 Hey everyone, welcome to SuperCloud Five, the battle for AI supremacy. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, we're here to be with you. Very pleased to welcome Robin Harwani to the program, the head of global telecom industry solutions for AWS. Robin, great to have you. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you Lisa, thank you for having me. So you've been a part of the core team that initiated the telecom business at AWS. Back in 2017, you helped hire team, you helped mentor a team across specializations, across geographies. You are presently, as I mentioned, the head of industry solutions technology for the worldwide telecom vertical at AWS. Would love to get your perspectives on the evolution of this telecom BU and some of the important milestones that it's reached. Absolutely, thank you Lisa. Yes, it's been a journey for us. We started in 2017 when we were in the initial phases of the business. A lot of our customers were already using AWS, but mostly for any private workloads. As things evolved, we realized that, a lot of our customers wanted to leverage AWS for not just the enterprise IT workloads, but for WSS, BSS, the management workloads, the billing workloads, all the way into the more of the network domain as well. So all the way from core and the radio access networks for 5G were important for them and they wanted to make sure they were able to leverage the power of cloud. While doing all of this, they also wanted to leverage the platform for automation, orchestration, and a common software delivery model that they could use for all of these workloads. So it's been a journey we've worked across our customers and partners to build this capability over the last few years. One of the big milestones that we had along the way was when we launched our 5G edge solution in 2018 called Wavelength. Since then we have also launched a platform for our customers called Outposts that allow for 5G networks to be virtualized at the edge. This was one of our biggest customers that announced that they were gonna roll out the entire nationwide network, leveraging AWS cloud in 2021. Since then we have had multiple other customers in Europe, both brownfield customers like Swisscom and multiple customers leverage our platform for private mobile networks as well for industrial customers. So very exciting. And for this year, it's even more exciting. So it's been a great journey and it's a pleasure to be part of it. It has been a great journey. You talked about a number of customers names. We'll talk about that in a second but I want to talk about the partner angle because I understand that really making AWS the best place for its telecom partners has really been for a founding tenant of the business unit from the beginning. Talk about some of the value add for AWS partners in the BU. That's a fantastic point. I think AWS at the very heart of building the industry vertical or telecom was to make sure that AWS was the easiest place for partners to deploy the workloads. And the whole purpose was so that our customers could achieve their business outcomes faster at a pace that they wanted to leverage at the cloud pace. In the addition to that, we wanted to make sure that the partner community that we built for industries was across not just the enterprise domain but the OSS-BSS domain, the new emerging technologies domain for their customers to build offerings that they could CSPs and telecom companies could offer to the end enterprises. And then finally within the networks domain. So we have had the pleasure of working across all of these communities, partner communities to create a very intentional focus to help our customers achieve and these outcomes together. Walk through some of the exciting things that are gonna be coming out in terms of new offerings in telecom that AWS is gonna be delivering. Yeah, I agree when this year, super exciting. Before the first time, we're gonna have technology assets at the telecom lounge at the Venetian expo which are across all of the domains that I mentioned from the enterprise domain to the networks domain to the billing and the network management domain where we are going to showcase capability across generative AI, right? So all the way from using these models to increase the product lifecycle velocity to going into developing an intent-based orchestration framework, finally kind of helping the customers to understand their bills better and having new experiences that they can avail through the CSP partners of ours. That's something that we are gonna be showcasing. The second big thing that we are doing is we of course have talk talks and sessions and all of the content that we have every year for the last seven years. But this year, we have the first time we are jumping in to architectures that we are production ready and we're gonna be showcasing that in TLC 302. And finally, another first that we have this year is we have a workshop where our customers, our builders across our community can come in and develop applications on top of Bedrock, on top of SageMaker Jumpstart for telecom customers, telecom applications that can be used to serve and solve these problems that our customers have been talking about. So that's super excited about all of these things at Reinvent this year. I'd love to kind of like even dig more, Robin, into the workshop. It sounds like it's gonna be so exciting, so innovative, but you're allowing customers to get much more hands-on. Tell us about that and what some of the key challenges are that customers have that that workshop is gonna show them guys together. This is how we're gonna tackle this. No, this is a great question. You know, one of the things that helps our customers is to experience the technology and builds the starting point. It's the first barrier to adoption of any new technology, as you know. And this workshop is tailor made for to leverage our platform to solve for customer issues like fraud management, like revenue assurance use cases. How do the customers use these to implement in the workshop live with the community as well as help that they get in a guided instruction to implement these use cases? Once implemented, they can take this away and work with our teams to put this into production in their environments. By the way, with the same workshop, we will be making it virtually available for all of our global community to come in and leverage and build on top of Bedrock and SageMaker Jumpstart. So that's, we're super excited about that as well. Well, giving the global community access to that, understanding what it means to them, the implications, the barriers it's gonna help them solve and getting them that access to kind of see it and feel it and touch it is huge. And that's kind of a different element for Reinvent from what I understand, is that right? It's been a tradition at Reinvent to have these workshops, but this is the first time we are doing at this scale for the telecom industry, four generative AI to achieve these outcomes. So yes, the first of a kind for sure and very exciting, very exciting. Last time we did this was with Edge, we had this for building out a network, 5G network, a private 5G network live, which was a super exciting as well. And now we're doing this in the generative AI space. It's a first of a kind, so we're super excited about it. The gen AI space, white hot, Robin, I'm sure your team has been working fast and furiously for a very long time. So we so appreciate you carving out some time to kind of give us some of the insights and a sneak peek, speaking of sneak peeks with the pace of innovation in the telecom industry just continuing to accelerate. What are as we round the corner of 2023 and headed 2024, what are some of the things that we might keep our eyes out for in the AWS ecosystem of telecom? A lot, I think over the seven years, we started with our infrastructure services, we went into the Edge, we introduced machine learning for our customers to achieve the business outcomes that they wanted. We partnered with some of the best telecommunication industry ISVs, like HamDocs, Ericsson, with Nokia, all of these to bring together the outcomes, the business outcomes that they wanted. And as we go forward with the integration of Bedrock and SageMaker, start into these business outcomes, I think it is going to be critical for the customers now to jump in, take the use cases that they want to solve top of mind things that we are hearing, come back, work with us, leverage the attendee guide we have at re-invent and dive in, and then not drop the conversation there. I think it's important to follow through and make sure we go all the way to achieve the business outcome, the cost per bid, making sure we achieve the automation of the network that we want and intent-based orchestration and the completely new experiences that they can offer to customers. Those would be my hopes that we could sneak peak and drive after re-invent. I love that, Robin to your point. Let's dive in and really dig through the customer business outcomes that AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners can help customers achieve. Because at the end of the day, it's all about those business outcomes. Robin, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for sharing your insights and your time. Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for your time. My pleasure. You've been watching SuperCloud 5, the battle for AI supremacy. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. We'll see you soon.