 Telecommunications is well north of a trillion dollar business globally that provides critical services on which virtually everyone on the planet relies. Dramatic changes are occurring in the sector. And one of the most important dimensions of this change is the underlying infrastructure that powers global telecommunications networks. Telcos have been thawing out, if you will, their frozen infrastructure modernizing. They're opening up, they're disaggregating their infrastructure separating, for example, the control plane from the data plane and adopting open standards. Telco infrastructure is becoming software defined and leading telcos are adopting cloud native microservices to help make developers more productive so they can respond more quickly to market changes. They're embracing technology consumption models and selectively leveraging the cloud where it makes sense. And these changes are being driven by market forces the root of which stemmed from customer demand. So from a customer's perspective, they want services and they want them fast, meaning not only at high speeds, but also they want them now. Customers want the latest, the greatest and they want these services to be reliable and stable with high quality of service levels. And they want them to be highly cost effective. Hello and welcome to this preview of Mobile World Congress 2023. My name is Dave Vellante and at this year's event, theCUBE has a major presence at the show made possible by Dell Technologies and with me to unpack the trends in Telco and look ahead to MWC23 or Dennis Hoffman. He's the senior vice president and general manager of Dell's telecom business and Aaron Chason who was the vice president of telecom and edge solutions marketing at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks so much for spending some time with me. Thank you, Dave. Thanks, glad to be here. So Dennis, let's start with you. Telcos in recent history have been slow to deliver and to monetize new services in a large part because their purpose built infrastructure has been somewhat of a barrier to respond to these market forces. In many ways, this is what makes Telcoms really this market so exciting. So from your perspective, where is the action in this space? Yeah, the action Dave is kind of all over the place. Partly because it's an ecosystem play. You know, I think it's been, as you point out, the disaggregation trend has been going on for a while. The opportunity's been clear, but it has taken a few years to get all of the vendors and all of the components that make up a solution, as well as the operators themselves, to a point where we can start putting this stuff together and actually achieving some of the promise. So, Aaron, for those who might not be as familiar with Dell's activities in this area, you know, here we are just ahead of Mobile World Congress. It's the largest event for Telcoms. What should people know about Dell? What's the key message to this industry? Sure, yeah, I think everybody knows that there's a lot of innovation that's been happening in the industry of late. One of the major trends that we're seeing is that shift from more of a vertically integrated technology stack to more of a disaggregated set of solutions. And that trend has actually created a ton of innovation that's happening across the industry where along technology vendors and providers, the Telcoms themselves. And so one of the things that Dell's really looking to do as Dennis talked about is build out a really strong ecosystem of partners and vendors that we're working closely together to be able to collaborate on new technologies, new capabilities that are solving challenges that the networks are seeing today, be able to create new solutions built on those in order to be able to bring new value to the industry. And then finally, we wanna help both partners as well as our CSP providers activate those changes so that they can bring new solutions to market to be able to serve their customers. And so the key areas that we're really focusing on with our customers is technologies that help modernize the network to be able to capitalize on the value of open architectures and bring price performance to what they're expecting and availability that they're expecting today. And then also partner with the lines of business to be able to take these new capabilities, produce new solutions, and then deliver new value to their customers. Great, thank you, Aaron. So Dennis, you and I have known you for a number of years. I've watched you, you're a trend spotter, you're a strategic thinker. And I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze and now you gotta make it happen. So how would you describe Dell's strategy in this market? Well, it's really two things and I appreciate the comment. I'm not sure how much of a trend spotter I am, but I certainly enjoy and I think I'm fascinated by what's going on in this industry right now. Our two main thrusts, Dave, are first around trying to catalyze that ecosystem, be a force for pulling together a group of folks, vendors that have been flying in fairly loose formation for a couple of years to deliver the kinds of solutions that move the needle forward and produce the outcomes that our network operator customers can actually buy and consume and deploy and have them be supported. The other thing is there's a couple of very key technology areas that need to be advanced here. This ends up being a much anticipated year in telecom because of the delivery of some open infrastructure solutions that have been being developed for years with the Intel Sapphire Rapids program coming to market. We've, of course, got some purpose-built solutions on top of that for telecommunications networks, some expanded partnerships in the area of multi-cloud infrastructure. And so I would say the second main thrust is we've got to bring some intellectual property to the party. It's not just about pulling the ecosystem together, but those two things together really form the twin thrusts of our strategy. Okay, so as you point out, you're obviously not going to go alone in this market. It's way too broad. There's so many routes to market. Partnerships, obviously, very, very important. So can you share a little bit more about the ecosystem and partners? Maybe give some examples of some of the key partners that you'd be highlighting or working with, maybe at Mobile World Congress or other activities this year? Yeah, absolutely. As Aaron touched on, I'm a visual thinker. The way I think about this thing is a very, very vertical architecture is tipping sideways. It's becoming horizontal. And that all of the layers of that horizontal architecture are really where the partnerships are at. So let's start at the bottom. Silicon, the Silicon ecosystem is very much focused on this market and producing very specific products to enable open, high-performance telecom networks. That's both in the form of host processors as well as accelerators. One layer up, of course, is the stuff that we're known for. Subsystems, compute storage, the hardware infrastructure that forms the foundation for telco clouds. A layer above that, all of the cloud software layer, the virtualization and containerization software and all of the usual suspects there, all of whom are very good partners of ours and we're looking to expand that pretty broadly this year. And then at the top of the layer cake, all of the network functions, all of the VNFs and CNFs that were once kind of the top of proprietary stacks that are now opening up and being delivered as well-formed containers that can run on these clouds. So we're focusing on all of those, if you will, product partnerships. And there is a services wrapper around all of it. The systems integration necessary to make these systems part of a carrier's network, which of course has been running for a long time and needs to be integrated with in a very specific way. And so all of that together kind of forms the ecosystem. All of those are partners and we're really excited about being at the heart of it. Interesting, it's not like we've never seen this movie before, which is just sort of repeating itself in telco. Aaron, you heard my little intro upfront about the need to modernize infrastructure. I wonder if we could touch on another major trend which we're seeing is the cloud. And I'm talking about not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. There's, telcom providers are looking to the public cloud for specific use cases. You think about like bursting for an iPhone launch or whatever, but at the same time, these cloud vendors, they're sort of competing with telcos. They're providing local zones, for example, sometimes trying to do an end run on the telco connectivity services. So, telecom companies, they have to find the right balance between what they own and what they rent. And I wonder if you could add some color to as to what you see in the market and what Dell specifically is doing to support these trends. Yeah, I think the most important thing is what we're seeing as you said is these aren't things that we haven't seen before. And I think that telecom is really going through their own set of cloud transformations. And so, one of the hot topics in the industry now was what is telco cloud and what does that look like going forward? And it's going to be, as you said, a combination of services that they offer, services that they leverage. But at the end of the day, it's going to help them modernize how they deliver telecommunication services to their customers and then provide value added services on top of that. From a Dell perspective, we're really providing the technologies to provide the underpinnings to lay a foundation on which that network can be built, whether that's best of breed servers that are built and designed for the telecom environments. Recently, we announced our InforBlock program in partnering with virtualization providers to be able to provide engineered systems that dramatically simplify how our customers can deploy, manage, and lifecycle manage throughout day two operations, an entire cloud environment. And whether they're using Red Hat, whether they're using Wind River or VMware or other virtualization layers, they can deploy the right virtualization layer at the right part of their network to support the applications they're looking to drive. And Dell is looking to solve how they simplify and manage all of that, both from a hardware as well as a management software perspective. So this is really what Dell's doing to, again, partner with the broader technology community to help make that telco count a reality. Aaron, let's stay here for a second. I'm interested in some of the use cases that you're going after with customers. You got edge infrastructure, remote work, 5G, where security fit, what are the focus areas for Dell? And can we double click on that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I think there's two main areas of telecommunication industry that we're talking to. One, we've really been talking about the sort of the network buyer. How do they modernize the core, the network edge, the RAN capabilities to deliver traditional telecommunication services and modernize that as they move into 5G and beyond. I think the other side of the business is telecoms are really looking from a line of business perspective to figure out how do they monetize that network and be able to deliver value added services to their enterprise customers on top of these new networks. So you were just touching on a couple of things that are really critical. You know, in the enterprise space, AI and IoT is driving a tremendous amount of innovation out there. And there's a need for being able to support and manage edge compute at scale, be able to provide connectivity like private mobility in 4G and 5G, being able to support things like mobile workforces and client capabilities to be able to access these devices that are around all these edge environments of the enterprises. And telecoms are seeing as that as an opportunity for them to not only provide connectivity, but how do they extend their cloud out into these enterprise environments with compute, with connectivity, with client connectivity resources and even also provide protection for those environments as well. So these are areas that Dell is historically very strong at, being able to provide compute, being able to provide connectivity and being able to provide data protection and client services. We're looking to work closely with lines of businesses to be able to develop solutions that they can bring to market in combination with us to be able to serve their end user customers and their enterprises. So those are really the two key areas, not only network buyer, but being able to enable the lines of business to go and capitalize on the services they're developing for their customers. I think that line of business aspect is key. I mean, the telcos have had to sit back and provide the plumbing, cost per bit goes down, data consumption going for the roof, all the over at the top guys have had the field day with the data and the customer relationships. And now it's almost like the revenge of the telcos. Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell if you break out the binoculars a little bit? Yeah, I think you hit it earlier. We've seen the movie before. This has happened in the IT data center. We went from proprietary vertical solutions to horizontal open systems. We went from client server to software defined open hardware cloud native. And the trend is likely to be exactly that in the telecom industry because that's what the operators want. They're not naive to what's happened in the IT data center. They all run very large data centers. And they're trying to get some of the scale economies, some of the agility, the cost of ownership benefits. For the reasons Aaron just discussed, it's clear as you point out, this industry's been really defined by the inability to stop investing and the difficulty to monetize that investment. And I think now everybody's looking at this 5G and frankly, 5G plus 6G and beyond as the opportunity to really go get a chunk of that revenue and enterprise edge is the target. And 5G is touching so many industries and that kind of brings me Aaron to Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got industry 4.0, you've got our traditional industry and telco colliding, there's public policy. So give us a teaser to Mobile World Congress 23. What's on deck at the show from Dell? Yeah, we're really excited about Mobile World Congress. This, as you know, is a massive event for the industry every year. And it's really the event that the whole industry uses to kick off this coming year. So we're going to be using this obviously to talk to our customers and our partners about what Dell is looking to do and what we're innovating on right now and what we're looking to partner with them around. In the front of the house, we're going to be doing, we're going to be highlighting 13 different solutions and demonstrations to be able to show our customers what we're doing today and show them the use cases and put it into action. So they get to actually look and feel and touch and experience what it is that we're working around. Obviously meetings are important. Everybody knows Mobile World Congress is the place to get those meetings and kick off for the year. So we're going to have a, you know, we're looking at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be looking to have across the industry with our customers and partners in the broader community. And of course we've also got technology that's going to be in a variety of different partner spaces as well. So you can come and see us in hall three but we're also going to have technologies all kind of spread all over the floor. And of course there's always the cube. You're going to be able to see us live all four days, all day, every day. You're going to be hearing our executives, our partners, our customers talk about, you know, what Dell is doing to innovate in the industry and how we're looking to leverage the broader open ecosystem to be able to transform, you know, the network and what we're looking to do. So that in that space, we're going to be focusing on what we're doing from an ecosystem perspective, our infrastructure focus. We'll be talking about what we're doing to support Tech-O-Cloud transformation. And then finally, as we talked about earlier, how are we helping the lines of business within our telecoms monetize the opportunity? So these are all different things we're really excited to be focusing on and look forward to the event next month. Yeah, it's going to be awesome in Barcelona at the FIRA, as you say, Dell's big presence in hall three, Orange is in there, Deutsche Telecom, Intel's in hall three, VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone, you got great things to see there. Check that out. And of course the cube, we were super excited to be collaborating with you. We got a great setup. We're in the walkway right between halls four and five right across from the government of Catalonia, who are the host partners for the event. So there's going to be a ton of action there. Guys can't wait to see you there. I really appreciate your time today. Great, thanks. All right, Mobile World Congress, the cubes coverage starts on February 27th, right after the keynotes. So first thing in the morning, East Coast time, we'll be broadcasting as Aaron said, all week Monday through Thursday on the show floor. Check that out at thecube.net, siliconangle.com has all the written coverage and go to dell.com, see what's happening there. Have all the action from the event. Don't miss it. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you there.