(upbeat music)
>> Thanks Adam from the studio.
Dave, with the next interview,
I had a great chance to sit down with Pete,
from Microsoft Azure.
Talk about 5G and all the advances in the innovation around
Silicon and what's coming around under the hood.
Obviously Microsoft big hyperscaler, top three cloud player.
Let's hear from Pete my conversation
and we'll come right back.
(upbeat music)
Well, we'll come back to the cubes coverage
of Mobile World Congress 2021,
we're onsite in-person and virtual.
It's a hybrid event this year.
It's in-person for the first time,
since the winter of 2019 lots been passed,
a lot's happened and theCube's got to cover it.
Our next guest is Pete Bernard, senior director,
Silicon and telecom at Azure edge devices,
platform and services at Microsoft.
Pete, thanks for coming on theCube for our remote coverage.
Thanks for coming on.
We'll be there live and as well as with the remote
community. Thanks for coming on.
>> Yeah, no, that's great to be here.
I'm coming here from sunny Bellevue, Washington.
I wish a wish I was going to be in Barcelona this year,
but like, as you mentioned,
I think the last time I was in Barcelona was 2019.
So a lot has happened since then. Right?
>> Well, let's get into it.
First of all,
we'll see you on the interwebs and the community, but let,
let's get the content storyline after the number one story
at mobile world.
Congress is the rise of the modern developer overlay on top
of this new infrastructure, 5g, what is the edge,
super edge, AI edge, whatever we want to call it.
It is an enabler. Okay.
And it's also leveraging the assets of,
of these telecom infrastructures and certainly the pandemic
we've had great success, nothing crashed.
It saved us. So what's your, what's your view on this?
This is the big story. It's the most important story?
What's your take?
>> Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned,
a lot has happened and there's been a lot of advancements in
this area and I think, you know,
the part of what's happened with the pandemic is companies
have really accelerated their strategies in this area.
In terms of, you know,
we have tons of commercial customers that are trying to
solve really difficult problems using AI and edge and,
and 5g now.
So the demand is tremendous and the technology has really
advanced quite a bit. And you know, we're,
my team is specifically focused on sort of the intersection
of 5g edge and AI,
and it's sort of bringing together these kinds of existing
credible technology advances and it's unlocking some amazing
new scenarios and business models for,
for customers and partners. For sure.
>> So let's get it under the hood a little bit and talk about
some of the technical issues.
Obviously 5g is enabling a lot of commercial benefits cloud
providers like Microsoft Azure is having great edge
capabilities now with, with bringing the cloud to the edge,
which opens up the obvious gamers Mehta versus AI,
AR VR kind of things, low latency, applications, cars,
and all that good stuff,
all the data coming in and then new use cases.
So it's a data problem. It's a typology challenge.
It's a new architecture, unpack that for us.
What, where are we in this?
So.
>> So I mean, as you mentioned, I mean,
it was kind of an infinite set of problems to be solved.
And one of the things that we found was that there was
actually a lot of friction out there.
It's almost like so many different partners and typologies
and ways to put things together. Quite often,
we get with a commercial customer and they're like, look,
we just need to solve this particular problem in retail or
healthcare energy.
And so one of the things that we introduced as part of our
kind of Azure portfolio is something called Azure percept,
which is an end to end system for edge AI development and
deployment that now works over 5g and L PWA as well.
And so a lot of what we're trying to do as a platform
company is help customers and partners kind of expedite and
speed that development and deployment of solutions.
Because like I said, there's no shortage of demand,
but they're quite complex. And as you mentioned,
you could have, you know, on-prem solutions,
you could have hybrid solutions that talk to on-prem
hardware and then go to the cloud.
You can go direct to the cloud.
But the question is like,
how do you put these things together in a secure way?
And it get an ROI quickly out of your edge AI deployments.
And that's been kind of an interesting challenge.
And I think when I talked to a lot of partners,
telco partners, especially Silicon partners,
were all struggling with how do we expedite, expedite?
Because you know,
the sooner we can get people to deploy and solve their
problems, obviously, you know, the sooner they're happy,
the sooner we all get paid. Right?
And so that's one of the things we have to be careful of is
with all the new technology,
how do we really sort of titrate down to, you know,
what does it take to actually get things from a POC to
deployment as quickly as possible?
>> And one of the big things is happening is not seeing the
developer ecosystem is coming hardcore into the telco cloud,
whatever you want to call it.
And it's interesting, you know,
the word operators is used a lot, the carriers,
the operators, you don't hear that in it and say,
you don't say that's the operator,
the operators writes it department.
So you have cloud native and this operating cultures coming
together,
dev ops dev sec ops coming to what is a carrier grade
operating model,
which is like a steady build solid foundation.
That's what they expect.
So you kind of have this classic OT it collision.
And this has been talked about in the edge.
What's different though,
because now you've got to move faster.
You got to have a lot of it like cloud scale with automation
and AI at the same time I need full Bulletproof operations.
Yeah.
>> And so it's, you know,
we're trying to expose a consistent developer fabric,
you know, to our community.
I mean,
Microsoft's got millions of developers around the world
using lots of, lots of tool, tool chains, and frameworks.
And we want to sort of harness the power of that whole
developer community to bring workloads and applications onto
the telco network, right.
In, in environments that they're familiar with.
And we're seeing also sort of,
you mentioned sort of colliding worlds in the edge world.
There's kind of traditional embedded developers that are
building cameras and devices and gateways.
And then there's a lot of data science,
AI developers as well.
And what we're trying to do is sort of help both communities
sort of learn these skills so that, you know,
you have developers that are enabled to do, you know,
AI workloads and scenarios and all of the business logic
around those things and develop it in an environment,
whether it's cloud-based or edge based that they're familiar
with.
And, you know,
so therefore a lot of the complexities of the teleco network
itself get sort of obfuscated or abstracted for them.
So the developer doesn't have to become a telco expert,
right.
To build a 5g based camera system for their retail stores.
Right. And so that's,
that's exciting when we start to merge some of these
communities together.
>> Yeah.
So what would be your message to the operators this year?
I mean,
obviously the edge is not something you need to educate
people on, but they are trying to figure out how to,
you know,
swap the engine of the airplane out at 35,000 feet,
as I say, they got,
they want to innovate and this year what's your message.
Yeah.
>> I mean, there's kind of two things going on.
One is yes. I think we're,
we are deeply involved helping telcos Cloudify their network
and take advantage of 5g and virtualization.
And, you know,
we have recent acquisitions as a metal switching affirmed
and hold that whole thing. So that's,
that's that chunk of work that's ongoing.
I think the other thing that's happening is really thinking
about telcos. We're seeing as a hunger for solutions.
And so telcos thinking of themselves as solution providers,
not just connectivity providers and, you know,
getting into that mindset of saying,
we're going to come in and work with this city or this,
you know,
big retailer and we're going to help solve the problems for
them. And we love working with partners like that,
that are actually delivering solutions as opposed to pieces
of technology.
>> What solutions do you think Pete are showing
the most promise for helping
the telco industry digitally transformed?
>> Well, I think on the NGI space,
there's a couple of big verticals.
I mean, you know,
obviously places like agriculture are huge, you know,
where you need a wide deployments.
We're seeing a lot of areas in around retail, you know,
retail environments when I would have leveraged like low
latency 5g.
One of the pieces of feedback we heard was a lot of
retailers actually want less hardware in their physical
store and they want to leverage 5g more to get back to the
cloud.
And then we're seeing, you know, energy sectors, you know,
and mining and other kind of difficult to reach areas where
you can leverage ciliary networks.
So a lot of these verticals are, you know,
turning onto the fact that they could get some of their
conductivity and edge AI solutions combined together and do
some amazing things.
>> Right.
You just made me think of a question while I got you.
I got to ask this because you know,
you've brought up 5g and back haul, you know,
and people in the,
in this business always know backhaul is always the problem.
We all know we've been to a concert or a game where we've
got multiple bars on wifi, but nothing's loading.
Right. So we all know, right.
We've seen that that's back haul. That's a choke point.
If 5g is going to give me more back haul to essentially
another exchange, how has the core of the internet evolved?
Because as I started poking around and research and there's
more direct connects now, there's not many exchanges.
It used to be, we had my west and my east,
those are now gone. I'm like,
what's going on in the backbone? Does that simple?
Is it better or worse? Is that still a good thing?
>> Well, yeah.
One of the exciting things around kind of the virtualization
of what's going on with networking is that we're able to
partner with telcos to sort of extend the Azure footprint to
help with some of those congestion points, right?
So we can, we can bring heavy edge equipment,
pretty darn close to where the action is,
and actually have direct connections into teleco networks to
help them sort of expand their footprint, you know,
even farther out to the edge and they can leverage our
hyperscaler to, to do that.
So that that's a benefit of one of the architectural
improvements of 5g.
>> That's awesome.
And I'm looking forward to following up on that great point.
And I think it's, it sells a digital divide problem.
That's been going on for over a decade, 15, 20 years,
this digital divide.
Now you got city revitalizations going on. You have, I mean,
just the, just the,
the digital revitalization in global communities is
everywhere. And I think,
I think this is going to be an influx point.
That's not yet written about in the press now,
but I think it's going to be very clear. So, so with all that,
I got to ask you the importance of how you guys see an
ecosystem for this transformation,
because it used to be the telcos ruled the world,
and now it's not going that way.
They still have a footprint. I mean, everyone,
the rising tide helps everybody, as they say,
what's the importance of a strong ecosystem in order to
drive this nutrient?
>> Well, you know, it's definitely a team sport.
It's definitely a team sport. And, and you know,
Microsoft's been a big partner company for decades,
and I think it's something like $8,
a part of revenue for every dollar of revenue from the
Microsoft generate. So we're heavily invested in our device,
builder partners, our telco partners, the ISV community.
And, you know,
I think what we're trying to do is work with telcos to sort
of bring those communities together,
to solve these kinds of problems that customers are having.
So yeah, it's definitely a team sport.
And like I said,
the new entrance with some really innovative software
platforms, it's an opportunity for telcos, I think,
to sort of reinvent and to kind of rethink about how they
want to be more agile and more competitive. Again,
this will be businesses.
>> Okay, great.
And have you on, I got it.
I got ask you, we've talked about the most important story,
obviously 5g edge in AI. I think you nailed it.
You're you're in this cross hairs of probably one of the
most exciting areas in the tech industry as distributed
computing goes that last mile, so to speak pun intended,
what, but what's, in your opinion,
the most important story that not many people are talking
about that should be talking about,
what do you think is something that's being written about,
but to talk about,
but it's super important that that needs to be true.
>> Well, you know, it's interesting.
I mean,
a lot of the marketing and talk about 5g is around phones,
people talking about their speed on phones.
And I think we're finally getting past the discussion of 5g
on phones and talking about 5g for like more MTM
communications and more,
more kind of connecting really trillions of things together.
And then that enabled me to is going to be a big,
big deal moving forward. And I think that's,
we'll start to see probably more coverage of that moving
forward. We're on the inside of the industry.
So we kind of know it,
but I think on the outside of the industry,
when people think 5g, they still think phones.
And then hopefully that becomes,
there's more of a story around all the other pieces being
connected with 5g.
>> Yeah.
And I got to ask you about two quick things before we go
open source, openness, interoperability, and security.
What, how would you,
what's your opinion on those two pillars?
>> So I think security is kind of foundational for what we're
we've been doing at Microsoft for a long time,
whether it's Azure sphere that we're doing for end to end,
you know,
edge security or any of our security offerings that we have
from services perspective.
So we're trying to like with Azure percept,
we actually build in like TPM encryption of AI models from
edge to cloud, as an example of that.
So security really is foundational to all of the stuff that
we need to do.
It cannot be something that you do later or add on it has to
be designed in. And I think from an open source perspective,
I mean, whether it's our, you know,
stewardship of GitHub or the involvement in open source
communities, you know, we're,
we're totally excited about all the innovation that's
happening there and you know,
you got to let people participate. And in fact,
one of the cool things that's been happening is the amount
of developer reach in areas where maybe there isn't,
you know,
like we've had our build conferences and other Microsoft
events.
It enables everyone to participate virtually no matter where
they are in the world,
even if they can't get a ticket to Redmond Washington,
and you can still be part of the developer community and
learn online and be part of that.
>> I think this whole embed developer market's going to come
back in and massive volumes of new people as Silicon becomes
important. And of course,
I can't leave you without asking the Silicon angle question
for our team.
Silicon is becoming a competitive advantage for whether it's
acceleration, offload and or core things,
whether it's instance related or use case related,
what's the future of Silicon and the telecom and cloud in
general.
>> For mine. Yeah.
So I mean,
the advances happening in the Silicon space are fantastic.
Whether it's like process advances down to like five
nanometers and below. So you're talking about, you know,
much lower power consumption, much higher density, you know,
packaging and, you know,
AI acceleration built in as well as all these other,
you know, containerized security things.
So that's being driven by a lot by consumer markets, right?
So more powerful PCs and phones.
And that's also translating into the cloud and for some of
the heavy infrastructure.
So the leaps and bounds we're seeing even between now and
the last MWC in person in 2019 in Silicon has been amazing.
And that's going to unblock, you know,
all kinds of workloads that could be done at the edge as
well as incredible high-performance stuff to be done in the
cloud.
That's pretty exciting.
>> Peter Love that word unblocked,
because I think it's going to unblock them that big,
you know, rock in the river.
It's holding the water back.
I think it's going to unleash creativity, innovation,
computer science engineering down from Silicon to the modern
application developer. Amazing opportunity.
I think the edge is going to be the,
an awesome area to innovate on.
Thanks for coming on the cube.
>> Sounds good. Thanks for having me.
>> People in our senior director,
silica telecom as your edge devices for platform services at
Microsoft, a lot going on big cloud player,
hyperscaler at the edge. This is the final area.
In my opinion,
that's called the accident habits going to be great
innovation.
It's part of the cloud cloud is creating massive change in
telecom. We've got to cover here in the queue.
Thanks for watching.
Okay, Dave, that was a great interview with Pete Bernard,
senior director, Silicon telecom, Azure edge devices,
platform, and services.
Microsoft's got all those long titles in the, in the thing,
but Silicon is a key thing.
You heard my interview wide ranging conversation,
obviously with that kind of pedigree and expertise.
He's pretty strong, but he,
at the end there a little gym on the Silicon. Yeah.
Okay. Because that is going to be a power source.
You you've been reporting on this.
You've been doing a lot of breaking analysis.
Microsoft's a hyperscaler they're they're the second player
in cloud, Amazon.
Number one, Microsoft number two, Google number three,
Microsoft.
They didn't really say anything.
They have something Amazon has got grab a ton,
but big directional signal shift there.
>> Well, I think it was interesting.
It was a great interview by the way,
and the things that struck me pizza,
and they're focused on the intersection of 5g edge and AI.
So AI is all about data-driven workloads.
If you look at AI today,
most of the AI in the enterprise is done in the cloud and
it's modeling,
but the future of AI is going to be inferencing at the edge
in real time. That's where the real expenses today.
And that's where you need new computing architectures.
And you're right.
I've written about this one of my last breaking analysis on
AWS, a secret weapon,
and that secret weapon is a new computing architecture.
That's not based on traditional x86 architectures.
It's based on their own design, but based on arm,
because arm is higher performance, lower cost, better price,
performance, and way cheaper.
And so I guarantee you based on what you just said that,
well,
Amazon clearly has set the direction with nitro and graviton
and, and, and, you know,
gravitate on to Microsoft is I think following that
playbook.
And it's interesting that Pete has Silicon in his title and
telecom and an edge they're going after that because it
doesn't require new low powered architectures that are going
to blow away anything we've ever seen on x86.
>> Yeah. I mean, I think that's a killer point.
You and I have been covering the enterprise,
the old guard rack and stack the boxes.
Amazon was early on that clearly winning low power,
high density looks like a consumer,
like feel in cloud scale, changes the game on economics.
And then he also teased out if you squint,
there's a lot of stuff to decode.
We're going to unpack that video and write probably six or
five blog posts there, but he said,
5g is going to change the direct connect.
They're already doing it.
Microsoft's putting that to the edge,
that right in the same playbook as AWS,
right on the almost right on the number, put the edge,
make it powerful, direct connects connectivity.
>> We've seen this before. The consumer piece is key.
The consumer leads,
we know this and the consumer apple is leading in things
like AI and, and Tesla is leading at the edge.
That's where you have to look for the innovation.
That's going to trickle into the enterprise.
And so in the cloud guys, I kicked the hyperscale.
You and Sergeant Joe Hall talked about this at the startup
showcase that we did was that the cloud guys,
the hyperscalers, and a really strong position for the edge.
>> I got to tell you,
we are on this go to the siliconangle.com.
Obviously that's our website, the cube.net.
We are reporting on this. It's very nuanced point.
But if you look at the cloud players,
you can see the telco digital revolution telco. Dr.
Is a digital revolution back to you, Adam,
in the studio for more coverage,
we'll be back at the desk shortly.