 Okay, we're back here in theCUBE. This is day three of our coverage right here in the middle of all the action of Cloud City at Mobile World Congress. This is the hit of the entire show in Barcelona, not only in person, but out on the interwebs virtually. This is a hybrid event. This is Back to Real Life, and theCUBE is here. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, and DR is here. And Yellow Houston, welcome back to theCUBE for fourth time now at the Anchor Desk. Coming back, we love you. It's been a busy day. It's been a busy week. It's been an awesome week. Feeling good? Oh my God. You made the call. I've made the call. This is your podcast months ago. Yeah. You made the call. You made the call. You're on the right side of history. Right, and people were like, it's gonna be canceled. COVID won't be handled. Blah, blah, blah. She's crazy. Nope, oh, she's crazy. I'm okay with that. Right, but I'm like, I'm forward looking in a lot of ways, and we were looking towards June, and we're like, I think this is gonna be the first event back and we're gonna be able to do it. You know, the crazy ones commercial that Apple ran is probably one of the best commercials of all time. You can't ignore the crazy ones in a good way. You can't ignore what you're doing. And I think to me, what I'm so excited about is, because we've been covering cloud. We're cloud bigots. We love the cloud, public cloud. We've been on that train from day one. But when you hear the interviews we did here on theCUBE and interviews that we talked about with top people, Google, Amazon Web Services, we're talking about the top people, both technology leaders like Bill Vass and the people who run the telecom verticals, like Alfonso, Adolfo, I mean, Hernandez. We had Google's top networking executive. We had their industry leader in the telecom, Microsoft and Silicon, all are validating and it's like surround sound to what you're saying here. And it cannot be ignored. I mean, we are coming to a big moment in taco, right? And I mean, I've been saying that it's coming. I called 2021 the year of public cloud in telco. It helped that Ericsson bailed. So thank you, Ericsson people. It was a gift. It was a gift. It really was. It really was a gift. And it was not just for me, but I think also for the vendors in the booth. I mean, we have a cloud city army, right? Here we go. Let's start marching. And it's awesome. It reminds me of that baseball player that took a break because he had a hangover and Cal Ripen. Cal Ripen? Yeah, yeah. What was that guy's name? Did that really happen? Yeah, he took a break and... The new guy stepped in. And so, well, Cal Ripen. So, before, no, who was it? Lou Gehrig. Lou Gehrig, right? Lou Gehrig was nobody. And we can't remember the guy's name. Nobody knows the guy's name. What was that guy's name? Nobody knows. Oh, because Lou Gehrig, he got hurt. And Lou Gehrig stepped in. He sat out, Lou Gehrig replaced him. Love it. I'll take that. Never missed the game. Never missed a game for his entire career. So, again, this is what Erickson did. They just, okay, take a break and... But, I mean, it's been great. Again, I had a great day yesterday. My keynote was delivered. Things are going well with the booth. We had John Bon Jovi. I mean, that was just epic. And it was acoustic. And it was right after lockdown. I think everyone was really excited to be there. But I was talking to a vendor that said, we had been able to accomplish in three days, but normally would take three years from a sales funnel perspective. I mean, that is, that's big. And that's not me. That's not my organization. That's other organizations that are benefiting from this energy. Oh, it's awesome. The post-isolation economy has become a living metaphor for transformation. And I've been trying to sort of grok and put the pieces together as to how this thing progresses. And my interview with Port-a-1 in particular really brought it into focus for me anyway. And I'd love to get your thoughts. One of the things we haven't talked much about is public policy. And I think about all the discussion in the United States about infrastructure. This is critical infrastructure, right? And the spectrum is a country like South Africa is saying, come on in. We want to open up. We want to innovate. And to me, that's the model for these tier two and tier three telcos that are just going to disrupt the big guys. Whereas China maybe is on the other end of the spectrum, very controlling, but it's the former that is going to adopt the cloud sooner and it's going to completely transform the next decade. I think this is great technology for a smaller challenger CSP that still is a large successful company to challenge the incumbents. They are dinosaurs too. They move a little bit slow. And maybe if you're a little bit faster, quicker dinosaur, you'll survive longer. Maybe you'll be able to transform and a public cloud enables that. And I think, I'm playing the long game here, right? Is public cloud ready for every telco in every corner of the world? No. There's a couple of things that are barriers to that. We don't really talk about the downsides. And so maybe we sort of wrap up with there are challenges and acknowledge there are challenges. In some cases, there are data regulations and issues, right? And you can't, right? There's not a hyperscaler in your country, right? And so you're having a little bit of challenges, but you trend this out over 10 years and the pace at which the hyperscalers are building new data centers, they're each at 25 plus each, plus or minus a few, right? They're marching along and you trend this out over 10 years. I think one or two things happened. Your data regulations are eased or a hyperscaler appears in a place you can use it and those points converge and hopefully the software's there and that's my effort and yeah. No, it's an interesting trend, D.R. and John, that is maybe a harbinger to this is you just mentioned something. The hyperscalers might not have a presence in a country. You know what they're doing and our data shows us, I do that weekly series of breaking analysis and the data open stack was popping up. Like where's open stack come from? Well, guess what? When you cut the data, it was telcos using open source to build clouds in regions where there was no hyperscalers. So it's a gap filler. Yeah, it's a gap filler. It's a bandaid until they get the hyperscaler. I think this is where like outposts is such a great idea, right? Like getting outposts and I think Microsoft has the ability to do this as well. Google less so, right? They're not providing the stack, they're doing Anthos so you're still managing the rack. But they're giving you the ability to tap it in those services but I was talking to a CTO in Bolivia who was like, we have data privacy issues in our country. There's no hyperscaler. Not sure Bolivia is like nuts on the list for AWS, right? But he's like, I'm going to build my own public cloud and I'm like, why would you do that when you can just use outposts? And then when your data regulations release or they get to Bolivia, you can switch and you're on the stack and you're ready to go. I think that's what you should do. Just totally do that. It's exciting. And one of the things that's come up here in the interviews and theCUBE and here in the show is that there are risk takers and innovators and there's operators. And this has been the consistent theme around, yeah, the on-premises world you mentioned there's regulation reasons and or some workflows just have to be on-premise for security reasons, whatever, that's the corner case. But the operating model of the technology architecture has shifted. And that reality, I don't think is debatable. So I find it, I got to ask you this because I'm really curious. I know you get a lot of people staring at you, oh, the public cloud's just hosting. But why are people getting this architectural shift? I mean, you mentioned outposts and wavelength which Amazon has is a game changer. It's Amazon cloud at the hub. Okay, that's a low latency again, low hanging fruit applications, robots, whatnot. I mean, that's an architectural dot that's been connected. Why are people getting it? In our industry, I think it is a lot of not invented here syndrome, right? And that's a very sort of 90s thought. And I have been advocating stand on the shoulders of the greatest technologists in the world, right? And there's a geopolitical US thing. I think we lived through a presidency that had a sort of nationalistic approach and a lot of those conversations pop up. But I've also looked to these guys and I'm like, you still have your Huawei kit installed and there's concerns with that too. So, and you picked it because of cost and it's really hard to switch off of. So give me a break with your public cloud USA stuff, right? You can use it. You're just making excuses. You're just afraid. What are you afraid of? The HR implications? Let's talk about that, right? And the minute I take it there, conversation changes. You know, I talked to Theresa Carlson when she was running the public sector at AWS. She's now a president at Splunk. I call her a Renaissance woman. She's been a great leader and public sector in this weird little pocket of AWS where it's a sales division but it's own company. And she did the CIA deal, the DOD and the public sector partnerships are now private. A lot more private relationships. So it's not like just governments. You mentioned government and national security and these things. You start to see the ecosystem not just be about companies. Government and private sector. So this whole vibe of the telecom being regulated, unregulated, unbundled, is an interesting kind of theory. What's your thoughts and reactions to this kind of this melting pot of ecosystem change? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a very nationalistic approach by the telcos, right? They sort of think about the countries that they operate in. There's a couple of groups that go across multiple countries but can there be a global telco? Can that happen, right? Just like we say, you were saying it earlier, Netflix, you say Netflix UK, right? And so can we have a global telco, right? That is challenging on a lot of different levels. But think about that and the public cloud starts to enable that idea, right? Elon Musk is going to get to Mars. You need a planetary level telco. And I think that day is, I mean, I don't think it's tomorrow but I think that's like 10, 20 years away. We're going to see it start this decade. I mean, already starting, we're going to see the fruits of that dividend. I got to ask you, you're a student of the industry and you had so much experience, it's great to have you on the cube and chat about, riff about these things. But the classic who's ready for disruption question comes up and I think there's no doubt that the telcos as an industry has been slow moving and the role and the importance has changed. People need to have the internet access, need to access. And you got the edge. Now applications are now running on a, since the iPhone 14 years ago, as you pointed out, people now are interested in how packets move. That's fast, whether it's a doctor or an emergency worker or someone. But what we have done in 2020 without the internet and broadband and our mobile phones, I mean, it would have been miserable. I think about 1920 when the Spanish flu pandemic hit 100 years ago, those guys did not have mobile phones and they must have been bored, right? I mean, what are you going to do? And so, yeah, I think last year really moved a lot of thinking forward in this respect. Yeah, it's always like that animal up in Seren Getty that gets taken down by the cheetah or the lion. How do you know when someone is going to be disrupted? What's the tell sign in your mind? You look at the telco landscape. What is someone waiting to be disrupted or replaced? You know what their auspices, how do you say that word, right? They stick their head in the sand. Like I don't want to talk about it. La, la, la, I don't want to think about it. They bring up all these like roadblocks and I'm like, okay, I'm going to come visit you in another six months to a year and let's see what happens when the guys that are moving fast that are open minded to this. I mean, when you start to use the public cloud, you don't like turn it on overnight. You start experimenting, right? You take an application that is non-threatening. You have, I mean, these guys are running thousands of apps inside their data centers. Pick some boring ones. Pick some old ones that no one likes. Move that to the public cloud. Play with it. I'm not talking about moving your whole network overnight. Tomorrow, you got to learn. You have no, I mean, very little talent in the telco that know how to program against the AWS staff. Start hiring, start doing it and you're going to start to learn about the compensation. I used to do compensation, right? I spent a lot of time in HR, right? The compensation points and structures, they compare AWS and Google versus the telco. Do you want telco stock? Do you want Google stock? Right, right. And so you need to start like, that's going to challenge the HR organization in terms of compensate. How do we compensate our people when they're learning these new valuable skills? When you think about disruption, you know, the master or the professor of disruption, Clay Christensen. One of the best lectures he ever gave is he was at Cambridge and he gave a lecture on the steel industry and he was describing, you know, like four layers of value in the steel industry, the value chain and it started with rebar, like the lowest end, right? And the telcos, actually the opposite. So, you know, when the international companies came in, they went after rebar and the higher end steel companies said, let them have it. That's the low margin stuff. And then eventually, you know, when they got up to the high end, they all got killed. It was over, yeah. The telcos are the opposite. They're like, you know, in the connectivity and they're hanging on to that because it's so big. But all the high value stuff, it's already gone to the over the top players, right? It's being eaten away. And I'm like, what is going to wake you guys up to realize those are your competitors? That's where the battle is, right? It's really where the value is. The battle of the bastards. You're there by yourself, the Game of Thrones and they're coming at you. I need a dragon. What are you doing about it? I need a dragon to compete in this market. Riding a dragon would be a good strategy. I know, I was just watching. Because I have a podcast. It's called Telco in 20. And we always put little nuggets in the show notes. I personally reviewed them. I was just reviewing the one for the keynote that we're putting out. And I had a dragon in my keynote, right? It was a really great moment. It was really fun to do. But there's, I don't know if you guys are Game of Thrones fans. Oh yeah, sure. But there's a great moment when Daenerys gets her dragons, the baby dragons. And she takes over the unsoldied army, right? And it's just this, right? Like all of a sudden, the tables turn in an instant where she has nothing. And she's like on her quest, right? I'm on a quest. Comes out of the fire. Right, comes out of the fire, the unburnt, right? She has her dragons, right? She has them hatched. She takes over the unsoldied army, right? Slaves. It starts her march, right? And I'm like, we're putting that clip into the show notes. Because I think that's where we are. Think I've hatched some dragons, right? Cloud City Army. Let's go take on Tocca. Well, I mean, to me, I definitely have made it happen because I heard many people talking about cloud. This is turning into a cloud show. The question is, when is this going to be a cloud show? Yeah, it's just Cloud City is a big section of the show. I mean, all the big players are behind it. Yeah, yeah. Amazon Web Services, Google, Azure, ecosystem, startups. Thinking differently, but everyone's agreeing. Why aren't we doing this? I think, like I said, I mean, people are like, you're such a visionary and why do you think this will work? I'm like, it's worked in every other industry. Am I really that visionary? I think these are the three best tech companies in the world. Like, are you kidding me? And so I think we've shown the momentum here. I think we're looking forward to 2022. You know, MWC 2022, you've got to start planning this the minute we get back, right? I wouldn't recommend doing this in 100 days again. That was a very painful. But, you know, February, there's a sign inside MWC, February 28th, right? We're talking seven months. You got to get going now. Let's get on the front page of the hotel, Co. I mean, I think you're right on. I mean, you know, remember Skype in the early days? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't regional. Yeah. It was just plug into the internet. It was just Skype. It was just WhatsApp. Well, this is a great location. If you get a shot, guys, of the people behind us, I don't know if you can, if you're watching, check out the scene here. It's winding down. A lot of people are having a happy hour now. This is a social construct here at Cloud City. Not only is it chock full of information, reporting that we're doing and getting all the data and with the presentations on the main stage with Adam and the studio and the team. This is a place where people are meeting and there's deals being done, face-to-face intimate relationships, the best of the best are here. They make the trek. So, it's been a successful formula. Of course, theCUBE is in the middle of all the action which we love. We're excited to be back. I want to thank you personally while we have you on stage here. I want to thank you guys and the crew. The crew's been amazing, turning out videos on short order. We have all these crews in different cities. Our own show has been virtual. Adam's and Bristol, right? We're here. This was an experiment. We talked about this 100 days ago, 90 days ago. Could we get theCUBE there and do the show but also theCUBE? You are a visionary. You said made for TV, hybrid event with your team, produced television shows. theCUBE, we're digital. We love you guys, great alignment. But it's magical because the content doesn't end here. The show might end. They might break down the beautiful plants and exhibits but the community is going to continue the content and the conversations. So, we're looking forward to it and... Super glad, super glad we did this. Awesome. Well, any final moments that you want to like to share in the last two minutes we have, favorite moments, observations, funny things that have happened to you, weird things that have happened to you. Share something that people might not know or a favorite moment. I mean, I don't know that people know. We have a 3D printer in the coffee shops and so you can upload any picture and they're 3D printing coffee art, right? So, I've been seeing lots of social posts around people uploading their logos and things like that. I think John Bon Jovi, he was super thankful to be back. He thanked me personally two different times and I'm just glad to be out in front of people and I think just even just the people walking around. Thank you for being brave. Thank you for coming back. You've helped Marcellona and we're happy to be together. Even if it is with masks, it's hard to do business with masks on. Everyone's happy and psyched. Well, the one thing that people cannot do relative to you is they cannot ignore you. You are making a great big wave. I shout pretty loud. It's getting harder to do it. You're making a great big wave. You're on the right side. We believe a history public cloud is driving the bus down Main Street of Cloud City. And if people don't get out of the way, they will be under the bus. I'm like I said in my keynote. It's go time. Let's do it. Okay. Thank you so much for all your attention and mission behind the cloud and the success. We'll do it again. We're going to do it again soon. We're going to do it again soon. A hundred million dollar investment. You're the CEO of Toge. You must follow that progress. And of course, Telco DR, Danielle Royson, the digital revolution. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you guys. It was super fun. Thank you so much. This is theCUBE. Dave Vellante. We're going to send it back to Adam in the studio. Thanks to the team here. I want to thank the team. Everyone here. Adam, great. Chloe, great working with you guys. Awesome. And what a great crew. So great. Thank you everybody. That's it for theCUBE here on the last day, Wednesday of theCUBE. Stay tuned for tomorrow. More action on the Main Stage here in Cloud City. Thanks for watching.