 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Micron Insight 2019, brought to you by Micron. Welcome back to Micron Insight 2019 in San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're wrapping up our day, Dave Vellante with David Floria, where Kea Jones is here. She's the senior principal for 5G connectivity in the GPM group at Microsoft. Great to see you. Great to see you guys. It's been a wonderful day. Yeah, nice job up on stage today. We're going to talk a little bit about 5G and get your perspectives on it, but tell us more about your group and sort of what you focused. Yeah, well, you know, I'm in Azure and Azure is, even though it's our cloud infrastructure, there has to be a lot of backbone support. So inside of networking, we have all those components that would support the physical structure of cloud technology. And so we focus on virtualizing a lot of the different managed services that we have and we provide those to customers for scalability and sustainable models that allow them to pretty much transport data safely. What's it like inside of Microsoft these days? I mean, what a transformation of the company. I did a little segment on LinkedIn the other day, a little video segment. There's a lot of ways. If you want to spend some money, there's a lot of ways to spend money with Microsoft. You know, you got cloud, you got application management, you got security, you got all the app. I mean, really, you're hitting on all cylinders. It's, what a dynamic. What's it like inside of there these days? You know, I think the world now is very different. I see Microsoft making a huge transformation over the last, I've only been there three years. But what I can say to you is that I see that the opportunity is there for partnership now, which is something that I don't think we focused on. We did too well in the past with our new CEO Satya Nadella and Peggy Johnson, who leads our business development. I mean, we are really taking the game and just changing and making it more something that we can do with everyone instead of in silo. And so the culture is definitely changing. Is there opportunity? Yeah, but I think our company is dedicated and focused on, you know, creating more diverse technology that can meet to customers' needs all over the globe. Yeah, I mean, look, Windows is still a huge part of Microsoft's business, but it's not the future of Microsoft. It's very, very impressive to see that transformation. All right, what should we know about 5G? What's Microsoft's point of view on 5G? What's the opportunity for you? Well, that's a great question. A lot of people are like, Microsoft and 5G, how does that work? Well, in the past, I think with the telcos and all the communication service providers, we've always been either their customer or they've been our customer. The new world that we're going into now is, how do we help the telcos now be better enablers so that we can accelerate business? And so I took over this charter along with my boss Yusuf Kalidi about a year ago. And our vision for what we thought we could do came to really great reality when we understood the ecosystem that already existed. This business of 5G is not as simple as it sounds. So what we decided to do, and we released a press release back in July, was we were going pretty much all in, in a sense, with AT&T and helping them with their global strategy for really wireless, to help stabilize their wireless network and combine some software-defined principles and capabilities to what they're already planning for in the future. So I think with that transformation, honestly, a lot of it is unknown, but we're taking it day by day. Yeah, we were talking earlier about a lot of it's unknown in terms of what apps are going to emerge, who's going to pay for what, but there's a lot of hype around 5G, certainly a lot of folks in the technology community are excited about it. Help us understand what's real and what's not, what's hype and what sort of things that users can actually expect. And when, I want to know exact months and years. Wow, that's a deep question. You know what, I think if you can imagine it, it's a possibility. I think it all boils down to the type of partnerships. I always say that it's the power of three in the sense. In the past, it's always been the power of two, where two companies come together and we can make it work. Well, now you need an extra component. Not only do you need a company like Microsoft, but you need a telco, but you're going to need a system integrator, right? And I'm not talking about the hardware side, but more of the software application side. I think if a lot of people talking about these things, we know that Smart City, we think that's a possibility real soon. I still think we got a way to go with a lot of the townships and the city infrastructures moving so slow with governmental policies changing. I think that we can likely see improvement in connected vehicles, connected internet of things, internet of everything is coming. We first must be able to connect the dots with those things first before we actually bring in a government entity. I think they have a lot of questions that we're not yet ready to answer. And so I think there's a lot of great need for POCs. And that's what my team focuses on inside of Azure Networking, is looking at what can be the next POC where we can help truly define a next generation requirements. You're kind of acting as the accelerant. I like the Power 3 analogy of bump set spike. Yeah, right, exactly. You know, pass-shoot score, right? We love sports analogies on the cube. And then you know, you point about, I think governments is right on, I was saying earlier to David that I participated in a mayor of Boston as this Smart City Future Initiative. And you're talking 2050. Oh yeah. You know, that's their time horizon trying to figure that out. And that's right around the corner. Yeah, yeah. I thought you were about to be in the 2020. Feels like I just graduated from high school. Yeah, I'm still 25. You too, it feels that way anyway. It does. But when you're looking at these opportunities, there seems to be a big divergence of opinion in terms of networking between, are you going to push the processing out to the edge and do as much of it possible there and only take the subset of data from that processing? Or are you going to bring it in to some sort of center to do the processing there? Yeah. What are you seeing in your 5G as the models of computer, putting together compute storage and networking? Yeah. For me, I have a, this is where key as opinion, but I think that in the future, when we talk about compute, we need to be able to chop it up and we need to sell it to individuals. Individuals could be enterprises or consumer. In my world and the way I think about this, I think that we have an enormous amount of opportunity to give customers freedom and flexibility. If we're not able to give them freedom and flexibility, I think that we really limit the possibilities of what truly 5G can bring. And so in my world, I believe that you should be able to prepay for your computing power. I believe that you can literally distribute it among all your devices within your families like you know you have the family rate plans that the telcos are selling. Well, think about this. In that family rate plan, now there's an additional component that you will sell which will be compute. I may not want to go as fast as you. So like for gaming, for instance. Absolutely, gaming for everyone and at the speed of what you need. So atomic components of compute that you can actually assign to individual users, applications, workloads. Yeah, if Satya told me tomorrow, Ruki, what do you want to do? That's what I'd say. And your son would be in there with the gamers. Absolutely, he totally wants to do that, yes. Okay, so what are you doing here? What's the connection between Microsoft, your role and this Micron Insight event? Well, Micron is a great partner with Microsoft. I think we do a lot of business as it relates to chips. I specifically am here because Peggy Johnson supports the company and she's over our business development operations for the companies and she believes Micron is onto something. And so I'm proud to be here and getting to know more about the businesses at Micron and the partnerships that we can create in the future. Well, more partnerships that we've made. Obviously you need memory and storage to run all this stuff. You totally do, you can't do without it. You're part of the build out. Well, Ruki, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. We'll give you the last word. Your takeaways, what should we be watching for from you and your group? Yeah, I mean, I think that as we go forth with our partnership with AT&T, which happens to be one of the global carriers around the world, we are planning for some amazing things and we will make announcements at our Microsoft Ignite event in early November. And so I hope that everyone will attend that event and perhaps support us by sharing the information and coming to talk to us about new partnerships with our cloud networking department. Great, well, we'll be there at Ignite. Hope to have you back on. That'll be great. Absolutely, great. Thank you. And thank you everybody. Thank you, David Floyer. Great job with the crew. This is a wrap from Pier 27. It's a wrap. At Microsoft. Micron. Micron. Micron. Micron. I'm blending Microsoft, both same names, right? Insight conference, Micron Insight 2019. That's right. And check out siliconangle.com, check out thecube.net for all the videos and we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante for David Floyer. Thank you.