 Okay, I'm back. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here in the middle of the action at Mobile World Congress at Cloud City. This is where the action is. Daniel Royce and Telco DR. Digital disruption here happening. This next interview I did with Casey Choi is executive vice president of Samsung. I did this remotely. He couldn't be here in person. We wanted to bring him in for a conversation. I had a chance to record this with him. He talks about the intelligent human edge or industry 4.0. It's about edge computing. Samsung is a leader. Obviously we know what they do. They're part of this IoT revolution. Casey Choi, brilliant executive. I really enjoyed my conversation. Take a listen. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with CUBE alumni. Casey Choi is executive vice president and GM of the Global Mobile B2B team, communications team at Samsung. Casey, great to see you. Thank you for coming off the special remote Mobile World Congress. We're here in person, but also hybrid event. We get a lot of remote interviews. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. John, great to see you. Great as always to be with you and great to be at least here virtually with the team in Barcelona for MWC. You know, in Samsung, when I think about the edge, you are leading a team that's driving this innovation. We've talked in the past about industry 4.0, but the innovation at the intelligent edge, human edge is a big part of it. With 5G, it's just another G, but it's not just another G. You got to have a backbone, you got to have a backhaul, you got to have an interconnection. You have commercial, not just consumer technology. So the edge is becoming both this human and device commercial environment. So the industry is quickly moving to this, you call it the 4.0 trend. What do you see happening? This is a clear change over the telco is not what it used to be. Change is coming fast, a lot of disruption. What's your view? Yeah, I think we see a number of things, John, and certainly from our perspective, which is, I think we've got somewhat of a unique view on this because of our huge focus really in consumer use and attitudes and certainly it's been informed by what we've seen, what we've all collectively seen over the last year and a half or so and are still seeing today. And I think one of the things that we're certainly experiencing is I think the edge is it's expanding further out. I think it's also getting more tightly coupled in many respects to the human factor. And it's not just a set of, you know, billions of discrete sensors anymore. And I think the evolution of our thinking around this has changed quite a bit from the IoT version one variant of this, which was more of, you know, what I would call billions of these things, communicating all kinds of information, you know, either to the cloud or the data centers and doing it in a very voluminous way. And what we're seeing is with the advent of more of the human to machine interface and certainly the capabilities that we're seeing both on the network and the device side, it's really redefining how we're thinking about edge. And certainly here at Samsung and with some of our partners and we're starting to call this more the intelligent human edge where the human factor really begins to play a big role in how we're defining the internet of things. And those things include really people and this is how we're looking at it. I love the theme, the human edge. I think that's very relevant. I want to get a human aspect here tied into on the industry side because, you know, as we emerge from the pandemic and move to a broader economic recovery, you see the psychology of the industry where cloud is one of the shining examples of what the pandemic highlighted, cloud speed, cloud agility. And now you're seeing with openness in the telco industry that cloud is coming in, open cloud, interoperability. So the coming out of the pandemic cloud is the theme is driving an economic recovery, which driving the psychology of we're back to real life, we're back to business, but it's not business as usual. The fashion's changing, the attitudes are changing. You mentioned that. And now the disruption of how cloud will be implemented. And it seems to be telco is where these edge and cloud are just completely radically changing what was once a kind of a slow moving telco space. So how do you see the partnerships and coming out of the pandemic, some of the response of cloud impact, cloud technology, public cloud impact on this new telco? Yeah, let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think we see two dimensions on this, certainly on the carrier side, the operator side of the equation, and we're certainly partnered with everybody across the globe on that. Certainly there's been a definitive impact around software defined everything, right? So, and this has been accelerated really by the standards that have starting to develop around 5G. And even now there's a lot of discussion, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of it at MWC around 60 and what is happening there. But I think with the advent of things like O-RAN, for example, and some of the activity that we're seeing really around MEC type solutions and opportunities, the traditional role of the carrier and the operator is evolving and has to evolve, right? It is now much more aligned with the provision of these types of services that are very different from the type of data or voice services that we've seen in the past. So certainly we're seeing that transition. The second big transition is really around the notion of hybridity. Now, we've been talking about this now in the industry for a while, but I think it's really starting to take firm root. The idea of not only multiple clouds, but clouds that are deployed either on-prem or certainly available as a service in its various forms. So I think that combination, along with the advances that we're seeing in the technology, and this is both on the connectivity side. So certainly around the ultra-reliable late-sea communications, what we're seeing with things like slicing, for example, starting to take root, as well as, frankly, the devices themselves are getting that much more powerful and compact, right? This is what we're seeing with SOC technologies. What we're seeing with the functions being moved more and more on device capability. So I think about hybrid. I mean, in my past, I used to think about it more as a small data center, right? How do you compact it, move it out to somewhere else? Now we're thinking about it more in terms of the type of processing capability that you can put really in the hands of the human or hands of the device. And at that point, you really start to get different use cases start to emerge from that. So this is how we're thinking about this extension and what I'm talking about more as an expansion of the edge further out. You know, I love this, is it splicing or slicing? What's the term? Slicing is a technology? Slicing, network slicing. Slicing, not splicing cable, slicing. Not splicing cable, no. Okay, so this has come up a lot. So splicing kind of points to this end-to-end, you know, work flows. You look at some of the modern development, the frameworks are successful. You know, you're seeing these multifunctional teams kind of having an end-to-end visibility into the modern application workflow from CI CD pipeline, whatever. Now, if you take the concept of O-RAN, you mentioned open radio access networks, this kind of brings up this idea of interoperability because if you're going to have end-to-end and you add edge to it, you have to have the ability to watch something go end-to-end, but it's never been like that in the past because you had to traverse multiple networks. Right, so this becomes kind of this hybrid a little bit deeper. Can you share how you see that and how Samsung's working with folks and how you guys are addressing this? Because you can be at the edge, but ultimately you've got to integrate. So you got openness, you got idea interoperability issues, and you ultimately have to move around and work with other networks, other clouds and other systems. This is not always like that. So can you share how this is evolving and how real this is and what's your view on it? Yeah. Our thinking on this, I mean, let me start by maybe tackling this in a little bit of a different angle. One of the things that we see as one of the barriers around interoperability has really been more on the application side of the equation. And this is actually the third component in making all of this work. And let me just be very clear in what I'm saying here. I think in terms of mobile architectures and really edge architectures, it has been one of the last bastions, if you will, of closed architectures. There have been very much what I would call purpose built architectures at the edge. Certainly that's been driven by things like the industrial side coming together with more of the commercial side of the equation. But we think it's time really to extend the interoperability of what we are seeing really on the IT side of the equation and really driven by cloud native. This is really in the area of containers. It's in the area of microservices. It's in the area of cloud native development. And if we're really talking about this, we really need to extend that interoperability from the application point of view and the data point of view really to the endpoint. And this is where some of the work that we're doing and we really embarked on in earnest last year with Red Hat and IBM and with VMware, for example, in really opening up that edge architecture to really the open source community as well as really to the microservices architectures that we have now seen propagate down from the cloud into hybrid architecture. So this has been really one of the key focus areas for us. The network interoperability has really been driven by the standards that we've seen and that have been really adopted by the industry. And when it comes to, for example, 5G standards, what we've been more focused on quite honestly is the interoperability on the application and data side. And we think that by extending, if you will, that right once run many type concept down into the edge and into the device that this is going to open up a really a wealth of opportunity for us on the application and on the data side. That's awesome, I love the openness, love the innovation you guys are doing. I think that's where the action is. That's where the growth is going to be. I do have to ask you how you see edge computing in the IoT era in terms of security. Are we more vulnerable because of it now? And how are you guys addressing the issue of security and data privacy at the edge? What's your opinion on that? What's that Samsung? I mean, you just have to look at the news today that it's obvious that we are more vulnerable, right? There's no doubt that points of vulnerability are being exposed and they're probably being exposed in now industrial areas, right? Certainly with what we've seen just even recently with some of the attacks that have occurred. So a couple of things there. Number one, we are relying very heavily on our long history around establishing root of trust and kind of zero trust environments. We've had our Knox platform as an example. We just celebrated in fact our 10th year of the product. In fact, it was announced at NWC back about 10 years ago. So this is something that we're celebrating at its anniversary. Our belief on this is that we really need to ensure that we maintain a hardware based root of trust when it comes to the edge. We can't only rely upon software protection at that layer. We can't let that truly rely upon some of the network protections that are there. So, we've shipped about three billion devices with our Knox security suite over the last 10 years. And this is something that we're relying very heavily on. Not only for, again, that hardware based root of trust. So one of the key solutions there is our Knox Vault product which we just released a few months back. This is really a safe within a safe concept really ensuring that the biometric password and other user data is protected. It's really what drives some of our strategy around making sure that we rely upon something that protects all the back doors that are resident not only at the software layer but at the hardware layer as well. And then management is the other key piece of this. Security without the ability of managing these thousands to millions of devices is really somewhat compromised. So we've extended a lot of our Knox management capability at our device level really to address some of those particular attributes as well as these fleets become more prominent and they start to take on workloads that are more critical to IoT type workloads. Casey, great to have you on. Your insights awesome. Love what you're doing at Samsung. And again, your leader, you've been, they've seen those cycles of innovation. I have to ask you my final question for you. Sure. As a personal one and a professional one. The last Mobile World Congress was 2019 in person. Last year was canceled. A lot's happened in the industry since 20 something months ago. Now we're going to be in person. A lot of hybrid still remotely but there'll be people in person. The world's changed. What is the big change in the telco, telco cloud, telco edge? What's happened in these 20 plus months since the last Mobile World Congress that people should pay attention to? What's the most important thing in your mind? Most important, thank God, John. You're putting me on the spot here, right? I think it's wisdom to be quite honest with you. I mean, we've certainly all collectively learned a lot in terms of user patterns and what people need and want. And I hope to think that collective wisdom is going to be a key part of how we drive this going forward. And then if I can just pick one more, I would say reinvention. I think what we're starting to see is that coming out of again from 2019 to what we're seeing now, we do see this opportunity for reinvention and rethinking, right? And I think that's the difference and the pace of that is going to really dictate how we look at this and how we collectively solve these challenges. So I hope to think we're wiser and that we're more imaginative coming out of this. And again, after being in this industry for 30 years, we've not seen the types of things that we've seen over the last couple. So I hope to think that this is a pivot point for all of us. Well, Samsung, certainly a leader in many areas and great to see you on theCUBE here and the theme and your talks around intelligence, human, edge, innovation, open, this is a force that's happening. And I think the big change, as you said, the wisdom combined with a reinvention is happening. And it's going to be a very interesting ride. It should be fun to work on. It will be, John. And I thank you for our friendship and our relationship over the years. It's always great to see you and to be with you. And again, we're very optimistic as we always have in coming out of this. And again, thanks for the time and have a great MWC. You too. Casey Choi, Executive Vice President, General Manager of the Global Mobile Business to Business Unit, Commercial Unit at Samsung. This is theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Okay, we're back here. That was Casey Choi talking about wisdom, collective wisdom coming out of the pandemic. Great friend of theCUBE, great friend of the industry, doing great work there at Casey Choi. Like we are doing here on the ground in Mobile World Congress in Cloud City, as well as Adam and the team in the studio. So back to you, Adam and team.