 Thanks, Adam, from the studio. Dave, with the next interview, I had a great chance to sit down with Pete from Microsoft Azure, talk about 5G and all the advances and the innovation around Silicon and what's coming around under the hood. Obviously, Microsoft big hyperscaler, top three cloud player. Let's hear from Pete, my conversation and we'll come right back. Well, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. We're on site in person and virtual. It's a hybrid event this year. It's in person for the first time since the winter of 2019. A lot's been passed, a lot's happened and theCUBE's got it covered. Our next guest is Pete Bernard, Senior Director, Silicon and Telecom at Azure Edge Devices, Platform and Services at Microsoft. Pete, thanks for coming on theCUBE for our remote coverage. Thanks for coming on, which will be there live and as well as with the remote community. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, no, it's great to be here. I'm coming here from sunny Bellevue, Washington. I wish I was going to be in Barcelona this year. As you mentioned, I think the last time I was at Barcelona was 2019, so a lot has happened since then. Well, let's get into it. First of all, we'll see you on the interwebs in the community, but let's get the content storyline. After the number one story at Mobile World Congress is the rise of the modern developer overlay on top of this new infrastructure. 5G, the Edge, SuperEdge, AI Edge, whatever we want to call it. It is an enabler, okay? And it's also leveraging the assets of these telecom infrastructures. And certainly the pandemic, we've had great success. Nothing crashed, it saved us. So what's your view on this? This is the big story. It's the most important story. What's your take? Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, a lot has happened and there's been a lot of advancements in this area. And I think the part of what's happened with the pandemic is companies have really accelerated their strategies in this area in terms of, we have tons of commercial customers that are trying to solve really difficult problems using AI and Edge and 5G now. So the demand is tremendous and the technology has really advanced quite a bit. And my team has specifically focused on sort of the intersection of 5G, Edge and AI. And it's sort of bringing together these kind of, these just incredible technology advances. And it's unlocking some amazing new scenarios and business models for customers and partners for sure. So let's get under the hood a little bit and talk about some of the technical issues. Obviously 5G is enabling a lot of commercial benefits. Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure is having great Edge capabilities now with bringing the cloud to the Edge, which opens up the obvious gamers, metaverses, AI, AR, VR kind of things, low latency, applications, cars and all that good stuff, all data coming in. And then new use cases. So it's a data problem. It's a topology challenge. It's a new architecture. Unpack that for us. What, where are we on this? So I mean, as you mentioned, I mean it's kind of an infinite set of problems to be solved. And one of the things that we found was that there was actually a lot of friction out there. It's almost like so many different partners and topologies and ways to put things together. Quite often we get with a commercial customer and they're like, look, we just need to solve this particular problem in retail or healthcare or energy. And so one of the things that we introduced as part of our kind of Azure portfolio is something called Azure Percept, which is an end-to-end system for edge AI development and deployment that now works over 5G and LPWA as well. And so a lot of what we're trying to do as a platform company is help customers and partners kind of expedite and speed that development and deployment of solutions. Because like I said, there's no shortage of demand, but they're quite complex. And as you mentioned, you could have on-prem solutions. You could have hybrid solutions that talk to on-prem hardware and then go to the cloud and you can go direct to the cloud. But the question is like, how do you put these things together in a secure way and get an ROI quickly out of your edge AI deployments? And that's been kind of an interesting challenge. And I think when I talk to a lot of partners, telco partners, especially Silicon partners, we're all struggling with how do we expedite? Expedite because the sooner we can get people to deploy and solve the problems, obviously the sooner they're happy, the sooner we all get paid, right? So that's one of the things we have to be careful of is with all the new technology, how do we really sort of titrate down to, what does it take to actually get things from a POC to deployment as quickly as possible? And one of the big things that's happening is obviously the developer ecosystem is coming hardcore through the telco cloud, whatever you want to call it. And it's interesting, the word operators is used a lot, the carriers, the operators. You don't hear that in IT. You don't say that's the operator, it's IT department. So you have cloud native and this operating culture is coming together, DevOps, DevSecOps, coming to what is a carrier grade operating model, which is like a steady built solid foundation. That's what they expect. So you kind of have this classic OT, IT collision. This has been talked about in the edge. What's different though, because now you've got to move faster. You got to have a lot of IT like cloud scale with automation and AI. At the same time, I need full bulletproof operations. Yeah, and so we're trying to expose a consistent developer fabric to our community. I mean, Microsoft's got millions of developers around the world using lots of tool chains and frameworks. And we want to sort of harness the power of that whole developer community to bring workloads and applications onto the telco network in environments that they're familiar with. And we're seeing also sort of, you mentioned sort of colliding worlds. In the edge world, there's kind of traditional embedded developers that are building cameras and devices and gateways. And then there's a lot of data science AI developers as well. And what we're trying to do is sort of help both communities sort of learn these skills so that you have developers that are enabled to do AI workloads and scenarios and all of the business logic around those things and develop that in an environment where that's cloud-based or edge-based that they're familiar with. And so therefore, a lot of the complexities of the telco network itself get sort of obfuscated or abstracted for them. So the developer doesn't have to become a telco expert to build a 5G-based camera system for their retail stores. And so that's exciting when we start to merge some of these communities together. Yeah, so what would be your message to the operators this year? I mean, obviously the edge is not something you need to educate people on, but they are trying to figure out how to, swap the engine of the airplane out at 35,000 feet, as I say, they want to innovate. And this year, what's your message to them? Yeah, I mean, there's kind of two things going on. One is, yes, I think we are deeply involved helping telcos cloudify their network and take advantage of 5G and virtualization. And we have recent acquisitions as a meta switch and affirmed and all that whole thing. So that's that chunk of work that's ongoing. I think the other thing that's happening is really thinking about telcos, we're seeing as a hunger for solutions. And so telcos thinking of themselves as solution providers, not just connectivity providers, and getting into that mindset of saying, we're going to come in and work with this city or this big retailer and we're going to help solve problems for them. And we love working with partners like that, that are actually delivering solutions as opposed to pieces of technology. What solutions do you think, Pete, are showing the most promise for helping the telco industry digitally transform? Is there a pattern? Well, I think on the NJI space, there's a couple of big verticals. I mean, obviously places like agriculture are huge, where you need wide deployments. We're seeing a lot of areas around retail, retail environments when I would leverage like low latency 5G. One of the pieces of feedback we've heard was a lot of retailers actually want less hardware in their physical store and they want to leverage 5G more to get back to the cloud. And then we're seeing energy sectors and mining and other kind of difficult to reach areas where you can leverage cellular networks. So a lot of these verticals are turning on to the fact that they could get cellular connectivity and NJI solutions combined together and do some amazing things. You just made me think of a question like, well, I got you got to ask this because you brought up 5G and backhaul. People in this business always know backhaul is always the problem. We all know we've been to a concert or a game where we've got multiple bars on Wi-Fi but nothing's loading, right? So we all know that, right? We've seen that, that's backhaul. That's a choke point. If 5G is going to give me more backhaul to essentially another exchange, how has the core of the internet evolved? Because as I start poking around and researching as there's more direct connects now, there's not many exchanges. It used to be, you know, we had Ma West and Ma East. Those are now gone. Like what's going on in the backbone? Does that simple, is it better or worse? Is that still- No, I think one of the exciting things around kind of the virtualization of what's going on with networking is that we are able to partner with telcos to sort of extend the Azure footprint to help with some of those congestion points, right? So we can bring heavy edge equipment pretty darn close to where the action is and actually have direct connections into telco networks to help them sort of expand their footprint, you know, even farther out to the edge and they can leverage our hyperscaler to do that. So that's a benefit of one of the architectural improvements applied to you around virtualization. That's awesome. And I'm looking forward to following up on that's a great point. And I think it sells a digital divide problem that's been going on for over a decade, 15, 20 years, this digital divide. Now you've got city revitalizations going on. You have, I mean, just the digital revitalization in global communities is everywhere. And I think this is going to be an inflection point that's not yet written about in the press now, but I think it's going to be very clear. So with all that, I got to ask you the importance of how you guys see an ecosystem for this transformation because it used to be the telcos ruled the world and now it's not going that way. They still have a footprint. I mean, everyone, the rising tide helps everybody, as they say. What's the importance of a strong ecosystem in order to drive this new transformation? Well, you know, it's definitely a team sport. It's definitely a team sport. And, you know, Microsoft's been a big partner company for decades. And I think it's something like $8 of partner revenue for every dollar revenue that Microsoft generates. So we're heavily invested in our device builder partners, our telco partners, the ISV community. And, you know, I think what we're trying to do is work with telcos to sort of bring those communities together to solve these kind of problems that customers are having. So yeah, it's definitely a team sport. And like I said, the new entrance with some really innovative software platforms, it's an opportunity for telcos, I think, to sort of reinvent and kind of rethink about how they want to be more agile and more competitive and get into some big businesses. Well, Pete, great to have you on. I got to ask you. We've talked about the most important story. Obviously 5G, Edge, and AI. I think you nailed it. You're in this crosshairs of probably one of the most exciting areas in the tech industry as distributed computing goes that last mile, so to speak, pun intended. But what's in your opinion the most important story that not many people are talking about that should be talked about? What do you think is something that's being, not to say written about but talked about but is super important that needs to be addressed? Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, a lot of the marketing and talk about 5G is around phones and people talk about their speed on phones. And I think we're finally getting past a discussion of 5G on phones and talking about 5G for like more M2M communications and more kind of connecting really trillions of things together. And that enablement is going to be a big deal moving forward. And I think that's, we'll start to see probably more coverage of that moving forward. We're on the inside of the industry, so we kind of know it. But I think on the outside of the industry when people think 5G, they still think phones. And then hopefully that becomes, there's more of a story around all the other pieces being connected with 5G moving forward. Yeah, and I got to ask you about two quick things before we go. Open source, openness, interoperability and security. What's your opinion on those two pillars? Yeah, so I think security is kind of foundational for what we've been doing at Microsoft for a long time, whether it's Azure Sphere that we're doing for end-to-end edge security or any of our security offerings that we have from services perspective. So we're trying to, like with Azure Percept, we actually build in like TPM encryption of AI models from edge to cloud as an example of that. So security really is foundational to all the stuff that we need to do. It cannot be something that you do later or add on, it has to be designed in. And I think from an open source perspective, I mean, whether it's our stewardship of GitHub or the involvement in open source communities, we're totally excited about all the innovation that's happening there. And you've got to let people participate. And in fact, one of the cool things that's been happening is the amount of developer reach in areas where maybe there isn't, like we've had our build conferences and other Microsoft events, it enables everyone to participate virtually no matter where they are in the world, even if they can't get a ticket to Redmond Washington, they can still be part of the developer community and learn online and be part of that. So that's pretty exciting. I think this whole embed developer market's going to come back in massive volumes of new people as Silicon becomes important. And of course, I can't leave you without asking the Silicon angle question for our team. Silicon is becoming a competitive advantage whether it's acceleration, offload and or core things, whether it's instance related or use case related. What's the future of Silicon in the telecom and cloud in general? Yeah, so I mean, the advances happening in the Silicon space are fantastic whether it's like process advances down to like five nanometer and below. So you're talking about much lower power consumption, much higher density packaging, and AI acceleration built in as well as all these other containerized security things. So that's being driven a lot by consumer markets, right? So more powerful PCs and phones. And that's also translating into the cloud and for some of the heavy infrastructure. So the leaps and bounds we're seeing even between now and the last MWC in person in 2019 in Silicon has been amazing. And that's going to unblock all kinds of workloads that could be done at the edge as well as incredible high performance stuff to be done in the cloud. So it's pretty exciting. Peter, I love that word unblock because I think it's going to unblock of that big rock in the river. It's holding the water back. I think it's going to unleash creativity, innovation, computer science, engineering down from Silicon to the modern application developer. Amazing opportunity. I think the edge is going to be an awesome area to innovate on. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Sounds good. Thank you for having me. Pippinart, senior director of Silicon Telecom, Azure Edge devices for platform services at Microsoft, a lot going on, big cloud player, hyper scalar at the edge. This is the final area in my opinion. That's all we actually going to have. It's going to be great innovation. It's part of the cloud. Cloud is creating massive change in telecom. We've got the coverage here in theCUBE. Thanks for watching. Okay, Dave, that was a great interview with Pippinart, senior director of Silicon Telecom, Azure Edge devices, platform and services. Microsoft's got all those long titles in the thing, but Silicon is a key thing. You heard my interview, wide-ranging conversation, obviously, with that kind of pedigree and expertise. He's pretty strong, but he, at the end there, a little gem on the Silicon, okay? Because that is going to be a power source. You've been reporting on this. You've been doing a lot of breaking analysis. Microsoft's a hyper scalar. They're the second player in cloud. Amazon number one, Microsoft number two, Google number three. Microsoft, they didn't really say anything. They have something, Amazon's got Graviton, but big directional signal shift there. Well, I think it was interesting. It was a great interview, by the way, and the things that struck me, Pete said, they're focused on the intersection of 5G, Edge and AI. So AI is all about data-driven workloads. If you look at AI today, most of the AI in the enterprise is done in the cloud and it's modeling, but the future of AI is going to be inferencing at the edge in real time. That's where the real expense is today, and that's where you need new computing architectures. And you're right, I've written about this. One of my last breaking analysis was on AWS's secret weapon. And that secret weapon is a new computing architecture that's not based on traditional x86 architectures. It's based on their own design, but based on ARM. Because ARM is higher performance, lower cost, better price performance, and way cheaper. And so I guarantee you, based on what you just said, that Amazon clearly has set the direction with Nitro and Graviton and Graviton 2. Microsoft is, I think, following that playbook. And it's interesting that Pete has Silicon in his title and Telecom and Edge, they're going after that, because it requires new low-powered architectures that are going to blow away anything we've ever seen on x86. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a killer point. You and I have been covering the enterprise, the old guard, rack and stack the boxes. Amazon was early on that, clearly winning. Low-power, high-density, looks like a consumer-like feel in the cloud scale, changes the game on economics. And then he also teased out of his squint, there's a lot of stuff to decode. We're going to unpack that video and write probably six or five blog posts there. But he said 5G is going to change the direct connect. They're already doing it. Microsoft's putting that to the edge. They're right on the same playbook as AWS, right on the, almost right on the number. Put the edge, make it powerful, direct connects, connectivity. And we've seen this before, the consumer piece is key. The consumer leads, we know this. And the consumer, Apple is leading in things like AI. And Tesla is leading at the edge. That's where you have to look for the innovation that's going to trickle into the enterprise. And so, and the cloud guys, I think the hyperscalers, you and Sargeet, Johel talked about this at the startup showcase that we did, was that the cloud guys, the hyperscalers, are in a really strong position for the edge. I got to tell you, we are on this. Go to thesiliconangle.com. Obviously that's our website, thecube.net. We are reporting on this. It's a very nuanced point. But if you look at the cloud players, you can see the Telco digital revolution. Telco DR is a digital revolution. Back to you, Adam in the studio for more coverage. We'll be back at the desk shortly.