Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (00:03):
Most services are deployed in the cloud, but that's not how every enterprise wants to deploy. Joining me to discuss a partnership that provides alternatives is Ignacio Zamora, HPE, distinguished Technologists, and Gordon Milliken, director, product line, packet Management core at Nokia. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. So how did this partnership come about?

Gordon Milliken, Nokia (00:28):
Well, we've had a broad partnership with HPE for a long, long time. What happened here was a specific project, and it's a project where we thought we had a little niche need. And this is where service providers want to support the enterprise business. And in order to support the enterprise business, you need to take part of your cloud and deploy it in a factory, a shop, a school. And when you do that, you want to have minimum footprint, you want to have low cost, but you still want to be able to manage it as part of your cloud. When service operators deploy cloud systems there, they have to have multiple servers, up to five servers to deploy any kind of traffic. We created this shrunk down solution where we took our VNF and we use a very thin layer of the virtualization KVM, and we deploy what you would get in five servers in just two servers. And that was great for the enterprise solution.

Ignacio Zamora, HPE (01:34):
And everything is based on a foundation. I mean between HP and Nokia, we working through partnership and it means that, I mean, we have the basic ingredients of partnership, like respecting each other, having a mutual curiosity, wanting to do things better all the time, and working closely with a lot of honesty and having common goals, identifying what can I do for you, what you can do for me, how can we bring this to the market? And then also how can we serve it in a very realistic manner, not only technology, also processes. So based on that foundation, we started working together sometime ago, and this brought us here,

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (02:11):
Generally speaking, that's counterintuitive to this increasingly virtualized world that we're going into because most people want to deploy in the cloud, but not everyone,

Gordon Milliken, Nokia (02:21):
Right? So for enterprise, they want to have local control, low latency of call processing and of management of the traffic. And therefore they want the user plane function, which carries the data right in their location. So as a service provider, I've got a big cloud, but now I've got to deploy a part of my cloud in someone's factory at a school. And when I do that in a cloud environment, I have to bring the entire cloud infrastructure with me. That can be up to five or seven servers. What we've figured out here is how to shrink that down into a minimum two server solution that is low footprint, low cost, low power management. It still provides all the capabilities that those enterprise customers need. That's the only way you can scale this to thousands and thousands of businesses.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (03:23):
So that provides sort of almost a niche for people who don't want to deploy everything in the cloud. Has any other kinds of developments come out of this partnership as well? Once you realize that there is a market for that,

Gordon Milliken, Nokia (03:39):
It's sort of crazy. So along the way we discovered that there are some service providers, particularly when we go back a couple of years that the cloud was brand new for them. They said, I don't know how to deal with this stuff. Why don't you give me the good old hardware systems without the cloud? And so what we did is we took our cloud product, our VNF product, and we implemented it in this set to server solution. And we can deploy it there, not just for enterprise, but for operators that want the cloud without the management cost or complexity of cloud. So we did that and then some operators needed more capacity. We turned to our partners and both HP and Dell and built more and more powerful higher capacity systems. And ultimately this has now grown into a product line that big customers can use that want to save on costs of not having to implement all those servers for the cloud, want to not pay for the infrastructure or the people to manage the infrastructure, but get all the capacity. So now we've got major customers with big a hundred million, 200 million subscriber networks using the same solution that we developed for an enterprise use case.

Ignacio Zamora, HPE (05:04):
And it is not something that happened over time. I mean, it happened in a nighttime. I mean, it's been part of that partnership and that joint relationship, right? I mean, because at the end of the day, it was about bringing together an enterprise technology and a telco technology for an enterprise use case. To me, very personally, it started with a wow. I mean one day talking to Nokia engineers in their labs and on the classical question on what are you up to? What's your next big thing? And then they were showing not only the idea, they started showing some already running systems and it was like, there's something we have to do together here. There's something, I mean, we can help you getting this better. I mean, it's a great project to start with. It's a very big challenge to make this not only work, but work perform at the level that is expected. So then there was a lot of, I mean, that was the initiation of a journey where we did a lot of co-engineering into the system tuning and it was a learning process. We were able to bring a first solution and then as Goon just mentioned, we were able to evolve that to some use cases that we were not even thinking of in the beginning.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (06:12):
I was just about to ask you, so what's in the future for the partnership for the platform? What's next?

Gordon Milliken, Nokia (06:21):
It's one thing to just grow, but what we've seen since we started working with HP and a MD that every generation, which is about a year, year and a half, every generation has literally doubled capacity. We went from a hundred gigs for a two service solution to 200 gig with the current solution, and next year we're going to be delivering 400 gigs per two service solution. And now we're in FWA territory where we're really delivering pretty fantastic performance.

Ignacio Zamora, HPE (06:53):
And that basically means that every year, year and a half, we have the opportunity to repeat that wow factor and go back to the flu entire process again. Meaning that we need to look at the very little details and make not only a solution work, but make it perform at world record, which is our goal always. Well,

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (07:09):
Thank you both for your insights and congratulations on your partnership.

Gordon Milliken, Nokia (07:12):
Thanks very much. Appreciate it very much.

Ignacio Zamora, HPE (07:14):
Thank you so much, and thank you Nokia for your partnership and thank you hpe.