 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. We're here in person and remote. This is a physical and virtual. It's a hybrid event and theCUBE's got the wall-to-wall coverage. I'm Sean Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great guest here, Delpho Hernandez, Vice President, Global Telco Business Unit for Amazon Web Services, AWS. Delpho, thank you for coming on remotely for this virtual hybrid Mobile World Congress. Thanks for having me, John. Exciting. You have an impressive background in telecom industry over the years. The technology industry has been great innovation. We've seen, I mean, how many Gs have been, we've gone through, but I remember the days when Wi-Fi wasn't even around. So you got a complete change in the past couple of decades. This year, more than ever with the pandemic, coming through this, you're starting to see some clear visibility on the trends. And also, this is the first Mobile World Congress in person since 2019. So a lot has changed. What is your view on the marketplace and what is your message you're telling the telecom industry from Amazon? To your perspective, what do you see? Yeah, you're absolutely right, John. This is a fascinating time to be on the cloud, to be a Mobile World Congress. I remember Mobile World Congress 2020 was the first event that actually got canceled. So that was the beginning of the pandemic. And now here we are, right? A year and a bit later, working with the leading telecommunications operators, with the leading telecommunications ISPs and solution providers. And what a better place that we've been doing that with AWS and this very transformational time in this space. We are supporting telecom operators around the world as they reinvent communications in many different ways. As you see, this is not just one more G, right? We are definitely transforming the industry. Like any industry, right? We see telecom operators having to get simplification on their operations and transforming the IT side of the house. So they got the internal IT that needs big transformation. They also got the network IT, everything related with OSS and BSS, and they need to migrate that to the cloud. And we've got a lot of experience doing that with telcos around the world to really help them accelerate that journey to the cloud. And we can help them with data center consolidation, migrations and a number of things. So we've got examples like GitGav, which is one of the largest MVNOs. I'm one of the first ones in Europe to go all in on the AWS cloud and they move all the data and the heart of the business there. So once you're sort of dealing with the network, the IT transformation, then you've got to go and look at how do you reinvent and accelerate the delivery of 5G connectivity? Well, that's very current as we're doing now. And we really want to help them because when they accelerate to the cloud, they get more flexibility, they get more agility to the get, more cost effectiveness. And if you think about how traditional telcos networks were built, where you have to provision a lot of systems, you have to provision a lot of on the base stations and then you needed to provision a lot of systems on the cloud, on the ram side, and then you needed to put aggregation centers, traffic centers, and then you would have the headquarters and then you would have all the network functions going from the radio all the way to the center. One of these systems needed to be provisioned for peak capacity, this sort of famous Mother's Day moment. As you move to the cloud, you can provision on the different parts of the cloud, you can provision on the AWS outpost, you can provision on Localson, you can provision on Regions and you leverage right away the experience that we've got and all of our infrastructure, reducing cost, getting a lot of flexibility and being able to embark just and consume what you need. And an example of that's been Telefonica Vivo in Brazil, we talked about that a couple of weeks ago and they've accelerated their move by deploying a 5G standalone cloud native platform and that gives them a lot of automation capabilities to give them faster CI, CD, CD. So really cool stuff that you couldn't do in the old ways of building networks. It's interesting, you mentioned CI, CD pipeline and developers to me, that's what comes to my mind when I think of AWS, the enablement of developers, now the enterprise. Now you get the telco cloud and Amazon is not known for being a 5G player but you guys are enabling a lot of 5G. Could you address that question? How is Amazon Web Services enabling 5G? What's your answer to that? So first of all, I'd like to say that 5G is an absolutely great example that this is a lot about moving to the cloud. 5G is cloud native, it's cloud friendly. You can virtualize pretty much every function. You can separate every function from the hardware and the software and move everything to the cloud. And that is really lending itself to move to a cloud delivery model. As we were talking about earlier, we are enabling people to go and take the AWS infrastructure, like AWS outpost and bringing all the AWS infrastructure, all the services, all the APIs and all the tools that you have on AWS virtually to any single location. And that allows you to really deploy things like thousands of sales sites across Iran. You couldn't do that before. On the AWS local zones, you can take everything there, compute, storage, databases and a lot of different services. And those are perfect for large metro areas where you need to do a lot of network traffic aggregation and this makes them really good to deploy in parts of the network core. Again, that's another innovation. And then you can look at them, the regions and the regions have everything that you need from a compute, storage and services perspective. And those are really well suited for BSS, for OSS to keep in the network running and to do all of that. And you can do that today, leveraging existing infrastructure that you don't have to acquire, that you don't have to provision, that you don't have to provision for the peak capacity and that you don't have to install and manage. And I think that's a serious breakthrough for the industry. Okay, so let me just capture that because I heard a bunch of things that I really like, cloud native 5G. What does cloud native 5G mean for the telco industry specifically? Well, I think that if I had to put it down to one thing, it's just about making it really easy to roll out. It's just about being able to deploy easily, to automate easily. So you can free up investment and you can free up resources and you can free up overhead. You can really start taking advantages of all that flexibility and scalability and automation that you get with the cloud and you apply that to a network. And that is the very first time we're able to do that in wireless. And it's just going to give you a lot of advantages. Look at Dish, right? We made this announcement with Dish that they're moving with one of the industry first cloud, 5G cloud native networks out there. Look at the example I talked about earlier, Telefonica V were doing that 5G standalone solution. So you're going to be seeing, this is just the beginning, but this is going to be not the end because it's a lot of interest in getting these benefits. I saw the Dave Brown announcement with Dish a while back, just recently. So I want to ask you, Graviton processors play a role in the Dish deal. Do you mind answering that if you comment on that? Yeah, I think you might remember Dave Brown being very proud of everything that Graviton two processors can do in terms of increasing the price performance, helping telecooperators, not only with the price performance factor, but also with the energy equation. So it's just really, really exciting to have that differentiation and being able to believe about innovation and that value to telecooperators in a cloud native 5G network. I got to ask you about some of the open source and cloud scale things coming together. It's a big trend I'm seeing here at Mobile World Congress, openness, multi-vendor, scaling up quickly, provisioning stuff fast and easy, leveraging existing technologies, and of course developer friendly. So with that, I got to ask you, what's all the big deal about with this open ran? Obviously radios are key and wireless. What does open ran mean? Can you take us through what's the importance of this? Well, yeah, open run is an industry wide and mostly industry wide initiative to look in and effectively trying to apply some of these, some of these open and sharing models to the run. And I said, you've got vendors and you've got telecooperators participating. But what we do, and you know as well, John, because you've been working with AWS for a while, you know that we're very customer focused, right? And 90% of what we do is what we hear that they're trying to solve because the things that matter to them. So when we engage with them, when we engage with somebody like Dish and they tell us that they're interested in open run, we will go and partner with the right partners who can provide the right solution to deliver on that open run. And you've seen we've signed agreements with the likes of Nokia to do research and solutions on cloud run. You also saw a couple of weeks ago, we did another collaboration announcement with Madinir to deliver not only cloud run, right? But a set of 5G solutions like IMS, the 4G, 5G converge packet core messaging and others. So we are engaging with the complete ecosystem on our customer's behalf to deliver whatever they're after. And open run is one of these topics and we are delivering to operators like Dish and others in the market. Do you think that this new shift with cloud is going to increase the surface area? Because that to me is the big theme I'm seeing with this new shift as we look at even telco cloud and edge. It's the classic surface area. And this is well known in the security world that there's no perimeter anymore. The surface area for security is everywhere. So things have changed. But telco just seems like the edge is expanding. You got satellite, you got space, you got more 5G, more commercial, so much more surface area. What's the impact going to be to the industry and to applications? Well, I think what we're seeing is 5G comes out there because there is a need for more data and more bandwidth, obviously increased security, new standards, but there is also about latency, right? Latency reduction. And I think that's really going to change the paradigm as we inject this increased responsiveness, this low latency closer to the edge. And we bring the applications and we bring the compute and we bring the storage as we do with wavelength right through to the edge as we do with Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI, SK Telecom, and operators around the world. This is going to enable a number of transformational use cases for society, whether they are in virtual reality, whether they are with autonomous driving, whether it's about automating and getting more intelligence into manufacturing processes. There is just so much potential to transform society. And it all comes back with these sort of new 5G and some of the things that enables like moving closer to the edge. So as I said, really interesting times. And Delvoe Hernandez, Vice President of Global Telco business with Amazon Web Services. Thanks for the great insight here on theCUBE for our Mobile World Congress coverage. Really, really great insight. Thanks so much. Thanks John, delighted to be here. If you don't mind, I'd like to just quickly shift gears which is something while I got you here on the industry. Delvoe, you're very well known in the industry for someone who knows how to turn things around. You've done that in the past. You've been part of growth companies. You've been part of companies that have refocused. Telco has been a big change over people looking at this new opportunity as a growth opportunity and people are looking at divesting some non-critical divisions and looking at acquisitions. I mean, the private equities on fire right now and you're starting to see a lot more formation because there's more visibility into territory to take. There's more opportunities to be had. This is more potential revenue than there is you can do on the cost-cutting side. So yeah, everyone I talk to who's been in the industry has got their eyes are really popping out of their head. They're saying, there's more opportunities if we can reconfigure our resources to take advantage of cloud. You're an expert in this area. For the folks out there who are in the boardrooms cranking away, thinking through how to organize for the cloud scale. What would be your advice to those teams? Well, I mean, there's a lot of insight to be had from the experience that at AWS we've gained through the years, right? Doing this at IT. Do you definitely have to get a top-down vision? I say, it's really going to start at the C-suite. It's moving to the cloud for what it brings, right? Faster pace of innovation, the cost reduction, the agility, right? And that's you've got to be thinking about going to the cloud top-down. Then the next thing you've got to go and say, okay, what are the parts of my operation that I can go after with cloud? Where do I start? Do I start with the IT applications? Do I start with some new go-to-market initiatives? Do I start by infusing some machine learning capabilities into existing operations? Do I start by building data lakes that I can go and monetize or I can go on and use to generate best-of-customer service? Or I can go and fundamentally transform my networks. Not every telco is going to start in a different place. But I would say is you've got to start looking at that agility, that faster innovation, that better use of resources that cloud brings to telco for the very first time in a long time, in decades. And then if you're going to do that, I would strongly recommend people to talk to the provider that's got the capabilities, the broader set of services, the deepest set of services, and the most relevant experience to do that. Because we've been doing that in IT and we've been working on telcos now for five plus years and we've got pretty much every relationship. And as you know, John, this is really important. In telco, you depend on collaborations on ISVs and software vendors and every vendor out there, every software company out there will develop, certainly on AWS. So we'd be delighted to engage with them and help them move forward. Yeah, and Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS last year at Reinvent really kind of made that the hallmark of his keynote around, get those teams together, the executives top down, be a builder, think like a builder. Mackenzie just put out a report, trillion dollar opportunities that no one sees yet that's coming. So a lot of emphasis on revenue, new revenue opportunities are coming and certainly this has been something that telco's been looking for for a long time. So great opportunity and thank you for sharing your insight, appreciate it. Thanks John. Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Mobile World Congress 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching.