 The CUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. All right, welcome back to the theater in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Day four of coverage, MWC 23. We've been talking all week about the disaggregation of the telco networks, how telcos need to increase revenue, how they're not going to let the over the top providers do it again. They want to charge Netflix. And Netflix is punching back. There may be a better ways to do revenue acceleration. We're going to talk to that topic with Dave Trigg, who's the global vice president of Telecom Systems Business at Dell Technologies and Ken Burns, who's a global telecom partner sales lead. Guys, good to see you. Good to see you, good to be here. Thank you for being here. Dave, you heard my intro. There's got to be better ways for the telcos to make money. How can they accelerate revenue beyond taxing Netflix? Yeah, well, first of all, sort of the promise of 5G and a lot of people talk about 5G as the enterprise gene, right? So the promise of 5G is to really help drive revenue, enterprise use cases. And so it's sort of the promise of the next generation of technology, but it's not easy to figure out how we monetize that. And so we think Dell has a pretty significant role to play. It's a CEO conversation for every telco and how they accelerate. And so it's an area we're investing heavily into three different areas for telcos. One is the IT space. Dell's done that forever. 90% of the company's leaning in on that. The other place is network. Network's more about cost takeout. And the third area where we're investing in is working with what we call their line of businesses, but truly their business units, right? How can we sit down with them and really understand what services do they take to market? Where do they go? So we're making significant investments. So one way they can do it is working with Dell and we're making big investments. Because in most GEOs, we have a fairly significant sales force. We've brought in an industry leader to help us put it together. And we're getting very focused on this space and looking forward to talking more about it. So Ken, you know the space inside and out. We just had AT&T on. And they were saying we have to be hyper sensitive because of our platinum brand to the use of personal information. So we're not going to go there yet. We're not going to go directly monetized. But yet I'm thinking, well Netflix knows what I'm watching and they're making recommendations and that's how they make money. And so the telcos are shy about doing that for right reasons. But they want to make better offers. They want to put forth better bundles. You know, they don't want to spend all their time trying to figure that out and not being able to change when they need to change. So what is the answer if they're not going to go toward that direct monetization of data? How do they get there? So I joined Dell at the end of June and wrote on as David said to build and lead this, what we call the line of business strategy, right? And ultimately what it is is tying together Dell technology solutions and the best agreed of what the telecoms bring to bear to solve the business outcomes of our joint customers. And there's a few jewels inside of Dell. One of it is that we have 35,000 sellers out there all touching enterprise business customers. We have a really good understanding of what those customer needs are and what their outcomes needs to be. The other jewel is we have a really good understanding of how to solve those business outcomes. Dell is an open company. We work with thousands of integrators. And we have a really good insight in terms of how to solve those business outcomes, right? And so in my conversations with the telecom companies when you talk about combining the best assets of Dell with their capabilities and we're all talking to the same customers, right? And if we're giving them the same story on these solutions, solving business outcomes, it's a beautiful thing. It's a time to market. What's an example of a situation where you'll partner with telcos that's going to drive revenue for both of you and value for the customer? Yeah, great question. So we've been laser focused on four key areas. Cyber, well, let me sort of with connected laptops. Cyber, private mobility and edge, right? Now the last two are a little bit squishy but I'll get to that in a bit, right? Because ultimately I feel like with this 5G market we could actually make the market. And the way that we've been positioning this is almost on a journey for IOT. When we talk about laptops, right? Dell is the number one company in the world to sell business laptops. Well, if we start selling connected laptops the telcos are starting to say, well, you know what? If all of those laptops get connected to my network that's a ton of 5G activations, right? We have to use cases on why having a connected workforce makes sense, right? So we're sharing that with the telcos to not simply sell a laptop but to sell the company on why it makes sense to have that connected workforce. Why does it make sense? Because you know what? Because you're the end customer. Yeah, so, you know, I'm probably not the best to answer that one, right? But ultimately, you know, Dell is selling millions and millions of laptops out there. And again, the Verizon, the HT, the Timbos, they're seeing the opportunity that, you know, connecting those laptops, give those the 5G activations, right? But Dave, you know, the way that we've been positioning this is it's not simply a laptop. It could be really a Trojan horse into this IoT journey because ultimately, if you sell 1,000 laptops to an enterprise company and you're connecting 1,000 of their employees, you're connecting people, right? And we can give the analytics around that what they're using it for, you know, making sure that the security, the bios, all of that is up to date. So now that you're connecting their people, you'd open up the conversation to, why don't we connect your place? And, you know, allowing the telecom companies to come in and educate customers and the Dell sales force on why a private 5G mobility network makes sense to connecting places, that's a great opportunity. When you connect the place, the next part of that journey is connecting things in that place, robotics, sensors, et cetera, right? And so really, so we're on this journey of people, places, things. So it got the cyber wrangle in there, Dave, that's a very clear benefit. You know, if you've got all these bespoke laptops and they're all at different levels, you're going to get, you know, you're going to get hacked anyway. That's right, hack worse. Yeah, I'm curious, as you go to market, do you see significant differences? You don't have to name any names, but I imagine that there are behemoths that could be laggards because essentially, they feel like they're the toll booth and all they have to do is keep collecting the tolls whereas some of the smaller, more nimble, more agile entities that you might deal with might be more receptive to this message. That seems to be the sort of way, the circle of life. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing the big ones? Are you seeing the, you know, the aircraft carriers realizing that we got to turn into the wind guys and if we don't start turning into the wind now, we're going to be in trouble. So this conference has been absolutely fantastic allowing us to speak with, you know, probably 30 plus telecom operators around this strategy, right? And all of the big guys, they've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in their 5G network and they haven't really seen the ROI. So when we're coming into them with a story about how Dell can help monetize their 5G network, I got to tell you, they're pretty excited about it. So they're receptive. Oh my God, they are very receptive to it. Hey, that's the big question, right? I mean, is anybody ever going to make any money off of 5G? And Ken, you were saying that private mobility and edge are a little fuzzy, but from a strategy standpoint, I mean, that is a potential gold mine. Yeah, but for a lot of the telcos and most telcos, it's a pretty significant shift in mentality, right? Because they are used to selling SIM cards to some degree and how many SIM cards are they selling and how many, what other use cases? And really to get to the point where they understand the use case, because to get into the enterprise, to really get into what can they do to help power a enterprise business more wholly, they've got to understand the use case. They don't understand the whole more complete solution. Dell's been doing that for years and that's where we can bring our Salesforce, our capabilities, our understanding of the customer, because even your original question around AT&T and trying to understand the data, that's just really how do you get better understanding of your customer? Right, absolutely. And combined, we're better together because we bring a more complete picture of understanding our customers and then how can we help them understand what the edge is? Because nobody's ever bought an edge, right? They're buying an edge to get a business outcome. Back in the day, nobody ever bought a data lake, right? They're buying an outcome. They want to use that data lake or they want to use the edge to deliver something. They want to use 5G and 5G has very real capabilities. It's got intrinsic security, which a lot of the Wi-Fi doesn't. It's got guaranteed on time for areas where you can't lose connectivity, autonomous vehicles, et cetera. So it's got very real capabilities that helps deliver that outcome, but you got to be able to translate that into the enterprise language to help them solve a problem. And that's where we think we need the help of the telcos. I think the telcos, we can help them as well and really go drive that outcome. So Dell's bringing its go-to-market expertise and its technology. Telcos obviously have the connectivity piece and what they do. There's no overlap in terms of the equipment and the software that you're selling. I mean, they're going to take your equipment and create new networks, beautiful. And it's interesting. You're like, you think about how Dell has transformed. Prior to EMC, Dell was a PC maker with a subpar enterprise business. Kind of a wannabe enterprise business. Sorry, Dell, it's the truth. And then EMC was largely, you know, companies sold storage boxes, but you owned VMware. And then you brought those two together. Now all of a sudden you had Dell, powerhouse leader and Michael Dell. You had VMware, incredibly strategic and important and it got to EMC with amazing go-to-market. All of a sudden, as Dell technologies became incredibly attractive to CIOs, C-level executives, board level, and you've come out of that transition. Well, VMware is now a separate company. But now you have these relationships and you've got the shops to be able to go into these edge locations, edge companies, and actually partner with the telcos. And you've got a very compelling value proposition. Well, it's been interesting in this show again, most telcos think of Dell as a server provider. You know, important, but not overly strategic in their journey. But as we've started to invest in this business, we've started to invest in things like automation, we've brought together things in our info blocks, and then we help them develop revenue. We're not only helping them take costs out of their network, we're not helping them take risk out of deploying that network. We're helping them accelerate the deployment of that network, and then we're helping them drive revenue. We are having, you know, they're starting to see us in a new light, not done yet, but you know, you can start to see, one, how they're looking at Dell, and two, and then how we can go to market. And you know, a big part of that is helping them drive and generate revenue. Yeah, well, as a former EMC person myself, I will assert that strategic DNA was injected into Dell by the acquisition of EMC, and I'm sticking- I won't say that, I'll believe you on that, I'll believe you. I'm sticking with the story, and it makes sense when you think about moving up market. That's the natural thing. What's nearly impossible is to say, we sell semi-trucks, but we want to get into the personal pickup truck market. That doesn't work. Going the other way, works. Now, back to the conversation that you had with AT&T. I'm not buying this whole, no offense to AT&T, but I'm not buying this whole story that, oh, we're concerned about our branded customer data. That sounds like someone who's a little bit too comfortable with their existing revenue stream. If I'm out there, I want to be out partnering with folks who are truly aggressive about coming up with the next cool thing. You guys are talking about being connected in a laptop. Someone would say, well, I got Wi-Fi. No, no, no, I'm thinking, I want to SIM in my laptop, because I don't want to screw around with Wi-Fi. Okay, fine, if I know I'm going to be somewhere with excellent Wi-Fi connectivity, great. But most of the time, it's not excellent. That's right. So the idea that I could maybe hit F2, and have it switch over to my SIM, and know that anywhere that I've got coverage, I have high-speed connections, just the convenience of that. I pay extra for that as an end-user consumer. And I pay for the service. I gotta tell ya, in fairness to AT&T, I think it's more, they ask, they're comfortable. They don't know how to monetize that data. Now, of course, AT&T has a media business. Necessity is the mother of invention. If they don't see their necessity, then they're not going to think about it. That's not their swimming mentality, shit. But yes, you start talking about private mobility, there's no concern about personal information there. You're going in with basically a business transformation. Hey, your business is not digital. It's not automated. Now we're going to automate that and digitize that. It's like the Dell booth with the beer guys. Right. You saw that, right? I mean, that's such a simple application. Yeah, a perfect example of how you network and use this technology. I mean, how many non-digital businesses are there that need to go digital? 100% of them, pretty much. Yeah, and this jewel that we have inside of Dell, our global industries group, right? Where we're investing really heavily in terms of what is the manufacturing industry looking for? Retail, finance, et cetera. So we have a CTO that came in. It would be the CTO of manufacturing. That gives us a really good opportunity to go to AT&T or to Bryson or any Toko out there, right? To say these are the outcomes. There's Dell technology already in place. How do we connect it to your network? How do we leverage your assets, your manager, professional services to provide a richer experience? So it's, you said before, Dave, there's really no overlap between Dell and our telecom markets. Yeah, you guys, making some serious investments here. I mean, I've been critical over the years of, hey, you can't just take an x86 box, put a name on it that says edge something and throw it over the fence because that's what you were doing. And we would agree. Yeah, of course, but that's all you had at the time. So you put some... I don't have agreed then. But you brought some people in, like Ken, who really know the business. You brought the people into the technical side and you can really see it happening. It's not going to happen overnight. You know, I mean, if I were an investor in Dell, I'd be like, okay, when are you going to start making money at this business? I'd be like, be patient. It's going to take some time, but look at the TAM. You guys do a good tennis. He's a pro at this stuff. We've been at this two to three years and we're just now coming with some real material products. You've seen our server align, really start to get more purpose built. Really start to get in there as we started to put out some software that allows for quicker automation, quicker deployments. We have some telcos that are using it to deploy at 10,000 locations. They're literally turning up thousands of locations a week. And so, yeah, we're starting to put out some real capability. Got a long way to go. A lot of exciting things on the road map, but to your point, it doesn't, you know, the ship doesn't turn overnight. You know. Be a really meaningful portion of Dell's business. I'm excited for the day that Tom Sweet starts reporting on it. There's our telco business. The telco business, but that's not going to happen overnight. But, you know, Dell's pretty good at things like ROI. And so you guys do a lot of planning, a lot of TAM analysis, a lot of technical analysis, bringing the ecosystem together. That's what this business needs. I just don't, it feels unstoppable. You know, you're at this show, everybody recognizes the need to open up. Some telcos are moving faster than others. The ones that move faster are going to disrupt. They're going to probably make some mistakes. You know, but they're going to get there first. Well, we've seen the disruptors are making some mistakes and are kind of re, they're already at the phase where they're reevaluating, you know, their approach, which is great. You know, you learn and adjust, you know, you run into a wall, you make a turn. And the interesting thing, the one of the biggest learnings I've taken out of the show is talking to a bunch of the telcos that are a little bit more of the laggards. They're like, no, we don't believe in open, we don't think we can do it. We don't have the skill set. There may be in a geo that it's hard to find the skill set. As they've been talking to us, and we've been talking about, there's almost a glimmer of hope. They're not convinced yet, but they're like, well, wait, maybe we can do this. Maybe open, you know, does give us choice. Maybe it can help us accelerate revenue. So it's been interesting to see a little bit of the, just a little bit, but a little bit of that show. We all remember at 2010, 2011, you talked to banks and financial services companies about the heck the cloud is happening. The cloud's going to take over the world. We're never going to go into the cloud. Now they're the biggest, you know, Capital Ones launching cloud businesses, Western Union. I mean, they're all in the cloud, right? I mean, it's the same thing's going to happen here. It might take a different pattern. Maybe it takes a little longer, but it's a fate I completely... I was in high school then, so I don't remember all that, but... Yeah, sorry, Dave. Wow, that was a whoa, whoa idea, though. But the one thing that is for sure, there's money to be made convincing people to get off of the backs of the dinosaurs they're riding. That's right. And also, the other thing that's a certainty is that it's not easy. And because it's not easy, there's opportunity there. So I know it all sounds great to talk about the wonderful vision of the future, but I know how hard the road is that you have to go down to get people, especially if you're comfortable with a revenue stream, if you're comfortable running the plumbing. If you're so comfortable that you can get up on stage and say, I want more money from you to pump your content across my network. I love the Netflix retort, right, Dave? Yeah, but it's totally Dave. But the other thing is, Telco is a great business. They got monopolies that print money. So it's rational, I understand. There's less of an incentive to move, but what's going to be the incentive is guys like Dish Networks coming in saying, we're going to disrupt, we're going to build new apps. That's right, yeah. Well, and that's revenue acceleration, the board level, the CEO level, know that they have to do things different. But to your point, it's just hard and there's so much gravity there. There's hundreds of years, literally of gravity, of how they've operated their business to your point. A lot of them, most of them were regulated and most CEOs around the world at one point, right? They were government owned or government regulated entities. It's a big ship to turn and it's really hard. We're not claiming we can help them term the ship overnight, but we think we can help evolve them. We think we can go along with them with the journey and we do think we are better together. IT, the network and the line of business. Love the strategy. Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Great to have you. Great to have you. All right, for Dave Nicholson, Dave Vellante here. John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio banging out all the news. Keep it right there. theCUBE's coverage of MWC23. We'll be right back.