 Good afternoon. This is Akshay Sharma and a Motivity Executive C-Level Interview Series at the Linux Foundation's Open Networking and Edge Summit. And today we welcome a partner in Brooke Frischmeyer, a seasoned telecom executive with over 25 years of experience as an executive and senior engineer at Cisco Systems, NetNumber, AT&T Bell Labs, and many other places. I'm Eddie Brooke, a senior director of product management 5G and Edge at Robin.io, a solution provider for 5G Edge computing solutions using the Motivity Alliance partners as best-of-breed solutions vendors. Welcome, Brooke. Great to virtually meet you again. Thanks for having me. Great to see you again as well. Great. Brooke, from your decades of experience, what is the main value composition of the Motivity Alliance that it provides? Good question. So as we move to the first slide there, we're bringing together a lot of industry leaders, leading edge and incumbents that have actually done this before. We've got Covair, Robin, ColorTokens, Allot, we have Privify, BlueArchis, Agniti, QCT, ABB, Zatiki, CloudSpot, and Groover. So what we have the capability to do here, and if you want to go to the next slide, we have the ability to bring a whole solution from bare metal to services to administration to operation. So let's go back one slide, please. And then what we can do is we can take this and we can put together a completely pre-integrated solution, pre-validated, and we can deliver that to you directly, previous slide, please. What we can then do is, since it comes pre-integrated, we can integrate all of your life cycles and we can reduce the complexity over a number of fronts that we have moving forward. It's not just about installation, it's about how we reduce life cycle management across all of the activities. How do we do it in a way that these are the one-click or completely automated? When we look at the different services they want to bring, a lot of them are edge in nature, mech in nature, and certainly have mobility in nature, whether it's 4G, 5G-based services, whether they are industry applications, whether we're looking at logistics and transportation, but generally it's smartX everywhere, whether it's a smart city, whether it's smart medicine, whether it's smart agriculture. And one of the things that we also bring together here is there's a number of ways to skin this cat and something that a lot of different alliances or companies don't look at is there's a lot of multi-tenancy in nature, because you're going to have a lot of flexibility in terms of actually how you deploy. Even if you just deploy this on your own, you might have something that is a particular cost center. And as Akshay will talk about later today, how do you turn that into a value center? Now, with that, you have to make sure that even in your own teams you have roles-based access, you have a way to perform granular chargeback, even if it is a free service, you want to understand what the usage is. You have to have tenant observability, and we really need to build towards a mech framework as a lot of this is driving some of these next-genner applications. A big one for me is observability. Observability, when you're just looking at yourself, is pretty simple, because you own anything. There's nothing to hide a partition. But when we take a look at a multi-tenant visibility type of situation, it becomes much more complex, because you don't know who's looking at what, and you certainly need the key things separate. So if you don't have the right solution in place, what that means is you've got to take a number of different data services from bare metal to services, you have to find a way to get all that data back somewhere, then you need some massive AI to correlate it. And usually that isn't too bad, but when you throw in a wrinkle of multi-tenancy in, and the fact that there's a lot of privacy involved in many countries, you need to be able to do that in a way that A gives them a complete view of everything they're doing, all of the implications and intricacies and how the resources are being used up and down the stack, but you need to do it in a private way. We need to do it in an automated way. And at the end of the day, we need to provide these solutions that reduce multiple time-to-outcomes from integration to deployment to operation, and we want to serve it up in a way that is absolutely just in time or pays you well. So it's not only a highly advanced microservice architecture, but we can even get down to the micro payments. So you're paying as you use, as you expand, as you actually see revenue. Thank you. Thanks, Brooke. Now, what about end-to-end solutions and how does that get integrated within the lifecycle and the workflows? Yeah, there's a lot of lessons we learn. And the reason why we're starting off with this picture is there's a lot to it. I mean, a lot of times, and I'm guilty of this as an NF vendor back in the day, it's you talk about all these things and then someone says, well, then you can automate it, saves your operational costs. But there's a lot to that. You need a very holistic approach that really looks at the end-to-end solution and also looks up and down the different domains. And we have a number of services that the Motivity is considering here, some of these. And it starts off with bare metal. How do you provision and discover that bare metal? Because I don't have a service if my bare metal isn't up to snuff. And by the way, I've also have to condition my bare metal. I have to bring up some kind of cloud platform cluster. I have to make sure that that's running. Then I have to bring up some network functions as we see in the blue boxes there. And then on top of that, I have to hook them together as a service. And by the way, I need to one click that into existence. And we're still not done. We need to link these with other methods of procedures to other parts of a pipeline. We also need to incorporate them back into physical devices, like routers or even pagers for alerts. So what we need to do is not just build you a solution that puts this all together, but makes it easy to operate for you. Again, it's not just about delivering a solution in a box, calling it done. It's how do we make your life as Motivity easier in the future? And what we need to do is we need to take a look at the different workflows that I've just explained up and down the stack from bare metal to services. And we automate, not just automate it in silos, but again, single quick workflows that says, all right, if I want to build this particular service, I need these network functions. I need this kind of redundant cloud platform. I need this bare metal configuration. I need this networking, right? And I shouldn't have to ask for each one of those things in individual steps. I should have context-aware workflows, whether it's instantiate, start, stop, migrate, heal, clone, scale, and they should be able to be one-clicked or automatically driven by a policy engine. So what we can do with some of the Robin platforms and with the rest of partners in Motivity is give you that holistic ease of use because we have integrated everything as a package. So instead of doing tons and tons of steps, it's completely automated and or it's one-click if you want that type of control. Next slide, please. Great, thanks, Brooke. Any summary of lessons learned? Yes, good question. So things that we've learned as Robin and a lot of this we share with Motivity because we have actually done deployments with some of the Motivity partners before we actually joined. Some of them are a little more obvious, but the first one is just don't wait. If you really want to be the leader and you want to get the revenue and transform how you do your business, it's doable today. We do it. Motivity and everybody in Motivity has put together these type of services. So don't wait. Remember, it's all connected. And we'll talk about that a little bit more as I go down. But it's not just about getting an application running or a service. It's not just about billing. It's not just about pipeline. It's not just about metal. So this is an end-to-end solution. And it needs to act like an end-to-end solution. It shouldn't take you 20 steps to do things. It should only maybe take you one step for a life cycle, something you need to do the life cycle. It needs to be automated. And then one of the things that we bring to bear that everybody is an integrator. It doesn't mean you get rid of your integration team or you get rid of your favorite SI. But as we built this alliance and as we've worked throughout many different industries, more and more with these type of containerized or virtualized solution, everybody has a role. And everybody has to step up to the plate. And if you're working with partners that aren't deeply involved in your integration, they're probably the wrong partners. Next, you need to use technologies that make you not have to be beholden to any other vendor timelines. We will create a service for you. We'll drop it into a network. We'll help install this and teach people how to operate it. But we realize it's not the only part of that solution. Or if we're building you something to do a hosting platform for a number of services. Now, we need to make sure that we harmonize your virtual machines and containers. We need to do it in a way that doesn't create additional operation silos or resource silos, right? You shouldn't have to have two stacks that are running next to each other in two racks. They should really be able to share, reuse, and when necessarily isolate those resource pools. And they absolutely, positively need to not create operational silos. One of the things that I see that people do is they're so worried with getting something off the ground that they don't necessarily look at how it's going to work down the line. How is all the operations going to really work? A big one out to any potential customers is don't just ask what it does. It's really important to understand how it does and why it improves your life. You know, for instance, one of the things my pet peeves is always NUMA. Everybody says they're NUMA aware, but nobody really wants to explain it. And when you look at it, people don't really deal with all of the NUMA pieces. They can't properly do affinity anti-affinity sometimes. They don't necessarily, if you look at just some certain standards. You know, maybe I have granularity down to the worker node. Which is a logical construct where we run containers or multiple containers in many cases. You know, I want to see visibility down to every NUMA node in every server, in every cluster, in every cloud, and I want to be able to utilize it that way. Which is extremely important at the edge where resources are more constrained. So there cannot be any hard coding. If you're hard coding CPUs or virtual function IDs or any of this stuff, you're stuck and you can't automate. And you know, so you're going to need something that allows you to model and ask for things that I'll talk about here in a second. As I mentioned a little earlier, don't just focus on getting things off the ground like a 5G RAN. Focus on how that interoperates with the services that run on it. How do we manage life cycles not just across the RAN, but also across the applications like a MEC application. Make sure that we're not just consolidating applications, but we're consolidating operational silos. Every time you want to do something or make a change, if you don't, it will be a lot harder. We need to make sure we not just consolidate those operational silos, but you know, even workflows. If it takes me 50 different workloads to do something, workflows, then I probably have the wrong workflow engine. As we said before, plan for multi-tenancy. You need to have very granular roles. You need to be able to have charge back. And as I mentioned before, observability is a key piece. Last but not least, no rocket science. And by mean rocket science, if you're hard coding, you probably have too many rocket sciences. An example I like to use a Kubernetes platform. You should not have to be a Kubernetes platform as a user of a Motivity product to operate it. Sure, you should probably understand how your application or your service works, but you shouldn't have to be a genius required to figure out how to map that to the platform. You should be worried about the number of instances you want and where. You want to be considering how many CPUs or how much memory I need. Not I need these specific ones over there, just that I have some sort of need, some court of declarative requirement. Maybe I need another application to run before I can bring up the service. So it has to be pre-installed like a database or a data pipeline. Then you should hit the go button. No hard coding. The operation solution you get should say, here's what you want and we'll go find it. We'll find the resources for you. We'll do all the hard configuration for you. You don't have to hard code. You don't have to hunt for things. Needs to be simple. No rocket scientists. Thank you. Next question. Any last comments about what you see from Motivity? Yeah. So the plan is we need to deliver and the industry needs for literally everything unprecedented ease of use. While automation and next gen services are great, the expertise for everybody is not always there. We need to find a way to get these solutions to you and make them easy to operate. Not just easy to install, easy to bring up. We need a ride array of solutions options, a lot of them centered around mobility. And we need to have the kind of solution that allows you to do these next gen things that will set your business apart. We need to be able to start with small lean platforms, lean solutions and grow them to massive scale. And again, those are the type of things we need to think about before we deploy that first small one. We need to build them from the ground up. They need to be highly performing. So they have a long life cycle on their hardware. They have to have a lot of operation and solutions flexibility. Because when you look at all these great new applications, your requirements will not be the same even a year from now. So we have to do something in a way that makes it easy for you to rapidly iterate. And at the end of the day, when we talk about integration operations, all of your times. We have to reduce those time to outcomes to be truly valuable to our customers. Thank you. Great. I'd like to turn the tables and interview you, my friend. All right. Looking forward to it. Thanks. All right. I'll be gentle. So you have decades of experience. What are some of the key benefits of Covars, VSMP and VSDP? Let's talk about the value stream management delivery for 5G, Smart City, Smart Ex-Enabled. Please. Thanks for the question, Brooke. So as we know, you know, this is a journey. So it's not a destination. And one of the key Motivity Alliance partners, Colbert, is uniquely positioned with its PPM solution. It's a product and portfolio management solution for project management. And it's a solution set that allows you to basically project manage things end to end. So all the stakeholders have a unified platform to manage budget, schedules, resources, field data with a single interface, including revenue management. At the end of the day, this is all about, you know, hopefully creating a value to either the city in a Smart City deployment, or a Smart Campus deployment, or a Smart Grid deployment. And, you know, revenue management is a key component in here. So now in this particular situation, what we have is you can have an IT team, let's say for a Smart City, develop its internal software as a product using Colbert DevOps or ALM application lifecycle management solutions, manage the delivery of it through Colbert's CICV capabilities, along with Robin.io and other partners, bring these functions to the edge. So this is where 5G edge computing comes in, and they could ideate. You know, these could be Kubernetes containerized solutions. You ideate, you make open APIs. You then maybe put an enterprise service bus to it with policy controls. I noticed Brooke, you had RBAC, role-based access control. Well, how do you enforce all of that? How do you define the roles? You know, should the IT manager be able to see everything? Or maybe just the IT parts? Maybe, you know, different functions are allocated for different applications. So let's say HR can look at HR-related software packages. Logistics people look at things like SAP and things like that. Revenue folks talk or the finance folks look at the revenue management components. So all of these need to be orchestrated and coordinated in an industrial type setting. And that's where Colbert brings that to the equation. And in doing so, this can help transition the smart grid, smart campus or smart cities IT department from a cost center to a value center. Excellent. OK, let me ask you another question. So when it comes to software teams, how do they embark on this journey transitioning? Good question, Brooke. As enterprises move their siloed IT with internally facing product solutions towards the cloud, they must open their platforms to make it as a service. IT teams first form an API team and develop best practices, which include the creation of an API product manager, an API architect, ideally with the goals of turning IT from a cost center to a value center. An example is a broken year former company at Cisco Systems. They turned their internally focused IT functions and their existing products like unified communications and DOIP products like PBXs and session border controllers to become virtualized as a service in WebEx. And ironically, we're using Zoom here. A lot of the Zoom folks actually originated at Cisco WebEx. Now, here's an example of turning an internal product into an external product as a service. Now, while these functions can be decentralized, it would make sense to have cross functional matrix reporting within distributed teams to ensure the correct APIs, the correct tools, the correct enterprise service bus solutions and common analytics and dashboards are leveraged. And ideally, with revenue management, you have to have a framework for that too. Otherwise, we end up with disparate siloed solutions again. Once the API team is formed and the internal software solutions are made into cloud-based products, provided as a service, an external API should be developed, whether it's B2B, business to business or B2C, business to consumer. And this API must be made secure, process compliant with the correct dashboards, with the correct role-based policy controls to ensure the correct usages occurring with ideally disaster recovery as a service built in, all of which Covair and its partners provide, like Robin.io and the whole ecosystem of partners we have. And API, as we know, is an application program interface that allows for easier integration to tools and applications. Here, an application can invoke the third-party application, allowing for better, more holistic, integrated solutions to occur. This can extend the life of existing applications, can allow for increased productivity and reusing existing modules, allow for newer mashups of hyper-converged solutions and services to occur, perhaps with better workflow decisions being automated, perhaps with better metrics and dashboards. While an enterprise service bus solution from vendors like Covair with its Omnibus allow for pre-built, pre-tested integrations to third-party systems to occur without having the need for knowing individual tool APIs. This leads to more seamless integrations, increased productivity and better operational efficiencies. Now, in the case of Covair's Omnibus, it is pre-integrated with 120 applications like SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Cisco App Dynamics, as well as many other applications. And so in this case, what you can do is you can have additional benefits like process controls with dashboards and metrics, including revenue management, and then security with resiliency built in. All this should enable a better collaborative environment for better quality, better productivity, better security and support for better operational resiliency. Fantastic. So, let me ask you a question. What are the implications to business leaders for Covair's VSMP, VSDP announcement recently with Kubernetes? So, VSMP is one of the hottest topics right now. You know, as we see enterprises are transforming with digital transformation, moving to the cloud, looking at industrial IoT, looking at newer solutions like AI, ML, e-chaos, mobile applications, e-commerce, but all this will fall flat if monetization and revenue management is neglected. This key critical capability needs to be addressed as they look to transition their IT from a cost center to a value center within newer business models. Smart city, smart campus and smart grid enterprises can charge their customers using their APIs in different ways, charge per transaction, charge by a subscription model, charge API access to their platform as an upsell, charge based on revenues generated in rev share approaches, or perhaps not charge at all, but collect analytics proving increased sales of other products or decreased costs from operational efficiencies gained. Covair can provide the dashboards to help manage the revenue management and payment processing in this journey. Covair's PPM solution delivers greater value to the organization by connecting the entire lifecycle from planning to execution. It enables IT leaders to optimize their project portfolios, manage the capacity of resources against the demands raised from different projects and connects plans and resources to the actual project execution. The Covair PPM solution within its VSMP solution set not only provides complete visibility across the value stream, but also provides complete visibility of the delivery lifecycle from the quadruple perspectives of revenues, resource, timing costs to the C level executives, as well as to the stakeholders of the project through role-based real-time reports and dashboards. All right, before we tie it off here, I'm gonna make a few comments and then I'll turn it back over to you. You know, so what we've talked about today is how Motivity brings everything together across a wide array of solutions. And, you know, when I look at how, you know, what Akshay has talked about and, you know, what I've talked about at Rob and it's really about how do you make automation work the way you always thought it would? All right, how do you make things easy? How do you make operations smoother? How do you truly, you know, integrate this into your development and your operations? And, you know, that's part of the overall solution is that, you know, the Motivity Alliance has looked at this beyond, this is my application. And we looked about how do you make it real? How do you reduce timelines? And how do you make it easy and work the way that you really thought it was supposed to work in the first place but never got before? And then with that, I'll turn it over to Akshay. You can close this out. Great, thanks, Brooke. Now, as you can see in the above diagram with our partner Robin, you know, the Robin platform is an application and infrastructure aware platform for automating the deployment, scaling and lifecycle management of data and network intensive applications on Kubernetes. The Robin platform abstracts the underlying server, network and storage infrastructure so that MNOs and MVNOs using Motivity as an MVNE, a mobile virtual network enabler, can deliver 5G services in a cloud native API driven environment with point and click simplicity. The Robin platform automates the provisioning and day two operations so that MNOs and MVNOs can deliver 5G applications in minutes instead of days. Now, Colbert does the above for industrial applications, you know, with integrations pre-built to SAP Salesforce and internally developed applications that the enterprise may have with its VSMP, VSDP workflow automation engine and its governance solution and policy engine, if needed. To wrap up, if I may, basically this is a journey, as I mentioned. And so what we're seeing is a lot of solutions are out there, a lot of siloed platforms are there, but what we're trying to do is connect all the dots. You know, this is a tough environment right now with work from home, with remote management, you know, solutions are needed for automation, remote management via dashboards, showing all the process metrics and statuses to be visualized in real time. We need remote control of workflow pipelines via email. We need role-based policy controls. We need to support multiple databases across hybrid multiclouds. So containerization is a key enablement solution there. And then Colbert's workflow process engine is unique with task-based models, which supports concurrency and multi-tenancy, which is more representative of real-world teams as teams are likely distributed and working on concurrent projects. And then multi-tenancy in the Omni bus as an enterprise service bus is also supported as well. These are challenging times now, but with newer solutions and newer thinking, hopefully this will all be alleviated with better solution from platform providers like Colbert, robin.io and the Motivity Alliance as we discussed. Hopefully the result is better harmony within IT teams, better business outcomes from innovations by Motivity Alliance members. So hopefully this is a game changer. Any last comments, Brooke? No, that's it. But with that being said, I suppose I always have a comment. Again, it's about making it easier to use. And I have to say, one of the things we do with the Alliance is we reduce your time to outcome from integration cross-life cycle management, whether we're talking about the technical aspects, the operations or the business side of your solution. Great, thanks, Brooke. And thank you for everyone attending this call. This was a great session. Thank you.