 Hello, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. I'm here in theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for SiliconANGLE news. We're here breaking down the telco disruption with cloud. You got the edge. The telecom industry just came off Mobile World Congress, MWC 2023. And big players emerged with new plans to reimagine the industry. And that's just the wave of the business transformation that cloud computing, data, AI, machine learning is all transforming. And the telco industry is one that is being disrupted. I'm joined here by Delpho Hernandez, Vice President of Global Telco Business Unit at Amazon Web Services, AWF. Delpho, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, thanks for having me. Good to see you as well. You guys had a big presence at MWC. We were there at theCUBE and we had a lot of conversations coming in around how telco is now transforming to the edge, moving from their old guard kind of environment to the new guard. You got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got machine learning. The infrastructure and the operations are evolving. Not as quick as some say, but it is happening unlike it was years ago with like a glacier speed of transformation, but a little bit much more acceleration going on this year. The big story was there's movement. They're transforming their business operations. You guys were a big part of many stories. You're simplifying, you're automating some solutions. What was the big takeaway for you guys this year around the acceleration and what's this transformation look like? Yeah, excellent points. I think it's the speed. I think it's the speed and reality. So a few years ago, whether it was three, five years ago, we had a vision and we were talking about the vision of being able to accelerate the transformation of telcos by helping them move to the cloud, right? And engaging with our partner ecosystem and innovating on their behalf and really get that transformation going. But at the time it was a vision, right? We were talking about it. We were doing some modest first steps. And I think what you saw a couple of weeks ago is that it's happening, right? It's this from vision to reality. Is that no longer is if, maybe not even how, we are in between how and when. And there is a lot of interest. So there's a lot of engagement. People wanted to see, people wanted to sit down, discuss, people wanted to go and engage in typical problems that they have. And we love working with them. So, you know, work backwards on those problems and just engage with our partners and give them the acceleration that they need to move to the cloud and transform this wonderful industry that is telecommunications. You know, I'm always joking about the glacier speed of telco. And, you know, I know you can't say that, but I can. But people know that I love the telco industry. I think it's always been one of those innovation areas. If you look at all the transit of internet from the internet days to how phone calls are being made on the mobile side. Now you've got 5G, the convergence of data. This is an opportunity zone for more innovation and use cases. You're seeing IoT devices, industrial IoT specifically and getting an extreme focus. A lot more of our lives are now being identified at the edge where telcos will be playing. The towers are getting smaller, getting more powerful, more distance, more bandwidth. This is a big part of why this is the confluence right now. What's the impact of the cloud native piece specifically? What is Amazon doing? What is AWS doing specifically right now in this particular moment? So the advantages of the clouds are huge for an industry, right? It gives you that elasticity. It gives you that agility. It gives you that ability to pay for what you use. In the context of telco, it also gives you an infrastructure that you don't have to build. An infrastructure that is already there. It gives you an ability of not having to build networks for peak requirements, but just use it and flex up or down with the associated cost reduction. It gives you the benefits of a much more improved green efficiency from where you're there. And then it also brings everything else that we have done on the IT side of the cloud. It brings you all the services, 200 services that you can go on and use. It gives you integration of cameras, IoT, computer vision, machine learning, data services. It gives you all of these services ready for you to consume within the telco domain. And you don't have to go through those long cycles that you and I remember, right? Of building the project and securing the budget, deploying the equipment, doing testing here. You can just innovate at a much faster clip. You can just boot up, test, succeed and scale up. And if it doesn't work, you shut it down and try something else. So you bring that together. Everything that I just talked about together with all these partners that we have and the thousand partners, it gives you the developer ecosystem, which by the way, developers was a big theme as well, right? Everything that the GSMA is doing on open gateway. And then we bring out a marketplace already with 10,000 vendors in it that are ready to run in the cloud. So it's just the best of both walls coming together and delivering real value today. One of the things that was a theme was unlocking growth opportunities that came up a lot in terms of new business opportunities, extending the margin of providers. What are some of those opportunities that you guys are unlocking with 5G Edge and some of the enterprise transformations? We saw a lot of private networks, 5G. What are some of those growth opportunities that you guys are driving with 5G Edge and enterprise transformation? You know, Sporon, one of our big announcements was announcing a solution that we call integrated private wireless. And it wasn't a solution that we just sort of brought to market as such. It was something that we brought to market with leading telcos around the world, right? We co-announced it with Deutsche Telecom, with the KDDI in Japan, with Orange in France, with T-Mobile in the US, and with Telefonica. And it was about combining all the capabilities that private 4G and 5G technologies can provide to enterprises with the ease of deployment and the manageability and the access of doing it on the AWS platform. So it's a bringing a offering that is easy for telecom companies to take to market. It's very easy to deploy on AWS. And if you're an enterprise user who spends the time on the AWS ecosystem, here's a landing page where you can use, you can look for your needs for integrated private wireless and you don't need to go and start a whole separate design and do it all from scratch, because we've done that work to help the adoption of private wireless. So that was one of the big things we put out there. We demonstrated a number of other revenue generating opportunities, like a demo we have in standard, super popular. Something we did with Telus Canada, it's smart home 2.0, on how you could integrate third party devices by any manufacturer, not only Amazon devices, was all sorts of third parties. How you can integrate Alexa, how you can integrate Siri, how you can integrate everything and have a serial touch platform owned by the telecooperator that can manage the provisioning and the management of a smart home. That a few years ago, would it just been science fiction? We were demonstrating that today. Another example, right on the edge, Telia, they're doing a fantastic piece of work with a logistic outsourcer in Finland called Transvalweb. They have built a AI ML power solution where they can process a real time video on warehouses and really track inventory moves and optimize inventory, all managing the edge and managing cameras. So there's a type of tech solution that these guys wouldn't have been able to do a few years ago and it just helps them build revenue. Yeah, I noticed that was on your LinkedIn feed that the CEO of Telia Corporation, I was talking about the deal you guys announced recently news. That's an example, what is the virtual private 5G component? Why is the virtual private network so poppers? Is that because that's what the enterprise is like? They want that security, is that security issue or is that a limitation or a new feature of the new environment? It's like, listen, Wi-Fi has a lot of advantages, right? And some wire line solutions have a lot of advantages but sometimes you need something that is more flexible and less costly to deploy them and you've got now the ability to have high connectivity, a lot of more devices, sensors everywhere and you don't have the quality of service. You might not have the reach, you might not have the security of Wi-Fi. So this private wireless solution brings the best of both worlds, brings the security, the quality of service, the security that it's available in 4G and 5G but you can deploy it in the context of your campus, your logistics center, your airport, your hospital and it's a really good use case of 5G, not only being used for consumers but also used to transform other industries and help us get that digital transformation accelerated. Adolfo, what are you investing in right now for your team? What are you looking at? What's the focus? What's the priorities? So it's a lot to be done, right? We talked about sustainability earlier and sustainability and decarbonization is a big topic for Amazon, as you know, for AWS and for us in AWS Delco as well. We sincerely believe that running a lot of these old workloads and certainly the new workloads on a more modern, more efficient, energy efficient infrastructure is going to save the planet. We had a demonstration by Entity Dockomo demonstrating how they can get a 72% energy efficiency by running on gravity to an infrastructure. One big area and it's a lot of stuff that we can do there. The other announcement that we made and it got quite a lot of headlines during last week is about the Delco Network Builder. It's about orchestration of network capabilities at the Delco standard level and then have a translation internally that sort of maps that network mapping that network engineers create and map that automatically into instances, pops and things like that. So we're just removing a lot of the complexity. That's another area. You've seen the area of private wireless. You've seen the work that we're doing with SageMaker to make it more relevant to some of the use cases that Delcos are accelerating. So, you know, we've been announcing outposts, innovations, snow, some of our mobile disconnectable ragerized devices for some complex use cases. So basically what we're doing is we're trying to bring the best of everything that we do at AWS and we make it relevant and value generating in the context of telecoms IT and telecom networks. And you're partnering with them to do all this. This is the focus. There's not so much to try to force the disruption. You guys are working hand in hand with the customers. We're working hand in hand with customers. Everything that we've announced is always partnering with someone. But we're also partnering with that ecosystem of partners that are critical in the telecommunication space, either in the IT domain, but growingly in the network domain, see the announcement we made with Nokia on Cloud Rand. How do we get the best of both worlds from Nokia's experience and platforms in the run and bring it to the cloud? We also did the demo with Juniper on energy optimization, but we're also partnering with Tec Mahindra, with CatGermini, with Accenture, with a number of other slalom critical SIs that are also adding a lot of value to those transformations. So for us in AWS Telecom, it's about partnering with the ecosystem and accelerating this. Yeah, I'm interested in that Juniper deal, but we have some other interview to get with those guys. Very interesting proposition. I want to sequence now to your themes at Mobile World Congress. I think these are going to be consistent with what we're going to be talking about over the next year, leading up to next year's cube at re-invent and also at Mobile World Congress. You guys had a couple of key things, networks cloudified, operations simplified, growth unlocked, and kind of simplifying and re-imagining the customer experience. So I have a couple of questions if you don't mind. Can you explain how Amazon's orchestrating the software defined network to provide greater scalability and security? Cause that's a big part. You kind of mentioned some of the automation piece, but what specifically, how you are orchestrating the SDN for scalability and security? So security is job one, right? AWS, everything that we do, when we build our cloud and we'll deploy it our infrastructure. And our services and our processes, everything is done with security in mind. And so it's scalability, right? So you see, you go and look at our cloud continuum, right, going from regions to be able to then go to local zones in the metros and be able to go to outpost or wavelength in particular operators or then out into snow devices. All of that is a cloud continuum where you have a common set of services, common set of APIs and tools that people can use. And everything is being built with security and scalability in mind. Then when we go and look at particular workloads, we have the ability to go and target what part of the network continuum is best suited for what particular workload. You wouldn't deploy a BSS in the same part of the architecture that you would deploy around because they have very different requirements in terms of processing and network throughput and others. So we are optimizing by workload, but we are keeping the basics, common security, scalability, flexibility and commonality of our tools and interfaces for developers. Yeah, and I think that's why that's the number one theme I noticed on the rank, networks cloudified is huge because networking is a big part of this industry, obviously, but also you have old school networking and kind of new school networking. The cloud native networking obviously is the new school. How are you guys approaching that integration of the cloud native networking technologies with the existing on-premises infrastructure-related hybrid cloud or old school networking? Because, I mean, right now there's more virtualization migration to say containers and Kubernetes than I've ever seen before, but still there's still smaller numbers than the legacy on virtualization. On the networking side, what's the equivalent on-premise migration integration dynamic? Can you share your thoughts on how you're approaching that integration of the cloud native networking with existing on-premises? So, I think the best way to go after this challenge is acknowledging that we're starting in two different positions, right? From one side, as you say, we're coming from sort of on-premise bare metal type networking capabilities on the cloud. It's networking is virtualized. So that was the starting point. That's where the two industries were. And we're doing a lot of work with our partners with the likes of Nokia as an example to go and figure out for every particular workload and this particular case that ran, what is the best possible solution? And there we came up with a joint engineer solution that respects the principles of being cloud native in everything that we do at AWS, but also addresses some of the design and architecture discussions that considerations that the likes of Nokia bring it. Just being an example as many others, but the key word and how we solve it is really running up our sleeves and getting our engineering teams talking to each other, trying to figure out what is the best solution for the customer and work backwards from the customer so that we end up having the right solution for the customer. Yeah, and I think that's a hot area. We're going to continue to explore that. We're seeing a lot of traction on cloud native networking and kind of creating this cloud operational model which is the next pillar of your themes, the operation simplified. Okay, this is now the ops side. Networking, a lot of work to continue to be doing there. I know you guys got good networking capabilities there. And in bridging that, it's going to be a challenge, but we can talk about that another time. On the ops side, this is really with a simplification of ops that the customers comes in. Can you talk about how you guys are addressing the challenge that customers have in managing the increasingly complex and distributed systems in a way that's both scalable and easy to use on the customer side, because as they get more scale and automation and it gets more distributed with the edge, the complexity is increasing, but also the scale and ease of uses. And that opens up a lot of things like configuration errors, potentially security. So this is the challenge. Can you share how you guys are addressing this? Yeah, Joe, let me sort of push back a bit. I think the challenge is not that particular configuration error. The challenge is that there is a lot of capital and talent deployed against these operations. And in many cases, they are legacy, overly complex, and they haven't been updated for a while. And they're actually holding the businesses back, right? There are still customers out there. Did you not have the catalog solutions that they need for a efficient go to market as a telco? There are telcos out there who still have very legacy, decades old BSS systems that need help with, right? And some of the work that we're doing with the likes of Amdox and Optima and a number of other partners, Eriks and BSS, because towards modernizing that those old infrastructures are moving them to the cloud so that they can get that agility. You also have some pretty large ERP systems that are maybe dated, maybe don't old expensive infrastructure that need to be migrated to the cloud. You might have particularly telcos, tens of thousands of Windows machines that are running out there, that are running out of date, out of maintenance, or very expensive maintenance hardware, that you could very quickly move to run on the cloud and virtualize. And then at the macro level, they sit on a very rich infrastructure of data centers. Some of them, they might wanna keep. Some of them, they just wanna exit because they're sitting on costs and energy costs that you don't have. And for some of them, John, the teams that build those operational centers and systems are of a certain age. Some of them are gonna be working through the workforce. So you wanna get the skills, the cloud skills to be more pervasive inside the telco operations departments. So as on when these workloads are moved for cost simplifications, for operational simplifications, for business agility reasons to the cloud, there is going to be a team there that is cloud native, they're born in the cloud, train in the cloud. And that's another area that we work with our customers and partners with. So your premise is that obviously the operations is outdated and antiquated. So it's not even simplified yet. So there's an error, there's one use case of the challenge of modernizing the existing old school ops, which is systems and process workflows. Get that modernized shift to the cloud, then simplify with cloud native. There is no, we have our migration tools and assessments and methodologies. Some things you can lift and shift, some things you have to simplify before you move them. So there isn't a universal solution. Some of these solutions in OSS, PSS in particular, they're rather bespoke. So it's not like the new one necessarily exists on the cloud. So the migration actually comes with some work that needs to be done. And again, I think they're working with someone like AWS. It has co-development relationships with the likes of Amdogs, does make these moves a lot easier. They're never painless, but they're just easier. And I think that's really why I've always called it the glacier speed movement, because I think their ops has hamstrung them a lot. I think you're right on on that. I think that's really the bottom next bin. But the beautiful thing about the pandemic that we saw during the pandemic was people were agile when they changed their ops. We saw Amazon Kinect, for instance, do well with during the pandemic. So I think a lot of people have opened their eyes to the fact that they could reboot ops quickly, that will change the customer experience and unlock the growth. So for the customers that have done that, if they have, the ones that have done that, okay, you believe that to be true. I'm sure you agree, you would agree with that. I do, I do and connect, it's a very good example of that. Connect highlights that you don't have to get stuck in hugging your old stuff. You could really kind of move that out, bring in the new quickly. And if there's pain there, you can solve it. But this unlocks the experience of the customer, okay, and unlocks growth. So can you talk about that piece of it for the folks that have been successful with Amazon? How have they leveraged the AI and machine learning? What tools are they using to help them? You see the rise of the chat bots are here. You're seeing that kind of vibe going on. So clearly the direction in the new model will be leveraging technology, driving operational efficiency for customer value. Can you share anything insights there? Yeah, so if you think about it from a, first of all from a simplification and a cost reduction perspective, we will be moving in connect from legacy telephony systems used by college and serving customers that only have the information that they had to fully on the cloud systems that you can deploy as a super fast clip. You can get hundreds, thousands of agents enabled very quickly in a virtualized environment. In an environment where all the data is there for you to use. And then within that data, you can start using some of the AWS AI ML services that would allow you to do things like on the fly, real time transcribing. You can do sentiment analysis. You can start predicting what the subject or the context of the next goal is going to be. You can start generating through some of the tools what our next best offer could be. And then you might even, you might not always do it just sort of for efficiency. Sometimes you might have an outage. Sometimes something might go down and you need to have something like connect. You can very quickly just pin out the systems which that's why they were so popular during the pandemic to give you that flexibility. There is a pick. There is a campaign. There is an outreach. And then you're doing all of this by capturing all your data by being able to understand all the calls, by being able to understand what's happening, by being able to predict and influence behavior. And that's just a paradigm because in the old days, you know these projects used to take tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in CAPEX. It would take a long, long time to deploy. And then they were quite static. Once they were done, this is flexible from day one and integrated with the AML services from day one. So it's fantastic. You know, I wrote an article when I interviewed Adam Sileski for the re-invent exclusive. One of the things we talked about was this new dynamic of the benefits of the, I call it the next gen Amazon. He didn't really like that, but that's what I called it. As you guys go out 13 years later, 15 years later, 17 years, it's been around the cloud. The CAPEX investments throwing off more value. As you point out, there's now customers sitting on top of Amazon, building ecosystems, and that look like at their own cloud, but they're really being powered by AWS. This is creating new growth opportunities. And that was one of the themes that you guys had out there at MWC. Can you share the kind of like, what's going to be that explosive edge growth that you're unlocking? I call it the edge generically because you got 5G edge, technically edge, but then the enterprise transformation that you guys call it. But it's basically the edge, telco and the edge networking. This is going to be a new business model opportunity for companies. What do you see as unlocking growth for people who are working with AWS? What kind of value propositions? I was just seeing the AI wave coming. We're going to see that part of the edge, IoT devices, industrial IoT. What are the big growth drivers you see out there? I think this is fundamental to transform other industries. So if you look at the edge, if you can look at what edge type solutions a private Mac deployed inside a manufacturing plant can do, right? Enabling a number of use cases that were in there before, you can have now real time processing. Well, you can capture all possible sensors, cameras. You can process them on premises and you can only send back what you really need. So now you go from very rigid manufacturing to e-manufacturing. If you think about what you can do now in healthcare hospitals, what you can do in airports, the user experience that you can give to fans in stadiums and arenas and different cameras, different projection. These industries are being fundamentally transformed by injecting 5G into their industries on top of the edge. And there is why we are so invested in our cloud continuum going from the region all the way out to the edge because we believe that to really transform these industries you're going to need ISVs, solution developers who are going to be writing these solutions and writing these ideas on top of those edge platforms. And we want them to be writing them with our telco partners and we want them to be writing it on the AWS platform. So, you think of entertainment, transportation, think about manufacturing and you can think of... Automotive. Automotive. So all of that, we just at the beginning of those industries being transformed and telecommunications on 5G edge is going to be the catalyst. And I would also highlight, not that first I agree with everything you said, I also highlight that role of data is becoming very clear at the edge. Now that you have intelligent, secure connectivity with 5G and Wi-Fi, you're going to have that now new dynamic of the business value of data at the edge with high compute power, with AI at the point of processing. So that's... It's going to be a really big opportunity. Well, one more comment before we go. I know we're coming up. Can I say, John, just real quick, if I may, because I think data, in data we're going to see the two dynamics, really important. One, you describe absolutely data that is acquired and processed on the edge. But we also seen more and more and more the emergence in telecom of the need to create telco data lakes internally. How do you connect without migrating everything that is impossible to migrate? But how do you create a single pane of glass view of all the data that you have inside a telecom operator whether a creator of content in the telecom operator and the consumer of content have access to each other much faster? So data is absolutely at the core and we're seeing volumes of data that is now being processed, stored and analyzed, just going through the roof. Yeah, and also compliance where it's stored, it's at location, if it's in a country, you've got a region, you've got a local zone. It's going to be everything is going to be changing. It's going to be pretty exciting and renaissance at the edge for sure, but also challenge is an opportunity. So, that brings us up on our time here, but I want to say thank you for coming on and doing a little recap for our news team here. You guys are really kind of staying ahead, scaling up with security, orchestrating the network. You know, the future of business is going to happen at the edge and you guys are doing a good job and we're going to keep following this. Again, next year, we'll be at Mobile World Congress again with theCUBE. I'll tell, great to have you on again, theCUBE alumni, I don't know who Nan is, her vice president, Global Telco business unit. I'll give you the final word. What should we expect next year at MWC? I think we're going to see a lot more of two things, more around sustainability and we're going to be seeing a lot more about Telcos becoming tech cars in how they go to market. All right, well, we'll be there. We're going to be covering it end to end all year. You'll see a lot more SiliconANGLE news coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.