[MUSIC PLAYING]
BRIAN KRACIK: Welcome, everybody,
to Cloud Innovators Live.
I'm Brian Kracik.
And I have with me MATRIXX.
I have Marc and André.
Marc, could you introduce yourself?
MARC PRICE: Yeah, hi I'm Marc Price.
I'm the CTO with MATRIXX.
ANDRÉ GUNNBERG: And I'm André Gunnberg.
I'm the CRO for MATRIXX.
BRIAN KRACIK: Love it, hey guys, thanks for the partnership.
Thanks for being here.
It's pretty great.
Tell me a little bit more about MATRIXX
and what you guys are doing.
MARC PRICE: Yeah, so MATRIXX is a rating and charging company.
We're supporting new monetization models in telecom.
And we're really happy to be doing that with Google.
Part of what makes us unique is that we're actually
a cloud-native solution, so taking advantage of the Google
Cloud to provide our operators both cost reduction,
operational agility, and support new business models,
driving innovation into the Cloud
is really exciting for MATRIXX.
BRIAN KRACIK: Well, cloud-native, microservices,
being more agile, getting some operational costs out
of the business is critical because our operators
need to do that.
André, what are you seeing as some of the use cases that you
guys are solving for?
ANDRÉ GUNNBERG: Yeah, no, I mean,
there's a lot of focus on the operational cost, for sure.
So that's what's driving a lot of the collaboration we
have with Google.
The operators wants to save money.
But on the use case side, we also
see that 5G is continuing to be a great enabler
for new services and how they're going to monetize this.
And they can't live with legacy.
The legacy charging billing functions
just doesn't support that kind of new innovation.
So that still is a growing market
and will continue to evolve.
But on the other side, we also see
on the enterprise side there's a lot of new competition
in the field.
So the telcos are focusing a lot around what
to do with enterprise, improve self service,
be better to serve their own customers.
So those are a couple of the key trends we see in the telcos
that we are working on.
BRIAN KRACIK: So you talked a little bit about legacy,
but this isn't just a lift and shift kind of thing.
Legacy is coming in all different forms here.
How are you tackling that?
MARC PRICE: Yeah, well, it is a big challenge.
So one of the things that MATRIXX does uniquely
is, we're solving those challenges
with very large workloads and with very low latency.
So this is unusual to deal with this as a cloud challenge.
It's unusual to deal with this as a software challenge
overall.
We've worked with Google to help to engineer
our solution so we can handle the largest
operators on the planet.
We're supporting billions of transactions a day
in some cases and extremely low latency,
meaning this is a real-time solution.
So the information that we're collecting
is immediately made available to use by engagement systems
and available for visibility directly to systems and users.
That's a real challenge.
And it's one that's very exciting
to solve because it actually supports the new business
models that are increasingly desiring
real-time availability of the data
to use for all sorts of new business purposes.
BRIAN KRACIK: So data challenges are absolutely an issue,
and then how do you cleanse that data
when you make it available.
So that leads into a lot of conversations
I think we have with operators around your data,
and cleansing it, and what's allowed to be shared,
what's not allowed to be shared.
Are we handling that?
How are you looking at that?
MARC PRICE: Yeah, absolutely, yeah,
so one of the major things that we have addressed,
and this is extremely important, you're absolutely right,
for the confidence of a solution like this in the cloud
is to have secure data.
When you talk about cleansing, the removal of any
personalized identifiable information from anywhere
where that data could be gleaned from any source.
So data is encrypted.
We, again, primarily work with the data
as it's being moved as opposed to data at rest.
But all data as it's being moved, of course,
is 100% secure.
And all data at rest is being stored securely as well.
Part of what we're doing with Google
is working with confidential computing in unique ways,
really, to support these types of telecom workloads
in ways that provide confidence in the public cloud.
BRIAN KRACIK: I think that's perfect.
And let's come back to the agility piece.
So, André, you talked about 5G.
We hear a lot about 5G, the promise of 5G.
I think some rollouts are still slow to come.
But new 5G services are coming and being more agile.
What's the time frame that you're
seeing with your customers?
ANDRÉ GUNNBERG: The time frame will be different in different
geographies, I think.
So we see movements in, let's say,
Europe coming next year, somewhere early.
Like our joint customer, Telefónica Germany,
they're an early adopter.
And we're doing great stuff there.
But I think the only thing we know
for certain is that we don't know
what the killer service will be because it's still evolving.
They don't really know yet, but the 5G services
and the really killer application, let's say,
will be.
But we know it will be a trial and fail kind of momentum.
And to be able to really be in the right position
to have that agility to be able to try it out, test it, and see
if it works or not, you need that agility in the system.
So that's what we are enabling.
BRIAN KRACIK: Is it going to be enough?
We've been to this, what is the next killer app conversation
before many years ago.
I think we've all been in the industry a while.
So is it the platform is the killer
app, is it the capabilities, is it the speed?
Do we have enough speed?
Can they fail fast?
ANDRÉ GUNNBERG: Exactly, and I think you need to have
the agility to be able to fail fast and try out again.
I think the promise of the 5G capabilities
around slicing, about private network.
These are the things that they really believe,
the telcos believe will be good revenue streams going forward.
But how that service is going to be constructed, set up, and be
automated to be able to monetize,
and what to monetize it upon, are still to be determined.
So that's what we are helping them out.
BRIAN KRACIK: So you mentioned a really key word in there.
It's called automated.
So to gain the operational efficiency we discussed
and to get automated is what allows
you some of that agility.
So I think that's pretty critical.
Are there any special things you're doing around automation
that's going to help the CSPs get
to this level in this next state for velocity?
MARC PRICE: Quite a lot, actually.
So 5G, many people don't realize,
is largely about workloads in the cloud.
This is actually key.
So, really, when you talk about the conversation, what
is the killer app going to be, which is often the question,
this is actually the wrong question.
What 5G is about is it's not about finding a single killer
app.
It actually is positioning this industry,
the telecommunications industry, and quite frankly
any enterprise that's going to make
use of this sort of an access network to drive new services,
to be able to support new models, new business
models, new monetization models, and automation of those models
with any workload that's imaginable.
So we've moved away from thinking that,
let's say, voice is a killer app,
communications is killer app, video is a killer,
app broadband is a killer app.
Now we're thinking, if every device is connected
and every device has a capability
to support some sort of a business model
somewhere in the world, then you have
to think about, how do I drive forward
a seamless way to onboard those devices,
use those devices-- by the way, not all of these
are human-centric devices.
Many of these are machine centric as well.
So IoT very much falls into this category.
BRIAN KRACIK: Which comes back to your scale and security,
once again.
MARC PRICE: It does.
BRIAN KRACIK: Because it's not about the 7 billion people.
It's about the 100 billion devices and things.
MARC PRICE: You're right, there's
orders of magnitude more, which comes back to automation.
So automation is absolutely essential.
There is no way to manage that type of workload
in a dynamic way.
This isn't just onboarding something and you're done.
It's not just simply getting a bill at the end of the month
and you're done.
It's actually dynamically coordinating
the monetization models as they seamlessly are associated,
not only again in direct channels,
but also indirect channels.
So you have B to B to X in terms of businesses
serving other businesses and other consumers.
We've supported automation within our workflow
and also with the tools that orchestrate and instrument
the solution as well.
And, again, this is a big part of what
we're doing in the cloud.
Ironically, again, what 5G is largely about
is not actually charging for the network events alone,
but being able to monetize the instrumentation
of the solution itself.
So if you set up a slice, as André said,
or if you set up an environment suited for a small or medium
business, how is that going to be charged differently than
supporting an environment which is tailored specifically
for a set of devices or a large business?
BRIAN KRACIK: So easier setup, not necessarily the engineering
effort that we've seen in the past,
more automated, easier, more of them,
and then getting that conversation going
on the enterprise and selling more of that.
So, hey, what's our secret sauce?
We have a good partnership here.
We've won multiple deals.
You're a big part of that.
What's happening between us?
And can we accelerate things?
ANDRÉ GUNNBERG: Well, I think the whole trend is going
towards--
I mean, two years ago, it was, is it
really possible to run charging on the public cloud?
So we had to overcome that.
That's now moving along.
We have a couple of customers.
We have Telefónica Germany.
We just announced TELUS together a few months ago.
So that's a great, great two wins for us.
But there's much more potential here,
both in regards to new operators and new market,
but also how we can leverage the MATRIXX platform for more,
let's say, intelligence and leveraging AI,
and machine learning capabilities out of Google
and using our commercial data to learn more about the customer.
So I think we need to take a step further
in not just seeing this as an infrastructure play,
but as a business play.
So that's where we are focusing a lot with your peers
and colleagues in Google now.
BRIAN KRACIK: But we're excited about the partnership.
We're excited about the wins we've had together.
And I want to thank you guys for joining us.
And that's it for now on Cloud Innovators
for Telecommunications.