 Okay, Chloe, thank you very much. Hey folks, and here in the Cloud City, we're here at Dana Wilson, great to see you. Watching you up on stage, I got to say, is the CEO of TelcoDR, leader and chief executive of that company, as well as a great visionary. You laid out the vision. It's hard to debate that. I mean, I think there's people who will say that vision is like freedom, no one can debate it. It's going to happen. Yeah, there's still a lot of debate in our industry about it. There's a lot of articles being written about it. I've referenced one about, you know, should we let the dragons into the castle? For me, I think it's super obvious. I think other industries are like, duh, we've made the move. And Telco's still like, hmm, we're not sure. And so, am I a visionary? I don't know, I'm just sort of just favoriting it a little bit. I think that's where we're going. You have a lot of content. Podcast, you write blogs, you do a lot of speaking. You brought it all together on stage. Right, that's got to feel good. You got a body of work. And it came together very nicely. How did you feel up there? Oh my God, it's absolutely nerve-wracking. I sort of feel like, you know, could you tell if my hands were shaking? Right, could you tell that my heart was racing? It's a good feeling. I don't know. I'll be honest, I'm happy it's over. I'm happy. I think I did a really great job, and I'm really happy. Yeah, you did a great job. I love the drag. Have it in the can. Fantastic. Love the drag Game of Thrones vibe there. Totally. One of the things I want to pick up on I thought was very interesting and unique was the iPhone reference 14 years ago. Because that really, to me, was a similar moment. Because that shifted the smartphone, a computer that happened to make phone calls. And then we all knew who was the leader at that time. Nokia Blackberry with phones. And they became toast. That ushered in a whole other era of change, wealth creation, innovation, new things. Yeah. Well, up until that moment, carriers had been designing the phones themselves. They were branded with their logos. And so Steve Jobs fought for the design of the iPhone. He designed it with the consumer, with the user in mind. But I think what it really, I mean, it's such a big pivotal moment in our industry. Because it singled the end of voice revenue and ushered in the era of data. But it also introduced the OTT players that came in through the apps and started to siphon our proof from the carriers. I mean, this is like, it's a pivotal moment in the industry. Change the industry forever. It's a step function. It was a step function. Change is obvious. Everyone knew it. But what's interesting is that we were riffing yesterday about O-Ran and Android. So you have iPhone, but Android became a very successful open source project that changed the landscape of the handset. Some are saying that that kind of phenomena is coming here. It's a telco, software, kind of like an Android model where that'll come in. What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, well, the disaggregation of the hardware, right? We're in the iconic Ericsson booth, right? They get most of their revenue from RAN, from Radio Access Networks. And now with the introduction of OpenRAN, right with 50% less CAPEX, 40% less OPEX. I think it's easiest for greenfield operators like Dish are building a brand new network. But just this month, Vodafone announced they're going to build the world's largest OpenRAN network. Change is happening, and the big operations are starting to adopt OpenRAN in a real big way. To me, riding the dragon means taking advantage of new opportunities on top of that dragon, developing apps, like the iPhone did. And you mentioned Android, they got it right. Remember the Windows phone, right? They try to take Windows and shove it into the phone. It was a KIN phone too, at least. I'm trying to delete it from my book here. I'm going to take this old world app and I'm going to shove it into the new world and guess what? It failed. So if the telcos try to do the same thing here, it will fail. But if they start building 5G apps in the cloud and think cloud-native and think about the consumer, isn't really that the opportunity that you're talking about? Well, I think it is, absolutely. And I think it's a way to call for the vendors in our space, right? And I'm certainly trying to become a vendor with Tatoki, really pushing my idea. But you can't take, using your Windows example on the Windows phone, you can't take a Windows app and stuff it onto a phone. And you can't take these old school applications that were written 20 years ago and just stuff them into the cloud, right? The cloud is not a place. It's a way to design applications and it all needs to be rewritten and go right. We write it. Let's take a step back on the keynote because I know we just did a couple of highlights there. It wasn't the whole thing. We were watching it, by the way, we thought you did a great job and you were very cool in common to pressure. But take us through the core ideas in the keynote. Break down the core elements of what the talk was about. Yeah, I think the headline really is, you know, just like there were good and bad things about the iPhone, right? It killed voice, but introduced data and all these other things. There's good and bad things about the public cloud, right? It's not going to be smooth sailing, no downsides. And so I acknowledge that, even though I'm the self-appointed queen, you know, the self-appointed evangelist. And so I think that if you completely ignore the public cloud, try to stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist, I think there's nothing but downsides for telcos. And so I think you need to learn how to maximize the advantage there, ride the dragon, like spew some fire and get some speed and height, and then you can double your up who. But I think going from there, so the next three, I was trying to give examples of what I meant by that, of why it's a double-edged sword, why it's two sides of the coin. And I think there's three areas, which is the enterprise, the network, and the relationship with subscribers. And so that really what the talk, that's what the talk is about. The three main pillars. Yeah, yeah. The network, enterprise, transition, open-ran, network. The network and then the relationship with the subscribers. Those are the structural elements you see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the most important one you think right now that people are focused on? I mean, I think the first one with work, that's an easy one to do, because there's not too much downside, right? I think we all learned that we could work productively from home. The reason public cloud mattered there is because we had tools like Zoom and G Suite, and we didn't need to be, I mean, imagine if this had happened even 20 years ago, right, broadband to the home wasn't ready, the tools weren't ready, I mean, it would have been, I mean, a bigger disaster than it was, right? And so this is an opportunity to sort of ride this work from home wave that a lot of CEOs are saying we're not coming back or we're going to have smaller offices. And all of those employees need fiber to the home. They need 5G at the home. I mean, if I'm a head of enterprise in a telco, I am shifting my 5G message from like random applications or whatever to be like, how are you getting big pipes to the home so your workers can be productive there? And not, I don't hear a telco's talking about that, that's a really big thing. You know, you say it's a no-brainer, but it's interesting you had your buildings crumbling, which is great, really nice, nice effect in the talk. I heard an executive, Wall Street executive the other day, talking about how my people will be back in the office. I'm going to mandate vaccinations, they're going to be back in the office. You work for me, even though it's an employee friendly environment right now, I don't care. And I was shocked, okay, it's just going to look like a butt. And it's not just the fact that it's an old guy, old guard doing that, because I take two examples of old guys. Michael Dell and Frank Slutman. Yeah, right? Michael Dell, you know, a hundred billion dollar company, Frank Slutman, Hobbes, you know, software company, both of them agree. It's a no-brainer. Why should I spend all this money on buildings and my people are going to be more productive? They love it. I think the office, and I can talk about this for a long time, and I know we don't have that much time, but on offices, it's a way to see, when did you come in, and when did you leave, and look over your shoulder and what we were working on, and that's what offices are for. Now we tell ourselves it's about collaboration and all this other stuff. And, you know, these guys are saying, come back to the office. It's because they don't have an answer on how to manage productivity. What are you working on? Are you authentically working 40 hours a week? I want to see you, I know if you at least, you're here, you're here. Now you might be playing, you know. You might be playing mind sweeper on your computer, but at least your butt was at your computer. So, yeah, I think this is a pivotal moment in work. I think telcos could push it, to work them home. We'll get to the pipes, we'll get to the cloud-based tools to help manage productivity, to change in work style. And we've covered this in theCUBE many times, about how software is going to enable this virtual first model. No one's actually built software for virtual first. I think that's going to happen. Again, back to your theme of software. But I want to ask you about software-defined infrastructure. You mentioned ORAN, and as software eats the world and eats infrastructure, you still need infrastructure. So, talk about the relationship of how you see ORAN competing and winning with the balance of software versus the commodity argument. Yeah, and I think this is really where people get scared in telco. I mean, authentically nervous, right? Where you're like, okay, really the public cloud is at that network edge, right? Who are we? It's an identity crisis. We're not the towers anymore. We're running space, right? We're now disaggregating the network, putting the edge cloud right there, and it's AWS or Google. Who are we? What do we do? Are we networks? Are we a tech company? Right? And so I'm like, guys, you are your subscribers and you don't focus on that. I mean, it's kind of like the last thought. So you're like a therapist then too, right? I'm a little bit of a therapist. Lie down on the couch, telco. Let's talk about what your problems are. They have tower issues. Yeah. All serious, no, but the tower is changing. There's backhaul. I mean, look at direct connex for instance, the rise of direct and kill the exchanges. I mean, broadband, backhaul, last mile, completely still issues, but it's going to software. And so that's there. The other thing I want to get to quickly, I know we've done a lot of time is the love relationship you talk about with subscribers. We had Peter Atterton on from Formally Use Mobile earlier. He was saying, if you don't have focus on the customer, then you just sell in minutes and that's it. And his point was they don't really care. Yeah. Let's talk about organizational energy, right? How much energy is contained within any organization, not just telco, but any organization? To some of your people times the hours they work per week. And then you think of that as a stack in how you're allocating your time and spending your time, right? So I think they spend 50% of their time, maybe more, fighting servers, machines, the network, right? And having all these battles. How much of that organizational energy is dedicated to driving great subscriber experiences? And it's a shrunk, right? I think that's where the public cloud can really help them, like ride the dragon. Let the dragon deal with some of this underlying stuff so that you can ride the dragon, survey the land, focus on your subscriber and back to the software. Use software, just like the OTT players are doing, that are taking away your ARPU. They're sipening your ARPU because you're providing a better customer experience. You need to compete on that dimension, not the network, not the three telcos in the country. You're competing again. WhatsApp, Apple, Amazon, Facebook. And you spend how much of your organizational energy to focus on that? Very small. And that's where digital platforms are all about. Everybody uses the word platform, why? Because everybody wants to be a platform. Why do you want to be a platform? You want to be like Amazon. They're a platform. And you think about Netflix, right? It's not a, you don't think about Netflix UK or network, Netflix Spain, right? There's one Netflix, right? You don't think about their marketing department or their sales department or their customer service. You think about the app, one interface. And that's what digital platforms allow you to do. Granted, there's a lot of public policy to deal with. But if you're shooting satellites up in space, now who owns that space, right? A global network. And what makes Netflix so good, I think, is that it knows you, right? It knows what you're watching and recommends things. And you're like, oh, I would like that. That's great. Who knows more about you than your mobile phone? Carry it everywhere you go, right? What you're watching, what you're doing, who you're calling, what time did you wake up? And right now all of that data we talked about a couple days ago is trapped in siloed old systems. And why do people think Google knows so much about you, you telco knows about you. And you start to use that to drive a great experience. And you've got a great relationship with Netflix. The relationship we have with our carrier is, oh, dear admin, can you call these guys and figure, I don't know, I lost the password, I can't get in. It's like, we don't have an hour and a half. Or you get sim hacked for you. I don't have an hour and a half to call your call center because you don't have a chat bot. I don't have time. Right, chat bot, right? I can't even do the chat bot. Because my problem is, you're like, I got to talk to someone. All of their systems are built with the intention of a human being on the other side. And there's all this awesome chat bot AI that works. Set it free. Yeah, you'd almost rather go to the dentist. Well, we got, we're going to wrap things up here on the keynote review. Did you achieve what you wanted to achieve? I mean, controversy, bold vision, leadership, obviously that came across. But people, they know who you are now. You are out there. And that's great news. Yeah, I think I rocked the telco universe. And I'm really, that was my goal. And I think I accomplished it. So very excited. For sure. Well, we love having on theCUBE. It's great to have great conversations, not only dynamic and smart. You're causing a lot of controversy in a good way. And waking people up to- Making people talk. And that's a start. And I think the conversations are there. People are talking and having relationships on the ecosystem open. It's all there. Daniel Wilson, you are digital revolution. DR, thanks for coming. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Always fun. Thanks. Of course, back to the Cloud City Studios. Adam is going to take it from here and continue on day three of theCUBE. Adam in studio. Thanks for having us and take it from here.