 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Hello and welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. I'm excited to have this next guest. Cube alumni, Casey Choi, corporate EVP, Executive Vice President and General Manager at Samsung Mobile, the B2B and B2G team. Casey, great to see you. How you been? John, it is wonderful to see you and it's been way too long. Great to be back on theCUBE with you, looking forward to our conversation and hope you're safe. Yeah, and same to you. Great to see you. I'm so excited. One of the things I've really admired about you and our conversations in the past is you've always had your finger on the pulse of the waves and you've always involved with some really great engineering work. And I want to dig into this now because your role is really hitting the industry 4.0 kind of wave, which is the confluence of tech, media, entertainment, every vertical, big data, IoT and with the distributed computing now called the cloud and edge. It really sets the table for what is now going to be the preferred architecture probably for the next 20 plus years. So give us your view on how you see the changing landscape in the industry. Yeah, I think you covered all of the major seismic ships that are happening here. And then as we've all experienced over the last, over a year with the COVID pandemic, that's actually accelerated a lot of the thinking around the edge. We've certainly seen use cases proliferate whether it be in things such as healthcare. Manufacturing's also taken, I think a real hard look at the applicability of these types of solutions. We've seen things like, for example, 5G pickup in these sort of industrial applications as the industrial companies have thought about worker safety as they've thought about automation, as they thought about utilizing more protocols as well as bringing these technologies and processes together in a way that will help to kind of reinvent their particular economic base as well as kind of the learnings that we've seen over the last year coming from these new safety protocols as well as the need for now, with the economy is picking back up, the need for productivity as well as greater efficiencies coming from these types of solutions. So we've seen that confluence happen. And then certainly on our end, as our network connectivity has become much stronger, lower latency, as well as the endpoint capabilities have increased dramatically over the last few years as SOCs and others have taken root. We've seen the edge, if you will, start to be more extreme in the sense that it's pushing further and further out beyond what we originally envisioned the edge to be. Yeah, and the SOC trend actually highlights that it's not so much about Moore's Law as it is more about more chip, more performance. If you look at actual performance, Dave Vellante just put out a report on this where there's much more performance now than ever before coming in from the combined energy. And combined processing power out there. So it's super amazing what you can do at the edge. Before we get into the edge, I want to just clarify, what is your new role there? I mean, Samsung's known for obviously the B2C with the phones and everything else, but you have a specific focus. What is your main focus there? Yeah, our mission's pretty straightforward. And as everyone knows, Samsung is this powerhouse consumer electronics company. We pride ourselves and obviously our position in that. But we also have a very significant role really in the business to business and in the government and financial services sector space with our mobile devices as well as with our NOC security platform solution and device management platform. We actually provide a large portion of the secure devices for governments worldwide as well as the NOC platform that is built into the majority of our both consumer as well as business devices really allows for that, if you will, that next protective layer on top of the Android OS that allows for things such as personal and professional profiles. So we produce those solutions out of my team as well as we provide really the go to market support as well as the R&D support for that platform including an area that's growing rapidly for us which is in the rugged category, which is one of the key products that we're using for some of these edge applications that we'll be talking about. Great, let's jump into that. What are you guys doing specifically in the edge computing space? Let's dig into it. Yeah, I think maybe the place to start on that is we're really kind of re-envisioning what the edge is. And I mentioned a little earlier that with what's occurring in the performance profile and really the functional profile what is being produced at the device level. We're talking about in the last few years, the fidelity and the capabilities are in what I would call the computer class type functions as well as obviously mobile devices have always been communication gateways for a number of functions whether they'd be videos or photos, they're multi-sensory in nature. And as this has become more practical and the connected tissue has gotten there with 5G as well as all kinds of other fast low latency communications capabilities and Wi-Fi 6, UWB included within that. What we're finding is that the use case to bring applications especially cloud native and container native applications to these devices to be augmenting the endpoint user, the frontline worker, really the knowledge worker and moving that capability further away from, if you will, an extension to cloud services as well as to MEC type services. This is where we see it going. And really what we're trying to work on with IBM and with Red Hat is how do we continue to fortify this not only from a actual processing AI ML capability but also equip these devices so that they can fully participate as part of a multi-hybrid cloud architecture. The endpoint is really one of the last bastions where we have not kind of conquered bringing cloud first container native applications really to that point. And we believe the time is right because of the capabilities that are there along with again, the connectivity that is becoming much more ubiquitous now to allow for that type of architecture to exist. And we're starting to call this the intelligent human edge as well. We think that the applications that we'll see for this are ones that will make the human operator more productive, safer, certainly more efficient. And we think that this augmentation of that frontline worker is an area that we put our stakes on in terms of pioneering just because of yet our experience in that mobility space and in that consumer space. That's great. You brought up Red Hat and IBM, obviously Red Hat was bought by IBM. Arvin, Arvin, the CEO. Well, I interviewed in 2019 in theCUBE at Red Hat Summit, ironically, a couple of months later, buys the company to smile on his face. He likes cloud. Maybe you had something to do with that, John. No, he wanted to, I can see he wanted to say it, but he loves the cloud. Everyone who knows Arvin knows that he's into the cloud in a new way. And this edge piece that you mentioned that you're using Red Hat and IBM for hybrid, this is what the new operating system is going to look like. It's a completely distributed system. And the edge is just part of that operating model. This is what their vision is, which I love, by the way. I think that redefines what that is. Are you saying that you guys are working with Red Hat and IBM for that hybrid edge piece? How does that work? Can you take me through that? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, this is a, obviously the ecosystems are bigger than that, but IBM and Red Hat really bring the expertise really around container ecosystems, certainly the work that they have done in terms of multi-hybrid cloud, certainly the work that OpenShift has brought forward in terms of multi-platform capability. We really love the concept of developed ones run any sort of a construct. And when you think about it, the mobile platforms, specifically ours as well as others, has really been that last bastion of areas where more of the development is on a particular platform, it's more bespoke. We think that by broaching this in conjunction with IBM and Red Hat, this is going to give us the ability to have these device architectures become a full voting member, if you will, of that hybrid cloud architecture. And of that microservice that can contain our architecture that is becoming much more prevalent. So this is really the work that we're doing. And then obviously we're working at a vertical level to see where are the applicable use cases in places such as the design studio we have in Singapore, where with the Singaporean government, we're looking at really bringing a renaissance to industry 4.0 type applications, smart factory automation, public safety, these areas where we believe that this type of architecture can be deployed. That's awesome. I totally believe that the edge is still going to be pushed farther and further out. And obviously having that open standards of hybrid. So I got to ask you on the edge, just while I got you here, one of the things that you see clearly is the industrial edge. It's called factories and whatnot. You mentioned some of those. And then you got the human piece, which is like people have phones and wearables and other things are going to be happening. So as you start to have those endpoints, which are then going to be connected into a distributed network, AKA a hybrid cloud, soon to be multiple clouds, but that's the subsystem within the cloud construct. The complaint has been not complaint, but the observation has been, and complain if you look at it, that the edge is limited by power and connectivity. Okay, these are like key basic concepts. How is the connectivity option? I know 5G is coming. It's here. We're seeing it being deployed. We got people saying, hey, this is our business application. Clearly got higher throughput, not as much range. Give us your take on this because this becomes important. I'll see power is battery driven, getting better and better, and power is getting, is not really that much of a problem, but connectivity seems to be. What's your vision of this? Yeah, and there's a lot of ways to approach that. I will tell you on the industrial side, at least in some of the deployments and POCs that we've been involved in over the last year to two years, connectivity is an issue. And a lot of it has to do with the infrastructure that is available in many of these plants or factories or points of distribution. They're not necessarily leading edge. In many cases, we're dealing with what I would call subpar connectivity. It's not like an office complex where you may have kind of state of the art, Wi-Fi capability or 10 gig capability or whatever it might be. So what we've found on that is it requires actually quite a bit of work in terms of fine tuning, both on the network infrastructure side, whatever that might be. Or we've also found that on the device side, the programmability of the device in terms of tuning it for whatever connective environment would be there. And we've worked with everything from Bluetooth, UWB to Wi-Fi 6 and everything in between. And in many cases, there are multiple protocols or connectivity methods that are there. So one thing we've learned is that you can't necessarily assume that in a, especially in a factory environment that those conditions are going to allow for consistency. So you have to engineer around that. And some of the things that we've done are really around making sure that we've got deployable programmability at the device as well as more dynamic network tuning capabilities that will allow for better connectivity and to handle things such as consistency. All right, Casey, great to insight. Final question for you. Why Samsung and IBM? What's the bottom line? Yeah, I think the bottom line is really straightforward. I mean, we've had a 30 year history of working together. We've been mutual customers to each other. We do a lot of work for IBM in regards to foundry type services and semiconductor services. And then we work very closely with them over many years on applications. So number one, there's been a natural relationship just in the services that we provided to each other. But as we look at really the go to market, I mean, IBM brings so much credibility from a vertical market perspective. There's a trusted advisor type status that I think is very profound and it's been built over many years delivering on the promises. And on our end, I think what we bring is really this cycle time that is driven by our passion in the consumer space. And when we start to apply that into more of these vertical industrial, vertical sectors, I think that combination is very powerful. The services piece obviously comes into play with IBM. And then really the red hat piece of this really just puts the icing on the cake with really the market leadership in hybrid cloud and in the container native architecture. So it's just a very powerful combo and the cooperation there has been strong and we continue to look forward to delivering more through that partnership. Casey, great to see you, great, great thing to hear. You got scalable infrastructure, you got modern applications, got the edge all at hybrid. Great, great partnership. Casey Choi, Executive Vice, Corporate Executive Vice President and General Manager of Samsung Mobile B2B team. Great to see you and congratulations on your mission. It's an exciting project. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing. Great to see you, John. Take care of yourself and looking forward to seeing you again. Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.