Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:24):
Hello, you are watching the Cloud Native Telco Summit part of our year-Round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels and for our final panel of this year's summit, we are going to look at the growth of cloud native and its impact on telcos. Are we now seeing broad adoption of cloud native by telecom operators? What are the challenges that remain and how will developments within the cloud native community impact telcos in the next few years? Well, I am delighted to say that joining me on the program are Partha Seetala who is President of the Cloud Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony. Balaji Subramaniam, Director of Product Line Management at Blue Planet, a division of Ciena, mark Longwell, Director, Telco and Edge Alliances, Hybrid Platforms Business Unit at Red Hat. I'm Amajit Gupta, Group, CEO and MD of Lightstorm, and Juan Carlos Garcia, Independent Senior Technology and Innovation Advisor.

(01:33):
Hello everyone. It's good to see you all. Thank you so much for joining us on the program today. Well, let me start by referring to some research that came out this year. Several analyst firms suggested that 2024 would be a turning point towards fully cloud native infrastructure and especially in terms of CNF workloads and there were some really bold predictions made at the start of the year. Do we agree though? Has it turned out this way? Juan Carlos, lemme come to you first because you and I have talked about cloud native fraud a number of years now. So what are your views?

Juan Carlos Garcia, Independent (02:11):
I think that is partially true. I want to be positive anyhow. I think there is a first cycle that is finishing with the implementation of the 5G standalone core in many intercom operators following a cloud native approach after a long and pay experience, probably with the virtual transition of the 4G core based on BNFs. I think operators now know what a cloud four teleco needs and which are the challenges. They know the need for new mindset and skills, the complexity of managing a highly restricted multi-vendor cloud. Also the need for Orchestration and automation. I think they're conscious that they will need new processes and tools. I think they have got used also and the telcos to work with public cloud providers and same partnership with them to get access to their expertise, capabilities and tools. But this is not meaning that we have the cloud native infrastructure and tools to host a complete network from access to the core.

(03:09):
There are challenges associated to managing this highly distributed cloud architecture with hundreds of nodes. There are many associations like the TM Forum, NGMN and the 'European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud' that have released documents describing these requirements and highlighting those that are not yet met by current systems. The last one was published by the European Cloud Alliance a couple of months ago, the Telco Cloud Amatic roadmaps, identifying gaps, describing them when initiatives and also providing recommendations moving forward. Some of them like multi-cloud orchestration, service orchestration, mobility Management Federation or a standardization of certain aspects like the capability exposure or the obsession layers like hardware acceleration. And it's also true that there has been a lot of progress in the run and fiber access space with the work of the other alliance and BroadB and foreign also bodies like tip working on the separation of contra and data place in the transport network that will help match on moving the control part to the cloud control part of the transport network to the cloud.

(04:13):
And also we have seen audio hand network providers announcing the evolution of their product towards cloud native implementation. So like Ericson and Nokia before summer now. So I think all of this is positive and all in all good moves this year, but I think we are not at the end of the journey. The cloud never stops. There are always new paradigms in the origin coming and some of them changing really the way of working and it's not so far to be coming mainstream for instance, and changing everything. Again, things like web assembly that is looking at aspects like efficiency, inter probability portability, and largely distributed computing environments. And this means that Kubernete has been so far our biggest step forward in handling applications in this highly distributed computing infrastructure, but it's not the end of the game. The cloud will keep on evolving and we'll see that we'll need many years like 2024 to get to where we want to go.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:09):
Sure, absolutely. It's not the end of the game, it's still evolving. Thanks very much Juan Carlos for giving us that summary of where we are. Mark, let me come across to you as well for your views as to where we are and whether or not we have reached a turning point.

Mark Longwell, Red Hat (05:23):
Yeah, I fully agree with Juan Carlos in my work here working with the CNF vendors to deploy their CNFs onto our platform. We see a various level of, I would call it cloud native, right? So Red Hat has a set of CNF best practices. It is something that's derived from the CNCF and experience that we have with our large service providers and we see a hundred percent fully cloud native CNFs and then we'll see VNFs just put into a wrapper with some container code quite frankly. And as we do these testings, we realize that people are on the journey, they're not all there and as Juan Carlos says, it's continuing to evolve. The tools are getting better, we get more experience, and as we get more cloud native, we say our implementation is becoming easier. We've also seen it from the 5G core perspective where we're seeing more of the cloud native versus the RAN side and we're seeing more success in deploying more cloud native CNFs on the 5G core side versus the ran side.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:26):
Great. That's really interesting. Thanks very much Mark. Amajit, let me come across to you as well for your views and what you are seeing from your perspective.

Amajit Gupta, Lightstorm (06:35):
Thank you for the question. From our perspective, I think I represent a startup which is about four years old in a play field, which is today the biggest and most populous markets in Indonesia and India and perhaps one of the few frontiers where it's cloud and digital first for all applications, whether it's B2B or B2C. So from that vantage point, I think this really is a time where there is no looking back, not because technologies are ready and solutions are quite robust, but simply because there is no way to be able to deal with the deluge of digital transformation without being cloud native. The fungibility and the scalability that the cloud needs today is essentially driving providers to think of alternatives which are cloud native almost by design as opposed to being an alternative. So from our vantage point is a player who's trying to transform that in the enterprises and use a cloud in enterprise, we think it's absolutely the perfect storm for cloud native to be able to be practical, usable, monetizable and good for business, particularly for telcos such as ours.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:49):
Great, thanks very much for those viewpoints, Amajit. Three different perspectives there from different backgrounds as well of the industry, so it's good to get that broad overview. Well, there's another report that came out earlier in the year, this one from IDC, which noted that whilst there will be growth, there'll always be severe challenges as well, such as lack of in-house expertise for many telcos, I guess the tier twos and threes, is this a problem? Is this still a problem? Balaji, let me come across to you and ask you what you are seeing here with the perceived problems around expertise in this field.

Balaji Subramaniam, Blue Planet (08:31):
Absolutely, guy, first of all, I fully agree with what Mark and Amajit was saying about this. Absolutely. We see that in the BSS space, a lot of cloudification has already happened and many of the BSS applications are already cloud-based, which, and then if I start focusing on the OSS side of things, if you feel look across the entire stack in a telco, I would say that around 85% of our all new deployments that we are having with our customers like BT and Dish and others, they're all moving towards cloud native. Not to say that it doesn't have challenges or doesn't come without challenges. Absolutely. That's the other part that we are trying to balance here. Fundamentally, I see two kind of things being played out here. On one side you have these large costs who absolutely have good awareness of how to deploy things, how to manage things, et cetera, based on some of the things that they've already done in the past on other areas with them, what seems to happen is that they are looking at things like how do you think about backup, restore, how do you think about the DevOps methodology for networks, things of that nature.

(09:49):
They're kind of looking at it from that lens as to how to operationalize this and so on. And then we also have the other perspective where we have some smaller telcos who completely have awareness of this, who completely believe that this is the way things are moving and you need to be cloud native, but they're confounded by a number of choices that are there. Here for example, do we use Terraform? Do we use the tools directly from the cloud vendor, et cetera. I sense that sometimes it's a bit overwhelming as to if you have so many choices, how do you sort of pick these things up? Where do I start? I know that I need to go there, I kind of hear you, but then where do I start? What we are trying to do is within Blue Planet, we are trying to come up with a cloud native operation service offer. We are trying to say that, look, we take away this complexity from you. We try to make this as simple as possible by giving you lesser choices and then laying it in front of you so that you could make an informed choice on where you want to go and how you want to

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:59):
Start that journey. Thanks very much Balaji. And one of, if not the most common question we get asked in our cloud native telco summit is how do I start, where do I start? That's so common amongst our viewers. Partha, lemme come across to you for your perspective as well, please.

Partha Seetala, Rakuten Symphony (11:18):
Yeah, so Guy like I spoke at the DSP summit in London last year. I think actually I want to start first with a base understanding of the terminology because cloud native is not cloud. Cloud native is as similar to cloud as JavaScript is to Java, which is nothing, no similarity at all. So cloud native is a design philosophy of how applications are built so that their operations going forward is a lot easier and it is consistent across different types of applications. That's what the cloud native philosophy is. It can be deployed a hundred on-premises, it can be deployed a hundred percent in the public cloud or in a hybrid manner. So going back to your question, so the challenges that at least we have seen by the way representing Rakuten actually as a provider of cloud native, a platform as well as Rakuten Mobile, which is a user of the cloud native platform to deploy their mobile network.

(12:15):
What we have seen is the expertise that existed before during the VNF world that does not immediately extend to managing CNFs and primarily because of cloud native being a new way in which these applications are built. Just to take an example, let's say that you're deploying an application that needs to scale. The way the application in the cloud native world is built is that the scaling is actually built outside of the application itself through some eventing trigger that happens within Kubernetes and that will automatically go add more compute and it is expected that the application understands that new compute has been added and it distributes the load across all these new instances of compute compute pods. So what we are seeing is the industry is now learning as to how do you manage this kind of an agile environment that can go up and down very ephemerally in some cases when it is stateless.

(13:15):
So that expertise is being built up and I mean the tools are also catching up. Balaji talked about people using Terraform and things like that in the past. Some of those tools extend to cloud native, but new tools have to be built. Some of the observability platforms that have been built in the past, they have to be extended to support these modern day approaches in which these applications are built. So I think that's happening. It is definitely more encouraging than what it was last year, but I think it's still in the journey where I think more expertise needs to build up within the operators so that they can go manage this new class of workloads.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (13:52):
Thanks Partha. Well it is good to hear that the expertise is building up, but as you say, there is still some way to go here. We need to develop this even further. Thanks so much everyone for those comments. I'd like to move on because another challenge that we hear, we've covered the expertise. Another challenge we hear is about operational complexity and especially when dealing with hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Do you think it's still too complex and if so, what is being done to reduce this complexity? And Amajit, let me start by coming to you please.

Amajit Gupta, Lightstorm (14:29):
Yeah, thank you Guy. I think this is a common question and it's less answered more often than not from our experience. We started with telco just three years back and we decided to do two things about these solutions from the tech industry, which often are solutions looking for a problem to solve. So we decided to be cloud native day one for whatever it means, which essentially means we have no OSS, no BSS, which is in premise and which cannot be opened up through an application framework. When we went about doing that, the operational complexity first started by identifying the backend of what was otherwise well-established BSS OSS frameworks, but had very little ability to be able to port it to the cloud. So from our perspective as a telco, just a simple thing of getting the OSS vendor to be able to talk to AWS and make it work natively was our first step.

(15:30):
And this was not too long ago, just 24 months back it so happened we were pretty optimistic. We went on and bulldoze our way to make sure that it works natively and we have never looked back. That was one. The other was about marrying together the bunch of suppliers in the OSS BSS world in telcos to be able to think cloud native simple things like redundancy availability, oversupply sizing is very complex even with the best of technology suppliers simply because the cloud native concept operationally when you marry together the economics as well as the ability to do business at scale and fungibility is so difficult to marry, but the best way to do it is what we found it is to doc forward it ourselves and then preach to our customers later. It's worked out very well and we are proud to report that having done that, we are actually opening up that stack to customers of ours enterprises.

(16:31):
Many of them are embracing the cloud, want to be cloud native, forget cloud native, they're actually born in the cloud, but the network fungibility of the scalability is not is an elusive creature. So I would say it's begin to solve itself step-by-step with telcos, particularly young smart startup telcos because they have less legacy to protect just like us. It's very tough in legacy telcos because there's a lot of legacy to hold on to and of course the don't forget the problem is proliferating down to where really money is made including the monies that Telco makes, which is the enterprise. And we are here in the middle of trying to solve for that. It's a very difficult problem to solve for overnight, but I see great promise, particularly with the advent of OpenAI and what it's doing to IL cloud and the transformation opportunity it provides to everybody, including telcos and enterprises.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (17:31):
Thank you very much for that. Much appreciated. We've got a number of comments we want to cover off for this question as well. So Balaji, I'm going to come to you next please.

Balaji Subramaniam, Blue Planet (17:42):
So the thing is, I kind of agree with what Amajit was saying on this, right? The other challenge is telcos have a very unique way of approaching this, right? The telco workloads are very different from traditional application workloads that are usually handled by cloud. If you'll right in a telco setup, probably you want to think about edge locations where you may have a different set of infrastructure or you may also want to think about things that need to be closer to the network. So things like adapters, things like network drivers or whatever you're collecting from the network sometimes need to be closer to the network. So what this essentially means is that the type of challenges that you see are kind of different for a tenco and your deployment strategies and your management strategies like things like high availability, what happens if you lose connectivity between these locations, et cetera, how do you recover from that? Those sort of things become more important and those sort of things have to be thought about what is this thing that I can solve? What are all the tools that I have in the cloud to solve that or do I need to improvise and smoke the tools that are there to sort of do that? That's usually what we are observing.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (19:03):
That's good to hear. Thanks, Balaji. Coming to Mark in a moment, but Juan, Carlos, let me come across to you next please.

Juan Carlos Garcia, Independent (19:09):
Hi. Well, I think complexity is there and we are adding new structural layers, new control mechanisms, and I think complexity will be very difficult to be reduced. We can manage it, we can hide it to the customer, to the telecom operator, but I think complexity is there and we need tools and complexity comes from many angles. So one is the high distribution of the telco cloud evolving from tens of nodes that you need for the core in what was called the two hundreds of nodes that we'll need for the access network functions, not for the run in what is called the, there is another complex complexity coming from the mix of technologies knowing private and public cloud. There are companies like Open Nebula that is an open source based company that is working precisely in managing highly distributed multi technology clouds. There's another complexity coming from the lack of standards that ensure portability, compatibility, interoperability between the different cloud environments.

(20:12):
And this is also an issue that is adding complexity for telecom operators. There are open source projects in Linux Foundation like Silva that are trying to standardize an open source based runtime environment for telco cloud. And also there are European projects like the IP cics, the credit for cloud infrastructure and service in Europe that is working on a standard and open multi-cloud orchestration mechanisms. We have on the other side another complexity coming from different virtualization schemes and I think my colleague from the hat mentioned some of them. So we have BNFs, we have Kubernetes over bms, we have BMS over es, we have now containers over bare metal, so we have different ways of making virtualization and this may even evolve to new formulas. So the cloud is never stopping and we may find new virtualization techniques in the future. There is also a lack of orchestration and automation.

(21:06):
So all this complexity somehow, especially mixed with multiple technologies, multiple domains, multiple providers, so makes it a very complex environment. And I must say there are companies working on this. Again, open Nebula is addressing this problem and dedicating significant efforting framework of European research programs bringing fresh ideas and solutions to the market in this open source approach to multi-cloud orchestration Federation is also an aspect to be considered that cannot add complexity. It is true that federation in cloud has never happened, but probably at this highly distributed cloud that includes the edge will be needed and there are projects working around this and you mentioned on this complexity and other brand that is the lack of skills of course, but complexity in general is increasing and I think we will see more mechanisms to manage it. Tools are evolving, we'll probably be able to hide it somehow for the customer, but complexity is there and we'll have to take attention to that.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (22:18):
Thanks Juan Carlos. So maybe it's not a case of reducing complexity but more managing the complexity. Interesting. Mark, let me come across to you and hear what you have to say about the complexity of this environment.

Mark Longwell, Red Hat (22:33):
Yeah, I think we're all in violent agreement that complexity we need to take out of the systems as much as possible. So Juan Carlos mentioned open source projects and so forth, so we'll talk about those a little bit later, but those, creating those standards helps out. One of the things we've done with our platform is to allow the same user experience whether you're in the data center, whether you're at the edge, whether you're in the cloud, wherever the case might be. So if you're running some of our platforms, the user has a single user experience across the hybrid cloud. Hopefully that reduces some of the complexity. And then with the maturation of tools around hybrid cloud management, we partner across our ecosystem to fill in the gaps that Red Hat doesn't have. And none of us can solve this individually. Not one company has all the answers, and unless you have a large ecosystem to support your core platforms and your core solutions, you won't have a solution that's available to a service provider or even an enterprise to deploy confidently to expand and to leverage cloud native functionality.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (23:37):
Fascinating. Thanks very much Mark for those insights. Thanks everyone for those comments. Well, we talked about complexity. Another issue that's been raised by a number of our telco friends and a number of viewers is the lack of maturity of cloud native software from vendors. This is something we first heard last year and we were hearing it again this year, and whether or not this lack of maturity is a reason that telcos might be holding back with their cloud native projects. Now, first of all, do we think this is a fair assessment? Is this what's really happening in the market now? Partha I'm going to come across to you first on what you think about the maturity of cloud native software.

Partha Seetala, Rakuten Symphony (24:28):
So I wouldn't use the word lack of maturity, but maybe I'll start with a little bit of background. So being a cloud native platform provider, just like Mark with Red Hat, we have been fortunate enough to see hundreds of different instances of application types being deployed in a cloud native platform. And what we have seen, and by the way this is I think a very natural thing is the vendors that existed in the past who have built out their applications on V nfs, they are getting onboarded onto the cloud native platforms. And the way they are doing that is to essentially take their vfs packaging that into a container and then deploying it on a cloud native platform like Rakuten Cloud and so on. Of course, there are newer vendors who are building their application from the get go on a containerized format using the cloud native principles and so on.

(25:21):
Now, as an operator, if you make an assessment that there's lack of maturity among the older vendors in terms of making this transition. I think that's a wrong way of looking at it because the complexity of cloud native, as I said, cloud and cloud native are not the same. Cloud native is a way in which an application is built. If you expect complex applications to be completely rearchitected within two or three years, that's a very unrealistic expectation. So what's happening and what I've seen is why in these, the vendors are slowly making the transition to transform their VFS into true cloud native. The platforms themselves, whether it's a Racon cloud or Red Hat and so on, they themselves are evolving so that they can support these kind of workloads. So it is, I would say pseudo cloud native. So thick containers applications don't necessarily scale like the cloud native principles basically dictate and so on.

(26:20):
And they're running, they're running in production today. I mean even if you look at Blackwood and mobile or the other operators that we have deployed our platform in, there are a lot of VNFs that have been turned into CNFs and they're running in production without issues. Yes, there is more complexity in terms of how you manage them because you don't use the same sort of toolings that you would use to manage let's say CNFs, but it's all running and it's working well. I would say that that's why I don't want to use the word lack of maturity. What I would say is that it is taking time for the older vendors to transform their architecture. It'll take time. And in my experience in the industry, I've seen that these kind of transformative things are slow transitions. You don't have a cutoff where let's say a big vendor will say, oh, you know what? I'm going to go down the cloud native way. I'm going to abandon this thing and restart my entire code base from the beginning. That is not going to happen. That's unrealistic. And if you go down this path, in fact, cloud native will never see being adopted by operators because these big vendors on which the operators depend on today will never be ready within the next 3, 4, 5 years.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (27:28):
That's interesting. And Partha, can I ask you a follow-up question? Do you think we need to manage the expectation more with operators? Do you think operators are expecting too much too soon given the complexity and given the time needed to evolve our offerings?

Partha Seetala, Rakuten Symphony (27:48):
I think the right way for an operator to evaluate this is not just are you cloud nato? I think the right way to evaluate is whatever you're doing, am I getting the benefit that a cloud native application gives me on a cloud native platform, even if you're not a hundred percent cloud native? So let me explain what I mean by that. So one of the benefits that an operator sees when you deploy a cloud native workload is that the deployment and the upgrade path becomes very straightforward. It becomes simpler, not straightforward, it becomes simpler, and ideally it can be done without the help of the vendor who's supplying that software. It can be done by the ops team or the operator themselves. If you can do that, you can essentially cut down on the operational burden that an operator sees when they're deploying applications. So that should be one evaluation criteria. The second evaluation criteria should be is this application resilient to the underlying failures that you see at the infrastructure layer, at the platform layer, at a user layer and so on. So there are certain things about cloud native that enable that kind of resiliency. So is this vendor, whether it's they're doing a thick container or a thin container, are they able to deliver on that resiliency in the event of these failures?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (29:01):
Great. Well thank you very much for following up on that one and we've got a number of other comments we are going to canvas now. So Amajit, let me come across to you first please.

Amajit Gupta, Lightstorm (29:13):
Yeah, thank you Guy. I was about to comment on the maturity of the supply ecosystem on cloud natives. And by definition when we say it's a supplier of vendor ecosystem, it's meant to serve a constituency, which happens to be the telco and cloud native telco in the context of their business, essentially means something which we shouldn't lose sight of. What this basically means as a telco myself, I can tell you is how do we match the scale and size and agility of the cloud, which anyways is 80% of the traffic in any network anywhere in the world. And I think part talked about services and speed of deployment, which is a natural consequence of it, but underlying is the fact the telco networks were built to last last for dozens, tens, hundreds of years. Whereas the cloud is built to change. And I think essentially from all tech providers, as a telco myself, we look to be able to deploy that layer which gives us not only the fungibility scalability of services to make more money, but also the ability for this strange world of networks to talk to the world of software.

(30:27):
And I'm oversimplifying that, but I do want to emphasize therefore that for many of us the perspective is do these solutions, this technology solutions really solve the problem that the telco is looking for or is that a solution still finding a problem? So I think that's the match we need to get with respect to the entire ecosystem maturity, both in telcos as well as the tech provider supplying to telcos to make the magic happen. Because only then and only then will the telco industry multiples, which is where investors, where people look for returns will match up to anything close to the cloud or anything in the natural world, which as we all know is not the best of health for telco anywhere in the world. So I just wanted to add that perspective guy so that we don't lose sight of this discussion.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (31:23):
Sure, absolutely. It's important we do. So thank you, Amajit. Juan Carlos, what's your thoughts about the perceived lack of maturity of Cloud native software?

Juan Carlos Garcia, Independent (31:35):
Not all vendors will be able to evolve to cloud native functions immediately. No, it will take time, but tele competitors need to understand now the readiness of the network functions. They are acquiring network from telecom vendors and this means that they will need somehow to have a measurement of this maturity to be able to compare different vendors because only when with cloud native network functions, they will get the benefits of the cloud. And there are initiatives fortunately like the Silva and Advocate, that are looking not just for having this standard cloud native environments for network patients, network functions, but also to bring programs, certification, validation and testing of the cloud readiness of the cloud native network functions, the cls, and this will help match the industry to get confidence on these network functions and to evolve to cloud.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (32:43):
Great. Thanks Juan Carlos and Balaji, what are your thoughts? Is there a lack of maturity or is this an incorrect assumption?

Balaji Subramaniam, Blue Planet (32:53):
I would say rather than using the word maturity, I would say there is a lot more diversity in how these applications are thought about in a cognitive fashion. I see the lack of standardization as more of a challenge than lack of maturity, I would say, and maybe one of the way we measure maturity is how these things can fit together. What I mean by that is with cloud native, you have two parts. One is the deployment aspects, the fungibility, the elasticity aspects of that. The other benefit is the operationalization aspects. For example, let's say if you move your VNF workloads or CNFs into cloud native manner, and if you still expect a proprietary EMS or NMS to sort of control them, I would question whether we are really being cloud native. One of the benefits should be that you still need to be open and related, managed through other means, through standardized means. Say for example, look at ODA principles or look at how three GPP and ET C and others are coming up with these standards that allow you to sort of mix and match different ways you can operationalize them. So I would kind of tend to look at it from that perspective, if that makes sense.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (34:10):
Yeah, it does, absolutely. Thank you. This has been a great discussion so far. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I hope our viewers are too. I'm sure they are. A final question I'd like to put to you though, and I'd like to look ahead a little and ask you what is happening with the development of Cloud native, especially within the open source community and how this may impact telcos. And Mark, I'm going to start by asking you, because you mentioned earlier that you'd like to talk a bit more about open source.

Mark Longwell, Red Hat (34:41):
Well, as you know, open source is Red Hat's mantra. That's how our business, and it's something we a hundred percent believe in, and we're seeing more and more of the vendors we work with working through open source. So we're at the forefront of projects such as Project Nefi, which is basically Kubernetes automation, and as Juan Carlos mentioned, project Sylvia, which is around a cloud software framework. So we're trying to make sure these standards are adopted. In addition, working through the cloud Native Compute Foundation and some of the standards they put out, in fact, our CNF best practices that we work with our partners on is a derivation of what was created by the CNCF. So we're leveraging that work out in the field already or out in the open source community to hopefully work with our partners and to see the value of the best practices.

(35:33):
And the goal obviously is to let them implement best and we hopefully will see less issues down the road as we do the implementations or the checking and the POC work. And obviously when you deploy, you want to have as few issues as possible. So the more that we can get to a defined set of implementation standards or automation standards through open source, which we think is the best way for these standards to evolve, the service providers will get the benefit of that by having better services, more uptime and faster to market to serve their customers. So once again, red Hat Open Source company, we fully believe in the value that the open source community is bringing will continue to forefront projects like Nefi and Sylvia.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (36:20):
Great, thank you Mark. And a couple of interesting projects there for us to keep an eye on. Juan Carlos, le tme come across to you because you've already mentioned a number of projects. What do you see as happening in Cloud native in the community as a whole that will impact and affect telcos?

Juan Carlos Garcia, Independent (36:40):
Well, of course there are things happening in the open source communities that are impacting telcos, and I think the impact is very positive. Now, as my colleagues said, there are progressively more projects in CNCF Alina Foundation supported and some of them even led by telecom operators that are moving in this direction on changing the way to standardize pieces of the future networks based on these open source communities. Now you mentioned NiFi Silva and there are others ATE and also projects inside the framework of the European Commission, like the PCs that are looking at developing open source components that will provide the support for a safe, sustainable, and secure cloud to host critical services like telecommunication. So all in all, I think we see a lot of more engagement of tele operators in these open source communities, much more adoption of open source based products. And what I think is that we will see operators increasing the partnership with cloud technology and service providers inside these open source communities to gain additional skills.

(38:02):
We mentioned about skills and competencies. You get them working on the topics in the right communities and they will have to work not just with the big ones, with the big cloud providers, also with the smaller partners that maybe focus on streamlining, automating and facilitating network operations. I mentioned one previously, open Nebula. I see other big companies like Entity data also with a lot of experience on cloud in IT environments that have also expertise in network and will be very valuable. So I think will be a question of for tele innovaters to keep on working on open source communities and partnering with companies that can help bring the expertise and the knowledge and the tools that they need.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (38:47):
Thanks Juan Carlos. Well, it's always encouraging to hear that we're seeing more engagement of telcos within open source communities. Well, we must leave it there for now. I'm sure though we will continue this debate during our live q and a show later. For now, thank you all so much for taking part in our discussion. If you are watching this on day three of our cloud native Telco summit, then please send us your questions and we'll answer them in our final live q and a show, which starts at 4:00 PM UK time. The full schedule of programs and speakers can be found on the telecom TV website and that's where you will also find the q and a form and our poll question. Forno though, thanks for watching and goodbye.