(light techno music)
>> Hello and welcome to our special
Mobile World Congress '1, #MWC17.
I'm John Furrier inside theCUBE Studio
breaking down all the analysis we're going
to be covering at Mobile World Congress.
We kind of know some news is coming out,
that's Monday and Tuesday all day coverage.
We're here with @rUvreuv, Reuv Cohen,
an entrepreneur I've known for years.
Going back to when we first met in the cloud days back
in '08 timeframe, '09, when dev ops was really
the beginning of the movement.
You've been an entrepreneur, you've sold multiple companies,
multi-time successful entrepreneur.
But you've been deep in the cloud game.
Welcome to theCUBE special coverage
of Mobile World Congress.
>> Thanks for inviting me, I'm happy to be here.
>> The other thing, too, is we just tried to get
the Periscope thing working so we have
our little Periscopes going here.
But this is really the media landscape that's going
to be one of the themes at Mobile World Congress
that certainly will be front and center.
These service providers have to have a business model.
And media entertainment has been on their to-do list.
Just a lot of the plumbing hasn't gotten done.
And the new trend that's going to be
really front and center is AI.
We were joking about that.
But seriously, you're doing a lot of discussions around AI.
And then Intel's 5G now, which they pre-announced
this week, prior to Mobile World Congress with 5G.
Their positioning is a step-up game changer.
So you got 5G overlay network, you have real plumbing
that's getting done with NFV,
Network Functions Virtualization.
You have the app market exploding.
Will the service providers ever make it?
Will the telco's actually figure out a business model?
>> Well, you know, they're always the pipes,
and you're always going to need pipes.
There's an endless amount of opportunities
for those people figuring out what to do with those pipes.
I don't know, this is the question
we've been asked for 20 years.
Do they want to be more than dumb pipes, right?
>> Well, they've yet to find a business model.
I mean, I think one of the things,
I was looking at the Intel announcement,
was, is 5G a technology looking for a problem,
or does it really actually create
a step-up function in terms of capability.
I mean 4G is just an evolution of 3G,
LTE is getting some speeds there.
But, I mean, my family hits their caps
on all the data we're doing.
People are hitting their data caps, we need more data.
So the question is, is that going
to be ready for prime time?
Your thoughts on?
>> Well, there's almost like a Moore's law of data, right.
The more data you have available to use,
the more things you can do with it.
You know, Periscope's a prime example.
Now they're doing a whole variety
of different video-related things, Facebook lives,
there's a YouTube lives, everyone wants to do live.
And all that requires massive amounts of data,
especially if you want to do high definition related things.
We were actually trying to set up a Periscope
before the broadcast this morning.
And one of the first things that became apparent was
we had to limit our bit rate to 800 kilobits,
which is relatively small when you think about it.
>> Yeah, that's the bandwidth issues.
I mean, at the end of the day it comes down
to the last miles, we always say.
But let's get into some of the analysis
of Mobile World Congress and let's get down under the hood.
Is could truly ready for prime time?
And when I say cloud, I mean, obviously,
full-stack infrastructure because network virtualization
has been one of those kind of shifting sands, if you will.
NFV has been one of those things
that's been kind of evolving.
OpenStack is seen to be much more of a telco use case
at some of the OpenStack summits we've covered.
Your thoughts on the progress of cloud-ready telcos?
>> You know it comes down to, if you're going to build
an application, whether you're an enterprise,
whether you're an individual developer or something
in between, you're probably not going
to build it in your own data center.
Whether that's a closet in the back of your office,
or your own...
You're probably going to go and build something
that's quick and fast and efficient.
And that really is starting to look like things
that are server-less, things that are event-driven and
that isn't really sitting in your own data center anymore.
>> So what's your take on the ecosystem?
Do you think that the ecosystem play for
the Mobile World Congress is going to shift at all?
I mean, I was commenting to Dave Vellante just last week
and Jeff Frick, here on theCUBE team that CES,
which we don't go to anymore because it's gotten too big.
But this year we did cover it here in the studio
like we're doing with Mobile World Congress.
It just seems that CES is no longer
a consumer electronics show, it's more of a car show.
Autonomous vehicles are, obviously, front and center,
that's the glam, that's the eye candy.
Mobile World Congress doesn't seem to be
a device show anymore, or it's shifting away.
Last year Mark Zuckerberg gave the keynote speech,
and you saw that shift.
What's Mobile World Congress turning into, in your opinion?
>> It's an app show.
So, where CES still sort of has this focus on
the actual physical things that you can touch and build.
The mobile apps of the world are now
the things that dominate mobility.
Is a phone interesting?
Not really.
(John laughs)
What you do on your phone is definitely interesting.
>> It's interesting to look at also,
and talking to folks about, Mobile World Congress
is one of those shows, it's a biz dev show, too.
A lot of people who fly over to Barcelona
don't really go for the pure content.
There's more business deals going on.
All the top executives of
the big technology companies go there.
Your thoughts on landscape of the vendors out there
that are suppliers to this new consumerized market.
You see deals happening that you think would be interesting?
Where do you see the formation of the industry lining up?
Obviously, some things have to get done
at a technical level.
5G's great, great hope for that.
But some companies are trying to transform look at Cisco,
companies like Cisco, companies like Hewlett-Packard
Enterprise, VM Ware, AWS, Google, Intel, Qualcomm.
I mean there seems to be a feeling
of posturing and a reef-set, if you will.
>> 2017, so far, is shaping up to be
the year of Snapchat, if you ask me.
With a pending IPO they're saying that their revenues
are going to be increasing 5x.
It looks like everything we've been talking about,
the app-based world, is sort of culminating
in this Snapchat thing.
So the question is, is Snapchat going to live up
to all the hype that's surrounding them
as this sort of, next generation of you know,
the next Facebook, the next Google, the next whatever.
>> Well it's interesting, Snapchat brings up
the conversation of, the people who have their head
in the sand versus people who are riding this wave.
Facebook was totally pooh-pooh'ed during the IPO.
I remember leading up to the IPO,
it was like, oh my God, there's no way they can do it.
They can never be the next Google,
that was kind of the comparison.
Google was compared to Microsoft,
and then Facebook was compared to Google.
And then everyone was like,
no frickin' way that's going to happen.
Why would anyone want to seed that company?
It's a social net for college kids,
and now some adults are coming on.
And then look what happened, so the world changed.
Snapchat's the same way, so it's interesting,
it's not what you think.
The core competency shifts and
the user consumption becomes democratized.
So the question is, what does Snapchat mean for telcos?
Does that mean that they're just pipes?
What do they do?
How do they get in front of this?
You got Netflix, you got Amazon
out there with, now, the video stuff.
>> People want content and they want it fast,
they want it in high quality and they want it on the go.
So, yeah it is the question.
I think that the challenge that a lot
of these telco's are having is the fact that
they still have a bit of a monopoly
in many parts of the world and they use that monopoly
to inflict quite a bit of pain.
So it's, I don't think that's something that they're going
to be able to get away with very much longer.
>> So what's your take on AI?
Since you've been doing a lot of AI.
And obviously, AI's been around.
In the 80's when I got my CS degree,
LISP was out there, neural networks,
object-oriented programming was hitting the scene.
You know, you had this kind of mind-set, and it was still,
AI was this elusive academic mental model and some coding.
Now it's all the rage, when you look at autonomous vehicles
and you look at IOT, drones,
a new landscape is here, connected consumer.
Your thoughts on where AI, is it, right now,
certainly it's hyped, we all agree on that.
>> There's been several iterations of AI
over the last 40 years.
Every time technology appears you hear about AI.
In the 70's you saw things like Space Odyssey
and there was this rush to AI-related activities around
the first generation of computing.
Then that sort of, we realized it wasn't really possible
and it disappeared for 25 years.
Then it reemerged in your early days of internet,
oh, it was still too early.
(John laughs)
So now 15, 20 years later, again,
we are in this, another dawn of AI.
But there is some critical differences.
Now there are tooling that allows you to do the sorts
of things that we had only dreamt of before,
whether it's natural language processing, generation
of information and other various forms of analytics.
So all these things are culminating
in these opportunities that were really never possible
until now, including things like cloud computing.
>> Machine learning certainly is the center of that.
I love the machine learning rates.
But machine learning's been around for a long time as well.
I mean machine learning isn't necessarily new,
it's mostly software that has to do with algorithms.
But now you have data to compute.
This is the new thing, right?
Data's available and you got tons to compute.
>> Yeah, it was hard >> Yeah.
>> It was really, really hard.
And anyone that's actually tried to go out and do
a machine learning system, neural net,
realized quite quickly that you had to be a phD
to figure out how to use these tools.
So now all these tools are being put together
into platforms and end-user applications.
So no longer do I have to go and try to put together
a Lego, you know, erector set of stuff.
I can go, I can get mostly everything I need to solve
a problem and I can be off to the races quite quickly.
>> So what's your up work you're doing now, Reuv?
You've been an entrepreneur, give us the latest update
on what's in your world right now.
You were, obviously, instrumental in a lot of cloud ventures
and, obviously, you've been in the industry,
certainly as an influencer as well, you've got the little
blue check on Twitter, which I don't have yet.
Twitter rejected me twice, I got to get to the...
Stu has it, Stu Miniman on our team.
In all seriousness, this is a new world and you're
on the front lines both as a media producer,
you've got a great podcast, but also you're in the industry.
Where is cloud going and where's that top of
the stack action because that really is, you mentioned apps,
that's where the action is right now.
What do you see happening and what are you up to these days?
>> Well, you know, a couple areas.
One of the things they don't tell you is,
after you sell your business, you lose
a little bit of your purpose. (laughs)
Personal problem, for sure, but.
>> You make some good cash. >> Yeah, exactly.
Put it in the bank there, bank some cash.
>> Yeah, so after Anomaly and Virtual Stream exited there was
this period where I get to do things that I want to do.
And investing in other start ups was,
you know, the thing that apparently, you do.
I focused heavily on AI-related companies.
Actually I just recently did an investment
in a company called Zoom.AI, which is really doing
some cool stuff around enterprise-focused AI work.
Also, I've got a day job as well outside that.
I recently joined a company here in San Jose that focuses
on security for containerized environments.
So, sort of policy-based security, very low level stuff.
>> At the orchestration layer, or at the docker layer
or where would you...?
>> It's at, it's even lower than that.
It essentially orchestrates the policy around things
like system calls and networking itself.
So, rather than having to focus on the complexities
of all the various parts of an environment,
what we do is we basically say, hey, look at the tags
that exist and things like Kubernetes.
And then those tags define the policies
in which things can communicate with one another.
Let's say it's a layer three network, or what has read
or write access to the system calls themselves.
>> Is that a new company for you, that you guys launched?
>> Well, we're in the process of launching.
>> So stealth?
>> It's stealthy, I'm telling you about it right now.
(both laugh)
>> What's the name?
>> Appareto.
>> Appareto, so there it is.
We're launching on theCUBE here, on Periscope,
pre-recorded for our Mobile World Congress special coverage.
Alright so this is, basically, this is the cloud native
goes to full scale cloud, for apps.
>> Exactly, so containers, we've come full circle.
Anyone that's been around for a while knows containers
is certainly not a new trend.
Solaris, you know, 25 years ago doing containers.
The implementation of it around micro-services
and the tooling around dev ops and docker
and other various Kubernetes-types deployments
have made it much more readily attainable,
in terms of using it within an enterprise
or a run of the mill application.
>> We were talking with a lot of folks leading up
to Mobile World Congress prep for our special coverage
and micro-services comes up heavily,
and micro-services as an integration layer.
And one of the things that we're seeing,
I want to get your thoughts on this,
is you see IBM just announced this week here
in San Francisco at their IBM Connect event,
oh, it's our Lotus Domino and Verved,
which is their collaborative software.
But the key to all this collaborative software,
even to the Oracle's of the world and to Amazon,
is integration with third party apps.
And micro-services and containers
become a critical component of that.
So, for entrepreneurs and/or app developers,
a new kind of third party developer
is emerging and they need to integrate.
What is the role micro-services play in all of this?
This is a really key point, because
this will point right at the telcos.
Because whoever can embrace an ecosystem of app developers
from an integrations standpoint will win, in my opinion.
Your thoughts, do you see it in the same way?
And how does micro-services and
all this stuff play into that?
>> Well, there's two...
>> It's the glue layer? >> Yeah, it's the glue.
Lego is, again, is kind of the thing that pops in my mind.
There are these two, sort of, battling schools of thought.
One is micro-services which allows you to easily plug
and play these various components.
The other is server-less, these things
that are very event-driven, they're transient.
They allow you to, again, act as
a kind of glue that puts everything together.
One's based on, predominantly, the idea of containers
which is kind of a lightweight OS.
And the other is basically saying, I don't need an OS.
All I need is the functions that I need, when I need them,
and I put them together and I'm off to the races.
I think that most applications aren't ready
for a whole choice of just doing one or the other,
it's kind of a combination.
So the exciting thing now, is you can do what used
to take weeks or months, in a matter of days
with these types of technologies.
>> So your final thought on Mobile World Congress.
What do you expect to see in the hype cycle
noise and where's the signal?
Where do you see this event happening, what's your thoughts?
>> I think we're going to see a lot more in the focus
of things like media and convergence.
I think video-related activities
is certainly going to remain to be hot.
I think the tooling around enabling that type
of high definition video focus is going to be
a priority for a lot of these companies
and the tooling around that will be a priority.
>> We're here with Reuv breaking down
the Mobile World Congress analysis and preview
and all of what's happening in the news.
Obviously, Intel, with the 5G, big announcement.
I think they raised the curtain early.
Obviously, they're competing with Qualcomm which has
a different licensing agreement than Intel.
Which is, you know, you see Apple
as a big customer of Qualcomm and Intel.
Interesting because as the price of the hardware
goes down the chip guys want more cash,
Qualcomm wants more cash than Intel.
Very interesting dynamic, I think this ecosystem is going
to be something that's going to watch.
I think there's going to be a battle.
I'm predicting that at Mobile World Congress
we'll see a battle of the ecosystem.
You're going to see whoever can make the market
and shift the game, will be the winner.
Reuv, thanks for spending the time, appreciate it.
This is SiliconANGLE broadcasting here in Palo Alto
for Mobile World Congress '17, special coverage.
Thanks for watching.
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