 I'm joined with my co-host, Stu Miniman, analyst at wikibond.org, and our next guest is Glenn Laxdahl from Ericsson. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to be here, thank you. Okay, so Stu, we were talking with Mike earlier about service providers, data centers. Data centers are trying to be more like service providers and service providers are trying to be more like data centers. All this kind of colliding together around essentially software defined infrastructure. Stu, what do you think the brocade opportunity is for service providers? So John, actually this segment, we're going to talk a little bit about partners. So Ericsson's a partner of brocades. Glenn, I understand you guys are involved in kind of software defined networks and some of the open flow, open stack discussions. Can you tell us a little bit about the brocade partnership? Well, let's just step back and talk a little bit about the importance of cloud to us and then we can move forward to the brocade. Okay, we're allowed to still use cloud. So software defined data center is kind of taking over the term now. Cloud's dead, right? I mean, back in the day, I called it the next generation virtual data center. But please. However we characterize it, I think that the reality is that the amount of data that's going to be hitting both mobile networks and fixed networks is going to be growing at a dramatic pace over the next five years. We project in some recent analysis that we've just completed and published that the data traffic hitting mobile networks is going to increase by a factor of 15 times over the next five years. And so networks are going to have to evolve very rapidly in order to deal with that. And I think that that subject was discussed in the presentations this morning. And so what we want to do is work with our service provider customers to help evolve those networks as rapidly as possible. And aggressively moving forward with the new architectures that are going to be required to deal with that traffic is going to be an important part of that, which includes the cloud. And as an aspect of the cloud, which ultimately includes moving in the direction of software-defined networks, which is allowing us to, number one, distribute the network and the cloud as close to the edge of the network as possible. And as you're distributing the cloud to the edge of the network, you need an ability to manage that. And an orchestration layer that allows you to manage that. And we think that there is a lot of value in providing that orchestration layer, that management layer, on top of the distributed telco cloud. And the importance of distributing the telco cloud is going to be to enable the network to deal with the explosion of traffic growth that is happening now and will continue to happen over the next several years. Okay, so could you kind of connect the dots for us? How does Ethernet fabrics from Brocade fit into the overall solution? Well, I think the partnership between Brocade and Ericsson is that we're both technology providers and that we both deal in the network space. We don't compete, we collaborate and we're working on some collaborative technologies today that we're in partnership on. And we come from the network side and the telco side. Brocade comes from the Ethernet side, but as these worlds collide in the data center and in the cloud, there's the natural opportunity for collaboration between a company like Brocade and a company like Ericsson. Okay, so Glenn, I'm wondering if you can help us kind of squint through some of the trends. So, you know, just go back a couple of years, cloud was kind of a general term. We said a lot of enterprises are really transforming into a private cloud. Service providers, obviously you're providing services and many customers are doing hybrid clouds. You know, what's your take on hybrid clouds? Is there federation between the clouds or is it some applications live off-site and some live on-site? No, I think that there's, I think if you want to use the term hybrid cloud, I think that's the direction that we're going to be going. That the new network of the future is going to coexist with the existing network and that as these networks begin to move to the cloud as applications that are running on top of those networks move to the cloud, what we're going to find is that the cloud, there won't be a single instance of the cloud, but multiple instances of the cloud, both in the data center and then toward the edge of the network. And some applications are going to nicely reside or are better delivered from the network edge, from the very network edge and some of those applications better reside back in the data center. And I think that there is a requirement to manage the flow of those applications from the data center out to the network edge and the management of that I think is going to be where a significant amount of the value is. Yeah, absolutely. We need to be able to manage between the two. I guess the question I have is, are you seeing cloud bursting? Are actually seeing applications that are kind of spiking up into the service provider environments when they need the capacity or is it really more of I have my stuff and I have the stuff that's offsite and I'm managing together? No, I think that in the network of the future that we are creating with our service provider customers, it's more to, it really is a purpose built to deal with the cloud bursting, to deal with enormous bursts of bandwidth requirement wherever those might happen in the network. And we see a world where more and more computing is going to be moving to mobile endpoints where smartphone penetration today is 50% in North America growing to 80 to 90% over the next four to five years. Smartphone penetration in the rest of world is 30% growing to that same 70 to 80% over the next five years. These smartphones becoming more and more powerful, computing endpoints and they are capable of generating tremendous amounts of traffic instantaneously. And so as applications are delivered more and more to these mobile endpoints, the challenge is for the network to be able to scale to meet the needs of those mobile computing endpoints wherever they might be. So Glen, bandwidth and scalability are important but if you talk about modern applications, latency is really one of the critical components. When I use Siri, it needs to be able to answer me immediately. Customers are playing flash to really help them have applications that have immediate response time. There's still the speed of light between where I am, my mobile device and my data. What are you seeing to kind of overcome distance as a consideration as service providers roll out these solutions? Yeah, and I'll also add something as fundamental as voice over IP over LTE, the wireless networks are now being upgraded for 4G or LTE and soon we're going to be adding voice onto those LTE networks and voice is also an application that requires very low latency and very high performance. And I think that in our view, the way the network is going to evolve to deliver those low latency, high performance application requirements is moving that application as close to the edge of the network as possible. It could be from the base station out to the handset, but the closer that that application it resides to the edge of the network, we can deliver higher and higher performance of that application, in particular with respect to latency. Can you give us your view on OpenStack? There's a lot of immaturity still in the solution. Certain companies have implementations of OpenStack that they are deploying in production environments, you know, the rack spaces of the world, but you guys are working on OpenStack. Give us your view, where are we today and what needs to be done to kind of move that forward? You know, I think we're working with OpenStack as one of a few other technologies. We're certainly working in that direction, testing it out, but I wouldn't want to comment any further. Okay, well it's an emerging area. I mean, we've been following OpenStack, we think it's played in different roles of kind of like a marketing tactic, hey, I got some cloud, join OpenStack. And then the public cloud shift that we saw at Private and Hybrid Cloud, and then we saw a lot of SDN kind of activity going on in the developer, basically the developer environment. So, you know, we're watching it. It's gotten a little bit more attraction relative to actually having some more meat on the bone than fluffy kind of like industry standard organization. So, we're watching that, but that brings my question around the ecosystem around this new network virtualization trend where you got software-led infrastructures evolving server, compute storage. We've documented the rise of storage as front and center with Flash and low latency infrastructure, but now you got, now change is going on in the ecosystem from delivery side of it, orchestration you mentioned, and developers. So, can you just share your observations in those two areas? How is this new era of data center and technology like with Brocade's introducing, impacting the delivery side of the services, business, service providers, not service providers, but like consultants, we're seeing boutiques pop up, we're seeing new value chains that are threatening and disrupting the old, you know, incumbent money-making essentials of the world, which are still doing orchestration, Cap Gemini and those guys. So, we're seeing a new breed of service providers and also on the developer side, we're seeing actually really geeks dig developing some stuff. So, can you comment on your observations on those two areas? Yeah, I mean, two ways. One, we want to enable the service providers to much more quickly and much more rapidly allocate bandwidth to wherever it's needed in the network. Very dynamically allocate bandwidth to wherever it's needed in the network. We see cloud enabling that and we see, you know, potentially ethernet fabrics playing into that as well, facilitating the more instantaneous provisioning of network bandwidth or instantiations of the cloud wherever it's required. The second way is exposing APIs off of the network to bring in third-party enterprise developers to develop applications which take advantage of the capabilities that are in the network. And so the rapid provisioning of bandwidth and the opportunity to expose APIs to enable third-party enterprise developers to come in and develop purpose-built applications which take advantage of the network layer are two examples that I would give. So, you know, obviously with developers it's always kind of a catch-22. You want developers to develop stuff but also opens up security issues, right? So, obviously with networking, bounding security in the platform has always been a key part of the strategy whether it's on chip sets or within other mechanisms. So as it's become more developer-friendly networking and with virtualization, you're seeing any trends around where to bound the security and how that's playing into the data protection side of the business. Well, I think security is going to be fundamental for us, for a, I mean, that's job one as far as we're concerned. So the networks of today are purpose-built and highly secure and as we evolve those networks to more to deal with the reality of the traffic flow that is going to happen and move in the direction of the cloud, we need to treat security as job one. So it will become the most important of the factors that we're dealing with as we evolve to the network of the future. Yeah, it's a lot of table stakes requirements. We saw GoDaddy get breaches last week and so the cloud is nice. So we're seeing people, you know, multi-tenancy, another huge complex both from a tech and security and also compliance. How is compliance? One of the things Mike Claco, which I was talking about was, you know, you got a compliance nightmare. You can fight it or embrace it and fix it and we'll solve around it. What's your view on that? That compliance with respect to? Just overall, you know, rules and regulations around security, networking, and everything else like that. Oh, and now I understand. No, I mean, keep in mind that our customer base is our service providers. It's AT&T and Verizon and Sprint and T-Mobile and the service provider customers. And so the compliance to requirements like security, low latency, high performance is absolutely critical. The network is their business and therefore as we transition that network and evolve that network to introduce some of these new capabilities that we're talking about today, the security, the low latency, the high performance becomes fundamental to that. It's not something that is one of several criteria that we're looking at. It's the most important criteria that we're looking at. Glenn, last question I have for you is around orchestration. You know, we talked about management in the different pieces, you know, is every service provider kind of, you know, creating their own or are there some technologies or some areas that you're starting to see pick up in the industry? I think the orchestration is something that, no, I don't expect that everyone is going to be creating their own. I think that we're going to be evolving towards not only standards with respect to orchestration but there is going to be a lot of value in the orchestration layer for the reasons. Any of the new startups or any of the big players that you're seeing getting traction out there today? You know, there are some I don't want to comment on names but I think there are some early signs that of where it's going. My final question is, share with the folks out there that are looking under the hood here around Brocade and just infrastructure because this is the powering mobile and the consumer stuff's great. Obviously, iPhone 5's out today, it's all the rage. We covered that earlier. But just share with the folks, just give some insight into the magnitude of what's going on in the mobile world relative to the explosiveness of the growth and what that's causing and the underpinnings just from your experience, you know, your perspective. I mean, you got a front row seat to all this, right? So, I mean, you know, LTE's now on the iPhone 5, you know, we're talking about that earlier. I mean, it's just awesome innovation. I mean, the end user side of the business and now on the enterprise, bring your own device to work. Massive amounts of applications being provisioned. All this new action. So, share with the folks your insight around the mobile. What's, where's the pressure points? What's the action look like? What's the, how massive of explosive changes is? It's totally massive. You know, just the pace of innovation that has gone on in the smartphone industry over the last three years has been absolutely unprecedented where we're, as we head into 2013, we're, you know, dealing with devices that will commonly have 1.5 to 2 gigahertz dual core and quad core processors in those devices equivalent to, you know, desktop computing today. And in terms of the numbers, as I said before, we're 50% penetrated in North America right now on smartphones. That's going to 80 to 90% over the next five years. Similarly on the tablet side is, as computing is moving from the desktop to a combination of tablets and smartphones, the change that that's driving is just absolutely dramatic and the networks are going to, are going to evolve at an accelerating pace to deal with that tremendous amount of traffic. And then on the application side, applications are now evolving and evolving very rapidly to be delivered to mobile endpoints. Both smartphone and tablet endpoints. And we want to participate in that. We want to participate in a big way in that. Glenn Alex, Eric, and thanks for that perspective, massive explosion happening. We're all seeing it around us, but under the hood, it's affecting the infrastructure, great opportunity in the networking area, evolution, opportunities for entrepreneurs and companies to participate in that and push that forward and change our lives for the better, we hope. And we surely will, obviously, new things that they've seen. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE.tv coverage of the Brocade Analyst Day. Now we are going to go live to an interview already in progress in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage in Las Vegas of Splunk's Developer Conference. And we're going to have Jeff Kelly with Wikibon and Jeff Frick of SiliconANGLE with Lena Yoshi and Matthew Culver. So we're going to go take a break here and we're going to go live and switch to the action in Las Vegas with SiliconANGLE.tv's extensive coverage. We will go out to the events to extract a signal from the noise and bring that to you. So stay tuned here at Brocade and we're going to go to Las Vegas right now.