 Okay, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, and we're here for virtual coverage. We're not yet face-to-face as we start to come out of COVID. We're still doing the remotes, but we got theCUBE virtual here with Dennis Hoffman, Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Telecom Systems Business Group within Dell Technologies. Dennis, great to see you. Thanks for coming on, CUBE alumni. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure, John. Great to see you and look forward to the days when we can stop doing this virtually. Well, you guys have been certainly pumping out a lot of content. And right now, Telco Cloud, Telco Disruption is big. We heard Michael Dell last event. And even when we were in person in real life, he was really laying down the 5G leadership. Now with Hybrid Cloud, standardized pretty much. I mean, the consensus is no debate, really. It's Hybrid, multi-cloud on the horizon, but still just a subsystem of basically distributed computing, AKA Hybrid Cloud makes the edge a huge part of the story this year. And the innovations are all around Telecom. Edge and 5G have been around and they're changing really fast. What's, how are these Edge and 5G technologies impacting the market today? Yeah, it's fascinating times. I'll tell you, they are providing really the ultimate carrots, you know, the catalyst for innovation in the market and really driving the world's network operators to wanna take advantage of all the opportunity that the Edge presents and that 5G enables. And it's, you know, at the end of the day, it's really forcing folks to think hard about if they have the right network architectures to enable that, to capture that opportunity, to have the right kind of capabilities. And so we're seeing an awful lot of interest in network desegregation, network modernization, various forms of adopting the technologies you and I are familiar with from years of what's going on in data center evolution. I'm really starting to hit the Telco network now at a really, really interesting time. You know, while we're on the landscape, I do wanna get your opinion on something I've been hearing a lot, certainly in interviewing other folks here at Dell Tech World and in the industry about how the Edge and the data compute equation and the connectivity has changed how they're gonna lay out essentially their factory, their plants, their operations, and certainly COVID pushing everyone at home has changed the game on how data's being computed on and how apps are being built. This is a huge 5G opportunity, certainly when you start to get into the business impact, autonomous vehicles. Well, I've been doing stories about autonomous boats and, you know, everything's gonna be, we could have been autonomous cubes. So, you know, everything's autonomous which drives to this whole edge piece. What's your take on that? Yeah, you know, it's funny, for years we've been talking about on-prem and off-prem, like there's two prems. Turns out there's a third prem, right? There's the other premises and that is not the private data center and not the public cloud. And when you stop and think about it, it makes sense because at the end of the day, wherever we can get data, we can create digital advantage. And it's always been cheaper and more effective and faster to move compute to data than to move data to compute. So, technologies like 5G are beginning to make it possible to run very interesting applications in very different places and capture what is predicted to be, you know, some three quarters of the data created over the next decade is gonna get created somewhere other than a private data center or a public cloud. And that's the edge. You know, and telcos look at that third premises as their opportunity to get another bite of the apple on services. You know, 4G was kind of a story of the over the top players really took the profit pool and made a lot of money from the Ubers to the Netflixes to the iTunes and so on and so forth. But when you come back to 5G and think of it kind of as the enterprise G, it's a chance now for the world's network operators to really get a chunk of that profit pool that comes from the emergence of this third premises called the edge. Enterprise G, I love that. I'm gonna steal that from you. It's great, great. I stole it from somebody else. So just... It's anonymous, yeah, the new trend. But it's a business, it's a business opportunity. Again, totally cool and consumers too. Okay, so you got, you're out on the road a lot. I know that we've talked in the past on theCUBE. There's a lot of discussions in the industry as well as customers that you're having. What are you hearing? What are some of the pain points? Obviously COVID has unveiled new use cases. People had adapted to it. There's adaptations that are out there that are new. And then things that might not happen again. What are you hearing from customers? Yeah, I would say in summary, we're hearing a mix of optimism and uncertainty. Optimism around all the stuff we just talked about and that you mentioned, it's a blank from anywhere world, right? Work from anywhere, learn from anywhere, medicine from anywhere. And if the pandemic has taught us anything, it's about the absolute necessity of communications technology to the world we live in today. The uncertainty comes from this question of, okay, so I know that there's this big opportunity. And I know that I need to modernize my network architecture and kind of change the way I operate to capture it all. But the architectures I run on today make that really hard. And the architectures that the modern data center is built on, we know they work, but how do I get them in a way that allows me to build a resilient, high-performance, agile communications network? Today, we face a world in which, or we see it, we have a world in which solutions are delivered fairly monolithically in the network for network operators. But going forward, the power to potentially decompose all of that is wonderful, provided it can be recomposed in a way they can consume. And I think that's where the uncertainty lies. There's a lot of testing and trialing of pieces, of applications, of underlying hardware, infrastructure, servers, accelerators, certainly different types of virtualization and containerization technologies. But in the end, these networks need to run at many, many, many nines. And they need to be extremely robust and pulling together a lot of different components from an open ecosystem is a daunting challenge for most of the network operators. You know, I hear you saying about the opportunity recognition and the refactoring, how we called it, recomposing. There's opportunity here. And again, I like this enterprise G angle because what it means is it's not a consumer, it's only, it's everything. It's a complete consumerization of IT. So it's a whole nother edge, landscape, prem, the third premise is the edge. All good. I've also said on theCUBE, and certainly Dave and I have rifted on this, is that, you know, everything's now cloud operations and the data center is a big edge and you got other pieces that are just edges of a distributed system. Kind of sounds like a computer from the cloud. So this is kind of an operating model. So I have to ask the question, which is in telco, if it's going to be distributed like that and it's going to be operated at scale, how is Dell responding to capture the mind share and customers using Dell in this new telco disruption? Because it's kind of, you got to keep the lights on and you got to also get them in a position to take advantage of the new opportunities. How are you responding? Yeah, well, we're trying to, we're literally trying to fill that gap, you know, the, in talking to the world's modern or say the world's telecom network operations leaders, we've had a lot of conversations with folks about what they need to do and what's holding them back from, really in many ways, taking advantage of the digital transformation that's kind of rippling through the economy. And as they kind of laid that out to us, we decided that it was an enormous opportunity for Dell, that this new network will be fundamentally built on compute technology and it will be open industry standard compute technology. And on top of that, we will use virtualization. And if this begins to sound like the way data centers are being built, because that's, you know, exactly what's happening. But more than that, I think there's a need for an at scale substantial provider that the world's biggest carriers can bet on and feel they can trust as a strategic partner to not only pull the ecosystem together, validate it, certify it, curate it a little bit and deliver it as an outcome, but then stand behind it and be running. And importantly, do all of that in a way that doesn't constrain the continuous innovation that's really the hallmark of some of these modern architectures. So for us, we see, you know, an opportunity that is literally perfectly built for a company like Dell. And that's why we decided to invest in it. That's why you hear Michael talking about it a lot. It's, you know, it's really super well aligned with our strategy. We think it's actually key to winning the edge. And it's also really well aligned with our purpose. You know, this company exists to accelerate human progress through technology. And this little slice of it is all about accelerating communications and the transformation of modern networks to do exactly that, right? To help close a digital divide, to bring fair and equitable medicine and learning to all and to allow us all to work from wherever we're working. So it's something that we're excited about on multiple levels. And we think the company is really built for the distributed computing environment that a modern telco network represents. Yeah, what's interesting is that the value that you guys can enable at the edge is real impact. It's not just data center and compute and have applications. You remember the old days, oh, I got my CRM and my ERP and I got my apps on my systems and it's all good. Now business is completely software enabled. It's the entire business and the business is software enabled, which means that you have to have that edge. So I totally love the positioning and the strategy. I have to ask you, if you don't mind, where is the resonance with customers? When you look at the telco enablement there that you're enabling them to do, what's resonating the most? What's jumping out from the telcos in terms of what Dell's doing for them and the customers you mentioned, telemedicine, which by the way is an amazing impact to the world. Just one example, but where's the resonance? Yeah, first we are what we are, right? I think with a lot of conversations, it begins with the telecommunications network needs server technology, but it needs very specific kinds of server technology built in very specific ways. The needs of compute at the base of a cell tower on a hill in Montana in the middle of winter are different than we've been building for data centers for years. So I think the first thing that resonates is, I need a very specific kind of open compute infrastructure, a hardware foundation that is industry standard and we turn to somebody like Dell to do exactly that. But what we've learned is there's so much more than that because really we need to begin to deliver outcomes on top of that foundation. For the first outcome we need to deliver is modern operations and maintenance of a distributed network. Zero touch provisioning, zero touch upgrading. How can we impact the total cost of maintenance and ownership in a meaningful way for a network that is in fact constructed out of a fabric of servers? On top of that, there's the actual network core, network services edge, the radio access network and how do we successively open up each section of the network driving compute and storage all the way to the edge? Because for many organizations in the world, many enterprises, their edge will actually be on the telco premises, right? The telco edge will be their edge. Some of the bigger companies certainly can build their own but as you get into the world of medium and small business, the person they buy their circuits from and their communications from, if they have the ability to deliver them private slices of networks and virtual compute and storage, that's going to be how they get after it. So for us that next piece that resonates is the ability to pull together solutions like we've been doing for years with the X-Rail, hyper-converged, the stuff we did with VCE back in the day. And then last, also go ahead. I'm just saying that you're bringing up things that kind of sound super complex, physical plant and equipment. You're talking about real hard and purpose-built devices in the past, very operational technology oriented stuff. And then that has to have IT agility, right? And then have scalability behind it and complete integration. This is not obvious and easy. It's hard. Yeah, I know. I mean, software doesn't run on software, right? Software runs on hardware. And so as much as a lot of the power and the interest comes from what the application can do, underlying it all as a capability to distribute compute and storage, to where the application or the software wants to run or runs best. What's really cool about 5G is its ability to do the stuff you mentioned earlier on, the G-Wiz stuff, drones and autonomous and AR and VR and all the things that are ultra reliable, low latency communication would make possible on a grand scale that really bring the machines into the picture, not just humans on the edge. It's the stuff that's on the edge. And we've been talking about it for a long time, but none of it's gonna matter if we don't put this infrastructure foundation in place. Then we got to lay an open marketplace of containerized network functions, virtualized network functions on top of that, all to enable our network operators to deliver interesting services to end users. It's super exciting. I got to say, Dan, it's super exciting because you know what's coming. It's like the energy's there. It's like the, you know, the storms coming of disruption, the innovation because you think about what containers and cloud native Kubernetes, the cloud native technologies can do for legacy gives it shelf life and more headroom, right? So you can, you can win these telcos can actually not only pivot, but line extension into new capabilities. So, you know, they tend to be very strong technically as an operator, operator networks, you know, the hard, you know, tech stuff but physical stuff and software, I mean, but not known for it. I mean, but now there's a huge opportunity that's going to come around the corner. I'm bullish on IoT and edge where you have the OT and IT coming together. It's really compelling. And it's going to be radically different, I think, in the next five to 10 years. What's your take on that in terms of outlook? I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's, for those of us that are in the industry always the knowledge of what's coming or the belief in what's coming, the hype precedes the actual development. But, you know, just as, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, the idea that you could completely disrupt the taxi industry with an app and a 4G smartphone service was in nobody's mind, except maybe a couple of people, you know. Exactly. It makes you wonder what is the Uber equivalent of a business service that will be fundamentally enabled by the architecture we just described that we're not thinking about right now. And that's why, you know, every time we move from a centralized computing model to a decentralized computing model, it's that decentralized computing model is dramatically larger than the centralized one. Client server, way bigger than mainframe. Edge, way bigger than client server, which is already way bigger than cloud, public cloud. And so I think it's, you know, there's a lot of promise, a lot of excitement, still a long way to go, though. You know, a lot of the stuff we're talking about still is not actually rolled out into the network. And that's kind of the opportunity for somebody like Dell. Yeah, and decentralized and open wins. It's funny, you mentioned hype. We were talking, Dave and I were just talking about Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger in 2013, we were talking hybrid cloud, that's seven, eight years ago. Yeah. Okay, so good stuff. Let's get into the news real quick. Dell Tech World, you got some news coming. Let's dig into it. Please share some of the outlook of the news you're going to be, you're announcing here. Yeah, thanks. Sure, John. I mean, we're going to be announcing two things relative to the telecom portfolio. And they're both reference architectures with VMware. One is the second edition of the telco cloud platform for 5G. So that's a Dell VMware reference architecture that is exactly what we just talked about. It's this open software defined on industry standard hardware platform for running 5G applications. And then the other one is the first version of the telco cloud platform for the radio access network. PCP ran, as we would call it. And as we start to push this technology from the core out towards the edge of the telecom network. So two really interesting developments in deep partnership with VMware and stuff we've been working on for a while. Stuff we are in fact, working on with customers and delivering today. And we'll be making formal announcements about those at the DTW show. Awesome, Dennis. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing the update. And thanks for the industry insight. I love the telco shift that's going on. It's an extension of existing. I think cloud native saves the day here with telco and allows the completely different landscape to evolve. So you guys are on top of it. Thanks for sharing. SVP and general manager of the telecom systems business with Dell Dennis Hopman. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, John. Okay, CUBE coverage here at Dell Tech World. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.