 Okay, welcome back to theCUBE stage here in Cloud City, Telco DR, Telco Digital Revolution. We had a chance to talk to Rob Haberman, CTO of Nokia Software. Great interview as part of our hybrid program here, but we're still on the floor on site. Let's go listen to my great interview with Ron and what he had to say about the power of the cloud. And welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. It's an in-person and hybrid event. And we're here in Palo Alto with a remote interview as part of the hybrid, getting as much content as possible. Is a great guest, Ron Haberman, who's the CTO of Nokia Cloud Network Services, known as CNS. Ron's an expert, he's going to come in and share with us his vision and his commentary on openness in the cloud, Telco cloud, the changes at the edge, so much going on, so much innovation that's changing the game that's going to impact lives and society. Ron, thank you for coming on theCUBE for this Mobile World Congress special segment. Thank you, Cloud, to be here. So the transformation in the cloud is so amazing with 5G. You got cloud native developers, you got enterprises changing their architectures and cloud service probably going to the next level. 5G certainly is a great edge, but the strength of the cloud combined with the new modern applications really is going to be the power. And you start to see people starting to think differently around how developers are building apps and how companies are working together. It's not just one company ruling the world anymore, it's a lot of interoperability, interconnections, a lot of API is openness, kind of sounds like a network, it sounds like a network effect. This is a big deal. What's your take on this whole shift as 5G gets enabling a fast edge and cloud native at go hand in hand? What's your take? Yeah, I think 5G and the transformation to cloud native generically speaking go very nicely hand in hand. It's important to understand that 5G is not just another G really because it's more intended for consumption by businesses and not just consumer. And what it means is that it would have a vast impact on how development is done, how the deployment is done and the type of features that would be required from the network. So when we went on our path to start developing for cloud native, primarily for 5G, it went beyond just being cloud ready. And we started looking at how do we expand the operability with the ecosystems? How do we go into topics such as continuous delivery? How do we create collaboration between CSPs and cloud providers such that we can provide the advancements? Now there are quite a few sub topics in the transformation. For example, it might be obvious but without automation, there's really no ability to create a cloud native delivery process. If you're on the cloud, you're creating speed and ability to innovate as well as access but you also are now required to create a better security system and ways to tie things back together. The multi-vendor environment and the path that it would enable to move to and as a service model is again a topic that can really be established as part of this transition to cloud native and had been greatly in focus for us. And finally, that there is a bit of a balancing act in some of the use cases. In how do we use new technologies such as machine learning in creating new use cases? For Nokia is a supplier of both the network functions which are now getting distributed into public cloud, in the private cloud and on the edges as well as control systems of different types, OSS, VSS, including charging, enablement of IoT, et cetera. It's really about how do we bring these things together in a way that creates use cases that the service providers can position especially in their now quest to go after B2B in leveraging their network. Yeah, and you guys bring huge strength there on the Nokia side. I want to ask you specifically as CSPs are collaborating with you guys to leverage that strength of cloud native and open. The question comes up is how fast can they get to a modern agile open infrastructure and how fast can they enable value? And that's where the whole, this whole interoperability thing or this interplay between cloud native and innovation comes together. Can you take us through how you see that, how cloud service providers are approaching cloud native today because that's really kind of where the focus is. How do I get the operating value, okay, with the speed and agility of development and obviously built in all the security and everything else. That seems to be the disruptor and then face it. It's been a slow world in the telco place. So cloud has been a speed game with value but it's an operator game too. What's your thoughts? That's right. And I'll take you maybe just a little bit into the history of this transition because only just a few years ago, most networks were really built purely with what we're now referring to as PMS, physical network functions, really equipment that was installed in certain pop locations and created the network. We started this transition to virtualization in the world of VNFs and then cloud ready and now cloud native. And it's been a few years for these things to come together. And maybe the most important thing that we must get right is that as we disaggregate and in a way complicate the deployment if you would by a few factors, we want to give the tools to indeed go fast because the name of the game in moving to cloud native is to speed up innovation. So what we've been doing in collaboration now with Google is on the one hand, we need to make sure that all of the network functions, the operating models work in a disaggregated cloud. They can go all the way from a private data center through the edge into the central data center. Then on the Nokia side, we have to bring the capabilities to tie networks together, be able to migrate workloads between the locations. It may be most importantly, as we release new versions of our software, as we enable new capabilities, we want to put it in the hands of the service providers and in turn, the developers right away. So we need to enable true continuous delivery in the sense that it's very familiar in the cloud world, but quite new to, you know, to telco. Go ahead, sorry to interrupt, continue. Maybe just to give a very practical example of a customer that we share in Europe, Telnet, which is starting with an on-premise, Anthos-based type of deployment, but keeping an eye on, you know, moving to the edge and into the broader cloud, really enabling themselves to be in a multi-region and with true in-Nordbound open interfaces for new use cases to be implemented. Yeah, Ron, I want to get your thoughts on this. Dave Vellante, my co-host and I have been, we're talking just in an earlier segment around how major inflection points have some characteristics. They all kind of have characters in common. Usually it's proprietary to open shifts happen. And one in point we were looking at was like the 90s, right, the late 80s, early 90s, when you had proprietary networking protocol stacks. And then OSI stack came out, obviously we know what happened from there. TCPIP created the best, biggest wave of innovation in the computer history we've seen. Similar things kind of happen here. You know, I won't say proprietary per se, but there are 5G and telco stuff that's kind of like operator-centric legacy. You start to see this openness kind of come back, and I'm not going to say a full stack, but new kinds of disruption. And 5G is opening up the door because it's not just consumer technology. A lot of people like the CEO of Intel saying, this is a business technology, commercial technology more than consumer because of the characteristics. And you combine that with cloud native and say openness with scale, with cloud service, as you mentioned Google, it's a public cloud, you know? And so public cloud is going to be a disruption but because it brings scale. So it reminds me of this inflection point where you have this new shift and you mentioned networks. These networks are connecting. So you got a public cloud and Google's known for their networks and their cloud is being highly scalable and secure. But they're not the only network in town. You got a 5G and you got back all, you got all kinds of new heterogeneous environments. What's your comment on that? Because this is what people are talking about. Where's the shift going to go? What wave is this? What's this going to look like? Is this a true disruption or is it more than the same? What's your thoughts? I think it's a true disruption. One of the biggest parts of 5G that would enable these new use cases is slicing. Now, slicing is a big word, describing something that most of us in networks know for quite some time. It's really the ability to create some kind of a piece of the network that is shared between partners for a particular purpose with a particular SLA that contains bandwidth in licensing requirements, locations, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the ultimate goal is for an enterprise to be able to interface with the public cloud and with their operator and consume resources completely dynamically. Now, you talk about Google and public cloud and obviously anybody that use GCP knows that at any point in time, you can go into a region, you can reserve what you need, use what you need, create result and then either keep it, move away, open new locations, et cetera, et cetera. One thing is missing. The connectivity over the mobile area interface to your user and slicing allows us to combine the power of the true cloud with the ability to dynamically and programmatically create a slice for a particular purpose. And for us, the ultimate goal is that really, networks would become programmable and a developer or their user would be able to interface with a system and literally create network in code. Now, there's going to be quite a lot of building blocks required to reach that goal given that today most of it is static, but it starts with at least being able to orchestrate resources out of the network, tie them into termination point that by themselves are nets that are cloud-nated and potentially even running in the true public cloud and then attach them into a use case. Now, you also mentioned openness and Nokia had been on this open path for quite some time in creating choice for our customers. But now with the Google coming in with GCP, for example, the interface that we create with technology such as Apigee enable openness not just for our customer being the CSP but also for the developer to come in from the outside and reside within the ecosystem that they chose and still be able to consume and even create services dynamically and we enable it with products that interface with that on the other side, which we can get in. Yeah, what's interesting, what you're saying is as interesting, I'll just call it out because I think it's important. We hear this all the time is that with the edge and the devices, people are managing an end-to-end workflow from an application standpoint. But that's very difficult when you don't have networks that are being managed as a heterogeneous environment. So that's a key point you made. So the question I have for you is, how can operators best manage this wave? Because this is the holy grail you're talking about here. We're talking about end-to-end visibility into the workflow as a developer, but the shift left security being built in. No one's debating that, everyone knows that, right? So there's an operator, I don't know why. What's the built, how do I, how do I'm starting today operate and manage through this? Because I got to operate a large network. It's almost like swapping the engine out at 30,000 feet in the airplane. So how should operators think about taking this step? So the first thing to do is to really just accept the fact that there is going to be true legacy and there are plenty of 3G networks today still operating around the world. There's going to be, to what is now starting to look like semi-legacy. So VNFs that have only been delivered to two networks maybe in the past couple of years and will carry 4G traffic and will stay in production for quite some time and manage this transition between VNFs, VNs running VNFs, VNs running containerized workloads and true cloud native, which may be their metal. And as we're working with Google on Anthos it literally enables this transition by creating a position for us to put the workload in each step of the path as well as in multiple locations around the network. And what Nokia brings into this equation is also a unified view for the operator. So if you're an operator that today runs on VNs, on-prem, you have some workflows defined and you've been running them in a certain way. We want to keep that view as similar as possible with the tooling that you were able to use over the past few years, but create extensions that connects us into a containerized workflow and then a true cloudified workflow out of the same environment. And this is actually in part what we've been collaborating about with some CSPs as well as with Google on Enable. Ron Heyberman, CTO, Nokia Cloud Network Services Group. Thank you so much for that insight, great commentary. Thank you for sharing your perspective on the future of Telco, Telco Cloud, Telco Edge, unifying those networks end-to-end. Great stuff. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Okay, this is CUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021. We're in person and we're virtual. It's a hybrid event. Thanks for watching. John, clearly the power of the public cloud in that interview, great job by the way. It was great to get Nokia in there. You can hear the operator impact and that's awesome, more to come. So back to the studio, Adam and the team back at the studio.