Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (00:02):
Multi-vendor networks have become the norm across the telecommunications industry, yet integrating diverse technologies remains a persistent challenge. Uwe Pecis Global Pursuit lead at Hewlett Packard Enterprise joins us to discuss how HPE is addressing these complex integration challenges. Uve, thank you for being with us today. Thank you for having me. So Uwe, what are some of the key integration challenges operators are seeing today?

Uwe Pecis, HPE (00:28):
Yeah, if you look around, what you see at Mobile World Congress this year and last year is that there's a major trend towards implementing autonomous networks and bringing that together with ai. And the challenge challenges most operators have is to define how they want to structure the journey. Because getting toward autonomous networks is a journey. It's nothing which you can do in a very short cycle. You have to plan for that, and you have to, well define the starting point and you have to see what is the best area and what will bring you the initial benefit if you want to get on that journey. And starting from that, thinking about how do we handle your data, because that's a key point you have to manage your data well, if you want to go on a journey towards autonomous networks.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (01:10):
How is HPE addressing some of those challenges?

Uwe Pecis, HPE (01:13):
Yeah, we are helping on two levels. On one level, we are trying to help them to define the journey. You see here, we have defined different levels and I think that's a common trend in the market that we talk about different levels and we have to define which is the right level to achieve the one step of the journey. And we have a lot of innovation in our software portfolio, which we are presenting this year. One of the highlights being the innovation we have for AI and Mel, which we introduced within AB five, which we recently launched. And that is helping operators to get a better understanding and better exploit the information they have in the data today and making that available for the next step of automation.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (01:51):
So what are the key benefits operators see from deploying HPE solution?

Uwe Pecis, HPE (01:55):
Yeah, one of the key benefits we have have been packaging together ready-made solutions for different domains which can be applied. And you rolled out taking away the challenge of having complex integrations. In the past we have had complex integrations between things which we say on the assurance side we have an assurance stack, we have an orchestration stack, but we have to bring these two worlds together. If we talk about automation, we have to find the common view on assurance and operations side. One of the innovations which we are introducing here is that we have a common understanding of the policies between both sites of the OSS world. And we have packaged that into readymade solutions. Like for instance, we have packages for ran, we have end-to-end packages for slicing, and these are the things which we are demonstrating this year at mobile work on this.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (02:45):
So what is a good starting point on the journey toward autonomous networks?

Uwe Pecis, HPE (02:50):
Yeah, as we said, very often it's a good idea to start with the management of the data, the data management, and getting a better interpretation of the data. 5G is generating a lot more data than what we had in the past, so it's very difficult to deal with the sheer amount of the data and AI is the right thing to do right now because you cannot, it's not possible for humans to manage all that data. And that's why we introduce NextGen next generation of AI management. Within AV five, we introduced a new performance management, which we call that analytics on metrics, where you take whatever data you get from the network and you try to understand you have to separate signal from noise in that data and then find the right information, fully qualified s qis, which you can hand over then to an orchestration system, which can then act, take action upon that data. And that integration between these two things is the biggest benefit we believe we can deliver with this end-to-end integration. We have this, our value packs for let's say for instance, for Iran management or for slicing or for other networking domains.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (03:57):
Can you show us the solution?

Uwe Pecis, HPE (03:59):
So what we have here is our automation end-to-end automation package for ran. So what we do is we take a machine, we deploy the machine on a ran site, there's nothing on that machine. We monitor, we discover that machine and we start deploying the cloud on that machine along with the deployment of the cloud of the machine. We also deploy all the measurements we need in order to understand what is happening on the infrastructure level on the machine. And once that is ready, we can then go to the next level and install on top of that machine the payload for the ran. In this case it would typically be a virtual du. We can put that on top. And also for that one, we would also deploy all the OSS assurance tools, which we need in order to have control of that machine. And if I go through the second screen now we are looking at a video and we can see, we have been talking before about AI applications, which we have in order to optimize what you see on the assurance side.

(04:55):
That's what is behind these screens here. So you see all the relevant information about the infrastructure, about the applications which we have out in the field. It's already aggregated here and displayed in a proper manner. So in case if you run into a problem, you can take action of that. The next level of that application would be that we have a complete management suite available to manage everything which is happening on the RAN side, including the radio configuration whatsoever. And we can also integrate that with the end end-to-end slice management, which is another one of our packages which we are producing here this year, where we can deploy an end-to-end slice crossing the different domains, the ran part, the transport part, the core part, and also doing for those components and end-to-end close loop management, which gives you very good end-to-end understanding on what is happening in your network.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (05:47):
So from the operator standpoint, if they are considering the HPE solution, what benefits should they expect?

Uwe Pecis, HPE (05:55):
One of the benefits they should expect out of these end-to-end packages is really, the first one is pretty simple. It's shorter integration times, right? Because if you look at the history we had in setting up assurance projects or orchestration projects, they're typically quite consulting or service intensive projects. We are taking away a large part of that integration effort by giving our customers something which is preintegrated out of the box and where we have several vendors already pre onboarded for an end-to-end solution and that it gives us an advantage over putting together dedicated pieces of software and having complicated integration projects.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (06:35):
Thank you so much for your insights and showing us the HPE solution.

Uwe Pecis, HPE (06:39):
Thank you Clarence, for having me.