 Hi, and welcome. My name is Bill Lambertson and I am a global director for IBM's telecommunications industry, and this session is called Distributed Cloud for Telco Networks and Edge. So I want to get started with kind of setting a few pieces of context. So we're seeing around the world from a global telecommunication standpoint, we're seeing a couple of trends occurring and IBM is responding to meet those trends. Those trends are really from around four things. Number one, operators are looking to move to a cloud native architecture for their network and their edge solutions. And they want to be able to run a set of edge applications as well as cloud native network functions on this cloud native architecture. So that's number one. Number two, they want to embrace an open platform so they don't want any vendor lock in. They want to have interoperability. They want to support open source communities and they want to be able to leverage a combination of network functions from multiple vendors. So that's the second trend. The third thing that we're starting to see is a real strong interest in this whole concept of hybrid for cloud. And it includes the use of public cloud facilities to run carrier networks on. And in my opinion, this is going to be something that is going to accelerate very rapidly in 2021. I'm working and talking with major operators around the world and they see a very strong role for public cloud as part of their network environment. And that's a change from what I've seen over the last couple of decades. And that public cloud is not only in public cloud facilities, but it's also the use of public cloud in what I call a distributed cloud model, meaning deployed, a public cloud deployed on premise or in a carrier's network data center. So that's the third trend. And the fourth trend really is that as operators make significant investments in infrastructure to support the deployment of new 5G and the cloudification of the network environment, they want to also connect that to top line revenue growth. So they want to monetize services. And that's really where the edge part comes in. So IBM in partnership with many ISVs as well as global operators have developed a set of solutions and offerings really targeting this space. And what we refer to as distributed cloud for telco networks and edge. And it's built on these four pillars. It is a cloud native first or container first architecture. And it's built on IBM public cloud and our new distributed cloud offering called IBM cloud satellite. So that's the first thing. The second it is open source and it is basically based on a community of open source technology and partners driven by Red Hat and Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack which has a very broad and rich ecosystem in the telecommunication space. The third thing is that our solution is really as a service offering. So operators want the ability to leverage and consume resources as a service and they want to be able to align their spend with their revenue streams. And this is really important important concept and why really the public cloud piece comes into play. And the solution has to be really carrier grade and focused on the telco industry. So we've worked with a set of partners to ensure that the capabilities are integrated well and that there's an onboarding process and a certification process to bring partners into the ecosystem. And we work with Red Hat very closely on that certification process and we work within our own organization around the certification as well. So this is really the whole concept of distributed cloud for telco network and edge and let me tell you a little bit more about it. So I mentioned that it is based on what we call IBM cloud satellite. And cloud satellite is in fact a distributed cloud and it allows an operator to be able to consume public cloud resources within their own data center environment. And so distributed cloud or IBM cloud satellite kind of sets it up like this on the left hand side of this chart is the public cloud. And this is really where all of the cloud resources are running. It's where we do all of the operations. It's where the the control plane is established for things like config using using Razzie as well as a service mesh based on it's yo and we extend this environment through cloud satellite down to a non premise location. And we refer to that as a cloud satellite location and we are able to deploy a whole set of public cloud resources on to your own environment. Things like red hat open shift as an example database as a service and a whole set of rich IBM public cloud content that you can use around machine learning and other things to complement your network environment. And the cool thing about cloud satellite is that there are many ways to deploy it or consume it. So we don't force you into having to have to having to provide or consume our own hardware stack. We give you many many different choices so you can bring your own infrastructure. It can be bare metal or it can be an I as service and we can deploy the cloud satellite location solution on top of that. Or we have an appliance based solution that you can basically order and roll in and then plug in and start up as a cloud satellite location for those operators that don't want to have to provide the underlying infrastructure. So these are a couple of options that are available and there's a whole set of hardware that's supported underneath it including you know GPU capable servers as well as things like servers that have the ability to do hardware acceleration with large PCI slots in it. So it gives you a broad range of choice that we know are important for operators to run network functions on it. So these are a couple of the highlights and it's managed, the service is managed by the IBM public cloud company. So we provide all of the updates for the services that run on top of it whereas you're responsible for the underlying infrastructure or we can provide services to support that underlying infrastructure if you choose to do that as well. So that's the start of the solution and let me build on that a little bit. So from an operational standpoint in a configuration, we provide a single pane of glass for you to manage your public cloud and your cloud satellite resources. And so you can quickly build and stand up a facility, a cloud satellite location. You can deploy an instance of Red Hat OpenShift down to that cloud satellite facility and you can deploy applications or network functions on top of that OpenShift environment. That's just an example. And you have full transparency and view of all of the resources that are running across all of your cloud satellite locations. So if you had it deployed across multiple metropolitan data centers, you would be able to see them all and manage them from a single pane of glass. Also, if you have a set of services running in the public cloud, you're also able to manage them from this single pane of glass. So we provide consistent security, control, compliance from this platform and it gives you the ability to focus really on running your network and not worrying about the underlying infrastructure that it runs on. So it's an exciting announcement. It's an exciting offering that I believe personally will have strong capabilities and relevancy in the telecommunication space. So let me go through and kind of share a big picture view of what does it mean for an operator. So if you take a typical network environment, I know there's really no typical one, but you have, you know, multiple topology layers. You may have a couple of national data centers and maybe a couple of dozen metropolitan data centers and then below that you'll have local data centers supporting your, you know, your ran environments and such. And really where we think cloud satellite fits well is in those distributed network data centers, both at the metropolitan layer and also down to the local data center layer. So you can have things like your OSS or your BSS solutions running in the IBM public cloud to take advantage of the low infrastructure. And then you can deploy cloud satellite in your metropolitan or your local data centers and be able to deploy network functions and data and AI and edge solutions on top of that. And the beauty of this is that by deploying cloud satellite into one of your metropolitan data centers, you now instantly have an edge solution, a network mech as an example where you can provide, you know, depending upon your location, but maybe five, 10 or 15 millisecond roundtrip latency capabilities for for edge workloads. And so operators are looking at this as an ability to support their new 5G network functions and network solutions, but also at the same time integrate that through things like network slicing and be able to deploy on top of the same platform, a set of machine learning and and automation and data and AI solutions targeting the edge space to help you monitor the network and monetize it and grow the revenue on the top end. So this is kind of an example and I'm going to show you a real topology drawing just to kind of put it on a little bit more clarity in some context. So if I go to the next slide, here's just an example of the topology I was describing. So at the top is a public data center where you may have all of your analytics and your security solutions. You are CICD pipelines, your VIM control plane across your environment, all running on a public cloud running on OpenShift. And then as you start to drop down into your metropolitan data centers, here's an example of five locations. You know, one might be in an IBM cloud property. You might also put it on top of another public cloud property and install it on top of the IaaS solution that they provide. You might put it into one of your network data centers if you have the space and the environmentals in that network data center. Or you can use a COLO facility and just provide, you know, be able to acquire space or rack space to be able to deploy it. And this really does now extend the public cloud property down into your own network and puts it in close proximity of your users for low latency capabilities. And then as you drop down to the lower level, this might be an example of where you might be doing maybe your DUs or your virtual RAN. And you may choose to deploy these on things like OpenStack instead of OpenShift. And this could be a private cloud solution tied into the broader distributed cloud platform. So the true sense of hybrid, leveraging public cloud, private cloud, and cloud at the edge to really deliver a holistic solution for distributed network and edge solutions. So that's kind of the highlight. Now I want to get into a couple of the other things that I talked about because I've only started to really discuss the NVI environment for the infrastructure and the VIM environment for, you know, running the virtualization layer on, which is the Red Hat solution. But there are a couple of other things that IBM is bringing to the table or has available today that complement this and are important. So orchestration, Amano, is the next layer, right? And we have launched in May a solution called Telco Network Cloud Manager, which is essentially three or four components as part of a suite of solutions. So the first one, it is a lifecycle management and network orchestration tool. And it does dynamic placement of or intent based orchestration for your network solutions. It's not like other orchestrators where many of them on the market today have workflows or scripts that you have to define. This is really intent based. So there's a lot of logic that's built into it to automate the process and to make it available at scale. The second element is around service assurance. So we have a whole set of service assurance tools that not only can you use multiple VNFs or CNFs from multiple providers, but you can also do full anti-end lifecycle management. You can orchestrate them and deploy them and then you can run automation and service assurance on them for day two support. And we also have a whole set of capabilities around performance for network performance. And then just recently we launched a capability based on Watson called AI Ops. So it's really about enabling artificial intelligence in the operations environment and helping you do cognitive, you know, taking it beyond predictive but do cognitive recommendations. In the network environment from an operational standpoint. So this starts to bring together the whole value chain of what we have available for the network side. Now let me talk to you a little bit about what we do around the edge capabilities because in the world of 5G network and edge are really going to be very much tied at the hip. And we're going to be looking at solutions that support both of them and that network slicing will do different things for customers based on the workloads that they want to deploy. So they're very much tied together. So we launched a product called IBM Edge Application Manager, which is an autonomous edge solution that allows you to deploy at scale data AI and edge applications or edge enabled applications. And you can deploy them down to Kubernetes environments like Red Hat OpenShift or you can deploy them down to individual Linux containers. So like a Docker or a Podman. And what's really unique about this and important is that this not only lets you address the edge in the IT applications and service offerings, but it really unlocks the area that's going to grow significantly and that's around operating technologies. So everything of value as we move forward is going to be connected and is going to be instrumented and intelligent. And essentially have a processor built into it. And so being able to orchestrate and manage those resources, even if they're operating technology like in a factory floor or robotics or drones, that might not be part of the traditional IT value chain, but more on the operation side. It allows a telco as an operator to participate in this explosive growth around far edge devices and the growth of operating technology components. So we have a lot more information that's available in our virtual booth, which I encourage you to take a look at this, but it's about bringing edge applications and telco network cloud functions together. And then on top of that, you know, it's one thing to have the platform to be able to deliver these capabilities and all the tools to orchestrate and set it up. But what really unlocks the value now is about having the content or the services, the edge enabled services on top to bring out the business insights. So we have a whole set of capabilities around edge that are focused on data and AI solutions for like industry forward auto use cases, worker safety, IBM manufacturing or production optimization, visual inspection of using intelligent video analytics to be able to recognize things or situational awareness, IBM visual insights to be able to recognize people that might be wearing masks or should be wearing a hard hat and a whole bunch of capabilities around what we refer to as Maximo worker insights. And Maximo has been around for a very long time and is an industry leading asset management solution that we've evolved to include predictive maintenance on a lot of those assets. So helping large enterprise customers predict when something might fail like a conveyor belt in a factory and being able to do acoustic analytics on the ball bearings of that conveyor belt and be able to predict when things might fail and to be able to perform services on them. So this is the exciting part about building these kinds of capabilities on top of the platform of our distributed cloud for network and edge. And so I want to kind of bring this all together for you in the big picture here and this is a complete solution end to end. And some of our clients pick and choose some components of this, you know, so it's not an oil or nothing kind of thing. That's the beauty of it. You can do do it in different ways. Some customers look for a fully managed service. Others are just want to buy the software asset and they want to manage it themselves. That's certainly an option. And a couple of examples of clients that you may have heard of and you actually might even be listening and I'm very proud of it is we we launched a partnership and a set of capabilities with with Bartier tell in India around deploying a set of of virtualized network solutions for their mobile operator environment. And we also announced a partnership with Vodafone idea, which is now called by and they're rolling out a whole bunch of micro clouds based on these technologies. So let me explain to you what some of them are. First of all, at the bottom in the infrastructure, we give you a broad choice around the NFVI environment or the infrastructure and hardware that you can run on. So it can be bare metal. It can be infrastructure. I as it can be power systems or x86 and it can be IBM or non IBM. So it doesn't really matter. And then we layer on top of it this, you know, cloud satellite capability that runs on on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or core OS. And then on top of the Red Hat environment, we deploy Red Hat OpenShift and that becomes the container first architecture or infrastructure to now start building applications and services on. And we have and I talked about this in this discussion here. We have a couple of orchestration engines. One of them is called IBM Edge Application Manager for the Industry 4.0 use cases. The other is Telco Network Cloud Manager for the VNF and CNF life cycle management. And then multi managed multi cloud management management for advanced cluster management across different Kubernetes clusters. So that kind of does the platform piece. And then we have a set of capabilities available on top of that. And I mentioned some of them around the Edge enabled applications. We also have a whole set of machine learning and data science tools that are starting to be used in the network space starting to be used in the security of the network space and other elements of it. And we also offer a set of services to help operators design, build, deploy and manage all of these environments. And it's exciting because IBM is really in a very unique position these days where in the IT space we've been doing a lot of this stuff for a long time. But as the world of network and Edge starts to become more cloud like and move to cloud native architectures, it's an opportunity that was just coming towards us where we have so much experience and skills in to help telecommunications companies really pick and choose the right strategy and the right approach going forward. And we're vendor agnostic. So we work with a lot of the with many of the network equipment providers, all of the all of the top brands and many of the emerging ones. We've worked with them to onboard it on the on the red hat environments on boarded into the orchestration engine. And we can provide really a key capability for telecommunications service providers around their plans to develop and deploy 5G network and Edge solutions. So I hope that you'll spend some time checking us out further in the virtual booth and we'll have some product demos some virtual demos on a couple of different items here. And remember IBM cloud satellite. It's IBM's distributed cloud. And also in closing, I will say that many of the services that run on top of this platform are part of the red hat marketplace, which was just launched a few weeks ago. It was announced back in May and it was just launched. It's a red hat marketplace operated by IBM. So you can feel safe and secure that the software that you're downloading from the marketplace to be deployed on your open shift environment is secure and trustworthy. And there's a lot of innovation going there. So I'd encourage you to look at it as you start building capabilities for your own network and Edge environment. Start with some accelerators or some patterns from many of the great companies that are contributing code and code snippets to the red hat marketplace. And if you have something that you think is unique and you want to share back to the industry, we encourage you also to publish some of your assets on the marketplace. So in a give back method. So I know I covered a lot. It was kind of an intro. I wanted to give you guys a high level overview of what it is. We're excited about the opportunity in front of us with 5G and Edge. And I want to thank you for spending a few minutes with us today. And I'll be available to answer some questions if you have some, if we have a few minutes left over. So thank you. Okay. Well, thank you very much for participating. And I'm really excited about this week ahead of us with the Open Networking and Edge Summit. And very proud to have IBM participate in this outstanding event. So moderator with that. We can close the session. Okay, this is Bill Lamberton. I'm happy to take any questions. If I see him in the Q&A chat session. Or you can also slack me and I'll be happy to answer them there as well. So we'll give just a couple of minutes and see if there are any questions. Okay. Well, I'm very happy to participate in the Open Networking and Edge Summit. It's an exciting couple of days of content. Hopefully you will be able to catch some of the other sessions. There are a few other IBM speakers. And I for one will be listening and learning myself. So moderator with that being said, I think we can close the session.