 Okay, we're back on theCUBE here in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Thanks, Adam and the guys in the studio. Awesome stuff. Dave, Mobile World Congress is happening. It's basically a hybrid show, mostly virtual. Actually, the physical action is a lot of booths. Cloud City is tricked out, big time, made for TV. theCUBE's obviously here. We've got the main stage with Adam and crew, Chloe and team, and it's pretty cool. Cloud City's thematic, John. We're going to see the next decade be about the cloudification of telco. And the major portions of telco are going to move to the cloud. It's very clear, especially the front end stuff. A lot of the business support systems, some of the operational systems are going to go. And you're seeing that. You're seeing that with Amazon. You're seeing Microsoft. You're seeing Google. They're all moving in that direction. It's inevitable. And I just love the fact that events are back. That's a game-changing statement. Mobile World Congress is not going to go away. There's no way they're going to let this event slide by, even though we're coming out of the pandemic clearly. Bon Jovi was here. He said, quote, we met him last night, face to face. He's like, go Patriots. Probably have a good season this year. He's a big Patriots fan. He said it's going to be better. He says it's going to be better. But he also said it's the first time he's performed in a year and a half in front of a... He was excited to be here, wasn't he? He was a calm, small, little, intimate crowd. Again, look behind us. You can see Cloud City. This is really built out extremely well. A lot of executives here, but the content's been awesome here. But also remote. We've been bringing people in live remotes. And we also had some prerecorded assets that we have. And we got one here from Booz Allen, who I had a conversation with earlier in the month. And grabbed some time to talk about the impact of 5G, telecom, and how it relates to national security for governments and society. And so, let's take a look at that video right now. Well, welcome to theCUBE conversation here. In theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California, I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great conversation here with two great guests. Going to explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security. And as the world goes digital, we're going to have that deep dive conversation around how it's all transforming. We got Keely, vice president of Booz Allen's digital business. Keely, great to have you. John Pisano, principal at Booz Allen's digital cloud solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. So one of the most hottest topics obviously besides cloud computing, having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale. And that's really modern applications and consumer. And then here for national security and for governments here in the US is the military impact. And as digital transformation starts to go the next level, you start to see the architectures emerge where the edge, the IoT edge, the industrial IoT edge, or any kind of edge concept, 5G is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You got Amazon with snowballs, snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology. That's IT-like and operational technologies. It's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption. So I want to get into it. Let's, Keely, let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast in this new architecture of digital? Yeah, John, I think it's a great question. And if I could just share our observation on why we started investing in edge. We mentioned cloud, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of IT, you take a look for mainframes to desktops, to servers, to cloud, to mobile, and now IoT. What we observed was that industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of an evolution of IT. So as you mentioned with industry spending billions on IoT and edge, we've just feel that that's going to be the next evolution. If you take a look at, you mentioned 5G, I think 5G will be certainly an accelerator to edge because of the resilience, the lower latency and so forth, but taking a look at what's happening in space. You mentioned space earlier as well, right? And what Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into space. We're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows storage to be ubiquitous, we think that the next generation internet will be space-based. So when you think about it, it won't be connected servers per se, it'll be connected devices. So that's kind of some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in edge. Awesome, I'd love to continue the conversation on space and the edge and super great conversation to have you guys on, I really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities of this new shift that's happening. The next big thing is coming quickly and it's here on us and that's cloud, I call it cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment edge with 5G, changing the game, key, I completely agree with you. I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and repivoting or refactoring their existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers as a pattern emerging, right? You got to be in the cloud, you got to be leveraging data, you got to be horizontally scalable, but you got to have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. That's the playbook. Some people are maybe, some people are not getting there. So I got to ask you guys, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance, launching a satellite, a couple hundred K, you can launch a CubeSat. That could be good and bad, right? So the telco business is changing radically. Cloud, telco, cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5G. Certainly business and commercial benefits more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? You know, as we think through cloud to edge, one thing that we realized, because our definition of edge, John, was actually at the point of data collection, right? On the sensor themselves. Other definition of edges were a little further back what we call the edge of the IT enterprise. But, you know, as we look at this, we realize that you need, you needed this kind of multi echelon environment, right? From your cloud to your tactical clouds, right? Where you can do some processing and then at the edge themselves. Really at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about is still all about the data, right? The AI needs the data. The telco is transporting the data, right? And so I think if you think about it from a data perspective in relation to telcos, right? One, edge will actually enable a very different paradigm and a distributed paradigm for data processing, right? So instead of bringing the data to some central cloud, right? Which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the process to the data, right? So mitigate what's actually being sent over those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them, right? So I think, you know, at the end of the day, the telcos are going to have a pretty big component to this, even from space down to ground station, right? How that works. So the network of these telcos, I think, are just going to expand. John, what's your perspective? I mean, startups are coming out at the scalability speed of innovation is a big factor. The old telco days are like, I mean, you know, months and years, new towers go up and now you got a backbone. You got, you know, it's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. Yeah, so I definitely echo the sentiments that Key would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, faster speeds being available, you know, in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about facing an adversary that's a near peer threat, the first thing they're going to do is make it contested, congested, and you have to be able to survive. While, yes, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms to places we've not had it before, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over rely on it, assuming it'll always be there. Because I know in my experience wearing the uniform and even if I'm up against an adversary, that's the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, you know, continue to survival and lethal. So that's something I think as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that. So Lo, and I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How do I continue the mission? Yeah, it's interesting. And if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology key, it's been like siloed. Okay, we got a workplace workforce project and we have the tactical edge and we have the siloed IT solution when really work and play, whether it's work here and John's example is the warfighter. And so his concern is safety, is life, right? And protection, the other department has to manage the comms. And so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go, right? So all this is, they'll integrate it now. It's not like one department. It's like it's together. Yeah, John, I mean, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this silo thinking, not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise, right? From a digital battlefield perspective, it's a joint fight, right? So even across these enterprises of enterprises, right? So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally. We have to integrate. We have to interoperate. And by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated to, right? Not reinventing the wheel. I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously, the towers are important. 5G obviously has much more deployments, not as centralized in terms of the spectrum. It's more dense. It's going to create more connectivity options. How do you guys see that impacting? Because certainly more gear, like obviously not the centralized tower from a backhaul standpoint, but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless transit is key. That's the real edge here. How do you guys see that evolving? So, you know, we're seeing a lot of innovations actually through small companies who are really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point because what they're doing is showing the art of the possible, right? Because again, we're in a different environment now. There's different rules. There's different capabilities. But then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, some of the larger companies, Amazon and Microsoft, also investing as well, right? So I think the merge of the, you know, are the unconstrained art of the possible, right? By these small companies that are, you know, just kind of driving, you know, innovations supported by the maturity and the heft of these large companies who are building out kind of these hardened kind of capabilities, they're going to converge at some point, right? And that's where I think we're going to get further innovation. Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys as people are watching this. A lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scaled, roll of data, we kind of, we hit out all the key points I think here. As they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. You know, the developers are now going to be on the front lines, mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning, architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? This is a great question. So I think you touched upon it. One is take the holistic approach. You mentioned architecture a couple of times and I think that's critical. Understanding how your edge architectures will actually connect with your cloud architectures. So they're not disjointed, right? They're not siloed, right? They're interoperable, they integrate. So you've taken that enterprise approach. I think the second thing is be patient. It took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for about three years now. And we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were discussing around edge and kind of pulling that all together. But it took us some time to even figure out kind of, hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value out for our clients, right? So being a little patient and thinking through kind of how you can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor. John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the points that Kyra raised, I would number one amplify the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment of legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, patients open, all that. I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of upskilling. This is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. Like how do you go through this life cycle? How is security embedded? So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation. We're back, Dave. This is a great interview we just had with Kay Lee from Booz Allen. The reason why I wanted to bring that into the CUBE programming this week was because you heard him say hybrid cloud, you heard him say public cloud, innovation, edge, all elements of the architecture. And he says, we are learning and it takes patience. And the other thing that he was hyper focused on was the horizontal scalability, not silos. Ken, this is an architectural shift Booz Allen, again, premier firm. And they're doing killer work. Those guys are amazing. So this brings up the whole theme here, which is you got to nail the architecture. If you don't know what Checkmate looks like, don't play chess. That's what I always say. So you don't know what the game is, don't play it. And I think the telco story that we're hearing from DR is that these guys don't know the game. Now, I would question that Amazon and others think they do because they're all partnering with them. Yeah, Amazon's got great partnerships. Google just announced a partnership with Ericsson. Goes on and on. I think anything that Ken move into the hybrid cloud Ken should and will, that'll happen. But there's some stuff that's going to take some time. Maybe we'll never move. You see that with mainframes. But what they'll do is they'll put an abstraction layer around it and it's got to communicate. And I think the big question is, okay, is it going to be the cloud stack coming on-prem? Which I think is going to happen. Or is it going to be the reverse? And I would bet on the former. Well, you know, we've been covering the cloud from day one. We've been part of that wave. We've had all the top conversations with Andy Jassy. When he was just breaking through the growth, all the cloud players, we've been there. We talked to all their customers. We have our finger on the pulse of cloud. And we are in cloud city, main street of cloud city. This is where all the action is. And the main stage is up there. Adam and team, take it from here.