 Hey everyone, Lisa Martin here with you on the Cube, live from Mobile World Congress 23 in Barcelona. We're having a great day at the show. We hope you are too. I've got two guests here with me next. We're gonna be talking about Telco's 5G, all that exciting stuff. Please welcome Jason Inskeet, the AVP, 5G and Private 5G Center of Excellence at AT&T Business. And Doug Lieberman is here as well, Senior Director, Global Solutions, Co-Creation Services at Dell Technologies. Guys, it's great to have you on the show, live from the show floor. Talk to me about what's going on. How are you? Hey, thanks for having us. You know, it's been, it's a great show. I'm happy to be back here this year and, you know, really looking forward to the conversations that are going on and really continuing these partnerships that we're, that Dell has with companies like AT&T to truly drive the realities and the benefits of 5G. Absolutely. Doug, talk to me a little bit. You have an interesting title. Director of Global Solutions, Co-Creation Services at Dell. Tell me a little bit about your role, what you're responsible for, and then Jason will have you do the same. Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. So, you know, I have a very interesting role and a very exciting role at Dell because we have a unique organization that I run globally whose job it is is to work with telcos to co-create services for enterprise and jointly go to market with those. So that basically take the combined power of AT&T and Dell and bring that to enterprise customers and other telcos in order to so that enterprises can realize the value of and truly leverage and harness the capabilities of 5G for private mobility and MAC and IoT and connected devices. Jason, let's bring you into the conversation now. You have an interesting title as well. You're with the 5G Center of Excellence at AT&T. Talk a little bit about your role and that COE. Yeah, thanks for having me again as well. You know, the role with my team at AT&T is we're on the cutting edge, right? We're sitting in between our customers and our product houses that are working with folks at Dell, really helping put in our products together in the space of 5G, right? A lot of open opportunities here. A lot of things changing really fast. So my teams are out as well as, you know, putting this stuff in customers' production sites. There's also taking and capturing that information, working with my internal partners both on the technology side, on the product side and partners like Dell, right? Who are coming in helping us enable in those products and services that we can take and scale out through the different opportunities that we're seeing in this space? Let's double click on that partner angle. Jason will stay with you. The 5G Revolution is here. We're all excited about it. There's so much potential that will come from that. Let's talk about the AT&T Dell partnership. How are you guys working together to deliver 5G globally? Jason, we'll start with you and then Doug will go to you. Yeah, I mean, at the core of it, right? When we started looking at 5G and seeing the changes that were happening, one of the biggest changes is it became software defined, so the way we could deploy the hardware with the software becomes a whole new conversation. And what we saw coming out of that is it's not going to be a single winner and loser to really execute the way it's necessary for the experiences of tomorrow. It has to be an ecosystem that comes together. Dell creates a great opportunity for us from the hardware perspective to move those services around, to scale those services ultimately to all kinds of site types up to cities, right? Down to small offices, right? And those different form factors that they bring with the software and the network pieces that we're adding on top of it, help to streamline the flows and processes, and really gets to that next generation that we see happening, which is this converged architecture, right? This meeting of network and application, creating a whole new skill set along with product. So while at the very top, you've got Dell AT&T at a partner level, it gets at a granular level too. The users and the developers underneath are starting to change as well. So very interesting by economy happening, right? Right. Doug, what is your, what's through Dell's lens? Tell us a little bit about the partnership and how you're working together to deliver 5G and really unlock its potential globally. Yeah, I think I'd love to bonus off of what Jason was saying for Dell. What we look at it is through the lens of an enterprise. An enterprise needs to execute their business function, their outcome, their mission that they need to operate. And so therefore they have workloads that they need to run. And 5G is an enabler for that technology. And there's lots of other enablers, but the key pieces, how can they get their business work done better, faster, cheaper, more efficiently, more securely? And the combination of AT&T and Dell truly is a combination that brings in a partnership that brings together a full breadth of those capabilities with understanding what those enterprise workloads are and how they work and how an enterprise would leverage these capabilities. And then bonus on top of that and merge together with that, the capabilities of AT&T. And when you look at 5G, there's a lot of people that talk about 5G being the enterprise G. And a lot of that is because of things that Jason mentioned. As we move to a disaggregated stack where you have software-defined aspects of it and the ability in the underlying definition of what 5G and the specifications to allow much more customization, it means that enterprises now can not just take connectivity as it is and use it however it comes, but actually work with the telco and work with Dell to customize that connectivity in a way that better meets the requirements, whether that be with slicing or private mobility or roaming between private and the public network and things like profiles and being able to have different views of how different users and devices connect to that network are all key in truly harnessing the power of that connectivity to have always on, always connected, always integrated systems from the edge, the core to the cloud. Always on, always connected. That's what we all expect these days. Wherever we are in the world, whatever we're trying to do, but to be able to take advantage of all that 5G offers for all of us, telcos have to create infrastructures that can support it. Let's double click guys on the infrastructure that Dell and AT&T have put in place to enable this. Jason, I want to get your perspective first and then Doug will go to you. Yeah, I mean, it's foundational, right? The things that we're trying to do and build out here and there's a lot of complexity in it now that we didn't have before because of the flexibility in it, right? It's one of those things like, the good news and software as you can do whatever you want, the bad news and software as you can do whatever you want, right? Once you have that foundation there though in terms of infrastructure, which for us is really air to glass, right? Fiber through the spectrum on top. But underneath of that, we have the servers, we have that infrastructure where those fibers come together where that air meets the radios and so forth. And we've got to have that great foundation, right? So working with Dell and getting those spaces built together, perhaps the area as needed so that there's additional place now for compute and scale at that new converged meet me point, right? And that's going to be the opportunity that we're trying to think about really that to get that foundation in a way that maximizes capacity and maximizes control for the customers and enterprises in particular. And more importantly, maximize the time horizon, right? Because they want to put it in a foundation like this. You're not looking at two to three years. You're trying to, you know, skate beyond, skate where the puck is going, look at five, 10 years out, set that foundation. And that's what we're trying to look at with Dell, right? What can our network do already? Where can we push it in return? They're going to build their solutions to help maximize that potential. From an infrastructure perspective, Doug, I want to understand really kind of where Dell is really shining there. But also, what are some of the differentiators that Dell brings to this foundational infrastructure that, to your point, is built for scale? Yeah, so it really all comes down to, as we start to see this transition, you know, that's been happening for years, but it's accelerating because of always connected devices and everything connected and the great proliferation of data at the edge, as we move assets from the data center and out to the edge, we introduce new challenges that have to be overcome. You have things like security, automation, infrastructure costs, maintenance, day one operations, day two operations. All of these things are new complexities, which enterprises want to enable their workloads and enable the outcomes that they want to generate, but they need to make sure that they're not taking a step backwards when it comes to things like regulations in Europe. You've got GDPR in the US, you've got different security regulations. No one wants to be the next front page headline about their company being attacked and having a ransomware attack. And so as we spread out these assets, what Dell is here to do is to work with AT&T and enable enterprises to effectively build their virtual enterprise around the world where those assets, whether they're at the edge or the core or in the cloud are all managed with the same profiles and the same security features and the same automation that they have in a core data center. So my ability to deploy an edge cloud so that I can leverage AT&T's network and have end user devices do things like gaming or connect to video services or get directed retail advertising to you are not basically introducing new vectors for security vulnerabilities into that network. And so Dell has worked really hard and is a leader in the industry in providing automation and lower cost of ownership and security for those solutions. So it's not just about putting a server out there but it's about putting an infrastructure and a cloud that is connected by AT&T's backbone and to a central core of automation management and orchestration capabilities so that I can leverage those assets securely and efficiently. That security element that you bring up, Doug, is so incredibly critical. We talk about it at every event. We talk about it every day. We've seen such dramatic changes in the threat landscape in the last couple of years with COVID and things like that. So that security element isn't trivial. It's essential for every type of enterprise regardless of where they are. I want to talk a little bit now about best practices and Doug, go back to you, looking at what AT&T is achieving, the 5G, COE, what you're doing with Dell, from your lens and your experiences, what are some of the best practices for telcos deploying secure network and connectivity at the edge? Yeah, well, I think the first one is that automation and that orchestration, right? The answer is that you cannot have snowflakes at every single endpoint. You need to make sure that those infrastructures are consistent and compliant with the integrations and with the policies that have been set across the network. The second thing is that you want to make sure that the connectivity is monitored and metered and managed so that we know whether, for example, that endpoint is there and it's not there if it goes offline and ensuring that the end user experience is consistent throughout. And so what we're seeing is that it's really important that we provide an implementation where the enterprise can get a consistent and a predictable outcome for what they're trying to accomplish. What they don't want to do, what enterprises hate and it's really bad for them, is when they provide an inconsistent or inappropriate result to their enterprise, to their users, to their customer base. So if your website goes offline or if you're a gaming platform, and people can't get to your game, you're going to lose customers, you're going to lose business, you're going to have people lose faith in your network. And so our partnership with AT&T and with other telcos is about ensuring that we have all those aspects covered, day zero, day one and day two, as well as the security aspects. And that backhaul is an essential piece of that because as we get more and more devices and more and more edge devices set up, there's more sprawl. And so the complexity goes up substantially but what really wins is when you can take that complexity and use it to your advantage and be able to manage and deploy those systems as though they were all within your virtual enterprise. Using complexity to your advantage, that's an interesting one, Doug, that you're bringing up. Jason, I want to know, what does that mean for you and how is AT&T leveraging complexity to its advantage for its customers all over the globe? First thing is, if you're thinking about, we're a network company, we're not just a 5G company. So we're wireline, we're wireless, we're global, right? In terms of the amount of fiber we have in the ground, the amount of, in the U.S. domestic sailor deployments, our investments in FirstNet, so our first responder network here in the U.S. So we have a big portfolio inclusive of IoT, right? That is a global brand as well. That, if you look at it through the outside lens, that's super complex, right? All over the planet. So when we're talking to our customers now in this new world, right? Which is very much, hey, you can do these things on your own. We go back and the bigger, one of the bigger, we actually have the products and the network and the tech but now that customers can take advantage of it and take things that Adele have rolled out, they need that new age expertise, right? You also got the Adele expertise of building these platforms from maybe a software level, from an orchestration level, those kind of things. And at the edge, that's creating a new type of person and a new type of workflow, a new type of way to respond and work. So that combination of those two is gonna be that new skill set, right? That's, it's in small pockets now. It's growing in how that looks because it's a little combination of both the developer and the network developer. That's coming together. Our footprint in terms of what we provide in there is not just 5G, it's 5G, it's fiber, it's all of those pieces together and that's what's gonna super enable that experience that Doug talked about when you're thinking about gaming or transportation. It's not just the network performance, it's the round trip, right? So we're really trying to focus on that and educate our customers in that way with the expertise that we bring over years and years of building these things. If I could just jump in there, I mean, I'd like to just emphasize something he just said, Jason just said, when we look at workloads at the edge, very rarely are those workloads uniquely just an edge workload, right? There are components, the example I like to use is video surveillance. If you're a big box store and you have video surveillance inside your store, there is a set of workloads and outcomes you need for immediate response at that edge. You wanna know if there's a safety hazard, if there's a theft or those things, right? Those things need to be processed real time in the store before the thief leaves the store. But then there's a set of connectivity as well where you wanna process that data up in the cloud to get long-term analytics and data off of that information. What's my average store density on a Thursday afternoon in November when it's 20 degrees out, right? Because that would drive how many employees I have, how much inventory I carry, et cetera. And that combination is a factor that drives all the different aspects of AT&T's network, right? We need the connectivity in the store for the private mobility and the spectrum for the cameras that talk to a central server. We need the high-speed backup and throughput in order to provide cyber recovery as well as point-of-sale services so that they can do credit card transactions flawlessly, which is using a lot of wireline services for AT&T. And together with their cloud and their other capabilities an enterprise needs all those different aspects to work, both the edge, the core and the cloud coming together to form an outcome from one piece of input. So that one piece of input, that video stream is used in multiple different ways. And because of that, that network that AT&T brings can support the end-to-end outcome and use cases for that implementation as an example. That end-to-end round trip that you guys talked about is essential for every type of enterprise. A lot of great work that Dal and AT&T are doing together to really enable enterprises to really capitalize on all that the new technology that 5G has the potential to deliver. So I got to wrap things up, Jason with you, from a business customer perspective. What's next for AT&T? What can those business customers expect? I'll just continue the scaling, right? Because you're looking at a space that's evolving rapidly, right? It's evolving rapidly. There's a lot of opportunity. You look at the private wireless space in particular. It's nascent, but growing rapidly with the customers having their ability to do this on their own. So for us, and really where we're starting to think now is we're seeing the things move from POC, starting to move to production. Customers are starting to think about what's next, right? For us, we're trying to skate ahead of that, knowing how we built our own networks, knowing how we engage in our own partnerships like with Dell and trying to bring that expertise back to the customer because it isn't cookie cutter anymore. There's a lot of flexibility in each input, creates a different output. So it's up to us to at least help them balance that to find what I like to actually call, find the Goldilocks, right? What is that just right for them? Great point, Jason. It is no longer a cookie cutter. Cookie cutter isn't gonna cut it. Jason Doug, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We appreciate all of your insights. It sounds like some great work that AT&T are doing together. Enterprises have a lot to look forward to. Thank you again for your time. Thank you very much. Look forward to seeing you at the show. I'm Lisa Martin from theCUBE at Mobile World Congress 23 in Barcelona. Thanks for watching.