Ray Le Maistre (00:07):
Okay. Good morning everybody. Thanks very much for joining us. We're here at the ZTE booth at MWC 24 in Barcelona. Of course. My name is Ray Le Maistre. I am the editorial director of TelecomTV. I'm the moderator here for this panel this morning, and we've got a great panel of speakers. So welcome everybody. And to help everybody know who is speaking here today, I'm going to ask our speakers to introduce themselves. So Ben, let's start with you.

Ben Panic (00:37):
Thank you, Ray. Good morning. My name is Ben Panic. I'm the Vice president of the Telco Center of Excellence for Red Hat.

Ray Le Maistre (00:44):
Okay, thank you. Ben Wang.

Wang Quan (00:45):
Okay, good morning. My name is Wang Quan. I'm vice president of ZTE, and I'm in charge of the global marketing for the core network.

Ray Le Maistre (00:55):
Okay, thank you, Eduardo.

Eduardo Gutiérrez (00:56):
Hello. Good morning everybody. My name is Eduardo Gutierrez. I'm the wireless operations director for izzi.

Israel Madiedo (01:03):
Hello, good morning and thank you for being here. My name is Israel Madiedo. I'm an innovation technology for izzi. For those of you actually not knowing who izzi is, we're the largest MSO in Mexico.

Ray Le Maistre (01:15):
Okay. Thanks everybody. So I mean, pretty much the topic we're talking about here today is the importance of 5G Cloud Native core innovation, which of course is really important to every operator in the world right now. So Ben and Wang, if I can start with you, Red Hat and ZTE to you have been in a collaboration on this topic. How did that collaboration come about?

Ben Panic (01:44):
Well, ZTE is one of our key partners globally. We've been working very closely with them for many years now and listening to the clients, listening to what the industry is looking for, the leveraging of open source technologies is something that we hear from our clients. Working with ZTE, especially around 5G and the wireless side of the network is something that we have been focusing on from an engineering through to a product management perspective. We see that the criticality of 5G continues to grow for our operators and they were looking for a strong partnership and that's where Red Hat and ZTE have come together to work on this.

Ray Le Maistre (02:23):
Okay. And Wang, how important is this relationship to ZTE?

Wang Quan (02:27):
Okay. I think about the collaboration between ZTE and the Red Hat. It is based on some fundamental understanding that many operators, they actually want three level decoupling architecture in their networks because it's open and it's flexible. They can choose applications, platforms, and hardware from different vendors. So there will be less vendor locking. And actually I also think it is one of the main reasons why we introduce virtualization and cloudification technology into the core network.

Ray Le Maistre (03:13):
So of course it's great to have partnerships in the industry, but the partners want customers and here we have a customer with izzi. So if we can come to the customers here, Eduardo, why did izzi choose this partnership between Red Hat and ZTE, and can you share some insights about what this solution has meant to you, how you're able to operate, what it means for your customers?

Eduardo Gutiérrez (03:41):
Definitely. Well, let me start first by saying that at izzi we truly believe that there is a need, an urgent need to sell something beyond simple connectivity. We really are keen on delivering experiences and experiences that help us to take that sense of our subscribers of being at home while they're in the go. And that is not easy. That is definitely not easy. And to do that you really need an flexible open platform and it's very difficult to envision for the future all the services and all the flows and the customer journeys that you will need. So that's why the platform has to be convergent. It has to be future proof and it also has to be standard based. So we found in this joint collaboration solution those attributes that can help us to do something completely different from what we traditionally see in the market.

Ray Le Maistre (04:49):
And Israel, this kind of the solution that's been delivered by Red Hat and ZTE, what does that mean for how a company like yourselves is able to deploy this really important next generation core platform and how does that impact the customers, what you're able to deliver to customers?

Israel Madiedo (05:10):
That's a very important question, Ray, because we have been working with ZTE and Red Hat for some time now. We have deployed several projects in Mexico very successfully. And now it's a time to move into the mobile arena. We are in MNO, so we are trying to bring the best solutions as Eduardo mentioned to our customers as a quad play operator. So it only makes sense to actually extend what we have been already working on the fixed side to the mobile side and have a real convergent environment. We have been cloud native in certain platforms for some years now, four or five years. And it came the moment to taking a decision, what's the next step and how do we make the best out of what we already have? But also thinking about the new deployment, the new core, and how to interlace everything. So for us it was quite a visionary kind of approach working with both ZTE and Red Hat and looking forward to achieve that. Everyone has been talking about convergence forever. I remember being in this show 10 years ago when everyone was like Convergence, well, we do believe that it's coming in and we need it to be ready. So it's quite a journey. Definitely.

Ray Le Maistre (06:28):
Has it met your expectations? Have things gone as you expected? Has it delivered what you needed

Israel Madiedo (06:35):
So far? So far so good now. Yeah, we are having a great support from both companies and Eduardo who's in charge of this deployment. All of us in the rest of the engineering departments and technology, we're supporting him. But definitely we sense that commitment from both ZTE and Red Hat to make this successful.

Ray Le Maistre (06:57):
Okay, excellent. So let's dive a little bit deeper into exactly what this collaboration is bringing to the market. What would you say, Ben, are the key highlights, the key strengths of this joint solution that you have with ZTE?

Ben Panic (07:18):
Well, I think firstly, we are going through a paradigm shift in the market. We've seen that over the past years as we've moved through the virtualization era and now into the cloudification of the applications. And one of the things that I'll pick up on is we're not done with this. And I think that's the exciting part for izzi and for the industry, is that through the open source technologies that Red Hat delivers with ZTE, we are building these platforms that are going to enable izzi and other clients globally to deliver new applications, to drive new revenue streams. As Eduardo said, not to just be providing carriage to be able to differentiate services in the market. For me, I think that's really exciting, having been in the industry for many years, for us to be able to generate new revenue services to increase the wallet share that we have from consumers and businesses is one of the highlights. I'm also seeing that clients are looking to partners like ZT and Red Hat to be able to help them de-risk the deployment of the solution. And I think that's where the work that we've done at an engineering level with our partner ecosystem team to be able to come together with ZTE and provide that resilient solution that izzi can build their business off is really important.

Ray Le Maistre (08:32):
Okay. And Wang, what kind of capabilities is this joint solution delivering to operators like izzi? What is it giving them that they haven't had before?

Wang Quan (08:45):
Okay. I think one of the most important highlights in this joint solution is that in this solution, ZTE comprise not only the software for the core network, we can also provide the end to end integration for the entire project. We can do this because first we have a very deep understanding about Red Hat product futures. Second, we actually have a dedicated laboratory to validate and to test every new version released by redhead and from ZTE through all the project we have already successfully deployed in the worldwide and the Red Hat platform. Actually we have already built experts and experienced the team. And of course with support from Red Hat, this team can get everything done smoothly and efficiently.

Ray Le Maistre (09:49):
Okay, thank you. So it's a new kind of platform. It's a new era for service providers looking to advance their portfolios, give more to customers, but of course at the same time, greater efficiency and greater agility is needed in what the operators are doing. So Eduardo, if I can come to you first and ask about how the implementation of this joint solution happened, how it compared to previous generations, how different is it and what kind of efficiency improvements have you seen?

Eduardo Gutiérrez (10:32):
Well, Ray, let me first start by saying that I'm very personally sensitive in certain way because I live with a legacy product. And this legacy product places us in a very rigid and unreliable paradigm I would say. And as you can imagine, for us the most important thing are customers and the service that we're providing. So living with an unreliability, it's just very painful. There are a lot of first of opportunity and the way we currently manage this legacy solution, not only on the way we manage the resources, but also the way we operate and troubleshoot and the way we create new services. So far, with the deployment that we're doing with ZTE and Red Hat, it's been just amazing. It is really difficult to see something going as flawless as is. And I believe it's also, again, back to the fact of flexibility, openness, standardization. It's amazing to see how fast, impressively fast the deployment is going. And I'm also completely relying that as we move forward and go beyond the deployment and the integration into the creation of these new customer journeys, things are going to still help us to really come up with new services really fast, really simple. And again, with reliability and fixing all these gaps that we have today in the current environment.

Ray Le Maistre (12:09):
And Israel, it's obviously relatively early in the journey, but you're obviously looking some way ahead and thinking what you can do in the future, how you can better serve your customers. How do you expect this deployment and this relationship to help transform the way you work and what kind of benefits do you expect in the future?

Israel Madiedo (12:32):
Totally. I believe we are working right now in the basis for something larger than just a single project or just a single line of product or just another kind of access network. This is a journey of service delivery. We're thinking about how we're going to be cross-selling services going among any and all of our networks. But having a foundation, as daughter mentioned, on something that is reliable and it's flexible and it's expandable, it's quite an adventure in terms that you need to develop a lot of new skills from the team and you need to change mindsets and tell everyone, Hey, by the way guys, we're going to be doing this in another kind of way because we're going to be able to do more in the coming future. So we need to take everything into account, the deployment of the current project, how it's going to be operated, how we're going to be providing the best service, and at the same time, what else are we going to be doing on this platform?

(13:35)
And that's why we are working a lot with the local teams in Mexico with redhead and ZTE in terms of what else can we do? How do we link this to the other networks, to the fixed part, how we're going to be doing this convergence dream. Again, how do we follow standards and how do we keep openness in the platforms, which is key. And that's something that we took a lot of time and invested a lot of research before going into the project. We're following a lot broadband forum as well. And we know that there are going to be certain interesting points in the middle, but at least we know that technology speaking, we have the tools to actually develop this new relationship among services and networks.

Ray Le Maistre (14:22):
Okay, excellent. Well, we've been hearing for years about cloud native deployments, the evolution of 5G and the impact the 5G core will have. But what's really good is to see this actually happening in action. Here's a customer using solution that's been developed in partnership and partnerships have been talked up so much in recent years, how important collaboration it is. So it's great to see this actually happening in action and to hear from the customers as well. So I hope that everybody here has enjoyed the insights from Red Hat, ZTE and izzi, and let's give all of our speakers a big round of applause. Great conversation. Thank you.

Thank you, Ray.

Thank you.

Thank you.