Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
Okay, we're at the fyuz 24 event in Dublin. I'm here with Ather Chaudhry, Senior Director, Global Telco Partner Solutions Architects at Red Hat and Niall Byrne who's Senior VP of Networks and Cloud Partner Strategy at Amdocs. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us today and making time in your schedules. So Ather, let's start with you. There's a lot of buzz here at fyuz. What are you mainly hearing about what's top of the agenda at this event?

Ather Chaudhry, Red Hat (00:34):
Sure. Thank you for the invite first at Dublin. I think the group is focused on, rightfully so on open ran, and part of that is looking at the business technology and operational transformation aspects of the Telco Cloud 5G network. A lot of emphasis on automation, for example, as well as how do we realize the outcomes with ai. So that's predominantly the focus here and we are happy to be part of it.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:04):
Okay, great. And Niall what are you hearing? What's top of the agenda for you?

Niall Byrne, Amdocs (01:09):
Again, it's similar to what Ather has said. It's all around orchestration, it's all around automation, all around gen AI and what gen AI can do for the end to end. So it's all around the cloud platform, the applications, the workloads that run on it, and that's a lot of work we're doing with Red Hat at the moment is around that domain and the O Cloud platforms and how we can move that into a AI operated ecosystem. And that's a lot of focus from the amdoc side is on that particular domain at the moment, and we're working with a lot of partners around that.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:47):
Ather, you mentioned their telco cloud transformation and of course that's something that all of the operators are going through right now. What are you seeing in terms of the progress there? What is the current focus of the operators in terms of this transformation?

Ather Chaudhry, Red Hat (02:03):
Absolutely. The telco industry has been on this journey for eight years of virtualization, cloudification presently in Telco Cloud 5G. My judgment is we have deployed many production 5G networks on cloud as well as good progress has been made on V ran cloud, ran open ran, which is the main theme here after three years of investment by Red Hat and its ecosystem, including with Amdocs, is I believe we've championed the ability to deploy open, ran with confidence and with tooling to orchestrate, manage and automate the stack end to end. So this network can be deployed with scale and performance eight years back in 4G. On the mobile side, the journey started with virtualization where essentially the infrastructure sort of evolved, but the application predominantly stayed the way it was and industry learned a lot from what's involved in opening up the stack now in 5G with truly cloud native, there's business technology and operational aspects changing at all layers from the application layer to the environment, which is cloud native and to the infrastructure which is opening up and with off the shelf silicon.

(03:18):
So trying to bring that stack together, that has been the focus for the last three, four years and my judgment is industry as a whole, there's extra depth and width to the experience from the 4G virtualization journey to the cloud native journey, certainly Red Hat with Amdocs and other ecosystem partners, we spent the last four years in really trying to integrate the stack end to end because Red Hat is in the middle of the stack between the application layer and the bottom infrastructure. And in last 18 months, 24 months, we've been heavily focused on the tooling using or and alliance standards and open APIs to be able to orchestrate, manage and automate across the entire stack. Because having tight integration is one aspect of managing the complexity, but then be able to deploy and operate with scale and confidence is equally important. And I believe we as industry together are bringing that capability to beer now where I think the operators should have confidence to be able to deploy this technology with some confidence.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:21):
And Niall what role will AI play in this telco cloud transformation?

Niall Byrne, Amdocs (04:26):
Well, we believe AI is going to be huge across all sectors and everything has to evolve in to take advantage because from an Amex perspective, we're working from obviously from the BSS, the IT domains, right the way down to the silicon, right the way to the stack and across horizontally across that stack. And we are investing a lot of time in AI operations and how we can really make a difference in terms of managing the network because again, a lot of our focus is on orchestration of the network and monetization of the network and the operations of the network because we have a big SI domain that works off of this. So we focus with the likes of Red Hat and what they're doing on the infrastructure, the O cloud and the telemetry that's coming off of that then feeds into our AI platform, our AI operations platform. And that telemetry is gold for what we need to be able to manage the network and understand the network and that's feeding up all the time. And that then can feed into our orchestration suite, which then we can mitigate and manage the network through the feedback we're getting off of the AIOps platform. So it's fundamental across the board and Red Hat are making huge advances in their OpenShift AI strategies and we are working very closely with them in that space to really capitalize on where we're going and where the innovation is going.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:56):
And in terms of that, I mean Amdocs and Red had been working together already for a number of years, but it sounds like the collaboration is extending in quite a lot of areas. Can you tell us about more about the collaboration and what we can expect in the future? Niall, let's start with,

Niall Byrne, Amdocs (06:13):
Well, I mean our products, our applications have run on OpenShift, red Hat OpenShift for a long, long time. And now because of the cloud transformations that are happening and we're getting this horizontal cloud effect, we are taking advantage of that. So we've got our applications workloads running within the OpenShift cloud environment, but the partnerships we're developing jointly with the likes of Dell with HPE, just to get that full end-to-end stack is where we are really getting the benefits and the growth and the potential automation and the benefits to our customers.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (06:56):
Okay. And Ather, how do you see the collaboration evolving in the future?

Ather Chaudhry, Red Hat (07:01):
Absolutely. I mean, we are already strategic partners, red Hat and Amdocs is, we do development together using the Red Hat platform where Amdocs is developing their O-S-S-B-S-S applications as an example. In recent years, the partnership has expanded from O-S-S-B-S-S into 5G core policy and other functions running on truly cloud native environment. And most recently we're doing work on the open ran side, for example, with the Amdocs SMO integrating with the Red Hat O Cloud, and that's what I mentioned earlier, to be able to give confidence and provide scale and agility to deploy these networks, you need end-to-end orchestration and automation across the full stack. So the SMO by Amdocs is, and the O cloud that the Red Hat is developing with OEM partners like Dell, it allows for that end-to-end orchestration across the stack. And this is using Ora Alliance open standards, which is the key focus here.

(08:00):
Then something priceless results beyond being able to deploy networks now across this full open stack application layer coming from Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Avenir, NEC, Fujitsu of the world, which are all our partners to the cloud layer with Red Hat OpenShift and the infrastructure with Dell, HP and other OEM partners. Now, each one of them always had a view of what's happening in the stack at their level. Now with standard open APIs, we are able to provide, each one of the function layer is able to share more relevant data and in a more consistent way. So we are creating a more comprehensive AI ops depository on top of which certainly AI applications more meaningfully can be established. And then now we are extending our strategic partnership to develop AI applications first, for example, more intelligence into the MO. In part we'll leverage OpenShift AI's development capability first, and then once the intelligence is developed to the target use cases, that application will also run back on OpenShift for better efficiency and scale. So that's where we think we are taking the partnership to and the value we are providing for the market.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (09:14):
Okay. I mean, you mentioned confidence a little bit earlier and how important that is, and I think this is the kind of development that's going to give the operators more confidence to take their transformations a bit further. So Ather Nile, thanks so much for joining us today and giving us an update on what the two companies are doing together. Thank you.

Ather Chaudhry, Red Hat (09:34):
Absolutely. Thank you.

Niall Byrne, Amdocs (09:34):
You're welcome.