 The Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Welcome to the fear in Barcelona, everybody. This is the Cube's coverage of MWC 23, day one of that coverage. We have four days of wall-to-wall action going on. The place is going crazy. I'm here with Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also in the house. Today's ecosystem day, and we're really excited to have Manish Singh, who's the CTO of the Telecom Systems Business Unit at Dell Technologies. He's joined by Doug Wolf, who's the head of strategy for the Telecom Systems Business Unit at Dell. Gents, welcome. Thank you. What a show. I mean, really the first major MWC, or used to be Mobile World Congress, since you guys have launched your telecom business, you kind of did that sort of in the COVID transition, but really exciting, obviously a huge, huge venue to match the huge market. So Manish, how did you guys get into this? What did you see, what was the overall thinking to get Dell into this business? Yeah, well, I mean, just to start with, if you look at the telecom ecosystem today, the service providers in particular, they're looking for network transformation, driving more disaggregation into their network so that they can get better utilization of the infrastructure, but then also get more agility, more cloud-native characteristics on to their, for their networks in particular. And then further on, it's important for them to really start to accelerate the pace of innovation on the network itself, to start more supply chain diversity, that's one of the challenges that they've been having. And so they've been all these market forces that have been really getting these service providers to really start to transform the way they have built the infrastructure in the past, which was legacy monolithic architectures with more cloud-native disaggregated. And from a Dell perspective, that really gives us the permission to play to really given all the expertise on the work we have done in the IT with all the IT transformations to leverage all that expertise and bring that to the service providers and really help them in accelerating their network transformation. So that's where the journey started. We've been obviously ever since then working on expanding the product portfolio on our compute platforms to bring Telco great compute platforms with more capability than we can talk about that. But then working with partners and building the ecosystem to again, create this disaggregated and open ecosystem that will be more cloud-native and really meet the objective that the service providers are. Great, thank you. So Doug, the strategy obviously was to attack this market as Manish said from an open standpoint, that's sort of new territory. It's like a little bit like the Wild Wild West. So maybe you could double click on what Manish was saying from a strategy standpoint. Yes, the Telcos need to be more flexible. They need to be more open, but they also need this reliability piece. So talk about that from a strategy standpoint of what you guys saw. Yeah, absolutely. As Manish mentioned, Del getting into open systems isn't something new. Del has been kind of playing in that world for years and years. But the opportunity in Telecom that came was opening of the RAN, the core network, the Edge. All of these with 5G really created a wide opening for us. So we started developing products and solutions. Built our first Telecom grade servers for OpenRAN over the last year. And we'll talk about those at the show. But as Manish mentioned, an open ecosystem is new to Telecom. I've been in the Telecom business along with Manish for 25 plus years. And this is a new thing that they're embarking on. So started with virtualization about five, six years ago and now moving to cloud native architectures on the core. Suddenly there's this need to have multiple parties partner really well, share specifications and put that together for an operator to consume. And I think that's just the start of really where all the challenges are and the opportunities that we see. Where are we in this transition cycle? When the average consumer hears 5G, feels like it's been around for a long time because it was hyped beforehand. Yeah. If you're talking about moving to an open infrastructure model from a proprietary closed model, when is the opportunity for Dell to become part of that? Is it, are there specific sites that have already transitioned to 5G therefore they've either made the decision to be open or not? Or are there places where 5G transition has taken place and they might then make a transition to open RAN with 5G? Where are we in that cycle? What does the opportunity look like? I'll kind of take it from the topology of the operator and I'm sure Manish will build on this. But if I look back in the core started to get virtualized back around 2015, 16 with some of the lead operators like 18T, et cetera. So Dell has been partnering with those operators for some years. So it really, it's happening on the core but it's moving with 5G to more of a cloud-like architecture, number one. And number two, they're going beyond just virtualizing the network. They previously had used OpenStack and most of them are migrating to more of a cloud-native architecture that Manish mentioned. And that is a bit different in terms of there's more software vendors in that ecosystem because the software is disaggregated also. So Dell's been playing in the core for a number of years but we brought out new solutions. We've announced at the show for the core and the parts that are really starting that transition of maybe where the core was back in 2015 is on the RAN and on the Edge in particular. Because NFV kind of predated the ascendancy of cloud. So it really didn't have the impact that people had hoped. And there's something when you look back because it's not same wine, new bottle as the open systems movement. There are a lot of similarities, but you mentioned cloud, cloud-native. You really didn't have back in the 90s true engineered systems. You didn't really have AI to speak of at the volume, the data that we have. So Manish, from a CTO's perspective, how are you attacking some of those differences in bringing that to market? Yeah, I mean, I think you touch on some very important points there. So first of all, to Doug's point, a lot of this transformation started in the core, right? And as the technology evolution progressed, the opportunities opened up, it has now come into the Edge and the radio access network as well, in particular with open RAN. And so when we talk about the disaggregation of the infrastructure from the software itself and an open ecosystem, this now starts to create the opportunity to accelerate innovation. And I really want to pick up on the point that you said on AI, for example. AI and machine learning bring a whole new set of capabilities and opportunities for the service providers to drive better optimization, better performance, better sustainability and energy efficiency on their infrastructure on and on and on. But to really tap into these technologies, they really need to open that up to third parties, implementation solutions that are coming up and again, the end objective remains to accelerate that innovation. Now, that said, all these things need to be brought together, right? And delivered and deployed in the network without any degradation in the KPIs and actually improving the performance on different vectors, right? So this is what the current state of play is and with Disaggregation Armor, definitely a believer that all these new technologies, including AI, machine learning, and there's a whole area of problems that can be solved and attacked and are actually getting attacked by applying AI and machine learning onto these networks. Open, obviously, is good. Nobody's ever going to argue that open is a bad thing. It's like democracy is a good thing, right? At least amongst us. And so, but the open ran has to be as reliable and performant, right, as these closed networks or maybe not, maybe it doesn't have to be identical. It just has to be close enough in order for that tipping point to occur. Is that a fair summarization? What are you guys hearing from carriers in terms of their willingness to sort of put their toe in the water and what can we expect in terms of the maturity model of open ran and adoption? Right, so I mean, I think on performance, that's a tough one. I think the operators will demand performance and you've seen experiments, you've really seen more of the Greenfield operators kind of launch open ran or VRAN type solutions. So they're going to disrupt. Yeah, they're going to disrupt. And there's flexibility in an open ran architecture also for 5G that they're interested in. And I think the Brownfield operators are too, but let's say maybe the Greenfield jumped first in terms of doing that from a mass deployment perspective. But I still think that it's going to be critical to meet very similar SLAs and end user performance. And I think that's where maturity of that model is what's required. I think Brownfield operators are conservative in terms of going with something they know. But the opportunities and the benefits of that architecture and building new flexible, potentially cost advantage over time solutions, that's where the real interest is going forward. And new services that you can introduce much more. Quickly, the interesting thing about Dell to me, you don't compete with the carriers. The public cloud vendors though, the carriers are concerned about them sort of doing an end run on them. So you provide a potential partnership for the carriers that's non-threatening. Because you're an arms dealer, you're selling hardware and software, right? But how do you see that? Because we're hurting the keynote today. One of the telco, I think it was the chairman of Telefonica said, cloud guys can't do this alone. They need this massive build out. And so what do you think about that in terms of your relationship with the carriers, not being threatening? I mean, versus say, potentially the cloud guys who are also your partners, I understand. It's really interesting dynamic, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the way I look at it, the carriers actually need someone like Dell to really come in who can bring in the right capabilities, the right infrastructure, but also bring in the ecosystem together and deliver a performance solution that they can deploy and that they can trust. Number one. Number two, to your point on cloud, I mean, from a Dell perspective, you know, we announced our Dell Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation. And as part of that last year in September, we announced what we call as the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks, the first one we announced with Wind River. And this is, think of it as the hardware and the cash layer all pre-integrated with a lot of automation around it, factory integrated, you know, deliver to customers in an integrated model with all the licenses and everything. And so it starts to solve the day zero, day one, day two integration deployment and then life cycle management for them. So to broaden the discussion, our view is it's a multi-cloud world, the future is multi-cloud, where you can have different clouds which can be optimized for different workloads. So for example, while our work with Wind River initially was very focused on virtualization of the radio access network, we just announced our infrastructure block with Red Hat, which is very much targeted and optimized for core network and edge, right? So, you know, there are different workloads that will require different capabilities also. And so, you know, again, we're bringing those things to the service providers to again bring those cloud characteristics and cloud native architecture for the network. And it's going to be hybrid. Yeah. Yeah, and you just said on something, you said cloud characteristics. If you look at this through the lens of kind of the general world of IT, sometimes when people hear the word cloud, they immediately leap to the idea that it's a hyperscale cloud provider. In this scenario, we're talking about radio towers that have intelligence living on them and physically at the base. And so the cloud characteristics that you're delivering might be living physically in these remote locations all over the place. Is that correct? Yeah, I mean. Yeah, I mean, that's true. That will definitely happen over time. But I think we've seen the hyperscalers enter, you know, public cloud providers enter at the edge and they're dabbling maybe with private. But I think the public ran is another further challenge. I think that maybe a little bit down the road for them. So I think that is a different characteristic that you're talking about, managing the macro ran environment. Yeah. If I may just add one more perspective of this. Clouds, I mean, again, the hyperscale cloud, right? I mean, that world's been great when you can centralize a lot of compute capability and you can then start to do workload aggregation and use the infrastructure more efficiently. When it comes to telecom, it is inherently a distributed architecture where you have access, you talked about radio access, you're poor and it is inherently distributed because it has to provide the coverage and capacity. And so, you know, it does require different kind of capabilities when you're going out and about. And this is where I was talking about things like, you know, we just talked about, we just have been working on our bare metal orchestration, right? This is what we're bringing is a capability where you can actually have distributed infrastructure, you can deploy, you can actually manage, do life cycle management in a distributed multi-cloud form. So it does require, you know, different set of capabilities that need to be enabled. Yeah, some when talking about cloud would argue that it's always been information technology. It always will be information technology. And especially as what we might refer to as public cloud or hyperskill cloud providers are delivering things essentially on premises. It's like, well, is that cloud? Because it feels like some of those players are going to be delivering physical infrastructure outside of their own data centers in order to address this. It seems the nature of the beast is that some of these things need to be distributed. So it seems perfectly situated for Dell. That's why you guys are both at Dell now and not working for other telecom places, right? Exactly, exactly, yes. It's definitely an exciting space. It's transformed, the networks are under transformation. And I do think that Dell is very well positioned to really help the customers, the service providers in accelerating their transformation journey with an open ecosystem. You've got the brand and the breadth and the resources to actually attract an ecosystem. But I wonder if you could sort of take us through your strategy of ecosystem, the challenges that you've seen in developing that ecosystem and what the vision is that ultimately, what's the outcome going to be of that open ecosystem? Yeah, I can start maybe just to give you the big picture, right? I mean, the big picture is disaggregation with performance, right TCO models to the service providers, right? And it starts at the infrastructure layer, builds on bringing these cloud capabilities, the CAS layer, right? Bringing the right accelerators. All of this requires to pull the ecosystem. So to give you an example, on the infrastructure, you know, telco-grade servers like XR8000 with the new Intel processors that we've just announced and extended array of servers. These are telco-grade, short depth, et cetera, you know, the telco-grade characteristic. Working with partners like Marvell, Qualcomm, bringing in the accelerators in there, that's important to again, drive that performance and optimize for the TCO. Working then with partners like Wind River, Red Hat, et cetera, to bring in the CAS capabilities. So you can start to see how this ecosystem starts to build up. And then very recently we announced our private 5G solution with AirSpan and Expedo on the core site. So bringing those workloads together. Similarly, we have our open-run solution we announced with Fujitsu. So it's open, it's disaggregated, but bringing all these together. And one of the last things I would say is, you know, to make all this happen and make all of these, we've also been putting together our hotel, our open telecom ecosystem lab, which is very much geared, really gives this open ecosystem a playground where they can come in and do all that heavy lifting which is anyways required, do the integration optimization and more. So put all these capabilities in place, but the end goal, the end vision again, is that cloud-native disaggregated infrastructure that starts to innovate at the speed of software and scales at the speed of cloud. And this is different than the 90s. You didn't have something like hotel back then. You know, you didn't have the developer ecosystem that you have today because on top of everything that you just said, Manisha, there are new workloads and new applications that are going to be developed. Doug, anything you'd add to what Manish said? Yeah, I mean, as Manish said, I think adding to the infrastructure layers which are critical for us to help integrate, right? Cause we kind of took a vertical telco stack and we've disaggregated and it's gotten a little bit more complex. So our solutions, Dell technology infrastructure block and our lab infrastructure with hotel helps put those pieces together. But without the software players in this, you know, that's what we really do. I think in hotel and that's just starting to grow. So integrating with those software providers with that integration is something that the operators need. So we fill a gap there in terms of either providing engineered solutions so they can readily build on or actually bringing in that software provider. And I think that's what you're going to see more from us going forward. It's just extending that ecosystem even further. More software players effectively. In thinking about O-RAN, are they, is it possible to have the low latency, the high performance, the reliability capabilities, the carriers that are used to and the flexibility or can you sort of prioritize one over the other from a go to market and roll out standpoint and optimize one, maybe get a foothold in the market? How do you see that balance? The answer is absolutely yes, you can have both. We are on that journey. We're on that journey. This is where all these things I was talking about in terms of the right kind of accelerators, right kind of capabilities on the infrastructure. Obviously retargeting the software, there are certain changes, et cetera, that need to be done on the software itself to make it more cloud native. And then building all the surrounding capabilities around the CI CD pipeline and all where it's not just day zero or day one that you're doing the cloud like life cycle management of this infrastructure. But the answer to your point, yes, absolutely. It's possible the technology is there and the ecosystem is coming together and that's the direction. Now, are there challenges? Absolutely there are challenges, but directionally that's the direction the industry is moving to. I guess my question Manish is, do they have to go in lockstep? Because I would argue that the public cloud when it first came out was nearly as functional as what I could get from my own data center in terms of recovery, you know, backup and recovery is a perfect example. And it took, you know, a decade plus to get there, but it was the flexibility and the openness and the developer affinity, the programmability that attracted people. Do you see O-RAN following a similar path or does it, my question is, does it have to have that carrier-class reliability? Everything on day one, does it have to have everything on day one? Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, like again, the Greenfield operators I think we're willing to do a little bit more experimentation. I think the operators, Brownfield operators that have existing, you know, deployments, they're going to want to be closer, but I think there's room for innovation here. And clearly, you know, Manish came from Metta and we've been very involved with TIP, we're very involved with the O-RAN Alliance. And as Manish mentioned with all those accelerators that we're working with on our infrastructure, that is a space that we're trying to help move the ball forward. So I think you're seeing deployments from mainstream operators, but it's maybe not in, you know, downtown New York deployment, they're more rural deployments. So I think that's getting at, you know, kind of your question is, there's maybe a little bit more flexibility there, they get to experiment with the technology and the flexibility, and then I think it will start to evolve. And that's where the disruption's going to come from, I think. Well, where was the first place you could get reliable 4K streaming of video content? It wasn't ABC, CBS, NBC, it was YouTube. So is it possible that when you say Greenfield, are a lot of those going to be what we refer to as private 5G networks, where someone may set up a private 5G network that has more functions and capabilities than the public network? Yeah. This exactly where I was going is that, you know, that's why you're seeing us getting very active in 5G solutions that Manish mentioned with, you know, Expedo and Airspan. There's more of those that we haven't publicly announced, so I think you'll be seeing more announcements from us, but that is really, you know, a new opportunity and there's spectrum there also, right? I mean, there's public and private spectrum. We plan to work directly with the operators and do it in their spectrum when needed, but we also have solutions that will do it, you know, on non-public spectrum. So let's close out. Oh, good. You have something to add there, please. I'm just going to add one more point to Doug's point, right? If you look on the private 5G and the end customer, it's the enterprise, right? And they're not a service provider. They're not a carrier. They're more used to deploying, you know, enterprise infrastructure, maintaining, managing that. So, you know, private 5G, especially with this open ecosystem and with all the open-run capabilities, it naturally tends to, you know, lend itself very well to meet those requirements that the enterprise would have. And people should not think of private 5G as a sort of a replacement for Wi-Fi, right? It's to deal with those, you know, intense situations that could afford the additional cost, but absolutely require the reliability and the performance and, you know, never go down type of scenario. Is that right? In low latencies, usually the primary characteristics, you know, for things like industry 4.0 manufacturing requirements, those are tough SLAs. They're just, they're different than the operator SLAs for coverage and, you know, cell performance. They're now, you know, 5.9 type characteristics, but on a manufacturing floor. That's why we don't use Wi-Fi on the Cube to broadcast. We need a hard line. Yeah, but why wouldn't it replace Wi-Fi over time? I mean, you know, I still have a home phone number that's hard-wired to align, but it goes to a voicemail. We don't even have handsets anymore for it. Yeah. I think, well, unless the cost can come down, but I think the Wi-Fi is flexible, it's cheap, it's kind of perfect for that moment. It's good technology. And it works great, right, for now, for now. But you wouldn't want it in those situations. So you're arguing that maybe. I'm saying eventually, why put a SIM in a device? I don't know, you know, but why not? Yeah, I mean, you know, and Dell offers, you know, from our laptop, you know, our client side, we do offer Wi-Fi, we do offer 4G and 5G solutions and I think those, you know, it's a volume and scale issue I think for the cost structure you're talking about. Yeah, come to our booth and see the connected laptop. Oh, yeah. Well, let's close on that. Why don't you guys talk a little bit about what you're going on at the show. I did go by the booth. You got a whole big lineup of servers. You got some, you know, cool devices going on. So give us the rundown and, you know, let's end with the takeaways here. Yeah, the simple rundown, a broad range of new PowerEdge servers, broad range addressing core, edge, RAM, optimized for those with all the different kind of acceleration capabilities. You can see that, you can see infrastructure blocks. These are with Wind River, with Red Hat, you can see Hotel, the Open Telecom ecosystem lab. We're all that playground, the integration, the real work, the real sausage makings happening. And then you will see some interesting solutions in terms of co-creation that we are doing, right? So you will see all of that and not to forget the connected laptops. Yeah, yeah, cool. Yeah, and we mentioned it before but just to add on, I think, you know, for private 5G, you know, we've announced a few offers here at the show with partners. So with Expedo and AirSpan in particular. And I think, you know, I just want to emphasize the partnerships that we're doing. You know, we're doing some, you know, fundamental integration on infrastructure, bare metal and different options for the operators to get engineered systems. But building on that ecosystem is really, the move to cloud native is where Dell is trying to get in front of. And we're offering solutions and a much larger ecosystem to go after it. Great. Manish and Doug, thanks for coming on the program. It was great to have you. Awesome discussion. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin where we're seeing the disaggregation of the telco network into open ecosystems with integration from companies like Dell and others. Keep it right there for the cubes coverage of MWC23. We'll be right back.