 theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Hey everyone, good to see you. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE's coverage, day one of MWC 23 from Barcelona. We're having a great day so far. The theme of this conference, Dave, is velocity. I feel like we've been shot out of a canon of CUBE content already on day one. We've been talking with today's ecosystem day. We've been talking about the ecosystem, the importance of open ecosystem and why, and we're going to be unpacking that a little bit more next. You know, Lisa, what used to be Mobile World Congress and is now MWC, it was never really intended to be sort of a consumer show, but with the ascendancy of smartphones, it kind of, they sucked all the air out of the room. But really we're seeing the enterprise come really into focus now as the telco stack disaggregates and enterprise is complicated. Enterprise is complicated, telecom is complicated. We have a guest here to unpack that with us. Chris Falloon joins us, the senior managing director of telecom practice at Dell. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much for having me. So you've been in the telecom industry for a long time. Talk about some of the things that you've witnessed over the last couple of decades and really help us understand the complexity that is telecom. Yeah, well, it's nothing more complex. Look, I was privileged to start my career in telco 20 years ago in Canada, working with other telecoms globally. And so I got a good picture of how they operate and what's important to them. But it's come full circle for me. I got into IT and come all the way back now to helping telcos figure out how to operate. And so it's been a great journey. What is some of the, oh, sorry. Please, go ahead. I was just going to say, unpack some of the complexity that we see now. Obviously, we think telecom we, and you talked about the consumerization, we have this expectation that we can get anything on our mobile devices. 24 by seven from any part of the world. But there's a lot of complexity in the industry as it's evolving. What are some of the complexities and how is Dell helping address that? Look, I think the transformation from traditional monolithic architectures to cloud-based architectures is maybe the most, the single largest complex transformation any industry's done in the last 20 years. And it's not just a technology transformation. It's critically an operational transformation. And so I think that's really at the heart of it is we've seen a real shift this year from conversations last year where around how this stuff gets turned on, can it work, does it work? To a conversation around how does it work? How do I operationalize it? What are the implications to my teams? And so we've got teams struggling with knowledge and competency gaps. We've got people figuring out how to get this stuff working at scale. Yeah, so, I mean, you think about telcos. You know, a lot of engineers, but a lot of the stuff was done kind of, I call it in the basement, kind of hidden. They make it work. And that transformation that you're talking about toward this more agile, open ecosystem, moving fast, cloud-native, new services coming in, new monetization models, that does require a different operating model. How similar, given your background in both IT and telco, how similar is it to the transformation that occurred in IT in terms of the operating model, which some companies are still going through? Look, I think we're privileged actually to be able to do this 10 years after IT went through it, and there's a lot of patterns that are definitely the same. There's no question, there's differences. The applications are far different. The timing and issues in the RAN are far different. And the distributed size of these deployments is different. But the learnings around how to deploy cloud-native technology, how to organize around these platforms, and back to the operationalization, how to deploy them and operate them at scale, it took IT a decade to figure that out, and hopefully with the learnings that we've got from that, we can rush through it here in a few years or less. One of the other big differences, of course, is public policy and regulation. You don't really have that so much in the IT world. Sometimes you have no regulation. Google, Facebook, do whatever you want, and we'll figure it out 20 years later. How much of a factor is that in terms of the complexity? And are the new Greenfield players, are they bound by similar sort of restrictions, or can they move faster? What's the dynamic there? Look, there's no question that Greenfield is faster than Brownfield. Doesn't matter whether that's telco or IT. Yeah, sure. I think we're at a place in history where we're watching some of the early movers testing some of these theories. But I would tell you, just again, just in the last few days, leading up to this event, talking with our customers and our partners, it's clear that even the first movers are struggling with the operational complexity of these platforms. And as a, you know, I think Dell's position in IT for the last decade as a platform systems integrator is very much going to continue to play out in the, we're being asked to play that role here as we try to bring some of the cloud native operating competencies to the table. And where are you having customer conversations these days? Is it at the IT level? Is it higher sense networking is essential for any business and any organization to be able to deliver what the end user is demanding? Of course. Look, we've seen a real shift as I mentioned from the technology proof points to the operational proof points. How do we make sure that not only the business case is valid, but that we can maintain these new changes in these new operating models at scale at the right operating cost? And those are very healthy conversations because the success of this transformation to cloud architecture and edge computing and everything else is predicated on the idea that we can get cloud running at scale in the network. But I think the, it's very much use case driven and we're going to see, we're finally seeing some edge use cases that are driving consumption of those edge use cases for sure. You know, I said earlier, I was in the keynotes and it took 45 minutes to get to the topic of security. It was, I think, the third or fourth or even fifth speaker. Finally, 45 minutes in, mentioned security and I think that's because security is kind of a given in this world, it's a hardened environment. But that security model changes as well. The cloud brings a shared responsibility model. If it's multi-cloud, which it is, then it's shared responsibility across multiple clouds. You know, you've got now developers who are being asked to be responsible for security. So that's another part of the complexity. We're kind of unpacking complexity here, aren't we? It's throwing more things than the cake. Look, as security is, it's an indication of this shift from what to how very much includes security and I think we're seeing security come to the forefront. Dell has a, our philosophy is intrinsic security at all levels of the deployment, everything from the infrastructure all the way through to the delivery and the management. And through the supply chain. And through supply chain, all the way through to the delivery of our technology integrated with other people's technology to ensure that the security is intrinsic in those deployments. And those integrations, as we're getting more and more involved in zero-touch deployments and helping carriers stand up these cloud platforms at scale, one of the ways to make sure that it's done repeatedly and securely is to integrate those things at the factory or have your infrastructure partner take accountability for doing some of that pre-day zero. Well, the lab announcement that you guys have is, I wrote about this, that's pretty key, I think. Because if you can certify in the lab, that's one of the big differences. We talk a lot about the similarities between enterprise tech of the 90s and the disaggregation of the enterprise stack. But you didn't have so-called converged infrastructure back then, and even when you had converged infrastructure, it was like a skew that was bolted on. Now you've got engineered systems, you're starting with engineered systems, but you've got now the lab so that the ecosystem and you've got self-certification. Those, I think, are key investments that if you're thinking, why Dell? You need a company like Dell's got the resources to make those investments and actually kind of force that through. Yeah, that's right. I think the value of, again, the learnings from these last 10 years of integration is just that understanding what the major blockers are should provide us with an accelerated roadmap for solving some of these problems as we encounter them over the next year or two in telecoms, no question. There's always regional differences in telecom, right? In the United States, years ago, decades ago, sort of blew apart the telco industry, I would argue, many would, I think as well, that actually made the US less competitive. You got, certainly, have national interests around the world, across the European continent, certainly in APAC as well. How do you see that, what are you hearing from those different regions? How do you see that affecting the adoption of some of the new technologies that you guys are promoting? Yeah, look, there's leaders in laggards in every market, I would say. I think we've been at this now, trying to stand up some of these cloud infrastructures and cloud-run projects and virtual-run projects. We've been at that now long enough to know that there's not so much regional patterns as there are patterns of companies that believe deeply that these architectures are going to lead to the right type of innovation and allow them to build new markets and new sources of revenue. And those that are deeply committed to that structure are the ones willing to lean in and sort of blaze a path, right? So I would say that pattern is definitely emerged. We don't see the larger the organization, certainly the larger the carrier, the deeper their resources on engineering and their ability to pivot and train those resources to become cloud-capable. That's a factor. We see a lot of conversations, Dell's got a very large day-to-managed services business on the IT side, and as we pivot those day-to-managed services, practices into managing telco cloud platforms and edge cloud platforms, I think it's the companies that don't have the depth or the skill or the experience are the ones that are asking us for the help there, for sure. How much has Dell been able to leverage? I mean, in the telecom systems business, I see a lot of new faces at Dell, a lot of folks like yourself that have telco experience. How about the services business? Were you able to sort of realign your existing folks? Was it similar? You had to bring in people from the industry? It's both, actually. So services is critical because the industry desperately needs systems integration across the board. And I think if we can convince the industry to treat telco clouds as a horizontal platform, then the idea of a platform integrator is definitely, it's valued, and in fact it's required, I think, for the success of these projects. The services team at Dell is comprised of the folks who obviously run the pieces of the services business that are really no different in their construct. Building telco clouds is not that different from building IT clouds, so the elements are the same. Those teams persist, but definitely the apps are different and the support is different and the requirements for uptime and availability are different. And so we've brought in services specialists to sort of create the glue between the customers and our existing sales depth. Do you have a favorite customer story that really articulates the value of what Dell is able to deliver in telecom with the inherent complexities that we talked about? Yeah, look, it's not that well known, but the day zero touch deployment factory integration capabilities that Dell has, we've been deploying that in IT for years. And we've got a couple of projects globally now where we're not only designing and testing the stack in our labs and with our partners, but we're loading that stack in a known good architecture into third party and Dell hardware in a factory integration setting and shipping it to site with really nothing left to do but connect power and connectivity. And so from an engineering standpoint, the complexity of deploying cloud into thousands of data centers, we have examples of that that are being shipped continent by continent and being deployed in days and weeks as opposed to months. And so I think taking some of the pain out of deployment and building some repeatability into those deployments is a very big deal. Those are great projects. The next stage of that, of course, is helping them get to a place where the operations of those platforms is just as easy as the deployment. What's going to be different? Go ahead to 2030, let's go backwards from there. What's the world going to be like? What do people need to know in terms of what's coming? That's a great question. I think if I could see that far ahead, I wouldn't probably be sitting here. Yeah, but you have wisdom from experience. If we play back what's happened in the data centers, in the IT data centers, and you mentioned the disaggregated systems shift that happened a decade ago, once the applications re-architected to cloud native architectures and could take advantage of the platform changes, once the resiliency is built into the application instead of into the platforms, these things become more and more touchless. And I think the real double-digit payback on this shift to cloud native, yeah, we haven't begun to talk about it yet, because we're not anywhere close to the level of automation that can be achieved once we get to true cloud native and microservices-based application architecture. That's a big shift. And it's going to take a while. It took companies like SAP and others almost a decade to get that done. I think it'll happen faster here, but it's going to take us some time. Some of the things that you've heard, this is only day one of the conference, but anything that you've heard today or that you're looking forward to hearing in terms of how telecom is evolving and kind of playing catch up. Yeah, look, we really believe this is the year that the edge use cases come alive. I think we've been, almost every conversation I've been in, we've been asked sort of where are these use cases that are driving actual deployments and revenue, and I think carriers are very much interested in trying to figure out customer edge, very much trying to figure out their own edge. Dell, of course, has both of those edges in mind. We've got a very large enterprise edge business unit as well as our telco BU. And so I think this is the year we really start to figure out where those, we're seeing good deployments now in production, at scale, and I think this is the year that starts to really take shape. Well, and it seems like just in hearing some of the carriers talk, they want to avoid what happened with the over-the-top vendors, okay? And they want to monetize the data that they have about the network. Looks like they want to charge for API access, okay? Developers are going to love that, right? Especially at the volumes that we're seeing here. But I feel like there's a potential blind spot of disruption coming, you know, like the over-the-top vendors, you know, that created all this innovation. I can see developers, whether it's at the edge or new services that customers really want to buy, they really value. Different than, hey, I own this data and you need it. I'm going to charge it for it versus, hey, I'm going to create something that's really compelling. You know, an analog would be Netflix or other services that you get with, maybe it's private wireless that can do some things. And, you know, that to me is the interesting opportunity here that I feel like is a blind spot for traditional telcos, because they've kind of got that mindset of, okay, you know, we're going to monetize. Let's do it. But they don't have that creativity mindset yet, you know? This industry has been given an opportunity to monetize almost every major transformation in technology and many of them have slipped through our fingers, right? And this one is different because it's inextricably tied to the network. And I think the, you know, if you mentioned mobile phones earlier, I mean, I think what we saw in innovation in mobile was that we had no idea what was going to happen at the edge of that edge until someone created it. And so you have to have those in operating environments have to show up before the developers will spend the time to test them out and figure out what works. And so we haven't begun to even understand, I don't think, what's coming once we figure out a way to get ultra low latency, reliable connectivity at the edge. And I think developers have that open canvas and they're going to paint what that edge looks like. And that's why, I mean, I kind of get concerned about, you know, to me, the way to deal with developers, you give them a platform so they go create as opposed to, okay, pay to get access, which you're going to have to, but I mean, there's other third parties that are going to fund that, I get it. But there's a big open field that is going to get plowed here and it's going to throw off some, you know, serious benefits to consumers. Yeah, and that's what we all want. We have that expectation that there's going to be a with them. It's going to be a what's in it for me, right? What's in it for me? Absolutely. That's right. I was going to say, thank you so much. You want to add one more thing? No, I'm good. I was just going to thank you so much for stopping by and talking to us about Dell's presence in telecom, how you're helping customers manage the complexity and the opportunities that really are there. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure. Thanks guys. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live in Barcelona at MWC 23. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.