 theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Hey everyone, guys and gals, good to see you. It's theCUBE live in Barcelona at MWC 23. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante on day one of four days of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage. Dave, today's Ecosystem Day. We've had some great conversations about why the open ecosystem is so important and some of the key players in it. Well, and I'm in search of disruptors, so I'm looking for, okay, who are the network operators that are going to actually lean into the future and drive it and challenge the existing incumbents? We're going to be talking about that today. We're going to be talking about that next. We've got one of our alumni back with us. Satish Ayer is here, the Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Great to have you back on the program. Thank you. Richard Leitow is with us as well, the Vice President of National Development at Dish Network. Welcome. Pleasure to be here. So, lots of, this is day one. The theme is velocity. I feel like the day has gone by so quickly, but Dell and Dish have partnered together on a multi-year initiative to build your nationwide CloudNative 5G network that's going to cover a lot of the U.S. Talk a little bit about that partnership, we'll get both of your perspectives. Richard, we'll start with you. Sure, so thank you again for having me. So Dish had an opportunity of going through this experience of innovating once more. For the ones that know Dish, Dish is a company that was founded in 1980 by an innovator, a disruptor. A course, in the course of the next 40 years, we had the opportunities of even disrupting ourselves. We launched our first satellite TV service. We then launched the first streaming, video streaming platform, disrupting our own satellite business. And since 2008, we have been acquiring Spectrum. And you know, Spectrum, the most valuable asset of a wireless operator. We felt that this was the right opportunity, having 5G, having O-RUN, and we decided to go full in in a Greenfield project, building a national network, 5G, O-RUN, cloud-based network, one of a kind network in the U.S. And most of all, using O-RUN, it's very important to us what it can bring, and it can bring to Dish, but to the entire ecosystem of this sector in the U.S. So Dish, talk a little bit about the partnership from Dell's perspective, and some of the unique advantages that Dell is delivering to Dish. Oh, absolutely. Again, like Richard was saying, I mean, the telecom network is being desegregated, as we speak. You know, companies like Dish and everybody else is looking at what are the best in class technologies we can bring to the table. I would like to say that, you know, the cloud is coming to the telco world, right? A lot of us have seen the tremendous transformation in the cloud world in the last few years. Now, you know, Dish is a big enterprise company. As you know, we are pretty strong within the cloud space and enterprise space. So what we try to work with Dish is, Dell is to bring to Dish is, you know, that notion of cloud scale and the cloud ecosystem into telecom, right? By means, best in class infrastructure products, best in class software products, to allow somebody like Dish to innovate and basically expand and build their own network. So it's absolutely important for us, as we build and get into the telecom space to work with somebody like Dish, who's also disrupting us a career in that space. So it's early days for OpenRAN, but you've decided, okay, we're all in. So you burn the bridge, as they say. Go for it. So when you talk to most people, they say, okay, it's immature, it's got to be able to get to the levels of the hardened stack reliability, but of course it brings the advantage of flexibility and speed. Are you optimizing for one or the other right now? How are you dealing with that balance? Well, it's not mature in the sense that most of operators that think about it, they have a legacy network. And in order to go full in on the O-RAN side, they need to scrap a lot of things that they have, and honestly, they don't want, and it doesn't make sense. So being a greenfield operator gives us that advantage, gives us the advantage, and desegregation, it's all about chipsets, boxes, and software. And the chipsets part, and what I like the most in desegregation is the time of innovation, the time that we can use new chipsets coming into the market. The size of the boxes that we are using, obviously our footprint on site is much smaller than traditional carriers or proprietary systems. So all of that, Dell has been critical in supporting us, supporting us having the best chipsets, having the smallest footprint, and the software, the cycle of innovation is much faster than in proprietary systems. So it's maturing. I'm glad to say that probably two years ago here, O-RAN was more like a pilot type of technology. It is not. We are live. We are live for more than 30 million customers in the US, and the performance levels are very similar to traditional networks. So you don't just buy a nationwide cloud native 5G network out of the box? No, you don't. You got to build it. I'm curious as to what Dell's role is in that build-out? Right. And I'm curious how you would grade Dell, but we'll get there. Yeah, I mean, look, yes you don't. So I think the first and foremost is, again, as V Dell comes into the telcospace, one of the things we have to look at is to understand what makes Dell better in the enterprise space. It is the best-in-class infrastructure. It is the software ties together. As you talk about disaggregated networks, it's important to understand a lot of these peace parts have to be touched together. So I think the integration aspects become really key, which is really Dell is very good at. So one of the things we are working really closely with this, Richard was alluding to, is not just bringing all the software and hardware assets together, but how do you continuously innovate and keep fixing things faster? So in the old days, traditional ways, you have a software stack. It takes you 18 months, 20 months to actually get an upgrade done. Here we have continuously CI-CD pipelines, where if you want to change done within a weeks or within a few days, where we can actually go and test and make sure these things work. So I think a lot of the best enterprise software practices, cloud practices, combined with whatever needs for telco, actually is what makes it very unique. I saw that this started out as an FCC compliance initiative that turned into a partnership, obviously a very successful one. Richard, talk about what Dish saw in Dell that really made it the right choice, knowing you have choices, you have options. You know, we saw the capability to execute, but we also saw the capability to innovate. From an execution level, at the end of the day, like we were talking, we started the project in the middle of COVID. And we had the first mandate to cover 20% of the US population by June 2022. And now we have a second one, 70% of US population by June 2023. At the beginning of the project, it was all about availability of materials, logistics, how to distribute, how to transport material. So Dell is a world-class supply chain. We felt that working with Dell through all these challenges made things easier. So from an execution perspective, whenever you need to build a network and you are building thousands of sites, you need to have materials, you need to distribute them, and you need to install them. Dell helped us across the board. Our expectations obviously will change. We have a network. We want to cooperate with Dell in many other areas. We want to leverage on Dell the ability to reach the enterprise market, to have private 5G offers. So hopefully this collaboration will endure in time and will change and evolve in time. And it's a big bet. I mean, it's not like a little transaction that you guys are doing. I feel like Michael Dell and Eric Causton had dinner and they said, okay, we're going to partner up and this is going to be a multi-decade partnership. You had to be transparent. Hey, we're new at this, even though we're really good at enterprise tech. And so you're going to obviously, if you take a chance on us, there's what we promise you and vice versa. You guys had to say, all right, hey, we're willing to roll the dice because we're trying to change the world. So what was that dynamic like? I mean, how did, I'm curious as to, this has to be a lot of different levels. Engineering, senior management, board level discussion. It's a big deal. We felt a huge buy in from Dell on the open run concept. And you know, edge computing and the ability to get us the best product and evolve the best product. Intel is critical in all these offerings. Intel has a great relationship with Dell. Dell helped us. Dell sponsored the DISH program in some of these suppliers. So it was definitely good to have their support and the buy in on the open run concept, we felt it from day one and we felt secure on that. Yeah, I mean, to add to that, DISH was very instrumental in driving, dictating, and executing to our roadmap, right? They are one of the key, I mean, since they are out there and they are really turning in a way, it's important that a customer who's actually at the out front of innovation helps us drive our own roadmap. So to Richard's point, lot of our product roadmaps in terms of whatever you build and all that was based on what DISH thinks as going to be market-based requirements. They also helped us a lot in the integration aspects. Like I said, one of the things about open desegregation of these networks is there is a lot of integration because it's not a one monolithic pipe smokestack anymore. You're picking up best-in-class pieces, bits and pieces and tying it together. It's important to understand when you tie it together things will go wrong, right? So there's a lot of learnings from an integration standpoint, supportability, deployment. One of the things Richard talked about was supply chain, you know, other Dell's ability to a lot of these deployments, a lot of these configs in the factory, right? In the second time. So especially a lot of these partnerships started during COVID time. And as you all know, you know, what we went through two years ago. So we had to make sure that a lot of these things are done in one place in a factory and not done in the field because we couldn't do a lot of these things. So there's a lot of experimentation, a lot of innovation on it. So it's 2030. What's this look like? What's the vision? We can work backwards from there. Well, a great network. Coverage to the entire country. Bringing new services to enterprises, to verticals. Bringing value add to customers. And, you know, technology cycles, they are lasting much less than they were. I cannot even say what will happen in three years, 2030. I mean, I know somebody has a vision for 2030. That's another thing. So a lot of it is build it and they will come, right? I mean, it really is, right? You put that network in place and then innovation happens on top. That's the best thing. Yeah, and look, and I think the biggest, people think about open run in terms of cost, which, you know, you have some things in cost that you appreciate in open run. The footprint, the possibility to diversify suppliers and have more competition. But for me, open run is about innovation and cycles of innovation. I used to work for Nokia. I used to work for Alcatel. I knew from the generation of an idea to an execution and having a feature delivered to a certain customer, it took months. We want innovation to take weeks. We are innovating at the speed of the cloud. We are cooperating with new players, players on the cloud and we expect things to happen much faster than they traditionally happen on the telecom sector. Move fast and break things. Well, we also expect that speed. Break and fix. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you for that. But speaking of speed, your customers expect that, right? They expect the service to be up 24-7. They expect to be able to access whatever content they want, whenever they want, from wherever they are. So comment, Richard, in our last few minutes here of how the Dell partnership is helping Dish to really deliver the excellent customer experience that your customers just expect that you're going to deliver. Well, by setting up the system number one, we are leveraging on a number of services. And I mentioned the supply chain, but in reality, Dell made much more than that for our 20% milestone and it's supporting our 70% milestone by installing, testing, verifying most of our data center equipment. We found that this offering from Dell was really addressing some of our needs because we believe they know a lot in this area and they can provide the best advice and the best speed to market in terms of having this equipment. Because we are working on a time clock, we need to have this done as soon as possible. For the future, I hope that they can help us in driving more services. I hope they can bring all the infrastructure that we need to offer to our customers. And, you know, we keep committed to O-RAN. O-RAN is really important, we are not compromising that and I think the future is bright for both of us. And Dell learns from the experience. Exactly. Absolutely. There's got to be a catalyst for expanding your roadmap and vision in telecom. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I mean, you're asking a 2030 question and I think that, you know, six, seven years from now, I think people should look at what Dish and Dell and say they were the trailblazers of bringing O-RAN to the market and making 5G a reality. I mean, you talk about 5G, but every 5G is on different stages. I do think that this combination, this partnership has the best chance to be the first ones to actually have a truly O-RAN network to be successful in the market. Awesome guys, trailblazers, Dell and Dish. Well, we look forward to watching this story unfold. Thank you for joining me on the program today, talking about what you're doing together. We appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Our pleasure. Thank you, bye. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Barcelona at MWC23. We'll be back after a short break, so we'll see you soon.