 The Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Hi everybody, welcome back to day three of MWC23. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here live at the theater of Barcelona. Lisa Martin, David Nicholson, John Furrier's in our studio in Palo Alto. A lot of buzz at the show. The mobile world daily today, front page Netflix. Chief hits back in fair share row. Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix, talking about how, hey, you guys want to tax us? The telcos want to tax us? Well, maybe you should help us pay for some of the content. Your margins are higher. You have a monopoly. We're delivering all this value. You're bundling Netflix in for a lot of ISPs. So hold on, pump the brakes on that tax. So that's a big news. Lockheed Martin, boss issues AI guidelines, says AI is not going to take over your job anytime soon. Although I would say your job's going to be AI powered for the next five years. We're going to talk about data. We've been talking about the disaggregation of the telco stack. Part of that stack is a data layer. John Chrysler is here, the CMO of couch-based John. You know, we've talked about all week the disaggregation of the telco stack. They got silicon and operating systems that are real-time OS, highly reliable, compute infrastructure all the way up through a telemetry stack, et cetera. And that's a proprietary block that's really exploding. It's like the Big Bang, like we saw in the enterprise 20 years ago. And we haven't had much discussion about that data layer. Sort of that horizontal data layer. That's the market you play in. Couch-based obviously has a lot of telco customers. We've seen Snowflake and others launch telco businesses. What are you seeing when you talk to customers at the show? What are they doing with that data layer? Yeah, so they're building applications to drive and power unique experiences for their users. But of course it all starts with where the data is. So they're building mobile applications where they're stretching it out to the edge and you have to move the data to the edge. You have to have that capability to deliver that highly interactive experience to their customers or for their own internal use cases out to that edge. So seeing a lot of that with couch-based and with our customers in telco. So what do the telcos want to do with data? I mean, they've got the telemetry data. Now they frequently complain about the over-the-top providers that have used that data, again like Netflix, to identify customer demand for content. And they're mopping that up in a big way. Certainly Amazon and shopping, Google and ads. They're all using that network. But what do the telcos do today and what do they want to do in the future? They're all talking about monetization. How do they monetize that data? Yeah, well by taking that data, there's insight to be had, right? So by usage patterns and what's happening, just as you said, so that they can deliver a better experience. It's all about getting that edge, if you will, on their competition. And so taking that data, using it in a smart way, gives them that edge to deliver a better service and then grow their business. We're seeing a lot of action at the edge. And the edge can be a Home Depot or a Lowe's store, but it also could be the Far Edge. It could be an oil drilling, an oil rig. It could be a racetrack, certainly hospitals and certain situations. So let's think about that edge where there's maybe not a lot of connectivity. There might be private networks going in in the future. Private 5G networks. What's the data flow look like there? Do you guys have any customers doing those types of these cases? What are they doing with the data? Yeah, absolutely. We've got customers all across. So telco and transportation, all kinds of service delivery and healthcare, for example. We've got customers who are delivering healthcare out at the edge where they have a remote location. They're able to deliver healthcare, but as you said, there's not always connectivity. So they need to have the applications need to continue to run and then sync back once they have that connectivity. So it's really having the ability to deliver a service reliably and then know that that will be synced back to some central server when they have connection. So the processing might occur where the data- Get it to compute at the edge. What do you sync back? What is that technology? So within, so Couchspace and Couchspace's case, we have an autonomous sync capability that brings it back to the cloud once they get back to whether it's a private network that they want to run over or if they're doing it over a public Wi-Fi network once it determines that there's connectivity and it can be peer-to-peer sync. So different edge apps communicating with each other and then ultimately communicating back to a central server. I mean, the other theme here, of course, I call it the software defined telco, right? It got to run on something. It's got to have hardware. So you see companies like AWS putting outposts out to the edge. Outposts doesn't really run a lot of database to mine. I mean, it runs RDS. Maybe they're going to eventually work with companies. Like, I mean, you're a partner of AWS, right? So do you see that kind of cloud infrastructure that's moving to the edge? Do you see that as an opportunity for companies like Couchspace? Yeah, we do. We see customers wanting to push more and more of that compute out to the edge. And so partnering with AWS gives us that opportunity and we are certified on outposts. But you are, we are. Yeah, absolutely. When did that go down? That was last year, but probably early last year. So I can run Couchspace at the edge on outposts. That's right. I mean, outpost adoption has been slow. We reported on that. But are you seeing any traction there? Are you seeing any nipples? Are you starting to see some interest? Yeah, absolutely. And again, it has to be for the right use case. But again, for service delivery, things like healthcare and transportation, they're starting to see where they want to have that compute be very close to where the actions happen. And you can run in the data center, right? That's right. You can run in the cloud. You see HPE with GreenLake. You see Dell with Apex. That's essentially their outpost. They're saying, hey, we're going to take our whole infrastructure and make it as a service, right? And so you can participate in those environments. And then so you've got now, we call it SuperCloud, you've got the on-prem, you can run in the public cloud, you can run at the edge and you want that consistent experience from a data layer. So is that really the strategy for a data company is taking or should be taking that horizontal layer across all those use cases? You do need to think holistically about it because you need to be able to deliver as a provider wherever the customer wants to be able to consume that application. So you do have to think about any of the public clouds or private networks and all the way to the edge. What's different, John, about the telco business versus the traditional enterprise? Well, I mean, there's scale. I mean, one thing they're dealing with, particularly for end user-facing apps, you're dealing at a very, very high scale. And the expectation that you're going to deliver a very interactive experience. So I'd say one thing in particular that we are focusing on is making sure we deliver that highly interactive experience, but it's the scale of the number of users and customers that they have and the expectation that your application's always going to work. Speaking of applications, I mean, it seems like that's where the innovation is going to come from. We saw yesterday, GSMA announced, I think, eight APIs, telco APIs. You know, we were talking to theCUBE. One of the analysts was like, hey, that's nothing. One of these guys know about developers, but, you know, as Danielle Royston said, eight's better than zero. Okay, so we're starting there. But the point being, it's all about the apps. That's where the innovation's going to come from. That's right. So what are you seeing there in terms of building on top of the data app? Right. Well, you have to provide the APIs and the access because it is really, the rubber meets the road with the developers and giving them the ability to create those really rich applications where they want and create the experiences and innovate and change the way that they're giving those experiences. Yeah, so what's your relationship with developers at CouchBase? I mean, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, yeah, so we have a great relationship with developers, something we've been investing more and more in, in terms of things like developer relations teams and community. CouchBase started in open source, continually based on open source projects. And of course, those are very developer centric. So we provide all the consistent APIs for developers to create those applications, whether it's something on CouchBase Lite, which is our kind of edge-based database, or how they can sync that data back. And we actually automate a lot of that syncing, which is a very difficult developer task, which lends them to one developer. What I'm trying to figure out is, what's the telco developer look like? Is that a developer that comes from the enterprise and somebody comes from the blockchain world, or AI, or, you know, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of developer talk here, but there's a huge opportunity. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I feel like, you know, the telcos kind of remind me of, you know, a traditional legacy company trying to get into the developer world. You know, even Oracle, okay, they bought Sun, they got Java, so I guess they have developers. But, you know, IBM, for years, tried with BlueMix, they had to end up buying Red Hat, really, and that gave them the developer community. EMC used to have a thing called EMC code, which was a, you know, good effort. But, yeah, and then, you know, VMware always trying to do that. But so, as you move up the stack, obviously you have greater developer affinity. Where do you think the telco developer's going to come from? How's that going to evolve? Yeah, it's interesting. And I think, to kind of get to your first question, I think they're fairly traditional enterprise developers, and when we break that down, we look at it in terms of what the developer persona is. Are they a front-end developer, like they're writing that front-end app, they don't care so much about the infrastructure behind, or are they a full-stack developer and they're really involved in the entire application development lifecycle, or are they living at the back end and they're really wanting to just focus in on that data layer. So we tend, we lend towards all of those different personas and we think about them in terms of the APIs that we create. So that's really what the developers are for telcos, is there's a combination of those front-end and full-stack developers, and so for them to continue to innovate, they need to appeal to those developers, and that's technology like Couchbase, is what helps them do that. Yeah, and you think about the Apple's, you know, the App Store model, where Apple sort of says, okay, here's a developer kit, go create, and then if it's successful, you're going to be successful, and we're going to take a big, okay, good model. I think I'm hearing, and maybe I misunderstood this, but I think it was the CEO or Chairman of Ericsson on the day one keynotes were saying, we are going to monetize the, essentially the telemetry data through APIs, we're going to charge for that. You know, maybe that's not the best approach, I don't know, I think there's got to be some innovation on top. Now maybe some of these Greenfield telcos are going to do, you take like a dish networks, what they're doing, they're really trying to drive development layers, so I think it's like this Wild West open, you know, community that's got to be formed, and right now it's very unclear to me, do you have any insights there? I think it is more, like you said, Wild West, I think there's no emerging standard per se for across those different company types and sort of different pieces of the industry, so consequently it does need to form some more standards in order to really help it grow, and I think you're right, you have to have the right APIs and the right access in order to properly monetize, you have to attract those developers or you're not going to be able to monetize properly. Do you think that, in thinking about your business and you've always sold to telcos, but now it's like there's this transformation going on in telcos, will that become an increasingly larger piece of your business or maybe even a more important piece of your business or is it going to be steady state because it's such a slow moving industry? No, it is a big and increasing piece of our business. I think telcos, like other enterprises, want to continue to innovate, and so they look to technologies like couch base, document database, that allows them to have more flexibility and deliver the speed that they need to deliver those kinds of applications, so we see a lot of migration off of traditional legacy infrastructure in order to build that new age interface and the new age experience that they want to deliver. A lot of buzz in Silicon Valley about open AI and chat GPT. You know, what's your take on all that? Yeah, we're looking at it. I think it's exciting technology. I think there's a lot of applications that are kind of a little sort of innovate traditional interfaces. So for example, you can train chat GPT to create code, sample code for couch base, right? You can go and get it to give you that sample app which gets you a head start or you can actually get it to do a better job sorting through your documentation, like chat GPT can do a better job of helping you get access. So it improves the experience overall for developers. So we're excited about what the prospect of that is. So you're playing around with it like everybody is and potentially looking at ways to integrate. So are we. John, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Always great to see you, my friend. Thanks very much. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there. theCUBE will be back live from Barcelona at the theater. SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of MWC23. Go to siliconango.com for all the news. theCUBE.net is where all the videos are. Keep it right there.