 Thanks Adam, thanks for one in the studio. Dave, we got some great in-stage cube interviews. Normally we will sit at the desk and do a remote, but since it's a virtual event and a physical event, it's a hybrid event. We've got two amazing Google leaders to talk with us. I had a chance to sit down with Amal, who was gone yesterday during our breaking news segment. They had the big news. We had two great guests, Amal Padkay. He's our first interview. He's the head of Google's telecom industry. Again, he came in, broke into our segment yesterday with breaking news, obviously the relationship with Erickson and the O-Ran Alliance. I had a great chance to chat with him. A wide-ranging conversation for 13 minutes. Enjoy my interview with Amal right now. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage for Mobile World Congress 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in person as well as remote. It's a hybrid event. We're on the ground at Mobile World Conference Green. All the action here, we're remote with Amal Padkay, who's the managing director of the telecom industry solutions team at Google Cloud, a big leader and driving a lot of the change. Amal, thank you for coming on theCUBE here and the hybrid event for Mobile World Congress. Thank you, John. Thank you, John. Thank you for having me. So hybrid event, which means it's in person. We're on the floor as well as doing remote interviews and people are virtual. This is the new normal. Kind of highlights where we are in this telecom world because last time Mobile World Congress actually had a physical event was winter of 2019. A ton has changed in the industry. Look at the momentum at the edge. Hybrid cloud is now standard. Multi-cloud is being set up as we speak. This is all now the new normal. What is your take? It's pretty active in your industry. Tell us your opinion. Yes, John. I mean, the last two years have been seismic to say the least, right? I mean, in terms of the change that the CSP industries had had to do. You know, John, in the last two years, the importance of a CSP infrastructure has never become so important, right? The infrastructure is paramount. I'm talking to you remotely over a CSP infrastructure right now and everything that we're doing in the last two years, whether it's working or studying or entertaining ourselves, all on that CSP infrastructure. So from that perspective, they are really becoming a critical national global information fabric on which the society is actually depending on. And that we see at Google as well in the sense that we have seen up to 60% increase in demand, John, in the last two years for that infrastructure. And then when I look at the industry itself, unfortunately, all of that huge demand is not translating into revenue, right? Because as an industry, the revenue is still flatlining. In fact, the forecasted revenue for globally for all the industry over the next 12 months is three to 5% negative on revenue, right? So one starts to think, how come there is so much demand over the last two years post pandemic? And that's not translating to revenue. Having said that, the other thing that's happening is this demand is driving significant capex and optics investments in the infrastructure as much as eight to $900 billion over the next decade is going to get spent in this infrastructure from our perspective, which means it's really a perfect storm, John, right? We have massive demand, massive need to invest to meet that demand, yet not translating to revenue. And the crux of all this is customer experience because ultimately all of that translates into not having that kind of radically disruptive or transformational customer experience, right? So that's a backdrop that we find ourselves in the industry. And that really sets a stage for us to look at these challenges in terms of how does the CSP industry as a whole grow top line, radically transform PSTCO at the same time reinventing the customer experience and finding those capital efficiencies. It's almost an impossible problem to solve. Yeah, it's a perfect storm. The waves are kind of coming together to form one big wave. You mentioned capex and optics. That's obviously changing the investments of their post pandemic growth and change in user behavior and expectations. The modern applications are being built on top of the infrastructure that's changing. All of this is being driven by cloud native and that's clear. And you're seeing a lot more open kind of approaches, IT and OT coming together, whatever you want to do. This is just, it's a collision, right? It's a collision of many things and this positive innovation coming out of. So I have to ask you, what are you seeing of the solutions that are showing the most promise for these telco industry leaders? Because they're digitally transforming so they got to refactor their platforms while enabling innovation, which is a key growth for the revenue. Yes. So John, from a solution standpoint, what we actually did first and foremost as Google Cloud was look at ourselves. So just like the transformation we just talked about in the CSP industry, we are seeing Google being transformed over the last two decades or so, right? And it's important to understand that there's a lot Google did over the last two decades that we can actually now externalize all of that innovation, all of that open source, all of that multi-cloud was originally built for all the Google applications that all of us use daily, whether it's YouTube or mail or maps, you know, same infrastructure, same open source, same multi-cloud and we decided to sort of use the same paradigms to build the telecom solutions that I'm going to talk about next, right? So that's important to bear in mind that those assets were there and we wanted to externalize those assets, right? There are really four big solutions that are resonating really well with our CSP partners, John. You know, number one to your point is how can they monetize the edge? All of this happens at the edge, all of this gets converged at the edge. We believe with 5G acting as the brilliant catalyst to really drive this edge deployment. CSPs would be in a very strong position partnering with cloud players like ourselves to drive growth, not just for their offline but also to add value to the actual end enterprises that are seeking to use that edge. Let me give you a couple of examples. We've been working with industries like retail and manufacturing to create edge solutions in a post pandemic world solutions like contactless shopping or visual inspection of an assembly line in a manufacturing plant without the need for having a human there because of the digitization of workforce, which meant these kinds of solutions can actually work well at the edge driven by 5G but of course they can't be done in isolation. So what we do is we partner with CSPs, we bring our set of solutions and we actually launched in December 30 partners that are ready on our Google cloud solutions. And then we partner with the CSPs based on our infrastructure and their infrastructure to ultimately bring this all to life at the end customer, which often tends to be an enterprise whether it's a manufacturing plant or a retail which I... You guys got some great examples there. I love that edge story. I think it's huge. I think it's only gonna get bigger. I got to ask you while I got you here because again, you're in the industry, the managing director, so you have to oversee this whole telecom industry but it's bigger, it's beyond telecom, right? Now telecom is just one other edge network piece of the pie and the sugar computing, as we say. So I got to ask you, one of the big things that Google brings to the table is the developer mojo and open source and scale. Obviously the scale's unprecedented as everyone knows, everyone knows that. But ecosystems are super important and telcos kind of really aren't good at that, right? So the telco ecosystem was, I mean, I'd say okay, but mostly driven by carriers and moving bits from point A to point B. But now you've got a developer mindset, public cloud, developer ecosystem. How is this changing the landscape of the CSPs and how are they changing? How is it changing this cloud service providers ability to execute? Because that's the key in this new world. What's your opinion? Absolutely, John. So there are two things there, two dimensions to look at. One is when we came to market a couple of years ago with Anthos, we recognized exactly what you said, John, which is the world is moving to multi-cloud hybrid cloud. We needed to provide a common platform that the developer community can utilize through microservices and API. And that platform had to, by definition, work not just from Google Cloud, but any cloud. It could work on any public cloud, it can work on CSPs, private cloud and of course it works on Google Cloud. The reason was once you deploy Anthos once as a seamless application development platform, you could put all kinds of developer apps on top. So I just talked about 5G Edge, John, a minute ago. Those apps can sit on Anthos, but at the same time, IT to your point, John, IT apps could also sit on the same Anthos paradigm and network apps. So as networks start becoming cloud native, whether it's RAN, whether it's ORAN, whether it's 5G core, same principle. And that's why we believe when we partner with CSPs, we are saying, hey, you give this Anthos to an ecosystem of community, whether that community is network, whether that community is IT, whether that community is Edge apps, all of those can reside seamlessly on this sort of Anthos fabric, John. Yeah, and that's going to set the table for multi-cloud, which is basically cloud words for multi-vendor, multi-app. Well, I got to ask you all you have here. First of all, thank you for coming on and sharing your insights. It's a really great industry perspective. And obviously Google Cloud has got huge scale, great leadership, and again, the big cloud players are moving in and helping out and enabling a lot of value. I got to ask you, if you don't mind sharing, if someone asked you, hey, Mul, tell me about the impact that public cloud is having on the telco industry. What would you say? What's the answer to that? Because a lot of people are like, okay, public cloud, I get it. I know what it looks like, but now everyone knows it's going hybrid. So everyone asks you, we'll ask you the question. What is public cloud doing for the telecom sector? Yeah, I think it's doing three things, John. And great question, by the way. Number one, we are actually providing unprecedented amount of insights on data that the CSP traditionally already had, but have never looked at it from the angle we have looked at, whether that insights are at a network layer, whether those insights are to personalize customer experiences on the front end systems, or whether those insights are to drive care solutions in contact centers and so on and so forth. So it's a massive uplift of customer experience that we can help on, right? So that's a very important point because we do have a significant amount of leadership, John, at Google Cloud on analytics and data and insights, right? So we offer those to our CSP partners. Number two is really what I talked about, which is helping them build an ecosystem because let's take retail as an example. As a minimum, there are five constituents in that ecosystem, John. There is a CSP, there is Google Cloud, there is an actual retail store, there is a hardware supplier, there is a software developer. All of them, as a minimum, have to work together to build that ecosystem, which is where we give those solutions, right? So that's a second part. And then the third part is, as they move towards cloud native, we are really helping them change their business model to become a DevOps, a cloud native mindset, not just a cloud native network or IT, but a cloud native mindset that creates unparalleled agility and flexibility in how they work as a business. So those are the three things I would say as a response to that question. And also the retail is a great vertical for Google to go in there, given the Amazon fear out there, people want this for certainly low hanging fruit. I think the DevOps piece is gonna be a big winning opportunity to see how the developers get driven into the landscape. I think that's a huge point, Amal. That's really great insight. Final question for you while I got you here. If someone says, hey, what's happened in the industry since 2019? Last time we had Mobile World Congress, they were talking speeds and feeds. Now the world has changed. We're coming out of the pandemic. California is opening up. There's gonna be a physical event. The world's going hybrid, certainly on the event and certainly cloud. What's different in the telecom industry from many, many months ago, over a year and a half ago from 2019? I would say primarily it's the adoption of digital everywhere, which previously there were all these inhibitions and oh, would this work? Would my customer systems become fully digital? Would I be able to offer AR VR experiences? Ah, that's a futuristic thing. And suddenly the pandemic has created this acceleration that says, oh, even post pandemic, half my customers are always going to talk to me via a digital channel only, which means the way they experience us has to be through these new experiences, whether it's AR VR, whether it's some other type of applications. So that has been accelerated, John, and the CSPs have therefore really started to go to the application and to the services, which is why you're seeing less on speeds and feeds because 5G is here, 5G is being deployed. Now how do we monetize 5G? How can we leverage the application? So that's the biggest change. There's down stack and then there's a top of the stack for applications and certainly there's a lot of assets in the telecom landscape, a lot of value, a lot of refactoring going on and new opportunities that are out there. Great, great conversation. Well, thank you. Well, Padka, Managing Director Telecom Industry Solutions. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Thank you, John. Thank you for having me. Okay, Mobile World Congress here in person and hybrid and remote. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thank you for watching. We are here in person at the Cloud City Expo Community Area. Thanks for watching. Okay, that was us. That was me online. Now I'm here in person, as you can see, Dave. That's a lot of fun. I love doing those interviews. We had a chance to grab Google's top people when we could. They're not here. Obviously Amazon, Web Services, Microsoft and Google the three hyperscalers, Dave. Didn't make it out here. They didn't have a booth, but we had a chance to grab them and that was head of the industry marketing and I mean the industry group. So he's like the managing director. He runs the business side. It's an important sector for Google. Amazon was really first with that push into Telco. Thomas Curian last March laid out Google's strategy for Telco. It's a huge sector. They know it. They understand how the cloud can disrupt it and play a massive role there. And Google, of course. They're not going to object to the public cloud narrative that Daniel Royce is pushing. I think they like it. Open source, Android coming to Telco. Who knows what he's looking like. Okay, so the next interview I did was with Salish Shukla. He is the senior vice president. He's the senior leader at Google Cloud for networking. And if you know Google, Dave, Google's networking is really well known in the industry for being really awesome because they power obviously Google search and a variety of other things. They pioneered the concept of a SRE, site reliability engineer, which is now de facto position for DevOps, which is a cloud now persona inside almost every company and certainly a very important position. It's probably the biggest global network, right? Undersea cables. I mean, Microsoft's got a big hyperscale because they've had MSN and a bunch of other stuff, infrastructure globally. But Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all have massive scale and Google, again, is very well engineered. They're total nerds, as we know, I live in Palo Alto, so I can attest that they're very strong. So this next interview is really from a networking perspective because as infrastructure as code gets more prolific and more penetrated, it's going to be programmable. And that's very going to be a key new enabler. So let's hear from Silesh, head of networking at Google, cloud in my interview with him. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. We are here in person in Barcelona as well as remote, it's a hybrid event. You're going to have the physical space in Barcelona for the first time since 2019 and virtual worlds connecting. I got a great guest here from Google, Shailesh Yukhla, Vice President and General Manager of the networking team, Google Cloud. Shailesh, great to see you. Thank you for coming on theCUBE for this special presentation from Mobile World Congress. I'll see the edge networking, core edge, human devices, all coming together. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much, John. It's great to see you again and it's always a pleasure talking to theCUBE. And I want to also say hello to everybody from Mobile World Congress. Yeah, and people don't know your background. You've a great history in networking. You've been there, many ways of innovation. You've been part of directly big companies that we're now known, big names are all there. But now we haven't had a Mobile World Congress since 2019. Think about that. Many months, 27 months gone by since the world has changed in Telco. I got to ask you, what is the disruption happening because think about that. Since 2019, a lot's changed in Telco. Cloud of scale has happened. You've got the edge developing, it's IT like now. What's your take, Shailesh, tell us. Yeah, John, as you correctly pointed out, last 18 months have been very difficult and I'll acknowledge that right up front for a number of people around the world, I empathize with that. Now in the telecom and kind of the broader edge world, I would say that the last 18, 24 months have actually been transformative. COVID, it turns out, was a very interesting sort of driver of completely new ways of both living as well as working. As we all have experienced, I don't think that I've had a chance to see you live in 24 months. So what we are seeing is the following. Number one, a number of telecom carriers around the world have started the investment process for 5G and deployment process. And that actually changes the game as you know, due to latency, due to all of the capabilities around incredible bandwidth, much lower latency, as well as much higher enterprise oriented capabilities. So network slicing as an example, quality of service by a traffic type and for a given enterprise. So that's number one. Number two, I would say that the cloud is becoming a lot more kind of mainstream in the world, broader world of telecom. What we are seeing is an incredible amount of partnerships between telecom carriers and cloud providers. So instead of thinking of those two as separate universes, those are starting to come together. So I believe that over a period of time, you will see the notion of kind of cloud native capability for both the IT side of the house, as well as the network side of the house is becoming kind of mainstream, right? And then the third thing is that increasingly it's a lot more about enabling new markets, new applications in the enterprise world, right? So certainly it opens up a new kind of revenue stream for service providers and carriers around the world, but it also does something unique, which is brings together the cloud capabilities, right? Around elasticity, flexibility, intelligence and so on, with the enterprise customer base that most of the cloud providers already have and with the combination of 5G, brings it to the telecom world. And those, I started to call it as kind of the triad, right? The triad of an enterprise, the telecom service provider and the cloud provider, all working together to solve real kind of business problems. And it's totally a great call out there on the pandemic. I think the pandemic has shown us coming out of it now, that cloud scale matters. And you've looked at all the successes between work play and how we've all kind of adjusted the cloud technologies were a big part of that, those solutions that got us through it. Now you got the edge developing with 5G. And I got to ask this question because when we have CUBE interviews with all the leaders of engineering teams, whether it's in the industry or at customers in the enterprise and even in the telcos, the modern application teams have end to end visibility of the workload. You're starting to see more and more of that. You're starting to see more open source in everything, right? So, okay, I buy that. You got an SRE on the team, you got some modern developers, you're shifting left, you got DevSecOps, all good, all cloud. However, you're a networking guy, you know this. Routing packets across multiple networks is difficult. So if you're going to have end to end visibility, you got to have end to end intelligence on the networking. How is that being solved? Because this is a critical discussion here at Mobile World Congress. Okay, I buy cloud native, I buy observability, I buy open source, but I got to have end to end visibility for security and workload management and managing all the data. What's the answer on the network side? Yeah, so that's a great question. And the simple way to think about this is first and foremost, you need kind of global infrastructure, right? So that's a given. And of course, you know, Google, with its kind of global infrastructure and some of the largest networks in the world, we have that present, right? So that's important. Second is to be able to abstract a way that underlying infrastructure and make it available to applications through a set of APIs, right? So I'll give an analogy here. Just as, you know, say 10 years ago, around 10 years ago, Android came into the market from Google in the following way. What it did was that it abstracted away the underlying devices with a simple kind of layer on top of operating system, which exposed APIs northbound so that application developers can write new applications. And that actually unleashed, you know, a ton of kind of creativity, right? Around the world. And that's precisely what we believe is kind of the next step, as you said, on an end-to-end observability basis, right? What if you can do an abstraction away from all of the underlying kind of core infrastructure, provide the right APIs, the right kind of information around observability, around telemetry, instead of making, you know, cloud and the infrastructure, the black box, make it open, make it kind of visible to the applications, bring that to the applications and let the thousand flowers bloom, right? The creativity in each vertical area is so significant because there are independent software vendors, there are systems integrators, there are individual developers. So one of the things that we are doing right now is utilizing open source technologies such as Kubernetes, right? Which is something that Google actually brought into the market and it has become kind of the de facto standard for all of the container and modernization of applications. So by leveraging those open technologies, creating this common control plane, exposing APIs, right? For everything from application development to observability, you suddenly have the ability to solve business problems through a large number of entities in the systems integrator and the ISV and the developer community. So that's the approach that we are taking, John. I love the Android analogy of the subtractional layer because at that time the iPhone was closed, it still is and they got their own little strategy there. Android went the other way. They went open, went open abstraction. Now abstraction layers are good and now I want to get your thoughts on this because anyone in operating systems knows that abstractions are great for innovation. How does that apply to the real world on Telco? Because I get how it could add some programmability in there. I get the control plane piece, putting it into the operator's hands. How do you guys see and how do you guys talk about the Edge service offering? What does it mean for the Telco? Because when I get this right, this is going to be in Telco Cloud developer play. It's going to be a Telco Cloud ecosystem play. It's an opportunity for a new kind of Telco system. How do you see that rolling out in the real world? Great question, John. So the way I look at it, actually even we should take a step back, right? So the confluence of 5G, the kind of cloud capabilities and the Edge is very clear to me that it's going to unleash a significant amount of innovation. We are in early stages, no question, but it's going to drive innovation. So one almost has to start by saying, what exactly is Edge, right? So the way I look at it is that the Edge can be a continuum all the way from kind of an IoT device, an automobile, right? Or an enterprise Edge, like a factory location or a retail store or kind of a bank branch to the Telecom Edge, which is where the service providers have not only their points of presence and central offices, but increasingly a very large amount of intelligent ran sites as well, right? And then the public cloud Edge, right? Where, for example, Google has 25 plus regions around the world, 144 pops, lots of CDN locations. We have a few thousand nodes deployed deep inside service provider networks for caching of content and so on. So if you think about these as different places in the network that you can deploy compute storage and intelligence at, right? And do that in a smart way, right? For example, if you were to run the learning algorithms in the cloud with its flexibility and elasticity and run the inferencing at the edge, very edge at the point of sort of a sale or a point where a consumer is standing, now you suddenly have the ability to create a variety of Edge applications. So going back to then your question, what are we seeing, right? So what we are seeing is depending on the vertical, there are different types of Edge applications, okay? So let's take a few examples and I'll give you some favorite example of mine which is in the sports arena, right? So in the baseball, right? When you are in a stadium and soon there are people sort of starting to be in stadiums, right? And a pitcher is throwing the pitch, right? The trajectory of the ball, the speed of the pitch, where the batter is, you know, what the strike zone is and all of these things, if they can be in a stadium in real time analyzed and presented to the consumer as additional intelligence and additional insight, suddenly it actually creates kind of a immersive experience even though you may be in the stadium looking at the real thing, you are also seeing an immersive experience. And of course at home, you get a completely different experience, right? So the idea is that in sports, in media and entertainment, the power of Edge compute and the power of AI ML, right? Can be utilized to create completely new immersive experiences. Similarly, in a factory or an automotive environment, you have the ability to use AI ML and the power of the Edge and 5G coming together to find where the defects are in a manufacturing environment. So every vertical, what we are finding is there are very specific applications which you can call as kind of killer apps, right? In the Edge world that over time will become prevalent and mainstream and they will drive the innovation, they will drive deployment and they also will drive ultimately kind of the economics of all of this. You're laying out essentially the role of the public cloud and the telco market. I'd love to get your thoughts because a lot of people are saying, oh, the cloud, it's all Edge now. It's still going back to on-premises. This is not the case. I mean, I've been really vocal on this. The public cloud and cloud operations is now the new normal. So developers are there. So I want you to explain real quick the role of the public cloud in the telecom market and the telecom Edge because now they're working together. You've got abstraction. You mentioned that Android-like environment coming. There's going to be an Android-like effect, that abstraction. You've got O-RAN out there creating these connection points for interoperability for radio signals and the transceivers or the edge of the radios. All this is happening. How is Google powering this? What is the role of public cloud in this? Yeah, so let me first talk about generically the role of public cloud. Then I'll talk about Google in particular. So if at the end of the day, the goal here is to create applications in a very simple and efficient manner. So if you look, put that as the goal, then the public cloud brings three fundamental things. Number one is what I would call as elasticity and flexibility. So why is this important? Because as we discussed earlier, Edge is not one place. It's a variety of different locations. If there is a mechanism to create this common control plane and have the ability to have elastic compute, elastic networking, elastic storage and have this deployed in a flexible manner, literally if you think about it like an effortless edge is what we are starting to call it. You can move workload and capability and run it precisely where it makes sense. Like I said earlier, training and learning algorithms in the deep cloud, inferencing at the very edge. So if you can make that decision, then it becomes very powerful. So that's the first point, elasticity and flexibility that the cloud can bring. Second is intelligence. The whole notion of leveraging the power of data and the power of AI and ML is extremely crucial for creation of new services. So that's something that the public cloud brings. And the third is this notion of right once deploy anywhere. This notion of kind of a full stack capability that an open kind of developer ecosystem can be brought in. Like we talked about Kubernetes earlier. So if there's a way in which you can bring in those developer and ISV ecosystem, which is already present in the world of public cloud, that's something that is the third thing that public cloud brings. And Google strategy very simply is to play on all of these, right? Because Google has incredibly rich deployment experience around the world for some of the largest services on the planet, right? With some of the biggest infrastructure in the networking world. Second is we have a very open and flexible approach, right? So open, as you know, we not only leverage kind of the Kubernetes environment, but also there are many other areas, K-native and so on where Google has brought a lot of open kind of capabilities to the broader market. And the third is the enablement of the ecosystem. So last year, we actually announced 200 applications from 30 ISVs in multiple verticals that were now going to be deployed on Google cloud in order to solve specific business pain points, right? And building out that ecosystem, working with telecom service providers, with systems integrators, with equipment players is the way that we believe a Google cloud can make a difference in this world of developing edge applications. We are seeing great traction, John, whether it is in the carrier world, carriers such as Orange, telecom, Italia, TELUS, SK Telecom, Vodafone, these have all publicly announced their work with Google cloud, leveraging the power of data, analytics, AIML and our very flexible infrastructure. And then a variety of kind of partners and OEM players in the industry, as an example, Nokia, right? Amdox, Netcracker and many others. So we are really excited at the traction that we are getting. And we believe that public cloud is going to be a key part of the evolution of the telecom industry. Charlotte, it's great to have you on. Charlotte Shuka's VP and GM of networking at Google cloud. And I would just add to that final point there that open and this Android like open environment is going to create a thousand flowers to bloom. Those are new applications, new modern applications, new companies, a new ecosystem in the telco cloud. So congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights, Google cloud. You guys are about the data and being open. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. Great to talk to you. Okay. So it keeps coverage of Mobile World Congress. Google cloud featured interview here on theCUBE, really a big part of the public cloud is going to be a big driver. Call it public cloud, hybrid cloud, whatever you want to call it's the cloud, cloud and edge with 5G, making a big difference and changing the landscape and providing innovation for the telco space. I'm John Furrier, your Cube host. Thanks for watching. Okay, Dave, that's the Google support. They are obviously singing the same song as Daniel Royston, Every Vertical. Two great interviews, John, really nice job. We can see the tech, the strategy is becoming more clear. You know, one of the big four. Yeah. I just love these guys are so smart. Every vertical is going to be impacted by elastic infrastructure, AI machine learning and this new code deployment right once deploy anywhere. That's the Cube. We'd love being here to cloud show now, Mobile World Congress back to the studio for more awesome cloud city content.