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Sean McManus, TelecomTV (00:07):
I am Sean McManus from Telecom TV, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Chivas Nambiar, who is the general manager of the Telco business Unit at AWS.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (00:17):
Thank you, Sean. Excited to be here.
Sean McManus, TelecomTV (00:19):
Thank you. Likewise, Chivas AWS is again joining the industry at Mobile World Congress. Tell us a bit about the key trends for the event this year and what people should be aware of to get the best out of it.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (00:32):
Yeah, we're excited to be here at MWC for our presence. That involves a lot of customer conversations, some demos, some announcements that we're driving, but overall, if you think about the telco industry and the transformation that it's going through, what we're most excited about is how is that transformation applying to the different things that make up a telco flywheel? Right? I always talk about a telco being a flywheel made up of usage that drives networks, that drives the creation of new products and services. And this year in particular, we're starting to see both the network modernization piece drive that part of the flywheel as well as generative AI being applied to multiple portions of the flywheel. As an example, we will do announcements this year that help customers really imagine how to take all the capabilities of a cloud and bring it to what they do in the core of their network business, and that allows them to build fully managed systems that have observability built in, that have the ability to react faster built in, and we are excited that telcos are finally getting access to some of these capabilities right at the edge of their network.
Sean McManus, TelecomTV (01:34):
That's brilliant. Tell us about the announcements you are making this week.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (01:37):
We have three announcements that we're doing. The first is a preview of a product that allows telcos to take our outpost infrastructure and use that for high throughput use cases like UPF functions in the 5G network. The second is actually a partnership with Nokia where we're building a ARM-based outpost ran server that considered the base of cell towers with an integrated L one card and a fully managed experience. Then finally, we're working with our IOT teams to build a managed integrations program where you can take devices from many manufacturers, bring them on boredom, and then manage the entire lifecycle of it in a smart home.
Sean McManus, TelecomTV (02:17):
Tell us about the use cases that AWS is enabling for telco.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (02:21):
A lot of our use cases are really from what the customers want to do. So in an example where we had a customer, Verizon, in this case, work with us to say they wanted to think about how to take the power of language models and decide whether they want to run it on a device or whether they want to run it in the cloud, and so we've been working with them and MongoDB and Intel to create a model where there is an agent that sits on a device that makes that determination, and then for the things that they can manage locally, they drive it to a small language model that's been deployed on the hardware device itself, and if it cannot, then it gets routed back into the cloud and onto Amazon Bedrock. So that's a good example of where customers are starting to think about how to use some of these generative AI capabilities that they haven't had access to in the past.
(03:09):
Another great one is one where you start to look at the engineering capabilities that some of our telcos and our telco ISVs have. Ericsson's storied company, fantastic engineering organization. They work on some of the most complex software engineering problems possible, and to take a 10,000 engineer organization and give them the ability to build faster is a hard problem to solve for. So what they have done in conjunction with some of the work that we're doing with them is really to take and apply Gen AI in the context of understanding what these systems are, how do they work, how do they interact, and then use that to speed up the development process. So like I mentioned, across the flywheel, we're seeing now multiple places where gen AI is really coming into the core of what a business does in the telco industry.
Sean McManus, TelecomTV (03:58):
Now, there's a packed program at Mobile World Congress this week. Tell us about the themes that you see having the biggest impact on the industry in the future.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (04:06):
There are a couple of areas that I would recommend people look at first. There's actually a separate Gen AI summit that's happening and the use case I mentioned with Ericsson. I'm going to be talking about it with the Ericsson team. We're excited about that. We've got quite a few folks from AWS talking about the work that we're seeing in network transformation. As an example. How do you take and model out everything that happens in a network using a graph database, and then say, what are the impacts to that? To then come back and decide how quickly can you react to it? We think that's going to fundamentally shift how network transformation observer will be the end long-term network operations works. So that's going to be really interesting and exciting. We also have, as part of the four YP program, one of our leaders on the A GI side, Michelle Sharma out there talking about how to think about building these foundation models in a safe fashion, how he thinks that's going to evolve over time, so lots of focus in that space.
(05:01):
I would also say be curious. We have just within the AWS space, about 24 demos across a range of partners and customers, and some of the things that you'll see here are the things we'll probably be talking about two years out, three years out. Some of the announcements you heard from us today are things we've been working on and really showcased as demos two to three years ago. So just being able to touch and feel. It helps us really think about how to innovate in a different area and different space, and then we're excited about how that evolves over time.
Sean McManus, TelecomTV (05:32):
That's great. Thank you very much for your time.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (05:34):
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
I am Sean McManus from Telecom TV, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Chivas Nambiar, who is the general manager of the Telco business Unit at AWS.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (00:17):
Thank you, Sean. Excited to be here.
Sean McManus, TelecomTV (00:19):
Thank you. Likewise, Chivas AWS is again joining the industry at Mobile World Congress. Tell us a bit about the key trends for the event this year and what people should be aware of to get the best out of it.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (00:32):
Yeah, we're excited to be here at MWC for our presence. That involves a lot of customer conversations, some demos, some announcements that we're driving, but overall, if you think about the telco industry and the transformation that it's going through, what we're most excited about is how is that transformation applying to the different things that make up a telco flywheel? Right? I always talk about a telco being a flywheel made up of usage that drives networks, that drives the creation of new products and services. And this year in particular, we're starting to see both the network modernization piece drive that part of the flywheel as well as generative AI being applied to multiple portions of the flywheel. As an example, we will do announcements this year that help customers really imagine how to take all the capabilities of a cloud and bring it to what they do in the core of their network business, and that allows them to build fully managed systems that have observability built in, that have the ability to react faster built in, and we are excited that telcos are finally getting access to some of these capabilities right at the edge of their network.
Sean McManus, TelecomTV (01:34):
That's brilliant. Tell us about the announcements you are making this week.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (01:37):
We have three announcements that we're doing. The first is a preview of a product that allows telcos to take our outpost infrastructure and use that for high throughput use cases like UPF functions in the 5G network. The second is actually a partnership with Nokia where we're building a ARM-based outpost ran server that considered the base of cell towers with an integrated L one card and a fully managed experience. Then finally, we're working with our IOT teams to build a managed integrations program where you can take devices from many manufacturers, bring them on boredom, and then manage the entire lifecycle of it in a smart home.
Sean McManus, TelecomTV (02:17):
Tell us about the use cases that AWS is enabling for telco.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (02:21):
A lot of our use cases are really from what the customers want to do. So in an example where we had a customer, Verizon, in this case, work with us to say they wanted to think about how to take the power of language models and decide whether they want to run it on a device or whether they want to run it in the cloud, and so we've been working with them and MongoDB and Intel to create a model where there is an agent that sits on a device that makes that determination, and then for the things that they can manage locally, they drive it to a small language model that's been deployed on the hardware device itself, and if it cannot, then it gets routed back into the cloud and onto Amazon Bedrock. So that's a good example of where customers are starting to think about how to use some of these generative AI capabilities that they haven't had access to in the past.
(03:09):
Another great one is one where you start to look at the engineering capabilities that some of our telcos and our telco ISVs have. Ericsson's storied company, fantastic engineering organization. They work on some of the most complex software engineering problems possible, and to take a 10,000 engineer organization and give them the ability to build faster is a hard problem to solve for. So what they have done in conjunction with some of the work that we're doing with them is really to take and apply Gen AI in the context of understanding what these systems are, how do they work, how do they interact, and then use that to speed up the development process. So like I mentioned, across the flywheel, we're seeing now multiple places where gen AI is really coming into the core of what a business does in the telco industry.
Sean McManus, TelecomTV (03:58):
Now, there's a packed program at Mobile World Congress this week. Tell us about the themes that you see having the biggest impact on the industry in the future.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (04:06):
There are a couple of areas that I would recommend people look at first. There's actually a separate Gen AI summit that's happening and the use case I mentioned with Ericsson. I'm going to be talking about it with the Ericsson team. We're excited about that. We've got quite a few folks from AWS talking about the work that we're seeing in network transformation. As an example. How do you take and model out everything that happens in a network using a graph database, and then say, what are the impacts to that? To then come back and decide how quickly can you react to it? We think that's going to fundamentally shift how network transformation observer will be the end long-term network operations works. So that's going to be really interesting and exciting. We also have, as part of the four YP program, one of our leaders on the A GI side, Michelle Sharma out there talking about how to think about building these foundation models in a safe fashion, how he thinks that's going to evolve over time, so lots of focus in that space.
(05:01):
I would also say be curious. We have just within the AWS space, about 24 demos across a range of partners and customers, and some of the things that you'll see here are the things we'll probably be talking about two years out, three years out. Some of the announcements you heard from us today are things we've been working on and really showcased as demos two to three years ago. So just being able to touch and feel. It helps us really think about how to innovate in a different area and different space, and then we're excited about how that evolves over time.
Sean McManus, TelecomTV (05:32):
That's great. Thank you very much for your time.
Chivas Nambiar, AWS (05:34):
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.
Chivas Nambiar, GM Telecom, AWS
Chivas Nambiar, general manager of the Telco Business Unit at AWS, talks us through the announcement of AWS Outposts for telco use cases, including on-premise 5G network workloads and cloud RAN. He also shares his thoughts on the major themes at MWC, including generative AI.
Recorded: March 2025
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