 theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. The leader in live and emerging tech coverage as you well know, we are live at MWC23 in Barcelona, Spain, Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our coverage, as you know, because you've been watching the first two days. A lot of conversations about ecosystem, a lot about disruption in the telco industry. We're going to be talking about OpenRAN, we've heard some of those great conversations, the complexities, the opportunities. Two guests joined Dave and me, Abdullah Abu Zayed, Technical Product Manager at Dell, and Gil Hellman, VP, Telecom Solutions Engineering and Architecture at Wind River. Welcome to the program, guys. Thank you. Let's talk a little bit about Dell and Wind River. We'll each ask you both the same question and talk to us about how you're working together to really address the complexities that organizations are having when they're considering moving from a closed environment to an open environment. Definitely. Thank you for hosting us. By the end of the day, the relationship between Dell and Wind River is not new. We've been collaborating in the open ecosystem for long and time enough. And that's one of the, our partnership is a result of this collaboration where we've been trying to make more efficient operation in the ecosystem. The open environment ecosystem, it has the place and the concern, the place of simplicity choice of multiple vendors, and then the concern of complexity managing these vendors. Especially if we look at example for the open environment ecosystem, dealing with multiple vendors, trying to align them. It brings a lot of operational complexity and TCO challenges for our customers. From this outcome, where we build our partnership with Wind River in order to help our customer to simplify all around deployment, operation and life cycle management and sustain it. And who are the customers by the way? Mainly the CSP customers who are targeting open and virtual run deployments. That digital transformation moving towards unified cloud environment or a seamless cloud experience from core to run. These are the customers we are working with them. You'll give us your perspective, your thoughts on the partnership and the capabilities that you're enabling the CSPs with Dell. Sure. It's actually started last year here in Barcelona. When we sit together and started to look at the, the industry, the adoption of open run and the challenges. And open run brings a lot of possibilities and benefit, but it does bring a lot of challenges of reintegrating what you disaggregate, okay? In the past you purchase everything from one vendor, they provide the whole solution. Now you open it, you have different layers. So if you're looking at open run, you have, I like to look at it as three major layers, the management, the application and the infrastructure. And we're starting to look what are the challenges and the challenges of integration of complexity, knowledge that operator has with cloud infrastructure. And this is where we basically, Dell and Winterverse sit together and say, how can we ease this? How we can make it simpler. And we decided to partner and bring a joint infrastructure solution to market that's not only integrated at a lab at the factory level, but it basically comes with complete life cycle management from the day zero deployment to the day two operation. Everything done through one location, through Dell supported, working out of the box. So basically taking this whole infrastructure layer integration pain out, de-risking everything. And then continuing from there to work with the ecosystem vendor to pre-integrate, validate the application on top of this infrastructure. So what is the Wind River secret sauce in this mix for folks who aren't familiar with what Wind River does? Yes, absolutely. It's a Wind River for many, many don't know we're in business since 1981. So over 40 years we specialize in high performance, high reliability infrastructure. We touch every aspect of your day and your life from the airplane that you fly, the cars, the medical equipment. And if we go into the telco, most of the telco equipment that it's not a virtualized, not to allow the fight today using our operating system. So from all the leading equipment manufacturers and even the smaller one. And as the world started to go into this aggregation and cloud, Wind River started to look at this and say, okay, everything it's evolving, instead of a device that included application, the hardware, everything fuse together, it's now being decomposed. So instead of providing the operating environment to develop and deploy the application to the device manufacturer, now we're providing it basically to build the cloud. So to oversimplify, they call it the cloud OS. Okay, it's a lot more than OS, it's an operating environment, but we took basically our experience, the same experience that we use in all those years with the telco equipment manufacturer and brought it into the cloud. So we're basically providing solution to build an on-premises scalable cloud from the core all the way to the far edge that doesn't compromise reliability, doesn't compromise performance and address all the telco needs. So Abdullah, maybe you can answer this. What is the go-to-market motion look like? Considering that you have two separate companies that can address customers directly, separately, what does that look like? If you're approaching a possible customer, who is knocking on the door? How does that work? Exactly, and this is a Dell service offering, our solution offering to our customers, where Dell in collaboration with Windriver, we proactively validate, integrate, and productize the solution as an engineer system, knock-door on our customers who are trying to transform our open ecosystem, we can help you to go through that seamless experience by pre-validating with whatever workload you want to introduce, enable zero-touch provisioning and during the day one deployment, and ensure we have sustainable lifecycle management throughout the lifecycle of the product in operational network, as well as having a unified single call of support from Dell side. Okay, so I was just going to ask you about support. So I'm a CSP, I have the solution, I go to Dell for support. Exactly, so start with Dell and level one, level two, and if there are complex issues related to the cloud code itself then Windriver will be an hour back supporting us. Talk a little bit about a CSP example that is using the technology and some of the outcomes that they're able to achieve, I'd love to get both of your perspectives on that. Vodafone, it's a great example, we're here in Barcelona, Vodafone is the first Oran network in Europe and it's using our joint solution. What are some of the outcomes that it's helping them to achieve? Faster time to market, you can see they already started to deploy the Oran in commercial network and very successful in the trials that they did last year. We're also not stopping there, we're evolving, working with them together to improve like stuff around energy efficiency. So continue to optimize, so the outcome, it's just simplifying it and ready to go. Using experience that we have, Windriver is powering the first basically virtualized RAN 5G network in the world, this is Verizon, we're at a very large scale, we started this deployment in late 2019, the first site and then through 2020 to 2022, we basically rolled in large scale, we have a lot of experience and learning from it, what we brought into the table when we partnered with Dell. A lot of experience from how you deploy at scale, many sites from a central location, updates, upgrade, so the whole day to operation and this is coming to bearing the solution that basically Vodafone is deploying now and which allow them, if I look, my engagement with Verizon started years before we started and it took quite some time until we got stuff running and if you look at the Vodafone, time schedule was significantly compressed compared to the Verizon first deployment and I can tell you that there are other service providers that were announced here, like KDDI for example, it's another one moving even faster, so it's accelerating the whole movement to Aura. We've heard a lot of acceleration talk this week, I'd love to get your perspective, Abdullah, talking about, you just mentioned two huge names in telco, Vodafone and Verizon, talk a little bit about Dell's commitment to helping telecommunications companies really advance, accelerate innovation so that all of us on the other end have this thing that just works wherever we are 24 by seven. Now exactly and this we go back to the challenges in open equity system. Managing multiple vendors at the same time is a challenge for our customers and that's why we are trying to simplify their life cycle by being a trusted partner working with our customer through all the journey. We started with DISH in their 5G deployment, also with Vodafone, we are finding the right partners, working with them proactively before getting into in front of the customer to we've done our homework, we are ready to simplify the process for you to go for it. If you look at the run in particular, we are talking with the 5G, we have run densification but I still have on the other side limited resources and skill set can support it. So bringing a pro ahead of time engineer system with a zero touch provisioning enablement and sustainable life cycle management it lead to the faster time to market deployment, TCO savings, improve margin for our customers and faster business revenue for their end users. Solid outcomes. And what you just described justifies the pain associated with disaggregating and reintegrating which is the way that Gil referenced it which I think is great because you're not re-aggregating, you're reintegrating and you're creating something that's better moving forward, otherwise why would you do it? Exactly, and if you look at the player and the ecosystem you have the vendors, you have the service integrators, you have the automation enablers but kind of they are talking in silos. Everyone, this is my rassy, this is what I'm responsible for, I'm not able, I don't want to get into something else. While we are going the extra mile by working proactively in that ecosystem let's bring brains together, find out what's one plus one can bring three for our customers so we make it end to end seamless experience not only on the technical part but also on the business aspect side of it. So the partnership it's about reducing the pain also eliminating it, okay? So this is the core of it and you mentioned getting better coverage for your phone. I do want to point out that the phones are great but if you look at the premises of a 5G network it's to enable a lot more things that will touch your life that are beyond the consumer and the phone. Stuff like connected vehicles. So for example, something as simple as collision avoidance, okay? The ability for the car that goes in front of you to be able to see what's happening and broadcast this information to the car behind that have no ability to see it and basically affect our life in a way that makes our driving safer and for this you need a ultra low reliable low latency communication, you need a 5G network. I'm glad you brought that up because we think about well we just have to be connected all the time but those are some of the emerging technologies that are just going to be potentially lifesaving and really life transforming that you guys are helping to enable. So really great stuff there but so much promise coming down the road. What's next for Dell and Win River? And when you're in conversations with prospective CSPs what is the superpower that you've delivered together? Love to get both of your perspectives. So if you look at it, number one customers look at it that savings and their day-to-day operation in 5G nature, we are talking the introduction of Oran it's still picking up but there is the matureization and densification of Oran and this is where we're talking I'm monetizing my deployment. Then the third phase we're talking sustainability and advanced service introduction where I want to move not only Oran I want to bring the edge at the same side I want to define the advanced use cases of edge where it enables me with this pre-work being done to deliver more services and better SLA services. By end of the day 5G as the girl mentioned earlier it's not about a good better phone coverage or better speed through but what customized SLAs I can deliver so it enables me to deliver different business streams to my end users. Yeah. So yeah, I'll say there are two pens one it's the technology side so for example energy efficiency it's a very big pain point and sustainability so we work a lot around this and the basically to advance this and so if you look at the integrated solution today it's very highly optimized for resource consumption but to be able to more dynamically be able to change your power profile without compromising the SLA so this is one side the other side it's about all those applications that will come to the 5G network to make our life better it's about integrating, validating, certifying those applications so it's not just easy to deploy an Oran network but it's easy to deploy those applications. I'd be curious to get your perspective on the question of ROI in this space. Specifically with the sort of the macro headwinds the economies of the world are facing right now, if you accept that. What does the ROI timeline look like when you're talking about moving towards Oran adopting VRAN, an amazing a plethora of new services that can be delivered but will these operators have the appetite to make that investment and take on that risk based upon the ROI time horizon any thoughts on that? Yeah, so if you look at the early days of Oran introduction in particular most of the entrepreneurs of Oran and virtual Oran run into the challenges of not only the complexity of OpenEcosystem but the integration it's like the reduce of the work and that's where we are trying to address it via pre-engineered system or building an engineer system proactively before getting into the customers per hour results or outcomes we get we are talking about 30% to 50% savings on the OPEX we are talking 110 ROI for our customers simply because we are reducing the redoes the time spent to discover and explore because we've done that rework ahead of time we found the optimization issues just for example any customer can buy the same components from any multiple vendors but how I can bring them together and give deliver for me the best performance that I can fully utilize that's where it brings the value for our customer and it accelerates the deployment and the operation of the network. You have anything to add before we close in the next 30 seconds? Absolutely, I would say we start to see the data coming from two years of operation at scale and the data supports performance it's the same or better than traditional system and the cost of operation it's as good or better than traditional unfortunately I can't provide more specific data but the point is when something is unknown at the beginning of course you're more afraid you take more conservative approach now the data starts to flow and from here the intention needs to go even better so more efficiency, so cost less than traditional system both to operate as well as to build up but it's definitely the data that we have today that says the ORM system it's at the minimum. So definite ROI there, guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about how you're helping organizations not just address the complexities of moving from close to open but your point eliminating them we appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you. All right, for our guests and for Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE the leader in live and emerging tech coverage live from MWC23, we'll be back after a short break.