 Okay, thanks for the studio there, for the hand-off. Appreciate it. We're here for breaking news, and it's exciting that we have Amal Padkha, who's the managing director. Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave, so we want to bring them in and get commentary while we end out day two. Obviously, the story here is Cloud City. We are in the Cloud City. Amal, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. I'm very excited to be here, virtually at MWC. Well, we've got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert, and you're the only standing between Bon Jovi and all the great stuff, so. A lot of people watching. Thanks for coming on. Seriously, you guys got some big news. First, Erickson partners with you guys on 5G, platform deal with Anthos, as well as Open RAN, Alliance, you guys are joining. Huge testament to the industry. Obviously, Google, with all your innovation you guys have in the Big Three Cloud Hyperscalers. Obviously, you guys invented SRE, so stranger to large scale. What's the news? Tell us why this Erickson news is so important. Let's start with the Erickson announcement. Sure. So John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market the strategic partnership that we've been building with Erickson for the last few months. The partnership, the reason we feel this is very important to the industry is we are actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not done in isolation. We are in fact, saw in the press release that we have already launched something together with Telecom Italia in Italy, because you would see that also in the press. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSPs monetize 5G and Edge, which is a real theme at the moment, using Google Cloud's solutions like the Edge computing platform and Anthos, and Erickson's cutting edge 5G components, 5G solutions. And if we can all put this together at the CSP, such as Telecom Italia, that creates massive time to market efficiency. So that's point one, because speed and agility is key, John. But then point two, it also unlocks a lot of Edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, you know, retail manufacturing, healthcare and so on, which we are already starting to launch together with Erickson. And so that's a second pillar. And then the final pillar, of course, is this continuous wave of cloud native innovation that you just highlighted, John. We are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Erickson, to really try and create this cloud native application suite for 5G over time. Talk about the innovations around cloud, because the message we're hearing this year at Mobile World Congress is that the public cloud is driving the innovation. And, you know, it could be a little bit over the top. So the telcos are slow, they're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are, they're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top, so there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept, cloud native enables that, so you've got containers, you can put that encapsulate that older technology and integrate it in. So this is not a rip and replay, someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the telcos. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? Spot on, John, spot on. We believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There is zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is, when you talk about that containerization and write once and deploy everywhere type architecture that we are trying to do, that's where the cloud native really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5G solutions with operators such as Telecom et al. Once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to cook it up again and again for every deployment? As long as you have Anthos and Ericsson working, you should be able to have the same experience. Yeah, John, I talk all the time in theCUBE about how developers are really going to drive the edge. You're clearly doing that with your distributed cloud, building out a telco cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving. A lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud, a lot of modeling being done when you think about edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? Sure, so I think David, first of all, it's a fantastic segue into how we are looking at analytics at the edge, right? So we have realized that the network is a very, very data computing heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned is definitely something that we can offer to the edge. Why is that so important? In the pandemic era, I think of running a shop or a factory floor completely autonomously with zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI inferencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products in manufacturing, that's a very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Ericsson and a Google cloud telecom Italia type carrier gives you that edge placement of the workloads that would sit right next to a factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run that AI inferencing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer a visual inspection capability to just bring us to life. Great, thank you for that. And now the other piece of the announcement, of course, is the open, open ran. We've been talking about that all weekend. And you know, you well remember when cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. And of course now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the telcos? And of course over time, we learned that you guys actually pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component, maybe first talk about the open ran piece, why that's important and how security fits. Sure. So first of all, open ran is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple, Dave. This aggregation of networks has been happening for some time in the radio layer. We believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and disaggregating that radio layer. And why is that so important? 80% of the operators spends globally is on radio of across their infrastructure, 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that and if you created synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware, standard purpose software with open interfaces. Number one, massive difference in PCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and becomes a really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution that's about to get larger with 5G and the capillarity that 5G needs. You're thinking of tens of thousands of microcells and radio cells going everywhere and having that kind of standardized hardware software with open interfaces is an extremely important cost dimension to. And on the revenue side, finish that, the reason we got so excited open brand was you can now run a lot of APIs on the radio layer itself that then suddenly brings the whole developer community on the radio layer that then helps you do a bunch of things like closed-loop automation for network optimization as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper-personalizing yours and mine experiences at a device level from the cell down. And so that really is what is driving us towards this open-rand type of announcement. Come on, we're going about a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on open source and the innovation. Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of TelcoDR, she's at a keynote today and she mentioned that the iPhone 14 years ago was launched. Okay, and you think about open and you mentioned proprietary with the 5G and having O-RAN be more commodity and industry standard that's going to lower the costs, increase the surface area of infrastructure, everyone wins because everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the Telco industry and open source is driving that. Is Android the playbook that you guys pioneered obviously at Google with the phones was very successful? How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at Telco? Absolutely, John. And the parallel and the analogy that you raised is fought on. We believe in the Telco world and toss multi-cloud as a unifying software development layer and the app development platform is the way that we're going to start to drive this innovation whether it's at the radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the IT side of house. Same software running everywhere that really allows you that whole CI CD SRE type development models that we are familiar with but on the telecom side and that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for start developing systems to come on. That's great stuff. I was just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at Mobile World Congress. Amal, thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news with Google. Congratulations on the Ericsson Anthos platform deal as well as the Open Renton Alliance. Congratulations, good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on the CUBE featured segment, so watch that interview. Thank you, John. Thank you, Dave. Glad to be here. Thanks, Amal. Thank you. Managing director, telecom industries and Google, obviously player. He's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology. They got the chops, Dave. And we're going to now bring up this, Daniel Roche, he's here when I bring up on the stage. Bon Jovi's about to go on behind us. Bon Jovi's here. And it's like a nightclub, a small intimate setting here in Cloud City, Dave. Bon Jovi's right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here. But first let's bring up the CEO of Telco DR. Daniel Roche, great to see you. She's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you, Mike, great to see you. Oh, it's great to be here. We're going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote, but thanks for coming by and closing, swinging by. I know, we're closing down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day today at MWC and in Cloud City. Well, big day too, by the way. Really starting to get packed. I mean, everyone's coming in. The band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So, I mean, it's really happening. A lot of buzz about Cloud City out there in the hallway. Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited with how it's going. So, yeah. Well, this is awesome. While we got you here, we want to put you to work being the CUBE analysts for this segment. You just heard Google. We broke them in for a breaking news segment. Obviously, some hard news. Ericsson partnership. We're in the, actually, former Ericsson booth. They're not even here. It's now the Telco DR booth. But that's the relationship. And then open ran. Again, open source. You got 5G. You got open source. All happening. What's your take on this? You're seeing. Yeah, I think, you know, there's too big, and I talked about it, my keynote this morning. There's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had MWC 21. I certainly wanted to make it about the public cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is open ran, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening. And I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, we saw these two. Well, I loved your keynote. We were here live, Chloe was here filling in for Dave while Dave was doing some research and getting some breaking stories. But you were on stage and we were talking, Chloe's like, there's trillions of dollars John on the table, and I was making the point that the money's at the middle of the table and it's changing hands. If people don't watch it. And then you on stage said, there's trillions of dollars. This is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table and you've got cultural collision. You got operators and builders trying to figure out it feels like DevOps is coming in here. Yeah. I mean, what's the holistic vibe? What's the... Yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the public cloud to double your ARPU without massive CAPEX expenditure. And I think the CSPs have always viewed to get the increase in ARPU, I got to build out the network. I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling the ARPU, why not? We should do that, absolutely. You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on the wave. You got to ride the wave, you're going to become driftwood, as John said yesterday. And I think it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the telcos. I feel like Danielle, they were entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then maybe, especially as it relates to developers, just talking about building out the edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the edge. And that's not a wheelhouse necessarily to the telcos. So they're going to have to partner for that. They're going to have to embrace cloud native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on. We'll see how long that takes. But if they don't move fast, you know what's going to happen. Well, I think you look at it from the enterprises perspective. And we just heard Google talking about it. You need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to. Now, historically, they haven't had this opportunity. Historically, the CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented. It's available. There's developers out there that know it. And so I think that's the big opportunity. This might be the big use case that they've been looking for with 5G and looking forward to 6G. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSPs to do that. I think that's an important point because you got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay, those are pretty safe bets. Those guys are going to be around. You think. You think. I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. I'm like, are you guys nuts? They're safe bets. Safe bets in terms of your investment in technology. Now you've got to move fast. That's the other piece of it. You've got to change your business model. Yeah, absolutely. You've got to be on the right side of history, too. I mean, what does trust actually really mean? Does Snowflake trust Amazon? It sure did to get them where they are. That's a great example, John. It really is. Because there's a company who can move fast, but at the same time, they compete, but at the same time, they add incremental value. And so here, you can see the narrative, like, oh no, we're partnering. Telcos aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new. Well, containers will help them manage that operational legacy, but culturally, if they don't move, they're going to have an asset that'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. Because the old model of build, the CapEx and extract of rents is kind of shifting because the value's shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching. It's still kind of unknown. Danielle, I'd love to get your thoughts on this because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like Cloud, then you don't have to try to extract the rents out of the CapEx or what's your thoughts? I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in Telco. I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved mega data centers, right? Huge data centers at scale and just leverage their investment and for your own benefit. It starts to focus and we heard, I'm all talking about it, starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us, right? Yeah. Well, you've talked about that many times that you exit, but you're right. The conversation has to go beyond, okay, we're just connectivity. It's going beyond, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges, great. Take that box, right? It's those value-added services that you're talking about and it's an infinite number of those that can be developed and that's where the partnerships come in, the creativity in the industry. It's just a blank piece of paper for you. Well, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you. We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving up ads and you're like, how did you write Facebook? But you know who knows more about us than Google or your mother? Even your telco. You take your phone with you everywhere, right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide a really good experience. And by the way, congratulations on the CEO of Ptogey and the investment, $100 million. That's a game changer statement. Again, back to the billing and the, there's a whole new, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I don't hold that. We're going to meet tomorrow. I want to leave that here. Stay on the data for a second because you made the point before, I think in the keynote as well, that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook now, trillion dollar valuation? It's all about the data. And telcos have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. I think there's two parts to the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them and it certainly can't do without. And we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight, it's useless, right? And so to Togi, we announced the launch of to Togi. I'll get a little to Togi plug in there, right? To Togi is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve. It would have been solved already, but I think the key is leveraging the public cloud to get your data out of on-premise and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provide to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizable, right? At the end, that's what they want, more ARPU, more revenue, right? And you know, we heard some keynotes from GSMA yesterday, some big, big guys, talking about how it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. Telco is heavily regulated, and they're like, it's not fair, and I'm like, yep, it's not fair. That's life, right? Stop complaining about it and start treating your customers better so they're happy to give you more money. Yeah, and I think that's the message about the assets too. Well, one thing I will say in this Mobile World Congress is that we've been having a lot of fun here in Cloud City. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote. You get a spring to your step. Cloud City is beautiful, spectacular here. Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip so far. Well, number one, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a bunch. You know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes, and that was really fun. But yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes, the attendance is reduced. Usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups. And yeah, the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right? The senior leadership teams are in the booth, we're having meetings, we're having amazing conversations. I think the last year, we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the public cloud. I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud-based tools. And I think the light bulb went off. I think I'm right in the right moment. It's awesome. Do you think that they'll think in there, like left money on the table? Because if you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies. Losers, people who held the line, struggled, and then winners. Big time tailway, booming, obviously the zooms of the world. Telcos did well, they were up and running. Business was good. You think they might have left some money on the table, they could have done more? I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation, or digital telco were digitally enabled. But I think the pandemic really tested this, right? Can you deliver a contactless SIM? Or do you need to go to a store in person to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store. And I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of telcos that were very digitally enabled, right? They were using Uber to deliver SIMs and all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot. Agile. Right, agile. And so I think that was a really big wake up box. Telemedicine, booming. So if you were in a digital business during the pandemic, in general, you're out of business, maybe unless you were a telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off, it was an aha moment, and they said, uh-oh, if we don't move. I mean, I am not kidding, right? As an ex-CEO, where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right, here's a docusign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses docusign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, right, in some country, once a month on Tuesday between 10 and two. And I'm like, how are you doing business? Like that. It's like the dark ages. John, this is where the crypto guys got it right would know your customer, right? Because they have the data. Well, they had to. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of things that come in wrong on crypto. We don't want to get the whole show on that. But then you have great to have you drop biopsies, Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? You're a huge fan, New Jersey boy Patriots fan. Yeah. We love them. Fantastic. Yeah, I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi, right? We knew we wanted a rocker, right? Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. That, I mean, since the beginning, and that's what we're doing here, right? We're really challenging, like the way things have been done in telco, kind of just shattering the glass ceiling in lots of different ways, right? Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me, right? I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like, that girl. Oh, we're punk rock. They're rock and roll. We can be punk rock. Right? I mean, maybe we should have gotten the clash, right? Black, black, right? I'm a little bit old. Bon Jovi's good. Right? We'll go with both of them. Accessible, right? Once more conservative, rock and roll, still edgy. Yeah, so really excited to get them here. I've met them before. And so hopefully they'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen them. So can't wait to connect with them again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up, and that's going to be always exciting to hear that guy talk. So yeah. He's going to be inspirational. If you talk space, space X, and connect to Starlink. Talk about the edge. Starlink, right? I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellite. And I think that's really interesting for rule, for rule, right? In telco, right? Being able to deploy very quickly in rule, where maybe the cost per gig doesn't make sense. The cost per deployment of tower, I think. And that's an interesting idea right there. Yeah. It's exciting. He's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming into this industry. Why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning. And they see the cloud and they're saying, oh, A or B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. Yeah. I think eventually the generation shifts. It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it. Yeah. Great, great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovators. Glad to have us here and presenting with you here. Awesome team. I'm so psyched to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership is. So thank you so much. We love it here. Yeah. Cube is rocking inside the cloud city, the streets of the cloud city, our hospital is booming. Backed in here. It's all stuff great stuff. Thanks for coming on. Yep, thanks so much. Bon Jovi is here. We got a shot of Bon Jovi. Do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? Yeah, there it is. Okay, he's about to come on stage and we're going to take a break here. We're going to send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.