 Thank you, Adam, it's great having you working with you all week in the studio. We're here live in Barcelona. The Cube's continuous coverage of Cloud City. It's unbelievable. Dara Grealish is here as the chief technology officer and co-founder of 56K Cloud. I love that name. We're going to talk about that in Alexander Lehrman as the director of new business development innovation at Sunrise UPC. Gents, great to see you. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having us. MWC, you guys made the bet to come here. Aren't you glad you did? Yeah, we had to go through a lot of processes, but it was totally worth it, you know? Yeah, we're going to talk about edge cloud, right? And we're going to talk about developers and how this whole thing's going to build out. But how do you think about the cloud? You know, we were talking to the DR earlier. The cloud, you know, people think about it's a place. Increasingly, people say, no, no, that's actually experience. It's a development environment. The cloud is expanding to the edge. The data center is just another edge node. How do you guys look at the edge cloud? Well, we see the edge cloud as a huge opportunity to monetize on 5G, to bring the understanding and the features that 5G can deliver into the next generation of developer experience. Because once we address developer experience, we're going to be able to address that next generation of user experience. Okay, so let's dig into a little bit about what each of your respective companies does. Tell us about 56K. I love the name. Maybe a lot of people don't understand it, but you know. Yeah, it's kind of a generation thing. So, I worked for a lot of large companies, all the super long email addresses. At the same time, I grew up with 56K Modem, the Dialob Modem as you know it. And the transition from Dialob to broadband was massive. I mean, in terms of user experience on the web, the impact on that technology that did meant that finally you could control the user experience. You had some predictability. And we thought it was a catchy name. People relate to it. I used to work at Tesla automation, so user experience was an important thing. And so we kind of combine now cloud and the 56K kind of understanding of the experience. And it's all about the addressing that, you know, user experience. It's a game changer from a consumer experience at that time. And that's obviously the metaphor you're using. Alexander, tell us more about Sunrise, UPC, what the relationship is with 56K. Yeah, so Sunrise UPC obviously is a telecommunications provider. Number two, largest private telecommunications provider in Switzerland. And in terms of partnership with 56K cloud, we've basically started the conversation of how we can bring our world together with what 56K cloud is doing. We see a lot of things that we can do to kind of improve the offer from our end to our customers and the wider community as well. Yeah, so this is a good example, right? Because we see, we always talk about the global telco industry, there's a lot of localization, right? There's a lot of public policy that has to be considered. So let's get into the cloud portion of your name. You think about things like wavelength, which essentially, it's really outposts for 5G. You think about it, right? They're not satellite, it's a platform for development. Tell us about wavelength and 5G, the intersection there, why it's important. Yeah, yeah, so the edge cloud solution from Amazon, as you've heard of, it's not just solving existing use cases or problems, it's actually creating new opportunities by combining the technologies of 5G, network slicing, network exposed functions, and multiple access edge compute. It's actually the platform. So what we're trying to do is bring that developer experience, that tuning that is dominated in this large ecosystem in the public cloud, stretch it into the network because we need to start to see developers to see the network as an asset. Once they realize that speed, bandwidth, and latency they're not fighting against this to deliver the best user experience, they can orchestrate this, they can be part of the challenge. And once we can get those developers to see the network as an asset, as a value proposition, then this is the kind of minimum components that will build that next generation, next opportunities. So I go, you know, you had an interview recently with Jeff Power from AWS, he referred to AWS Wavelands as this is not just solving existing issues. He said this is an opportunity, combining 5G, you know, 5G is not just 4G plus one, it's a whole stack of capabilities. And once operators realize that they will stack on public cloud, their telco stack, then they can, that's modernizing 5G, going to 5G standalone. And then once they're on public cloud, dogfooding, you start to take those technologies and you bring them to your subscriber base. But the developers that are in that subscriber base, once you address their needs, they can have their creativity process in building those super apps, like drones, such as user experience. Once they address that, then you're going to get that ultimate user experience. So offer review. So as a telco in the local region, you've got, well, so you've got an advantage because you've got your presence at the edge and you're leaning into next gen cloud native, container sort of developers. We've always said developers are going to win the edge. And you don't typically, you know, most many telcos anyway, you don't think of them as developer centric. You guys are different. So I want to, can you talk about how you envision leveraging wavelength and what the role of developers will be in your country? Yeah. I think for us, it's essentially very important to kind of look at new stuff in many ways. You know, my role at the company is to look at innovative things and to kind of think a little bit ahead of what's coming down the line and not necessarily being, you know, revenue generating today, but maybe something that's like coming sometime down the road. And I think that whole area has so much potential. It just plays into so many fields that are relevant for a telco. And it opens a new channel in any ways because, you know, we'll be able to not just sell connectivity, business connectivity, mobile, all those products straight to customers, but we actually take a more sophisticated route by working with a developer community and then I kind of augment the offering that then will hit the customer. So we've seen CDNs and over-the-top providers come in, use your network, thank you for building out all that great infrastructure. It sounds like this is different. You're actually facilitating the development of new apps. What's different? What kind of apps are we talking about here that you can monetize? Yeah. I mean, it's from small to large, literally everything. I think, you know, what we've learned with the rollout of 5G is that it actually touches all industries and maybe there's some others that shine a bit more than others, but, you know, fundamentally it's such a big shift in terms of what we as a telco provide. It's not just this smartphone-centric world any longer. It's much more like building customized solution for particular customer segments and help them in the industry. So, you know, one thing, you know, one industry I want to mention, particularly because we're from Switzerland, smart farming, agriculture, right? And you can do a lot of good things there if you bring all these technologies together and solve problems that this vertical has had in the past, which was literally increased food production and be sustainable. Now you can do that. You know, in the old days, that wasn't possible. So you're talking drones, stream data, and 5G enables that. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's a whole new world. And that is a great monetization opportunity. Who owns the data in that example? Is that a discussion that's going on? Who owns the data? The customer owns the data, right? If it's the case or her data. Great answer. How about when you think about 5G features, network slicing, other capabilities? How do you see 56K taking advantage of those and working with the developer community to really exploit them? Yeah, so we've been working four years already working in public cloud, already on AWS. And what we've done is a lot of that cloud native migrations we've done. We've seen those technologies, and what we're trying to do is remap that. And how we're doing this is we're going to be launching the 5G developer platform. It's going to be a global ecosystem, open source ecosystem. You can go and check it out. It's 5G.dev, literally. And there, what we want to do is expose these new features of 5G, not just in telco language. So we're launching this kind of network slice as code so that you have this infrastructure as code in the public cloud domain that resonates with developers. We want to stretch that, and like I mentioned earlier, make that network slice as code. So such features in network slicing, dynamic network slicing, is enhanced mobile broadband, geofenced ways, speed bandwidth in this way, ultra-reliable low latency. I've seen it in my own eyes. You can single digit milliseconds. It's ridiculous how accurate it can be. And then there is the massive IoT. So as you see in IoT, but actually bringing narrowband IoT really at scale and not just that you need technical boundaries or contractual boundaries to access that, the developer has the same experiences in public cloud. And so we want to monetize this to a global 5G. Single digit latency, right? So I mean, you know what's going to happen. I think people, I think that's why I love the name so much, right? And what happened is people, you know, even the consumer at first was like, oh my gosh, and then what happened is the developer community said, look at all the great data apps we can push in. And now it's just orders of magnitude more that we can do. We saw video in the early days of video, it was like jittery and so it's very exciting times. I think about the data center and how virtualization occurred there. And it was almost like force fitting kind of an old model into a new model where the cloud was setting the definition of that new model and now they're kind of catching up. Telcos are in a similar situation, right? They've got very purpose built infrastructure. You guys obviously have more forward thinking in regard, but is there a parallel there with the old sort of virtualization days and how you're modernizing the network? What's the state of the network today and where do you see it going? Yeah, I mean, we've always looked at the network as sort of our prime differentiator. And we have to be on top of new things and make sure that it is top notch. That's sort of an undisputable... Right, table stakes. Table stakes exactly. And so I guess from that point alone, you need to continue to look at how can you improve it? How can you make it more efficient? How can you make it more stable? I mean, frictionless is for us a key word in that context. And I think with those new technologies, there's just more that we can do. And now we can actually, and this is the beauty of it that comes with 5G and all these new cloud technologies we can actually make the network our offering again by delivering network-enabled services, which something that comes with 5G that wasn't there with 4G. Yeah, those value-added services are key. And it's almost like, again, I think about the virtualization days, but now we're bringing cloud-native containerization, Kubernetes, Docker to this new world and you're doing it on a cloud platform. And that's what's different about the data centers. The data centers we're trying to do it on general-purpose platforms that were kind of being refactored and forced into it, but the cloud has shown us the way and it's different, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Well, what it has shown to us is that we no longer have to sell the top down or anything. What we're doing is we have to sell developer to developer. There is multiple avenues, not just SIM cards, subscribers or large enterprises wanting a thousand SIM cards. It's past that. Now it's developers building those augmented kind of user experiences on the app, on drones, a convention to like tractors and stuff, and Acutech. In the end, these developers need to become aware that the network can be orchestrated by them and that we can describe this network as code. In a familiar way, the way they've developed those applications, we need to extend that developer experience of those applications and not just be talking about, I have slow speed here, I have fast speed. I mean, we want to enable some really serious, interesting use cases. Use the term network as code, infrastructure as code, has been a game changer in the technology industry. But, much of the infrastructure is not programmable. And so, what you're envisioning is a world where, whether it's edge, whether it's data center or cloud, it's the same, right? It's the same experience. The developer experience is the same. The programmability spans, that's the layer that spans all those physical locations. That's the game changer. Exactly, yeah. That's why we have to break down those technical boundaries inside the telecom industry, make this familiar to developers and expose them. So that's why we're working with all the major ISVs, the vendors, like you've seen here today in Cloud City. I mean, what we're doing is we're making those network exposed functions, if you call it that way, in a way that the developers can relate to. And why that's really important is because then they have that same experience on the mobile app world. But at the same time, we've been here at Cloud City, what we realize is, actually the vendors are also interested in that too. Because they want to talk across from each other and build and be more rapid. And actually, in the end, build more competitive, be more competitive in terms of the network implementation. Because right now, there isn't yet, let's say, the value proposition of why do I need a 5G phone? Why do I need a 5G phone? 4G is just good enough. Sometimes I have three out of four bars. We need to get that 4G to 5G transition. And the developers is going to drive that. Well, when customers see the applications, it's going to shine a light. We've got the mobile network operators. We've got the whole 5G network slicing capability. We've got this edge cloud coming together real quick. You've got to be excited, Alexander. That is an absolutely exciting point in our development, in our evolution as an industry. And it's a huge opportunity. Because, again, as I said earlier, it is game-changing. It's not just an evolution, but it's really a next step forward to do the things differently. Guys, great avenue. We've got to go. We're going to take it back to Adam Burns in the studio. Thanks for watching.