not going to be ripped and replaced. As I said, it will coexist with Wi-Fi. It's still got a great role. It's enabling those, solving those business problems that either hadn't been solved before or could not be solved with other technology. How are you guys using AI? Let me just talk about chat GPT. I love chat GPT. We use it all the time. Love it, hate it, you know, whatever. It's a lot of fun topic. But AI generally is here in a way that it wasn't when the enterprise disaggregated. So there's AI, there's automation, there's opportunities there. How do they fit into private 5G? So if you look at it, right? AI, AI ML is actually crucial to value extraction from that data. Because all private 5G is doing is giving you access to that precious data. But that data by itself means nothing, right? You get access to the data, extracting value out of the data that bring in business value is all going to be AI ML, whether it's computer vision, whether it's data analytics on the fly so that you can do your closed loop controls or what have you. All of these are going to be AI ML models. Does it play into automation as well? Absolutely, because they drive the automation, right? You learn, your AI models drive that automation. Control, closed loop control systems are a perfect example of their automation. Explain that further, like give us an example. So for example, let's say you're talking about a smart manufacturing, right? So you have widgets coming down the pipe, right? You have your computer vision, you have your AI ML model that says, hey, I'm starting to detect a consistent error in the product being manufactured. I'm going to close loop that automation and either tweak the settings to the machine, shut down the machine, open a workflow, escalate it for human intervention. All that automation is facilitated by the AI ML models. And by the way, there's real money in that, right? If you're making your part and you're making it wrong, you don't detect it for hours. There's real money in fixing that. So I've got an example, albeit not even slightly, but a tragic one. Let's say you have a train that's rolling down the tracks at every several miles or so, temperature readings are taken from bearings in the train. Wouldn't it be nice to have that be happening in real time? So it doesn't reach that critical point where then you have a derailment. I mean, it doesn't sound sexy in terms of, hey, what a great business use case that we can monetize, but I'll bet you in hindsight, that operator would have loved to have that capability to be able to shut the train down and not run. That's a great example where the carrier is actually probably in a good position, right? Because you've got wide area, you want low latency. So the traditional carriers would be able, in great position, to provide that exact service. Telemetry is another great example. We've been talking about other kinds of automation, but just picking up measurements and so on. The other example of that is in oil and gas, right? As you've got pipelines running around, you're measuring pressure, temperature, you detect a leak in minutes, not weeks. So there's a lot of good examples of things like that. You pick up in a point, Dave, it's like you look at these big, huge super tankers, right? They have private networks on that super tanker to monitor everything. If on this train, we hear about so many edges, let's call one more, the rolling edge, right? That edge is right on that locomotive, tracking everything with the IML models, detecting things, warning people ahead of time, shutting it down as needed, and that connectivity doesn't have to be wired. It can be a rolling wireless. It potentially could be a spectrum that's open spectrum in the future, or, as you said, an operator could facilitate that. So many options, right? Yeah, I got to double down on this. Look, I know, because I've been involved in some of these projects, amusement park operators are doing this for rides, so that they can optimize the amount of time the ride is up, so they can shorten lines, so that they can get people into shops to buy food and souvenirs. Certainly, we should be able to do it to protect infrastructure. Absolutely, right? But I think the ultimate point you're making is, it's actually quite finely segmented. There's so many different applications, and so that's why, again, we come back to what we started with, is at Dell, we're bringing the solution from edge, compute, application, connectivity, and be able to bring that across all these different verticals and these different solutions. The other amusement park example, by the way, is as the rides start to invest in virtual reality, so you're moving, but you're seeing something, you need some technology like 5G to have low latency and keep that in sync, and have a good experience on the ride. To 5G and beyond, Gents, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. Thank you guys. It was great to meet you guys, thank you very much. All right, keep it right there for Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE's coverage of MWC23. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. theCUBE.net is where all these videos live. John Furrier's in our Palo Alto office. Banging out that news, keep it right there, right back after this short break.