 Okay, we're back here at theCUBE and all the action here at Mobile World Congress. Cloud City, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great remote interviews. Of course, it's a hybrid event here in theCUBE. And of course, Cloud City's bringing all the physical face-to-face and we're going to get the remote interviews. Peter Aderton, founder, chairman, CEO of Mobile X Global. Nicholas Gerard, founder and CEO of OxyO. Gentlemen, thank you for coming in remotely onto theCUBE here in the middle of Cloud City. You missed Bon Jovi last night. He was awesome, a little acoustic unplugged and all the action. Thanks for coming on. Ah, thanks for having us. All right, Peter and Nicholas, if you don't mind, just take a quick 30 seconds to set the table on what you guys do, your business and your focus here at Mobile World Congress. So I'll jump in quickly, being the Australian. I'll go first, but just by way of background, I've founded a company called Boost Mobile, which is one of the, it's now the fourth largest mobile brand in America. And spent a lot of time managing effort in that space and now launching Mobile X, which is kind of the first cloud AI platform that we're going to build for mobile. Awesome. Nicholas? So I'm a founder of a company called OxyO. What we do is basically a telecom as a service platform for brands to basically incorporate telecom as part of their services and learn from their customers through what we call telecom business intelligence. So basically making sense of the telecom data to improve their business across retail, financial services, and the men economy. Awesome. Well, thanks for the setup. Peter, I want to ask you first, if you don't mind, the business models in the telecom area is really becoming, not just operate, but build and build new software-enabled software defined just cloud-based software. And this has been a change in mindset. Not so much a change, so much in the actual topologies per se or the actual investments, but it is a change in personnel. What's your take on this whole cloud powering that change in the future of telco? Well, I think you've got to look at where the telcos have come from in order to understand where they're going in the future. And where they've come from is basically using other people's technology to try to create a differentiation. And I think that that's the struggle that they're going to have. They talk about wanting to convert themselves from telcos into tech-cos. I just think it's a leak too far for the carriers to do that. So I think we're going to see the pushing 5G, which you see they're doing out there right now, then they start talking about open-ran and cloud. And at the end of the day, all they want to do is basically sell you a plan, give you a phone attached to that and try to make as much money out of you as they possibly can. And they disguise that basically in the whole technology 5G open-ran discussion. But they really, I don't think care. And at the end of the day, I don't think the consumers care. Their model isn't built around technology. The model's built around selling you data. And that's their fundamental principle and how they do that. And I've seen them go through from 2G at 3G, 4G, 5G. Every G we see come out has a promise of something new and incredible. But what we basically get is a data plan with some minutes for it. Yeah, yeah, totally right on. And I think we're going to get into the whole edge piece of what that's going to open up when you start thinking about what the capabilities are. And the new stakeholders who are going to have an interest in the trillions of dollars on the table right now up for grabs. But Nichols, I want to get to you on this whole digital first thing because one of the things we've been saying on theCUBE and interviewing folks and riffing on is if digital drives more value and there's new use cases that are going to bring on that's going to be enabled by software. There's now a new stakeholder's coming and saying, hey, you know what? I need more than just a pipe. I need more than just the network. I need to actually run healthcare. I need to run education on the edge. These are now industrial and consumer related use cases. I mean, this is software. This is where software and apps shine. So cloud native can enable that. So what's your take on the industry as they start to wake up and say, holy shit, this is going to be pretty massive when you look at what's coming. Not so much what's going to be replatformed, but what's coming? You know, I mean, I think it's where I kind of join peers on this, right? There's been pretty significant like innovation on the care side for, you know, if you think about it, like, you know, 30 years or so of like just reselling plans, effectively, which is a virtual slice of the network they built. And all of a sudden they start competing against, you know, the heavy weights on the internet we have, you know, putting the bar really high in terms of, you know, latency in terms of expectation in terms of APIs, right? We've heard about telecom APIs for 15 years, right? It's a nothing comes close to what you could get if you start building on top of a stripe or a Google. So I think it's going to be hard for a lot of those companies. You know, what we do is we try to bridge that gap, right? We try to build on top of their infrastructure to be able to expose modern APIs, to be able to open up a programmatic interface so that innovators like Peter is are able to actually really take the user experience forward and start, you know, building those specialized businesses across healthcare, financial services and whatnot. Yeah, David Lante and I were on theCUBE yesterday talking about how Snowflake, a company basically sits on top of Amazon, built almost nothing on the infrastructure, built on top of it and was successful. Peter, this is a growth thing. One of the things I want to get your thoughts on is you've had experiences in growing companies. How do you look at the growth coming into this market, Peter? Because, you know, you have new opportunities coming in. It's a growth play too. It's not just take share from someone, it's net new capabilities. Yeah, here's the issue you've got with the wireless industry is that there's only a very few amount of them that actually have that last mile covered. So if you're going to build something on top of it, you're going to have to deal with the carrier and the carrier has kind of like a duopoly slash monopoly because without their access to their network, you're not going to be able to do these incredible things. So I think we've got a real challenge there where you're going to have to get the carriers to innovate. Now you've got the CEO of Deutsche Telecom coming out yesterday saying that the OTT players aren't paying their fair share. And I sit back and go, well, hang on, you're selling data to customers who basically are using that data to use apps and OTT. And now he's saying, well, they should pay as well. So not only should the consumer pay, but now the OTT players should pay. It's a mixed message. So what you're going to have to do and what we're going to have to do as a growth industry is we're going to have to allow it to grow. And the only way to do that is that the carriers are going to have to have better access, allow more access to their networks. As Nico said, let the APIs become more available. I just think that that's a leap too far. So I think we're going to be handicapped in our growth based on these carriers and it's going to take regulators and it's going to take innovation and consumers demanding carriers do it. Otherwise, you're still going to deal with the three carriers in your world. Yeah. It's interesting about, I was just talking to Danielle Royston DR here, Telco DR and she said, I was talking about O-RAN and there's more infrastructure that's needed. She said, no, it's more software. I don't disagree with her, I do agree with her, but I also think that the O-RAN points to Nicholas, kind of this idea that there's more surface area to be had on the scale side. So standardizing hardware creates a lower fixed cost so you can get some cost reduction. And then with standardized software, you get more enablement for hardened openness. I mean, open source has already proven you can still be secure. Obviously cloud was once said, could never be secure and most probably more secure than anything. What's your take on this whole O-RAN commodity standardization mission efforts? I think it's, I mean, it goes along the second phase, right of what the differentiation in the telecom was, you know, early on specialized boxes that are very expensive, you know, that you get from a few vendors, then you have the transition over to software with lower the price as you were mentioning, you can run on off the shelf hardware. And then we're in the transition which is what Danielle is evangelizing, right? Transition towards the cloud, specifically the public cloud because there's no such thing as a private cloud really. And so open run is just another piece where you can make the Legos connect better effectively and just have more flexibility. And generally the game here is to also break the agenda money from the vendors, right? Because now you have a standard so you don't necessarily need to buy the entire stack from the same vendors, you have a lot more flexibility. You know, you've probably followed the same debate that we've all seen, right? With the push against Huawei, for instance, this is extremely hard for an operator to start ripping out the entire vendor because most of the time they own the entire stack. With something like Orion, now you can start mixing and matching with different vendors. But generally, this is also a trend that's going to accelerate the move towards the public cloud. That's awesome. Peter, I want to get your thoughts because you're basically building on the cloud and because you don't mind chiming in to kind of end the segment on this one point. People are trying to really get their minds around what refactoring means. And we've been saying and talking about, you know, the three phases of waking up to the world, reset your business or reboot, replatform to the cloud and then refactor, which means take advantage of cloud-enabled things, whether it's AI and other things, but first get on the platform, understand the economics and then replatform. So the question, Peter, we'll start with you. What does refactoring actually mean and look like in a successful future execution or playbook? Can you share your thoughts because this is what people want to get to because that's where the value will come from, that's where the iteration gets you. What's your take on this refactoring? So I always, I mean, we're in the consumer business. So I'm always about what is the difference going to make for the consumer? So, you know, whether you, and when you look at refactoring and you look at what's happening in the space, is what is the difference that's going to, what are the consumers going to see that's different? And are they willing to pay for that? And so we can strip away the technical layers and we all get caught up in the industry with these buzzwords and terms. And at the end of the day, when it moves to the consumer, the consumer just sits there and says, so what's the value? How much am I paying? And so what we're trying to do at MobileX is we're trying to use the cloud and we're trying to use kind of innovation into create a better experience for the consumer. One way to do that is to basically help the customer understand their usage patterns. You know, right now today, they don't understand that. Right, if I asked you how much you pay for your mobile bill, you would tell me, my cell phone bill is $150, but I'm going to ask you the next question. How much data do you use? You go, I don't know. Right, and then I'd say, how am I starting? Well, you'd say limited, right? I go, I don't know. So I sit back and go, most customers are like you. You're basically paying for a service that you have no idea what you're getting and it's designed by the carriers to scare you into thinking you need it. So I think we've got to get away from the buzzwords that we use as an industry and just dumb that down to what does that mean for a consumer? And I think that the cloud is going to allow us to create some very unique ways for consumers to interact with their device and the usage of that device. And I think that that's the holy grail for me. Yeah, it's a great point. And it's worth calling out because I think if the cloud can get you a 10x value and a reduction in cost compared to the competition, that's one benefit that people will pay for. And the other one is just, hey, that's really cool. I want, I value that. That's a valuable thing. I'll pay for it. So it's interesting to get the cloud scale there. It's just a good mindset. Yeah, so it's always, I always say to people, you know, I've spoken a lot to the dish guys about what OpenRan's going to do. And I keep saying them, so what's the value that I'm going to get from a consumer? And they'll say, oh, it's flexible pricing plans. They're now starting to talk about, okay, what the end product is of this technology. You look at eSIM, right? eSIM's been around for a long time. It's only now that we're starting to see eSIM technology get enabled. The carriers bought that for a long, long time. So there's a monumental shift that needs to take place and it's in the four or five carriers in our countries. Nicholas, what's your take on refactoring? Obviously, you know, you got APIs, you got all this cool software enabled. How do you get to refactoring and how do you execute through that? I mean, it's a little bit of what Peter was saying as well, right? The advantage of that point is to be, you know, all our stuff basically lives in the cloud, right? So it's opportunity to get that closer. You know, just having better latency, making sure that, you know, you're not losing your photos and your data as you lose your phone and just make the better access in general. I think ultimately, like the push to the cloud right now is mostly just a cost reduction tactic. Sorry, the carriers are concerned, right? They don't necessarily see how they can build that break and then from there start interacting with the rest of the entity world and, you know, Netflix is built on Amazon and companies like that, right? So as you're able to get closer as a carrier to that cloud where the data lives, this is also just empowering better digital experience. Yeah, and I think that's where the proof point will be there. As they say, that's where the rubber will meet the road or proof is in the pudding, whatever expression. Once they get to that cost reduction, if they can wake up to that, whoa, we can actually do something better here and make, oh, and if they don't, someone else will, right, that's the whole point. So final question as we wrap up, ecosystem changeover, a lot more ecosystem action. I mean, there's a lot of vendors here in Mobile Congress, but real quick, Peter, Nicholas, why don't you take on the future of the ecosystem around this new telco? Peter, we'll start with you. Yeah, I look, I mean, again, it keeps coming back to where I see that consumers have driven all the ecosystems that have ever existed. And when I say consumers, I also talk IOT as well, right? So it's not just the beta C, it's also beta B. So look to the consumer and look to the business to see what pain points you can solve and that will create the ecosystem. None of us bet on Uber, none of us bet on Airbnb. Otherwise we'd all be a lot richer than we are today. So none of us took that platform. And by the way, we've been in mobile and wireless and kind of that space, smart phone space for a long time. And we all miss those applications. And if you ask a CEO today of a telco, what's the 5G killer application that's gonna send 5G into the next atmosphere? They can't answer the question. They'll talk about drones and robotic surgeries and all things that basically will never have any value to a consumer at the end of the day. So I think we've got to go back to the consumer. And that's where my focus is and say, how do we make their lives better? And that will create the ecosystem. Yeah, I think they go for the low latency and whatnot. But yeah, it's going to be, we'll see what happens. Nicholas, your take on ecosystems as they develop a lot more integrations and not customization. What's your thoughts? Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I think going back to, you know, again, like 20 years ago, the network was the product, connectivity to the product. Today it's a building block, right? It's something that you integrate as part of your experience. So the same way we're seeing like conversions between telecom and financial services, right? You see a lot of telcos trying to be banks, banks or fintechs trying to be telcos. So it's a blending of that, right? So at the end of the day, it's like, what is the experience? What is the bobbin beyond the connectivity? Because customers at this point, it's not differentiated based on connectivity. They come just a busy commodity. So even as you look what Peter is building, right? What is the experience bobbin beyond just buying a plan that I get out of it? Or if you're a media company, you know, how do I pair my content or resolve real problems? Like for instance, we work a lot with the NBA and TikTok. They get into markets where, you know, having a video product at the end and people not being well connected, that's a problem, right? So it's an opportunity for them to bring the building block into their ecosystem and start offering solutions that are differentiated. Awesome. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Both of you, both experienced entrepreneurs and executives, ride in the wave on the right side of history, I believe. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, I appreciate it. Thanks for having us. If you're not riding the wave the right way, you're Driftwood and we're going to toss it back to the studio. Adam and the team, take it from here.