 Good afternoon, fabulous nerds, and welcome back to MWC here in Barcelona. It's midway through day two of our four days of live coverage here on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-host and analyst, Dave Vellante. Dave, how are you feeling? Afternoon, day two? I was just saying, we're getting punchy as day two. I know, I feel like we're getting a little... Which is fun. We're getting a little sasty. I know. Who knows what's going to happen next, folks? Be sure and stay tuned. This panel is going to be absolutely action packed and I'm super excited. We are talking about something we have yet to talk about at the show at all. We are talking about Open RAN and our guest Satish and Anand, two of the most important people to talk to us about it today. Thank you both for being here. You are CUBE legends and veterans over many years. You're on the show almost as much as I am, Satish. It's awesome. Why, what is the Open RAN landscape? And I'm going to take this to you first here at the show. I mean, this has got to be the intersection of all the players. Yeah, thanks for having us. Really nice being here. If you really look at the technology landscape, especially in the telco space, we're sitting in an important tipping point. The technology has not changed as much over the last two, three decades, as it has done. We've talked about this a lot this week, yeah. And the whole disaggregation of the stack, between the antennas and the RUs and the BBUs and the CU, and the disaggregation of the software and the hardware piece of it is completely changing the dynamics, right? It's creating some greater opportunities for telcos and some challenges as well, right? Opportunities such as being agile, right? Being flexible, driving down cars, right? Creating market differentiation, all great opportunities, right? But when you have a disaggregated stack, it drives complexity as well, right? And therefore the need to integrate better, and need to kind of design your networks better, address security challenges, all of that is part of the conversation today, right? And we're looking at, in the adoption curve, open-run is still in the infancy stage. Very early, right? It's going to be one of my questions, yeah. So actually, let's step back just for a second. In case the audience isn't aware, what is open-run? I feel like everyone's familiar with radio access networks, but why open? Why is that such a big difference? Well, it is like Anand was saying, right? It is about picking the best-in-class technologies at disaggregation. So to me, this is about cloud and cloud transformations finding the telco domain, right? And it's been going on for a while. I know our CEO, Michael, talked about it yesterday. You know, Dave, we were talking to him as well, right? I think it's basically transformation coming into telecom, right? And when we say open, you know, the way I think about this is open basically means pick the best-in-class tech and to solve a problem. And if that means that you have to pick and choose a bunch of things to integrate, so be it, right? And one of the main things, and you know, I want to point out is a lot of the technologies are actually coming together, right? The silicon diversity is here now, right? We all talk about it now. AI is here now, right? The compute power is here now. You know, the level of wave sophistication of data on cloud is here now, right? So I think in order for some of these transformational things to happen, a lot of these things start to come together, right? So I think this is probably as better time as any because we can see all this massive changes happening in all this. I think that basically brings, you know, gives a great opportunity for things like open app. When you hear the word open, okay, so open, you think open, distributed, API, scale, innovation, collaborative, and then there's always a little bit of risk. And so, and that's kind of the dynamic here, right? I mean, the other day I go into work, I had SOS. I'm like, hmm, funny, I had to restart. We all, sort of, many of us on the East Coast have experienced it, maybe across the nation. You know, but it's still, and then you heard, well, it was a glitch in the system. You really didn't know, it was sort of opaque. But the reality is, you really didn't notice. It sort of came back, right? It recovered, the thing's never down, which is phenomenal. So that is something that is part of the dynamic. It's got to be in no risk environment, but yet all those other things are so alluring. The open, the scale, the innovation, the collaboration, the APIs, the developer, all that piece. So that's an interesting balance, right? So, when? What do you guys see as that adoption curve? Is it a decade long? More? So, I personally think, you know, it's about, I started saying this, and I truly believe we are in the infancy state. The first and the most important thing is standardization, right? Organizations such as, you know, the open-run alliance or the telco infrastructure project. The work that they're doing is going to be fundamental, right, and critical. So if you ask me, I think, you know, we are about, yeah, eight to 10 years, you know, from a adoption, complete adoption cycle, right? If you draw a curve, you know. It's a journey. Yeah, it's a journey. It's a great, that's a great business that tells me. It's a wonderful business. You're not going to get the big returns up front. We talked about this with Michael. We're playing the long game. He told a great story. He said, the telcos came to us and they asked for better hardware, better systems. Yeah. So we said, oh, it's cheaper. We said, here you go. And they said, oh no, we need special systems. We need, you know, they have to, we have telcos special needs. He said, oh, you didn't tell us that. So we had to go back, develop those. So it's a long cycle, which means maybe initially the returns aren't there. It's not a quick hit, but long term, it could be a really big sustainable business for you. I mean, the adoption is there, right? I mean, you saw the gentleman from AT&T standing in the stage with Michael and talking about OpenRAN, right? So we have big, big operators. Dish is another one. Dish was one of our strategic partners in the US. So Dish has been working with Dell for the last three plus years, building up an OpenRAN, open network from the ground up. We also have other big players. We have Telefonica, we have Whataphone, right? We have a lot of big players actually now driving this. Again, the bigger one you saw in the traditional players is AT&T, basically saying that we are committed to OpenRAN and we're going to partner with, you know, Ericsson, we're going to partner with Dell, right? That's big, that's huge. Because Dish, you could say, okay, Dish is trying to disrupt, trying to develop applications and they have to because they're coming from, you know, not AT&T is in a position of strength. They don't have to, but they kind of do have to. They have to. Don't they? It's like Ethernet, you kind of have to. Yeah, they do. I'm curious. So we talk about building the best in class. That's the reason for Open, which is great. Not a word we, I'm just thinking about OpenWeek. It's not a word we associate with Telco very often, which is an interesting, fun game to talk about. What are some of the challenges for you guys in this? I mean, probably new people collaborating. Who knows? Anand, I see you nodding, I'm going to you. Yeah, it's critical to kind of, you know, identify what are those challenges. And in my opinion, there are about two or three important things. First of all, Open and therefore, you know, it the disaggregated stack means there is complexity. And therefore, you know, just the whole integration, the design of the network, you know, it's got to be bang on, right? You know, number one, that's super important. The second, if you got to, you know, you got to understand the security elements of it. Dave spoke about it, right? You know, the security is going to become super critical. The third is interoperability, right? You know, that's going to be critical as well. And doing all of this, you know, without impacting the quality of service, is what is going to be, is what's going to be critical to make this, you know, go up the adoption curve. So, yeah. No, I agree. I mean, look, fundamentally, when you talk about Open, the, you know, Dave, like you pointed out, right? Companies who are really good at doing what they do will do that really well, right? Then the next question is, somebody has to stitch it all together, right? Exactly. Because you are buying best in class of everything, right, in an open ecosystem, right? Best software, best infrastructure, best compute, best radio, right? Then somebody has to say, okay, all the best comes together, right? That is a challenge, right? That's an opportunity for some companies like Dell and HCL to work together. Well, so a really smart CEO that I respect, I won't say his name, said to me one time. You really want to understand if a market is attractive. Look for the SIs, because when they get in, that means it's big. There's money there. They also said they like to eat at the trough. It's true. It's a big market, right? I'll never forget that. Who said that as a smart guy? Every since then, I was like, hmm, when the SIs come in, it means it's a meaningful market. And, you know, I'll give you an example. And I, for instance, service now. For years, the SI ecosystem was tiny, and then all of a sudden, boom, it came in. And so, what role do the SIs play in this? I think SIs are in a very, I would say, central position on this, because all the four to five challenges that I mentioned, right, are absolutely great areas where we can go in and provide services for our customers to overcome, right? Ability, so what they're asking an SI like, you know, such as ours, is ability to kind of take the best in class products, help them put that together, right? And drive an outcome, right? You know, run those operations, meeting those SLAs, right? And, you know, large SIs such as ours can kind of do that. And that's where the true opportunity is. You know, it's a challenge, but, you know, it's a great opportunity. I heard something today earlier, and I'd never heard it before, because we talk about outcomes all the time. And this individual, who's from a telco, said, you were driving for an outcome, but we're also trying to make that outcome of sustainable and as experiences. Yeah, that stuck with me as well. Right, I'd never heard that before. So it's an outcome, we all want outcomes, and then it's thinking long. The customer demands a different experience now. And it should be able to sustain that outcome. It's that seamless end-to-end experience they want it fast, they want it now. And they want that same quality of UX that they've had in the asylos across systems, which is really interesting and actually brings me to my next question. How is the culture of collaboration with the different groups that you're working with? I can go ahead. Go for it. See, I think one of the critical elements we've not spoken about yet is ecosystem and collaboration. Yeah. Right? The power of the ecosystem is going to be super important for OpenRAN, right? You customers want us to have an opinionated point of view of how the ecosystem looks like and who in that ecosystem is going to do what, right? And ability to get that together and clearly drive a program around OpenRAN is going to be critical. Satish? No, I agree. Look, the whole Open basically means it's an open ecosystem play, right? So, you know, telecom companies want to solve a lot of problems about the stack, right? And by bringing in a strong system integrator and a strong infrastructure telecom platform provider, right? Then you are actually opening it up for all this application providers to come and validate, test, and bring those outcomes to the table. So I absolutely think consistent experience. See, in the cloud we always talk about, you know, in the cloud world, right? When you have the hyperscalers, we always talk about how do you bring the cloud experience on-prem, right? Yeah. So this is very similar, like how do you bring the cloud experience? Easy button, right? Yeah. Into a telecom world. I think that's basically what this is. So, you know, it's interesting. Sorry. Oh, please. The cloud came in and sort of disrupted the on-prem legacy businesses with this idea of how did Jassy say it, undifferentiated heavy lifting? And what happened was, you guys got good, got kind of slapped around in the face and said, oh, we got to have a better operating model. Yeah. And we can do that. And of course that IP leaked out, that mindset leaked out, and now you talk to IT, they go, cloud, we have a cloud right here. It's the same thing, it's the same experience, it's substantially identical. And people can debate that, but it's pretty much the same. That telcos haven't transformed yet. And they're largely on-prem, right? And so it's the different dynamic now, when versus 2010, when the cloud was really taking off. Do you agree with that assessment? I do. Not that the cloud's not going to play a role, it is, but there's more of a balance, I would say. Absolutely, I completely agree with that. You know, if you really look at, I'm just going to take a step back to your point, we are now seeing that recalibration of workloads, all over the enterprise and telcos, right? Gone are the days where everybody just said, cloud is my only path out. Now today, everybody's looking at the workloads and say, tell me what's the best place to fund it. Because from a commercial model standpoint, you can kind of make it work, right? And we see the same thing, again, from an open-run standpoint, cloudification is going to be a super important thing. Satish? No, look, I'll add to what Anand was saying, but one of the main things we have to think about is, Michael talked about it yesterday, right? The notion of cloud experience on-prem, one of the main thing is data is gravity, right? And now we all talk about AI, we've been talking a lot about AI, right? He talked about AI as gravity, right? And telco companies have a very important message because telecommunication companies are at the edge, right? When the decisions are to be made at the edge, those decisions are to be smarter, that has gravity, right? So you have to make those decisions there, right? So I think it's truly multi-cloud world, right? We always like to say that decisions are made like in a very distributed environment, but I think in telecommunication world, it's even more so important that it is going to be a very multi-cloud world, right? And I'm glad you used the word, I think you said recalibration. Yeah. You know, a lot of people use the word repatriation. Recalibration is a better term, because that's really what it is. It's not like, oh, we do it from here to here, we're going to move back, no, it's more, okay, let's bounce it out. More of an equilibrium. True, true. And that's what we're seeing across the whole, both enterprise and telcos, where there is a strong point of view around workloads and applications, right? Determining both the network requirements as well as where it's going to reside and what's going to run, right? And especially with generated AI now, you know, and because of security concerns, because of other things, right? You know, governance, now, you know, truly, organizations are saying hybrid is the way to go. And even though if you take the current workload numbers, it might be slightly skewed to the hyperscalers, long run, that's what we needed. Well, it's going to be interesting to see, because we've talked about the power law of Gen AI, where there's a long tail. You've got a lot of big models that are dominant, and then you have a lot of smaller models that are domain specific. Many of those we think are going to be on-prem. I think, you know, one of the debates we're having is okay, but remember the cloud in the early days, everybody said, no way, not going to go to the cloud, it's not secure. Debate is the same thing going to happen here. They're initially, they want to do stuff on-prem because it's more safe, it's more secure, it's more trusted, it's sovereign. I think it's different this time because of the data. Michael's point about data gravity, we talk about that, we throw that term around a lot, but everybody is right when they say, we're going to bring the AI to the data. You're probably not going to say, okay, let's rip the data out, put it in the cloud, and then bring the AI there, unless you can't deliver the tooling. So that's the challenge. You've got to be able to deliver the tooling, and that's substantially similar cloud experience, and the tooling capabilities, and what you're doing with the coheres, and the llamas, and all the other things. Yeah, I mean, the processing, cleaning, and the indexing, and the vectoring of the information, unstructured, structured, there is a lot for our organization to consume that in a very meaningful way within an AI model. So to your point, for a lot of the reasons, whether you have a general purpose LLM, but you're going to, to make it specific for you, you're going to take your data sets which you already have within the enterprise and leverage it for the most part, and that's where the power of the AI, where it belongs comes in, right? So it gets closer and closer to where the enterprises are, and that makes it more useful. So I would imagine when we hear from now, we're going to have a very similar conversation, and then one of these years, I don't know, maybe it's five or six years from now, we're going to go, yeah, we told you, it did happen, and we're going to have that momentum, that part of the S-curve is really going to be, see if that's sort of inevitable, you could see it coming, everybody wants it to come, they know it's coming, and it's just, you know, that pace is dictating the pace. Yeah, I agree. I'm curious, you see across verticals, you talk to a lot of different customers between both of you, are you seeing any remarkable trends that you can share with us, like who's excited about OpenRAN, or is they really eager to be one of these ecosystem partners with you? You want to go? I'll go for it. So, I think few verticals are definitely leading in my opinion, manufacturing is right up there. I can see that for sure. So, number one, number two, interestingly, we're also seeing a lot of interest in life sciences and healthcare, right? Yeah. So, and we're doing a lot of, and this is going back to the whole idea of adoption of OpenRAN, we're seeing a lot of requests for doing POCs, right? And ability to have, and I spoke about ecosystems as well, ability to have that whole stack, you know, as part of, you know, testing it out and figuring out the performance optimization. So, but then manufacturing is a big thing, you know, manufacturing is a big thing, I would say. Oh, it makes sense. I mean, throughput and supply chain and everything else is such a huge topic and the ability to do it better and more efficient with all of your edge locations, depending on where your factories are, is an absolutely massive battle. Exactly, edge, IOT, you know, all of that is kind of, and that is kind of really coming together and making sense from a great amount of investment, business impact, so on and so forth. Yeah, Satish, what about you? No, just to add to that, it's basically around low latency, right? Yeah. Super or near super high bandwidth, right? And really, really smart, quick, intelligent decision making, that's it, right? So, all of the use cases are going to be centered on those characteristics, right? It's as simple as that. Is there anyone that gets you particularly excited as a person, not just as a professional? As an individual, you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like to find restaurants much faster. Yes, okay, oh my gosh, I really want to do a segment while we're here in Spain now that I'm staying and maybe it'll happen. I want to use AI to help us find the best tapas. Exactly. And have that be one of our little tasting segments that we'll be fun. Especially for a vegetarian, I would really like them to know what I want and give me the smartest one. I love that. What about you and on? It's the human inside you, not just the brain, but... On what I like in terms of... What you're most excited about, like to your point, I love that, I would love to find restaurants faster. That's a great example of how all of this complex text we just talked about is going to enable a wonderful user experience for us. Exactly, for me that's the best place I can get the best experience. Being on the road like four days a week, anything that will help my travel make it easier, I think I'll go with that. Seriously, Aiman, I feel you. After 232 days on the road last year, I could not agree with you more. Also, when is my suitcase going to pack itself? Just pack yourself. I don't want to do it anymore. So much of my time spent putting clothing in cubes. Satition on. So much, so wonderful to have you on the show. It's why we bring you back over and over and over again. Thank you guys. Stay a fantastic question as always. And thank all of you, our fabulous Cube community for tuning in all week here from MWC in Barcelona. My name's Savannah Peterson. 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