 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021 live from Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with John Furrier. We have two live sets, two remote studios, over 100 guests on theCUBE at this year's show, and we're really excited to begin to the next decade in cloud innovation. And welcome from the keynote stage, Mark Ruin, the Chief Network Officer at EVP Addition Network. Mark, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Enjoyed your keynote this morning. So big news coming from AWS and Dish. You guys announced in the spring, the telecom industry first dish in AWS have formed a strategic collaboration to reinvent 5G connectivity and innovation. Let's really kind of dig into the AWS Dish partnership. Yeah, you know, we're putting our network in the cloud, which allows us to have a different speed of innovation and a much more collaborative way of bringing new technology. And then we have access to all the developer ecosystem of AWS, but that's a, as you say, it's a world first to put the telco in the cloud. And so the first time the 5G network is going to be in the cloud. And it was also announced, I'm curious, that Las Vegas is going to be the first city live. Here we are sitting in Las Vegas. What's the, any status you can give us on that? Yeah, so we're building across the U.S. And Las Vegas is a place that, you know, we've built and now we're better testing. So that's where we have all run and we're testing all sorts of traffic and capability with our people and partners live here at the same time that we have the reinvent. And beyond all run, we're also starting to test new capabilities like orchestration, slicing, things that we've never seen in the industry. So that's pretty exciting. I have to ask you in the telecom industry there, there's been an inflection point around cloud and cloud impact. O-Ran is opening up new opportunities. What is the telecom industry getting and missing at the same time? Because it seems to be two schools of thought. Cloud, pro-cloud, O-Ran, and then hold on to the old way. What's your- I think everybody would like to go to O-Ran and the cloud, but it's not as easy if you have a big install base. So for us, you know, it's, we're all new, it's easy, so we can adopt the best technology and the newest. But of course, if you have a big install base, there is going to be a transformation if you wish. So, you know, people are starting, are trying to set the expectation of how much time it will take. But for us, you know, we are, we're moving ahead because we're building a completely new network. It's a lot easier then. Well, what is relative to her? Yeah, it's certainly much more fun and we can, we don't have to make compromises, right? But it's still a lot of work. You know, we're discovering, we're learning a lot of things with our partners. What's the, if you have a clean sheet of paper or a green field, what's the playbook to roll us out across, say, a campus or a large geographic area? Yeah, so pretty much you have the same capability in terms of coverage and capabilities than anybody else, but we can do it in an automated manner. We can do it with much thinner and efficient hardware, you know, pretty much IT hardware with a few accelerators. So a bit of jargon, but, you know, we just have access to a larger ecosystem and much more silicon and all the good things that are coming with the cloud. Talk to us about some of the unique challenges of 5G that make running it in the cloud so much more helpful. And then also, why did Dish decide to partner with AWS? Clearly you have choice, but I'd love to know the backstory on that. Yeah, you know, I've been in the telco industry forever and I've always seen that our speed of innovation was too slow. The telco is very good at reliability. You know, your phone always works, it's very reliable, you can have massive traffic, but the speed of innovation is not fast enough and the applications that are coming on the cloud are much faster. So what we wanted to marry is the reliability of the telco and all the knowledge that exists with the speed of the cloud. And that's what we're doing with AWS, bringing their ecosystem into our ecosystem to get the best of the two worlds. Lots of transformation in the vertical industry we heard from Adam today on stage, verticals, AI, machine learning. How does that apply in the telco world? Because it's an edge. You got, see, sports stadiums, for instance, you're seeing all kinds of home impacts. How is vertical specialization? Yeah, so what is unique about the cloud is that you can observe a lot of things. You know, in the cloud you have access to data, so you see what's happening and then you use a lot of algorithms. We call it machine learning, analytics, to make decisions. Now, for us, it means if you're a stadium, you're going to have a much better visibility of what's happening. Where's the traffic? You know, people moving in or moving out, are they going to buy some food or what? So you see the traffic and you can adapt. The way you steer the traffic, the way you distribute video, the way you distribute entertainment to how people are moving, because you can observe what is happening in the network, which you can't do in a classic or legacy 5G network. So once you observe, you're going to have plenty of ideas, right, and you can start innovation. You can mix a lot of things and offer new services. In this last 22 months when we saw this rapid pivot to work from home, and now it's work from anywhere, right? We talk about hybrid cloud, hybrid events here, but this hybrid work environment, talk to me about the impact that Dision AWS are going to have on all of those companies and people who are going to be remote and working from the edge for maybe permanently. Yeah, as you say, you know, what is important is that people want to have access to the cloud, to the services, to enterprise from wherever they are. So as a software architect, I need to make sure that we can follow them and offer that service from wherever they are in a seamless manner. Today if you're making a phone call, you don't have to think. If you're connecting to the web, you know, through wifi, through Dision, you have to think. We want to make it as simple as making a phone call in the past where you're always connected, you're always secured, you always have access to your data. So that's really the ambition we have. And of course, with the new remote habits, the video conferencing, that's a perfect time to come with a new offer. And the trend also is moving towards policy-based, you mentioned understanding video and patterns, having that differentiated services capability in real time is a big deal. Yeah, that's a big deal. And actually what enterprise want, they want to manage their policy. So they want to decide what traffic gets a premium access and what traffic can be put in the background. You want to update your computers, maybe that's not a premium price for that. You can do it at any time, but you want to have real-time customer service and support, you want premium. And who am I to decide for an enterprise? Entrepreneurs want to decide. So what we offer them is the tools to create their policy. And their policy will be a competitive advantage for them when they can differentiate. And this brings up another point. I want to ask you, you brought this up earlier about the ideas, the creativity that enables with cloud. You mentioned ideas will come out. These are, this isn't where the developers now can really code. This is the whole theme of this path finders, keynote, you were up on stage. This is a real opportunity to add value, doing all the heavy lifting in the top of the stack and enabling new use cases, new applications, new expectations. You know what I tell to my engineers? My dream as an engineer is to be developer friendly. I want people to come to us because it's fun to work in our environment and try things. And a lot of the ideas that developers will have won't work, but if they can spin it off very fast, they will move to that killer application or killer service very fast. So my job is to bring that to them so that it's very easy to consume and try live and, you know, just. Bring candy to a baby. Say here. Yeah. Play and chose, right? And have fun and discover it for yourself and design for yourself. I got to ask you a question. You've been in the telecom for a while. We've been seeing on theCUBE earlier in our intro keynote analysis that we're now living in an era with SaaS applications, no more shelf-wear, now with purpose-built applications that you're seeing now and horizontally scalable, vertically integrated machine learning. You can't hide the ball anymore around it. What's working? Yeah. You can't put a project out there and say, no, you can't justify it. You can't put lipstick on that. You can't icing on that bad cake. Yeah, it's all the point of about beta testing and market adoption. You try, you put it there, it works. You say the bright doesn't work, you try again, right? That's the way it works. And in Delco, you're right, we were cooking for a year or two years, three years and saying, oh, you know what? That's what you need. It doesn't work like this. It's faster now. Yeah, yeah. And people want to be able to influence and they want to say, I like it, I don't like it. And the market is deciding. Speaking of influence, one of the things that we know we talk a lot about with AWS and their guests is their customer first, customer obsession, focus. So, you know, the whole reason we're here is to serve the customer. Talk to me about how customers and joint customers are influencing some of the design choices that you guys are making as you're bringing 5G to the cloud. Yeah, so what is important for us? We have two dreams, right? The first one is for consumers. We want consumers to have access to the network so that they feel that they are a VIP. And often, I know you and I, sometimes when we're connected to the network we drop a call, we don't get the feeling we're a VIP. So that's something, that's a journey for us to make people feel like they get a service and the network is following them and caring about them. For the enterprises, you want to let them decide what they want. You were talking about policy, billing. They want to come with their own rating engine. They want to come with their own geographical maps like here I have traffic, here I don't need coverage. So we want to open up so that the enterprise decide how they invest, how they spend the money on the network. Giving control back to the end user whether that's a consumer or an enterprise. Absolutely, giving control to the end user and the enterprises. And we're there to support and accelerate the service for them. Mark, I want to ask you about leadership. You mentioned all these new things are there. Your dreams and it's happening. Giving engineers the can just to paint their own future. It's got to be fun. It is fun. As you're affecting that change, what can people do as leaders to create that momentum to bring the whole organization along? Is there tricks to the trade? Is there best practices? Absolutely, there are best practices. We are very much following DevOps where as a leader you don't know, you're just learning and you're exposing and you're sharing. We're also creating an open world where we're asking all our partners to be open. Sometimes they feel like a bit challenged like do I want to show what I'm doing? And they say yeah, show because you're benefiting between each other. And then you want to give tools to your engineers and your marketers to be fast. Speed, speed, speed, speed so that they can just play and learn. And at the end of the day you said it. It's all about fun. If it's fun it's easy to do. We're having fun here, that's for sure. That is true, we always have fun here. Last question for you is talk about some of the things that AWS announced this morning. Lots of stuff going on in Adam's keynote. What excites you about this continued partnership between AWS and Dish? Yeah, we were surprised and so happy about AWS's answer to, when we came in, we're the first one to come big time as a telco and the cloud was not ready. To be honest, it was enterprise and data cloud. And AWS is going all the way with us to transform their cloud to make it a telco friendly cloud. So we have a lot of discussions about networking, routing, service level agreements. I mean, a lot of things that are very technical and they are a true partner innovating with us. We have a roadmap, we have ideas and that's really unique, so great partner. I was going to say it sounds like a really true trust and partnership. Yeah, yeah, we're sharing ideas and challenging each other all the time. So that's really great. Awesome, and end users benefit, consumers benefit, enterprises benefit. Mark, thank you for joining John and me on the program today. I'm Georgia Keynote, enjoyed hearing more about Dish and AWS and what are you doing to power the future? We appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. For John Farrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in tech coverage.