 Good evening and welcome back to beautiful Barcelona, Spain, where we're here with theCUBE, reporting live for four days of Mobile World Congress. The floor has been absolutely buzzing with energy, and now we're going to give you our analyst insights on the day, our hot takes. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined here by the beautiful and brilliant Shelley Cramer, John Furrier, and Dave Vellante. Colleagues and friends, thank you so much for being here with me. Do you guys always twin? Yeah, we always hang out together, as you know. Do you text in the morning about your outfits? No. Rarely actually. Rarely do we. Dave, text me, get up now. What was, we're, our room's a butt, so I was banging on the wall, that was a wake-up call. I heard, boom, back. It's too much, too much information. Three bumps is a blue blazer, you know, what to app is, and I said, We coordinate what we're going to talk about, and we say Dave, because all we do is talk all night about like telecom, data pass, workflows, back office operations. We get, we nerd out all night long, as you know. Yes, we know. Fellow nerd knows the nerd land. Speaking of nerdy things, it's the end of day one. It's been a really exciting day so far. Really curious to see, we've all had kind of different experiences and done different interviews today. Shelly, I'm going to turn it to you first. What's your hot take? Day numero uno. Well, I know this will come as a great surprise, but hey, AI is the main theme. Shocking. I know, I know, it's shocking. But we've had some great conversations with, we just had a great conversation with IBM, kind of talking about some real world use cases, and that's what I'm interested in. Like, you know, we can pontificate all day long about, hey, how AI is going to change everything, but show me the money, right? And I think that's really where we are right now, is show me the money stage. And so it's great to be hearing these conversations come out and these use cases and all that, so that's super exciting. And then seeing the many, many devices out there, you know, the little, what was that called? You did a demo or the phone? Clicks, the keyboard today, yeah, that was super fun. But little things like that that are consumer driven and to see people excited about things like that, and really the use cases in their lives, I know you feel strongly about that as well, so, no, lots of great stuff. Yeah, you seem very excited. I am excited. You've traveled a long way. Dave, what about you? How's your day been? Good, I mean, I think my, I look at the world through the lens of enterprise tech. You do? The world of enterprise tech has always moved at the pace of the CIO and telco has always moved like an order of magnitude more slowly, but to Shelly's point, AI is changing that. Yeah. Enterprise tech, everybody's like pouring resource into AI. They're stealing from other places. Telco industry, laying AI on top of it. I actually think as it relates to their mandate to monetize this time around, because they missed last time around, the OTT vendors got all the value on top of it. I think the telcos, they have a lot of resources and they're opening up and they're saying, hey, let's bring in some expertise so that we can win that monetization game. And I think they had a really good shot of incrementally adding a lot more value to their organizations. I think you're right, John. I mean, I think the insights from day one and looking forward is hearing from Antonio Neri, the CEO of HPE and the CEO of Juniper, because that combination of that acquisition, kind of a merger is going to set the agenda and networking, at least on the enterprise side, to day's point. But the telco industry has to move now. AI is a forcing function for AI, them to take advantage of it, because they have a lot of money to make. So one, I think telco powers a lot of activities, our human lives, the lives we live, mobility, devices. So as data and AI come down for applications that are going to impact humans and the world, it's got to run on something. So you can run in the cloud and it runs on some servers and packets move from point A to point B. So one, that's going to be a major forcing function. AI will force the telcos to deliver because they have to. Number one, the opportunities are too big. There are challenges as we learned today. Expectations are high and the DevSecOps cloud world is driving that and the customer experience has become front and center. So making that all work is going to be something that was obvious to hear, that that customer experience will drive a lot of innovation. The second piece was investments in AI are not as high as people think they are. There's still a lot of toe in the water kind of vibe. But definitely agree with that. So that's one. Clearly everyone's moving in that direction. Customer experience is again, as part of that investment, what is the value, how do I monetize it? Still embryonic and growing fast. And then finally the more nerd side of the equate insights is, where do you run this stuff? So I think telco and cloud coming together is going to create, I think, an opportunity for the first time to really do the edge right. When you say investment in AI, you're talking about telco investment in AI? Telco investments, they're customers, customers. So like you have, you have telco. But you're not talking about general, you're talking about specific to telco. Yeah, telco, not VC investment. Where am I spending my money to transform my business? So telcos have to. But your statement is telco specific. Yes, telco specifics. But also they're customers because they have customers on top of telcos. So that implementation of how I run my networks for an enterprise or a service provider is interesting. So I think it's opportunities and challenges, investments in AI, and how do you implement this stuff? How about, what have you seen? You've been walking around the show floor. I mean, the little time I've spent there is amazing. Yeah, yeah, well it's very impressive in general how big the booths are, the level of marketing lift that goes into this and to show off different aspects of every business unit. So one of the things that's really interesting about the show floor is you get to see so many different solutions from the large players here and our great friends over at Dell, I went over there to check things out just to see what was going on. And if any of you out there happen to enjoy an adult beverage, a beer fan, I'm personally a beer fan, they have a very cool application and I'm a sucker for this when we, and not a sucker actually, that's the wrong term. It means a lot to me when I can tell people outside of our industry an example of how AI and how tech is changing their world and making it better or making our planet more sustainable. And I think when we think of AI or we think of IoT, we do not immediately think of sustainability or things like that. We know there's massive compute and whatnot and so that's why I was really delighted over at Dell when I saw that they were pouring drinks, not just because they were pouring drinks, but it turns out that they've actually built an open brew system, which is a sensor system for brewers in micro breweries of a variety of scale and size to be able to both remote monitor and also really accurately monitor each one of those tanks at the different stages of the fermentation and brewing process. Now they can apply this to wine as well as other spirits. And if you're a, I've brewed beer, have any of you made beverages? Good friends who make it. So yeah, I'm close to the process. They count. Yeah, so. I have a friend who doesn't. Yeah, yeah. You're actually using the bathtub. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he's got a bathtub gin. There's a whole school of thought around that. But what's interesting though is it doesn't take much to mess up a batch of beer or a barrel of wine. And if you have real-time monitoring on that, you can anticipate when something might happen. You can be aware right away rather than when it's already ruined. And that's awesome. Not to mention it. And I thought this was really compelling because it's a fan of the small business forever, even though we are enterprise kings and queens here. I love that the first brewery that Dell worked with the team on to implement this and immediately they saw a 25% increase in production because they weren't losing cans in the assembly line coming down from the ceiling. They have detection that tells you if the lid's open or if the can's fallen over. And it's just, it sounds simple and obvious to a degree to have something like this, but it's such a nice application of technology. This helps the small business that ensures the quality of their beer. And it lets Dell show us off a real-world example here on the show floor in the middle of what is kind of chaotic and full of a bunch of lights and it's hard to stand out. And people like to drink beer here. Well, and the relatability factor is so key, you know? I mean, and I think that these conversations all day, I want to make sure that people understand that telco isn't transformative just because of AI. So I've been coming to this show for a very long time and the telco industry is transforming, okay? And it has been transforming. And they've been really focused on serving CSPs and they've been really focused on monetizing CSPs being able to monetize and serve their customers. And so I think it's important to understand how transformative everything, you know, first of all, we have these everywhere. We also have our wearables, smart cities, smart factories, I mean, all of these things, they're not new. And they're telco industry though has been driving this transformation for the last handle of years. So it's not like, oh, AI is happening and it's changing everything. It's AI is being added to the mix and helping fuel and spur innovation and transformation more rapidly. And I think that's important. Well, and here we are in Barcelona really considered to be the first IOT city in the planet in general. So what you're touching on is right. I mean, phones are edge devices. That's what we forget sometimes or don't necessarily factor in. That said, I will say, since we may be able to show some of this on our social media, there is a flying car here that I got to go check out on the show floor. And it is pretty beautiful. I'm a sucker for aviation. So that was, it's a nice little intersection. There's, there's a lot of fun things. Is that the drone car or is it a different one? It's, yeah, drone car. It's huge. Amazing, right. Yeah, yeah. But it's beautiful. The three copters, try copters, it's amazing. Yeah, no, it definitely stopped me in my tracks a little bit. Everyone was stopping their tracks on that one. Yeah. It was like 20 deep. Oh yeah. 20 deep on all around videotaping that demo. Oh yeah. That was killer. I had to wait in line so I could get some footage for our social media channels. It was the whole situation. Also, lots of robots here. I think that's one of the things you might not necessarily think about in a telco and mobile land. But, but robots are an extension of that. Lots of different types of robots. The dog robots doing cartwheels over there in the corner. This feels like the enterprise version of CES. It absolutely does. It feels like telecom meets enterprise and cloud and I think we see a lot of devices and gadgets that are connected. And number two, you've got a lot of enterprise people here like Dell and the HPEs of the world and cloud players are here. And you start to see the signs of open source with the Open Gateway initiative run by GSMA and Linux Foundation. But one thing that I have not yet seen a lot of conversation on is developers. Because remember, apps still need to run on stuff. So I think I expected more developer conversations around who's building stuff. That's a really good point, John. I haven't had a single developer conversation now that you're saying that, or DevRel.com. And I've always felt like developers are going to win the edge because all these specialized use cases, you would think that developers are going to be the ones that drive that. But this, maybe that's a real blind spot for this community in terms of being able to monetize and not get over the top again. Or it's a feature or a bug because in every market we're covering right now, developers are leading the de facto trends, whether it's open source with AI or KubeCon at CNCF, developers are driving the change. So the question is, if it's not happening here, who's driving the change, Dave? The cloud players? Or is it, the infrastructure has to flip that bit first before it goes to the next level? So are the developers waiting in the wings? Is it not ready for prime time? These are open questions. But the cloud players are serving those developers. You know this, right? They always have. Certainly Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are. Well, and the GSMA open gateway, that's all about serving the developer community. I mean, I think that's why it's so important that they announced this today. Right, and so I don't know enough about what GSMA's chops are. They're coming on later, so let's ask them about that. The other big thing here that Carolina Melanesi brought up, and it was clear this morning was China. China Mobile. Baddie brought it up. I was just at their booth. The presence of Huawei. I mean, this community, they embrace China. It's different than the United States. It's like, oh, no chips for you. And so the tone here is much different. China's a really, really important part of this ecosystem. Oh, absolutely, oh, absolutely. So speaking of developers, I got an email from AWS. Their mission is to enable developers. So the cloud guys are talking to developers. Absolutely. And they said their partner Verizon, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Orange and Liberty Global. Again, who does what becomes the question as this ecosystem develops? What's the role of telco? Who's going to be swinging the big stick? Is it the telcos? Because they control the pipes and they have the data, Dave. So where's the AI lead here? Where's the disruption happening? What is the disruptive enabler? We heard from IBM that banking is one of the big and telecom of the two verticals that have to happen. That flywheel goes on. So, is this really happening? We've had the head of developer relations from Verizon on. Yeah. And what were they doing it for the edge? They hadn't, believe it or not, in outposts. Multiple outposts that they were using local zones and things of that nature. So they're bringing that cloud model to the edge. And the cloud guys, we know they move fast. So maybe it's a feature that the developers aren't here because that's what they do with the cloud. But all the action on premise is happening. Or I'm going to provide a potentially contrarian perspective here. What if the conversation isn't around developers because the tools in the AI space are making it easier for people to build and to code and to create? Yeah. And the collaboration is so deeply built in that rather than recreating things like we would do with a traditional app, you build it from scratch yourself, you've got these huge partnerships like we saw with IBM and Samsung SDS earlier, for example, on the show and whatnot where they're coming together. And obviously there's devs doing things. This isn't me hating on devs, we all love devs. But point being, I think the conversation, exactly the conversation perhaps hasn't hit that space for us in our experience. Interesting thought. Yeah. But don't you think still that you're going to need the developers to take, it's like when you have chat GPT write something, it's like, I need to take it to another level. But as we've heard from guests at SuperCloud and at Supercomputing, like Johnny Dallas from ZEAT told us, he's seeing teams of three do it, teams of 300 developers had to do it before. Therefore, that's an order of magnitude or two less in terms of conversation ratio that we're going to have as analysts with that. Yeah, so. Well, no, to your point, one supporting data point would be if you look at the telcos, if you take the telcos in API, they're already developer enabled. So if you have a low code, it's kind of exactly what I'm thinking. You've got telco APIs and the cloud guys can apply their APIs to them. So I think that's where I see the cloud opportunity. In that case, it's not a dev show because they already got only one access. Is that saying the developer is the dev? Is that the point? If the telco network functionality goes through an API, that's inherently either cloud or cloud operations on premise. So that means the developer's already in market there. So Savannah's point about, this is not really a dev show because there's no dev tooling here. So if it's in the CICD pipeline already, all they need access to is guardrails around AI and network APIs. If I were one of the telcos, I'd be saying, hey, we need to develop something of the equivalent of an app store. And we've got to make those tools available for developers and create that kind of. That's the AWS marketplace. Well, it is. And you need to. Or AI explain who they've had on the phone. An ATT marketplace or a Verizon marketplace. Or it's this GSMA thing, which is, I mean, the whole point of this is applying this interconnection for operators so that they can, developers can use tech once for services like identity, cybersecurity, billing. All of those are important things, but then they can be integrated to every operator worldwide. So that's the whole point of this is making that ecosystem. So where is that ecosystem represented here? I mean, they're talking about it. Certainly. So I have an example. So Amazon sent me in this note too, in the pre-briefing, the early applications span a range of industry verticals, we still have that, consuming of the variety of APIs developed by the telcos. Autonomous vehicles, industrial XR, so augmented reality, financial services, and gaming. So if you look at those verticals, the early, again, they use the term early applications. That's their words, not mine. These are applications being built on the cloud using network APIs from the telcos. So the strategy could be, that's what they want to do. Here's the APIs, then make money on the data. Because remember, they own the data. The telcos, I think the telcos are going to make a boatload of money on the data. Absolutely. Jupot catch. Joe, wouldn't you think there'd be a developer, like a dev event inside of the event? There is one. There is. For that specifically. Yes. At the show. At the show. Okay, there you go. That's the missing piece. And it is, I noticed that when we were doing our research for our segment earlier this morning, there is a specific event for that. I haven't seen it hugely publicized, but I do think it's really interesting to your point, in terms of our conversations and who we're talking to, it's a lot more partner players. It's a lot more leads for specific solutions teams. It's a lot more, and so that obviously changes our conversation and the feel that we have, but it's not like a CNC effort, Kibcon situation in terms of just the discourse. That said, I think it's really interesting. Curious for you both. I got two questions to close us out here at the end of the day. What stood out to you from the conversations that we had on this wonderful desk today? John, I'll start with you. I was really intrigued by Juniper Network's CEO commentary around some of the pointed questions around silicon. And Dave asked a good line of questioning on silicon chip, custom silicon, versus merchant silicon. I think that's going to be a big part of the chip to app innovation. And then Antonio Neary was very candid on how telecom is a different vertical and the missed AI interactions. I think the missed portion of Juniper that HPE bought, to me, I think that keeps jumping out at me, that that's a key innovation that's going to spread like wildfire across all network devices. And I think networking will be very AI oriented because of the, maybe the dev innovations by having just AI policy handle all the routing, just automatically doing autonomous networking, basically. That was one. The second one was conversations around, again, Juniper CEO nailed it here. The combination of how chips and systems work together, what I'm calling clustered systems is a new wave. It's a new trend that's emerging where. It absolutely is. We talked about those, GROC too. Super computing. You saw, I've got GPU, I got a TPU, I got a GROC, a language, LPU. And I want to put that with a NIC card, maybe Ethernet. I want to have a, and it's a system. So that's purpose built for workloads. So I think this idea of clustered systems is going to be a practice. So we're watching that very closely and I think that jumped out and validated that. I think you're absolutely right. Shelly, what about you? What were some of your hot takes from our fabulous guests? You know, I really just enjoy hearing people talk about their AI because it's, everybody's talking about it. Everybody leads with it. Is that your love language? Talk AI to me, baby. But it is very interesting. And we just talked with Steven Rose from IBM and he was so confident. It's like, you know what, I'm at a show where everybody's talking about ATI, talking about ATI. What I care about is showing what we're doing with AI. And I think that those are the conversations that I'm most interested in. And so we're getting, you know, today's the tip of the iceberg, right? Yeah, absolutely. We've got a whole week of fun in the store. Dave, what about you? Favorite chat? So John hit on three or four of the highlights, I think, today. I think as well, the silicon piece. Rami said, silicon used to be, everybody sort of poo pooed it, it's going away, it's boring, nobody cares. It's obviously back in a big way. It really matters right now. It really matters, it's the oil. I mean, people say, date is the new oil? No, silicon is the new oil. I think the other piece was the conversations around, there's AI that makes networks run better than the telcos care about that because it's lowering their TCO. But there's also networks for AI to run AI on. You need very high performance networks to do things in real time. Our vision when we talk about the intelligent data apps is this real time digital twin of your business that's integrating people, places, things, think Uber for all in real time. And doing that on a very high speed network powered by silicon, that is where the innovation is going to come from. Yeah, absolutely. I really got a lot from all of our guests. It's amazing to me how many folks are playing together in the space, not just with the capitalist goals that we see in business all the time, but really with the goals to make people's lives better. Every conversation we had was about that from talking to IBM and Samsung to also even the clicks guys with their wonderful haptic keyboard, which is super fun. And it's not just about bringing the Blackberry experience back to those of us with our glass screens. Now they brought up in that interview the accessibility play. That haptic feedback lets people engage with their smartphone in a different way. And that matters. And one other point is that this unprecedented opportunities, financially, productivity wise, society impact. So I think there's going to be more money coming in to the vertical because Oh gosh, yeah. I think it's just step function. Yeah. I'm going to agree more. All right, wonderful, brilliant colleagues. Last question for you. What are we going to be listening to tomorrow? What can the audience look forward to hearing from us? Shelly, what might we hear? Well, we're going to hear about Broadcom and VMware and some exciting announcements that they're making. And I'm not going to say anything more about that, but it's going to be amazing. Love that. We've got that. Good cheese, good cheese. You're all tuning in at home. I hope you heard that. Anything else that you're particularly excited about? Networks is the new bottleneck. So we're talking about networking all day. Extreme networks is coming on. Chris Lewis is going to come on. We stopped to slot him in, but Chris is an awesome guest. He's been following the telco industry forever, lives in the UK. We also last year talked to Chris about accessibility. Chris is blind and has been for a better part of his life. And so he talks about from that perspective, it's all the things that people don't think about for people who need access. John and I had the pleasure of with, we met Joe Stretche, who was the associate producer on the Netflix series, all the things you cannot see. So we experienced that firsthand. It was actually amazing how accessibility, the importance of that for folks that need it and how most of the society doesn't even think about it, but increasingly doing more and more things to help folks, AI is going to play a role there. So I'm sure Chris is going to talk about that. I'm excited about having him on. Yeah, me too. We've even had the deaf and hard of hearing group from CNCF on the show. It is not just about designing for the masses, it is about designing for everyone. And I think we're seeing a lot of solutions in that space. Dave Vellante, John Furrier, Shelly Kramer. Thank you all for joining me and thank you for tuning in from home for this fabulous four days of broadcasting here in brilliant Barcelona, Spain. My name is Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech coverage.