 The Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of day one, MWC23 live from Barcelona. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, we've got some great conversations so far. This is the biggest, most packed show I've been to in years, about 80,000 people here so far. Down from its peak of 108, but still pretty good. You know, a lot of folks from China come to this show, but with the COVID situation in China, that's impacted the attendance, but still quite amazing. Amazing for sure. We're going to be talking about trends and mobility and all sorts of great things. We have a couple of guests joining us for the first time on the Cube. Please welcome Dr. Srinivas Mukamala, or Sri, Chief Product Officer at Avanti, and Dave Shepard, VP Avanti. Guys, welcome to the Cube, great to have you here. Thank you. It's a day one of the conference. Sri, we'll go to you first. Talk about some of the trends that you're seeing in mobility. Obviously, the conference renamed from Mobile World Congress to MWC Mobility, being part of it, but what are some of the big trends? It's interesting, right? I mean, I was catching up with Dave. The first thing is from the keynote, it took 45 minutes to talk about security. I mean, it's quite interesting. When you look at the show floor, we're talking about Edge, we're talking about 5G, the whole evolution, and there's also the concept of are we going into the cloud? Are we coming back from the cloud, back to the Edge? They're really two different things. Edge is all decentralized while you do compute. And one thing I observed here is they're talking about near real-time reality. When you look at automobiles, when you look at medical, when you look at robotics, you can't have things processed in the cloud. It'll be too late because you've got to make millisecond-based issues. That's a big trend for me. When I look at stuff, okay, the compute it takes to process in the cloud versus what needs to happen on-prem, on-device, is going to re-revolutionize the way we think about mobility. Revolutionize? David, what are some of the things that you're saying to you? Concur? Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, just reading some of the press recently, they're predicting 22 billion IoT devices by 2024. Everything Shree's just talked about there. It's growing exponentially. Problems we have today are a snapshot. We're probably in the slowest place we are today. Everything's just going to get faster and faster and faster. So it's a, yeah, 100% concur with that. You know, Shree, on your point, so Jose Maria Alvarez, the CEO of Telefonica, said there are three pillars of the future of telco. Low latency, programmable networks, and cloud and edge. So to your point, cloud and low latency haven't gone hand in hand, but the cloud guys are saying, all right, we're going to bring the cloud to the edge. That's sort of an interesting dynamic. We're going to bypass them. We heard somebody, another speaker, say, you know, cloud can't do it alone. You know, it's like these worlds need each other in a way, don't they? Definitely, right? So that's a fantastic way to look at it. The cloud guys can say we're going to come closer to where the computer is. And if you really take a look at it with data localization, where are we going to put the cloud in, right? I mean, so the data sovereignty becomes a very interesting thing. The localization becomes a very interesting thing. And when it comes to security, it gets completely different. I mean, we talked about moving everything to a centralized compute, really have massive processing and give you the decision back wherever you are. Whereas when you're localized, I have to process everything within the local environment. So there's already a conflict right there. How are we going to address that? Yeah, so another statement, I think it was the CEO of Ericsson. He was kind of talking about how the OTT guys have heard. We can't let that happen again. And we're going to find new ways to charge for the network. Basically he's talking about monetizing the API access. But I'm interested in what you're hearing from customers. Because our mindset is, what value are you going to give to customers that they're going to pay for? Versus, I got this data I'm going to charge developers for. But what are you hearing from customers? It's amazing, Dave, the way you're looking at it, right? So if you take a look at what we were used to perpetual, and we said we're going to move to subscription, right? I mean, everybody talks about subscription economy. Telcos, on the other hand, had subscription economy for a long time, right? They were always based on usage, right? It's a usage economy, but today we're basically realizing on compute. We haven't even started charging for compute. If you go to AWS, go to Azure, go to GCP, they still don't quite charge you for actual compute, right? It's kind of, they're still lean on it. So think about API based. We're going to break the bank. What people don't realize is we do millions of API calls for any high transaction environment. A consumer can't afford that. What people don't realize is, I don't know how you're going to monetize, even if you charge a cent, a call, that is still going to be hundreds and thousands of dollars a day. And that's where if you look at what you call low-code, no-code motion, you see a plethora of companies being built on that. They're saying, hey, you don't have to write code. I'll give you authentication as a service. What that means is every single time you call my API to authenticate a user, I'm going to charge you. So just imagine how many times we authenticate on a single day. You're talking a few dozen times. And if I have to pay every single time, I authenticate? Real friction in the marketplace, David. Yeah, and I tell you what, it's a big topic, right? And it's a topic that we haven't had to deal with at the edge before. And we hear it probably daily, really, complexity. The complexity is growing all the time. That means that we need to start to get insight, visibility. You know, I think a part of, something that came out of the EU actually this week stated, you know, there's cyber attack every 11 seconds. That's fast, right? 2016, that was 40 seconds. So actually, that speed I talked about earlier, everything Shree says that's coming down to the edge, we want to embrace the edge, and that is the way we're going to move. But customers are mindful of the complexity that's involved in that. And that, you know, lends thought to how are we going to deal with those complexities? I was just going to ask you, how are you planning to deal with those complexities? You mentioned one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. That's down considerably from just a few years ago. Ransomware is a household word. It's no longer, are we going to get attacked? It's when, it's to what extent, it's how much? So how is Avanti helping customers deal with some of the complexities and the changes in the security landscape? Yeah, should I start on that one first? It's, yeah, look, we want to give all our customers and prospective customers full visibility of their environment. You know, devices that are attached to environment, where are they, what are they doing? How often are we going to look for those devices? Not only when we find those devices, what applications are they running? Are those applications secure? How are we going to manage those applications moving forward? And overall wrapping it around, what kind of service are we going to do? What processes are we going to put in place to Shree's point, the low code, no code angle? How do we build processes that protect our organization? But probably a point where I'll pass to Shree in a moment is, how do we add a level of automation to that? How do we add a level of intelligence that doesn't always require a human to be fixing or amediating a problem? Because Shree, you mentioned, you're right, the key note, it took 45 minutes of already being mentioned security and I suppose it's because they've historically had this hardened stack, everything's controlled and it's a safe environment and now that's changing. So what would you add? Yeah, great point, right? If you look at telcos, they're used to a perimeter-based network. I mean, that's what we are. Boxed, we knew our perimeter. Today, our perimeter is extended to our home. Everywhere at work, right? We don't have a definition of a perimeter. Your browser is the new perimeter and a good example, segueing to that, what we have seen is horizontal-based security. What we haven't seen is virtualization, especially in mobile. We haven't seen vertical mobile security solutions, right? Yes, you hear a little bit about automobile, you hear a little bit about healthcare, but what we haven't seen is, what about food sector? What about the frontline in food? What about supply chain? What security are we really doing? And I'll give a simple example. You brought up ransomware. Last night, Dole was attacked with ransomware. We have seen the beef producer, colonial pipeline, now we have seen agritact being hit. What does it mean? We are starting to hit humanity. If you can't really put food on the table, you're starting to really disrupt the supply chain, right? In a massive way. So you've got to start thinking about that. Why is Dole related to mobility? Think about it. They don't carry servers and computers. What they carry is mobile devices. That's how the supply chain works. And then that's where you have to start thinking about it. And the evolution of ransomware, rather than a single-trick pony, you see them using multiple vulnerabilities. And Pegasus is the best example. Spyware across all politicians, right? And CEOs. It is six or seven vulnerabilities put together that actually was constructed to do an attack. How does AI kind of change this? Where does it fit in? The attackers are going to have AI, but we could use AI to defend. But attackers are always ahead, right? So what's your, do you have a point of view on that? Of course, everybody's crazy about chat GPT, right? The banks have all banned it. Certain universities in the United States have banned it. Another one's forcing his students to learn how to use chat GPT to prompt it. It's all over the place. You have a point of view on this? So definitely, David, it's a great point. First, we all have to have our own generative AI. I mean, I look at it as your digital assistant, right? So when you had calculators, you can't function without a calculator today. It's not harmful. It's not going to take you away from doing multiplications, right? So we'll still teach mathematics in school. You'll still use your calculator. So to me, AI will become an integral part. That's one beautiful thing I've seen on the short floor. Every little thing, there is a AI-based solution I've seen, right? So chat GBT is all played from multiple perspective. I would rather up-level it and say, generative AI is the way to go. So there are three things. There is human intense triaging, where humans keep doing easy work, minimal work. You can use ML and AI to do that. There is human dishing that you need to do. That's when you need to use AI. But I would say this in the enterprise, that the quality of the AI has to be better than what we've seen so far on a chat GBT, even though I love chat GBT, it's amazing. But what we've seen from being, it's got to be, is it true? Don't you think it has to be cleaner, more accurate? It can't make up stuff if I'm going to be automating my network with AI? I'll answer that question. It comes down to three fundamentals. The reason chat GBT is giving addresses, it's not trained on the latest data. So for any AI and ML method, you've got to look at three things. It's your data, it's your domain expertise, who is training it, and it's your data model. In chat GBT, it's older data, it's biased to the people that trained it, right? And then the data model is, it's going to spit out what it's trained on. That's a precursor of any GBT, right? It's pre-trained transformation. So if we narrow that, right, train it better for the specific use case, that AI has huge potential. You flip that to what the enterprise customers talk about to us is, insight is invaluable. But then too much insight too quickly all the time means we go remediation crazy. So we haven't got enough humans to be fixing all the problems. Three's point with the chat GBT data, some of that data we're looking at there could be old. So we're trying to triage something that may still be an issue, but it might have been superseded by something else as well. So that's my overriding, where I'm talking to customers and we talk chat GBT, it's in the news all the time, it's very topical, it's fun. It is. I even said to my 13 year old son yesterday, your homework's out of date. Because I knew he was doing some summary stuff on chat GBT, so a little wind up, it's out of date just to make that emphasis around the model. And that's where we, with our neurons platform Avanti, that's what we want to give the customers all the time, which is the real time snapshot. So they can make a priority or a decision based on what that information is telling them. And we've kind of learned I think over the last couple of years that access to real time data, real time AI is no longer nice to have. It's a massive competitive advantage for organizations, but it's going to enable the on demand everything that we expect in our consumer lives, in our business lives. This is going to be table stakes for organizations, I think in every industry going forward. But it assumes 5G, right? It's going to actually happen and somebody's going to, somebody's going to make some money off it at some point. When are they going to make money off of 5G do you think? No, and then you ask a really good question, Dave. I want to answer that question. Will bad guys use AI? Offensive AI is a very big thing. We have to pay attention to it. It's going to create an asymmetric war. If you look at the president of the United States, he said, if somebody's going to attack us on cyber, are we going to retaliate? For the first time, US is willing to launch a cyber war. What that really means is we're going to use AI for offensive reasons as well. And we as citizens have to pay attention to that. And that's what I'm worried about, right? AI bias, whether it's data or domain expertise or algorithmic bias is going to be a big thing. And offensive AI is something everybody have to pay attention to. And to your point, Sri, earlier about critical infrastructure getting hacked, I had this conversation with Dr. Robert Gates several years ago, and I said, yeah, but don't we have the best offensive technology in cyber? And he said, yeah, but we got the most to lose too. Yeah, 100%. We're the wealthiest nation in the United States. We're the wealthiest. So you've got to be careful. But to your point, the president of the United States saying we'll retaliate, right? Not necessarily start the war, but who started it? That's the thing, right? Attribution is the hardest part. And then you talked about a very interesting thing. Rich nations, right? Or there's emerging nations that are nations left behind. One thing I've seen on the show floor today is digital inequality, digital poverty is a big thing. While we have this amazing technology, 90% of the world doesn't have access to this. What we have done is we have created inequality across, and especially in mobility and in cyber, if this technology doesn't reach to the last mile, which is emerging nations, I think we are creating a crater back again and putting societies a few miles back. And at much greater risk. 100%, right? Because those are the guys in cyber, all you need is a laptop and a brain to attack. If I can't, if I don't have it, that's where the civil war is going to start again. Yeah, what are some of the things in our last minute or so guys? David, we'll start with you and then should we go to you? That you're looking forward to at this MWC, the Themis velocity we're talking about, so much transformation and evolution in the telecom industry. What are you excited to hear and learn in the next couple of days? Just getting a complete picture. One is actually being out after the last couple of years, so you learn a lot. But just walking around and seeing, from my perspective, some vendor names that I haven't seen before, but seeing what they're doing and bringing to the market, but I think goes back to the point made earlier around APIs and integration. Everybody's talking about how can we kind of do this together in a way. So integrations, those smart things is what I'm kind of looking for as well and how we plug into that as well. Excellent, and Shree? So for us there's a lot to offer, right? So while I'm enjoying what I'm seeing here, I'm seeing it an opportunity. We have an amazing portfolio of what we can do. We're into mobile device management. We are the last mile company when people find problems. Somebody has to go remediate those. We are the world's largest patch management company. And what I'm finding is, yes, all these people are embedding software, pumping it like nobody's business. As you find one ability, somebody has to go fix them. And we want to be the cyber hygiene company. We are the last mile. And I find an amazing opportunity. Not only we can do device management, but do mobile threat defense and add to give them a risk prioritization on what needs to be remediated and manage all that in our ITSM. So I look at this as an amazing, amazing opportunity which is exponential than what I've seen before. So last question then, speaking of opportunities, Shree, for you, what are some of the things that customers can go to? Obviously you guys talk to customers all the time. In terms of learning what Ivanti is going to enable them to do to take advantage of these opportunities. Any webinars, any events coming up that we want people to know about? Absolutely, Ivanti.com is the best place to go because we keep everything there. Of course, the CUBE interview. They should definitely watch that. So we have quite a few industry events we do. And especially there's a lot of learning. And we just released a ransomware report that actually talks about ransomware from a global index perspective. So one thing what we have done is, rather than just looking at vulnerabilities, we showed them the weaknesses that led to the vulnerabilities and how attackers are using them. And we even talked about DHS, how behind they are in disseminating the information and how it's actually being used by nation states. And we did cover mobility as a part of that as well. So there's quite a bit we did in our report and it actually came out very well. I'll have to check that out. Ransomware is such a fascinating topic. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on the program today, sharing what's going on at Ivanti, the changes that you're seeing in mobile and the opportunities that are there for your customers. We appreciate your time. Thank you. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from MWC23 in Barcelona. As you know, the CUBE is the leader in live tech coverage. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.