 Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on how Red Hat is working with telcos and the disruption in the telco cloud. We've got a great guest, CUBE alumni, Daryl Jordan Smith, Senior Vice President of Industries and Global Accounts at Red Hat. Daryl, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. It's great to be here and I'm really excited about having the opportunity to talk to you today. Yeah, we're not in person in real life's coming back soon. Although I hear Mobile World Congress might be in person this year. Looking like it's good. A lot of people are going to be virtual and activating. I know a lot to talk about. This is probably one of the most important topics in the industry because when you talk about telco industry, you're really talking about the edge. You're talking about 5G. You're talking about industrial benefits for business because it's not just edge for connectivity, access. We're talking about internet of things from self-driving cars to business benefits. It's not just consumer. It's really bringing that together. You guys are really leading with the cloud native platform from RHEL, OpenShift Managed Services, everything about the cloud native underpinnings. You guys have been successful as a company. But now in your area, telco is being disrupted. You're leading the way. Give us your take on this. This is super exciting. Well, it's actually one of the most exciting times. I've been in the industry for 30 years. I'm probably aging myself now, but in the telecommunications industry, this for me is the most exciting. It's where technology is actually going to visibly change the way that everyone interacts with the network. And with the applications that are being developed out there on our platform, and as you mentioned, IoT and a number of the other AI and ML innovations that are occurring in the marketplace, we're going to see a new wave of applications and innovation. What's the key delivery workload you're seeing with 5G environment? Obviously it's not just 5G in the sense of thinking about mobile phones or mobile computers as they are now. It's not just that consumer, hey, surf the web and check your email and get an app and download and communicate. It's bigger than that now. Can you tell us where you see the workloads coming in on the 5G environment? You hit the nail on the head. The killer application isn't the user or the consumer in the way that we traditionally have known it. Because you might be able to download a video and that might take 20 seconds less, but you're not going to pay an awful lot more money for that. The real opportunity around 5G is the industrial applications, things like connected car, automotive driving, factory for automation, how you actually interface digitally with your bank, how we're doing all sorts of things more intelligently at the edge of the network using artificial intelligence and machine learning. So all of those things are going to deliver a new experience for everyone that interacts with the network and the telcos are at the heart of it. You know, I want to get into the real kind of underpinnings of what's going on with the innovations happening. You just kind of laid out kind of the implications of the use cases and the target application workloads. But there's kind of two big things going on with the edge in 5G. One is under the hood, networking, you know, what's going on with the moving the packets around the workload throughput band with et cetera and all that that goes on under the hood. And then there's the domain expertise in the data where AI and machine learning have to kind of weave in. So let's take the first part first. OpenShift is out there, Red Hat's got a lot of products but you have to nail the networking requirements in cloud native with containerization because at large scales, not just packets, it's all kinds of things going on security, managing compute at the edge. There's a lot of things under the hood if you will from a networking perspective. Could you share what Red Hat's doing in that area? Yeah, so that's a very good question in that we've been building on our experience with OpenStack and the last time I was on the cube, I talked about, you know, people virtualizing network applications and network services. We're taking a lot of that knowledge that we've learned from OpenStack and we're bringing that into the container-based world. So we're looking at how we accelerate packets, we're looking at how we build cloud native applications on bare metal in order to drive that level of performance. We're looking at actually how we do the certification around these applications and services because they may be sitting in different applets across the cloud and in some instances, running on multiple clouds at the same time. So we're building on our experience from OpenStack. We're bringing all of that into OpenShift, our container-based environment with all of the tooling necessary to make that effective. It's interesting with all the automation going on, certainly with the edge developing nicely the way you're describing it, certainly disrupting the telco cloud. You have an operator mindset, a cloud native operator thinking kind of, I mean, it's distributed computing, we know that, but it's hybrid. So it's essentially cloud operations. So there's an operator mindset here that's just different. Could you just share quickly before we move on to the next segment, what's different about this operating model for these new kinds of operators as you guys have been saying, the CIO is the new cloud operator. That's the skill set they have to be thinking. And certainly IT to anyone else provisioning and managing infrastructure has to think like an operator. What's your view? Exactly, they certainly do need to think like an operator. They need to look at how they automate a lot of these functions because they're actually deployed in many different places all at the same time. They have to live independently of each other. That's what cloud native actually really is. So the whole notion of five nines and vertically orientated stacks of five nines availability, that's kind of going out the window. We're looking at application availability across a hybrid cloud environment and making sure the application can live and sustain itself. So operators as part of OpenShift is one element of that. Operations in terms of management and orchestration and all the tooling that we actually also provide as Red Hat but also in conjunction with a big partner ecosystem such as companies like Netcracker for example or IBM as another example or Ericsson bringing their automation tool sets and their orchestration tool sets to that whole equation to address exactly that problem. You bring up the ecosystem and this is really an interesting point. I want to just hit on that real quick because it reminds me of the days when we had this massive innovation wave in the 90s during that era. The client server movement really was about multi-vendor. And you start to see that now and where this ties into here I think is and I want to get your reaction to this is that moving to the cloud was all about to 2015. Move to the cloud, move to the cloud, cloud native. Now it's all about not only being agile and better performance but you're going to have smaller footprints with more security requirements more enterprise requirements. This is now it's more complicated. So you have to kind of make the complication go away and now you have more people in the ecosystem filling in these white spaces. So you have to be performant and purpose built, if you will, I hate to use that word but or at least performant and agile, smaller footprint, great security enabling other people to participate. That's a requirement. Can you share your reactions to that? Well, that's core of what we do at Red Hat. I mean, we take open source community software into a hardened distribution fit for the telecommunications marketplace. So we're very adapt to working with communities and third parties. That ecosystem is really important to us. We're investing hundreds of engineers, literally hundreds of engineers working with our ecosystem partners to make sure that their application and service is certified running on our platform. But also importantly, is certified to be running in conjunction with other cloud native applications that sit over the same cloud. So that is not trivial to achieve in any stretch of the imagination. And a lot of IT technology skills come to bear. And as you mentioned earlier, a lot of networking skills, things that we've learned and we built with a lot of these traditional vendors as we bring that to the marketplace. You know, I've been sitting on the cube, I think five years ago, I started talking about this and it was kind of a loose formulation. I want to get your reaction because you brought up an ecosystem. Now saying, you know, you're going to see the big clouds develop as the Amazon, you know, Microsoft came in after and now Google and others. And then I said, there's going to be a huge wave of what I call secondary clouds. And you see companies like Snowflake building on top of Amazon. And so you start to see the power law of new cloud service providers emerging that can either sit and work with across multiple clouds, either one cloud or others. That's now multi-cloud and hybrid. But this rise of the new, more CSPs, more cloud service providers. This is a huge part of your area right now because some call that telco, telco cloud edge, hits that. What is Red Hat doing in this cloud service provider market specifically? How do you help them? If I'm a cloud service provider, what do I get in working with Red Hat? How do I be successful? Because it's very easy to be a cloud service provider now more than ever. What do I do? How do you help? How do you help me? Well, we offer a platform called OpenShift which is a containerized based platform but it's not just a container. It involves huge amounts of tooling associated with operating it, developing it around it. So the concept that we have is that you can bring those applications, develop them once on one single platform and run it on-premise. You can run it natively as a service in Microsoft's environment. You can actually run it natively as a service in Amazon's environment. You can run it natively in IBM's environment. You can build an application once and run it in all of them depending on what you want to achieve. And who actually provides you the best zoning, the best terms and conditions, the best tooling in terms of other services such as AI associated with that. So it's all about developing it once, certifying it once, but deploying it in many, many different locations, leveraging the largest possible developer ecosystem to drive innovation through applications on that common platform. So the assumption there is that's going to drive down costs. Can you talk about why the benefits, the economics are there? Talk about the economics. Yeah, so A does drive down costs and that's an important aspect but more importantly, it drives up agility. So time to market advantage is actually attainable for you. So many of the telcos, when they deploy a network service traditionally, it would take them literally maybe a year to roll it all out. They have to do it in days. They have to do updates in real time in day two operations in literally minutes. So we're building the fabric necessary in order to enable those applications and services to occur. And as you move into the edge of the network and you look at things like private 5G networks, service providers or telcos in this instance will be able to deliver services all the way out to the edge into that private 5G environment and operate that in conjunction with those enterprise clients. So OpenShift allows me, if I get this right, I'm the CSP to run, have a horizontal only scalable organization, okay, from a unification platform standpoint, okay, whether it's 5G and other functions. Is that correct? That's correct. Okay, so you got that. Now now I want to come in and bring in the top of the stack or the other element that's been a big conversation here at Red Hat Summit and in the industry. That is AI and the use of data. One of the things that's emerging is the ability to have both the horizontal scale as well as the specialism of the data and have that domain expertise. You're in the industries for Red Hat. This is important because you're going to have one industry is going to have different jargon, different language, different data, different KPIs. So you got to have that domain expertise to enable the ability to write the apps and also enable AI. Can you comment on how that works and what Red Hat's doing there? So we're developing OpenShift and a number of other technologies to be fit for the edge of the network where a lot of these AI applications will reside because you want them at the, closer to the client or the application itself where it needs to reside. We're creating that edge fabric, if you like. The next generation of hybrid clouds really going to be in my view at the edge. We're enabling a lot of the service providers to go after that, but we're also igniting by industry. You mentioned different industries. So if I look at, for example, manufacturing with Minesphere, we recently announced with Siemens, how they do at the edge of the network, factory automation, collecting telemetry, doing real-time data and analytics, looking at materials going through the factory floor in order to get a better quality result with lower levels of imperfections as they run through that system. It's just one industry. And they have their own private and favorite AI platforms and datasets they want to work with, with their own data scientists who understand that ecosystem inherently. You can move that to healthcare. You can imagine how you actually interface with your healthcare professionals here in North America, but also around the world. How those applications and services and what the AI needs to do in terms of understanding X-rays and looking at common errors associated with different X-rays. So a practitioner can make a more specific diagnosis faster, saving money and potentially lives as well. So different vertical markets in this space have different AI and ML requirements and needs, different data science and different data models. And what we're seeing is an ecosystem of companies that are starting up there in that space. We have Watson as part of IBM, but you have Proceptor Labs, you have HTia, H2O, and a number of other very, very important AI-based companies in that ecosystem. Yeah, and you get the horizontal scalability of the control plane and in the platform, if you will, that gives a cross-organizational leverage and enable that vertical domain expertise. Exactly, and you want to build an AI application that might run on a factory floor for certain reasons due to its location and what they're actually physically building, you might want to run that on-premise. You might actually want to put it into IBM Cloud or into Azure or into AWS. You develop it once to OpenShift, you can deploy it in all of those as a service sitting natively in those environments. Terrell, great chat. I got a lot going on Telco Cloud. There's a lot of cloud-native disruption going on. It's a challenge and an opportunity and some people have to be on the right side of the history on this one if they kind of get it right. We'll know and the scoreboard will be very clear because this is a shift, it's a shift. So again, you hit all the key points that I wanted to get out, but I want to ask you two more areas that are hot here at Red Hat Summit, 21 as well, again, as well in the industry, I want to get your reaction and thoughts on. And they are DevSecOps and Automation. Okay, two areas. Everyone's talking about DevOps, which we know is infrastructure code, programmability, under the hood, modern application development, all good. Yeah, the second there, security, DevSecOps, that's critical, Automation's continuing to be the benefits of cloud-native. So DevSecOps and Automation, what's your take and how's it impact the Telco world and your world? You can't operate a network without having security in place. You're talking about very sensitive data. You're talking about applications that could be real-time critical and misses actually even life-saving or life-threatening if you don't get them right. So the acquisition that Red Hat recently made around Stack Rocks really helps us make that next level of transition into that space. And we're looking about how we go about securing containers in a cloud-native environment. As you can imagine, there'll be many, many thousands, tens of thousands of containers running. If one is actually misbehaving for one of a better term, that creates a security risk and a security loophole. We're shoring that up. That's important for the deployment open-shift in the Telco domain and other domains. In terms of automation, if you can't do it at scale and if you look at 5G and you look at the radios at the edge of the network and how you're going to provision those services, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of nodes, hundreds of thousands. So you have to automate a lot of those processes. Otherwise, you can't scale to meet the opportunity. You can't physically deploy. You know, Daryl, it's a great conversation. You know, as a student of history and Dave Vellante and I always kind of joke about that and you've been in and around in the industry for a long time, Telcos have been balancing this evolution of digital business for many, many decades. And now with Cloud Native, it's finally a time where you're starting to see that it's just the same game now, new infrastructure. You know, video voice, text, data, all now happening, all transformed and going digital all the way, all aspects of it. In your opinion, how should Telcos be thinking about as they put their plans in place for next generation? Because, you know, the world is now Cloud Native, there's a huge surface area of opportunities, different ecosystem relationships, the power dynamics are shifting. It's really a time where there will be winners and there will be losers. What's your view on how the Telco industry needs to cloudify and how to be positioned for success? So one of the things I truly believe very deeply that the Telcos need to create a platform, horizontal platform that attracts developer and ecosystems to their platform because innovation is going to sit elsewhere. Then, you know, there might be a killer application that one Telco might create, but in reality, most of those innovations, the most of those disruptors are going to occur from outside of that Telco company. So you want to create an environment where you're easy to engage and you've got maximum sets of tools for versatility and agility in order to attract that innovation. If you attract the innovation, you're going to ignite the business opportunity that 5G and 6G and beyond is going to actually provide you or enable your business to drive and you've really got to unlock that innovation. And you can only unlock in our view of Red Hat innovation if you're open. You know, you follow open standards, you're using open systems and open source is a method or a tool that you guys, if you're a Telco, I would ask, you guys need to leverage and harness. Yeah, and there's a lot of upside there. If you get that right, there's plenty of upside, a lot of leverage, a lot of assets to advantage. The whole offline, online, coming back together, we are living in a hybrid world, certainly with the pandemic. We've seen what that means. It's put a spotlight on critical infrastructure and the critical shifts. If you had to kind of get pinned down, Darryl, how would you describe that learnings from the pandemic? As folks start to come out of the pandemic, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. As we come out of this pandemic, companies want to growth strategy, want to be positioned for success. What's your learning coming out of the pandemic? So from my perspective, which really kind of, one respect was very admirable, but another respect is actually deeply, a lot of gratitude is the fact that the telecommunications companies, because of their carrier grade capabilities and their operational prowess, were able to keep their networks up and running, and they had to move significant capacity from major cities to rural areas because everyone was working from home. And in many different countries around the world, they did that extremely well. And their networks held up. I don't know, and maybe someone will correct me and email me, but I don't know one telco had a huge network outage through this pandemic. And that kept us connected, it kept us working. And it also, what I also learned is that in certain countries, particularly in Latin, where they have a very large prepaid market, they were worried that the prepaid market in the pandemic would go down because they felt that people would have enough money to spend and therefore they wouldn't top up their phones as much, the opposite effect occurred. They saw prepaid grow. And that really taught me that connectivity is critical in times of stress that we are also, well, everyone's going through. So I think there were some key learnings there. Yeah, and I think you're right on the money there. It's like they pulled the curtain back of all the fud and said, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. And when you look at what happened and what had to happen to survive in the pandemic and be functional, you nailed it. The network stability, the resilience, but also the new capabilities that were needed had to be delivered in an agile way. And I think, you know, it's pretty much a forcing function for all the projects that are on the table to know which ones to double down on. So I think you pretty much nailed it. Thank you. Daryl Jordan Smith, senior vice president of industries and global accounts for Red Hat CUBE alumni. Thanks for that insight. Thanks for sharing great conversation around telcos and telco clouds and all the edge opportunities. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. Okay, it's theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 21. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.