Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:07):
Right. Welcome back everyone. Hello. Hello, hello. It's the final sessions of today. Coming up very soon is our final panel, which Ray will be moderating. But before we do our panel, we just want to talk to one of our special guests and talk about strategy and AI strategy. So I'm delighted that joining me now is Darrell Jordan-Smith from Wind River. Thanks for zooming in, zooming in across Wild London to join us for this one. So all day, Darrell, we've been looking at hopefully use cases and strategies and thoughts and telcos and AI obviously, but we want to look down at what is the relationship between certain vendors and telcos. And I'd to start off first of all is what is Wind River doing in this area for telcos? How specifically are you addressing listening to their needs and meeting their needs?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (01:06):
Sure. I think really three things that come to mind. Number one, we're building out our technology. We have a technology called Conductor, which is an AI based software inference, stroke gen AI tool set that allows you to monitor networking flows, allows you to do predictive maintenance, allows you to interrogate what's happening in the network and have more of a natural language engagement so you can actually leverage the systems and technology and not necessarily having the top engineers to hand at one point in time. So really trying to make that interaction more natural and engaging, leveraging AI tools with conductor. So that's the first thing we're doing. The second thing we're doing is we're working with a diverse ecosystem of semiconductor technologies out there. Companies like Qualcomm, NXP, Intel, Nvidia, to look at what we need to build for them that is very specific to the silicon that they're putting in place.

(02:06):
So we can actually light up key features in that silicon that is sort of in midstream from an open source perspective or proprietary from some of the things that they want to try and achieve, specifically to enable different applications and services that might sit in the network and also look at business models, which is kind of the third thing around how we use AI to generate new services for the telco operators. A good case in point is what we're doing without another company IV who are very, very large in the automobile industry, how do we actually use connected vehicles? How do we use the electrification of vehicles? How do we deal with things such as electronic vehicle takeoff and landing some of those futuristic projects? How do we use 5G and networking operations to facilitate new applications and new services that occur across the network infrastructure? Leveraging AI as a core element and you need those components. You need the software, you need the hardware, you obviously need the ecosystem and in this case the automotive be industry is a good example of that. And as I mentioned, we're kind of expanding that a little bit into aerospace as well with the electronic vehicle takeoff and landing concepts that we're building out a lot in China at the moment, but we'll be coming to Europe really soon.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:25):
When you have these conversations with the semiconductor industry, which I find a fascinating aspect of this, do you drill down into specific verticals when you have these conversations with them about what vertical requirements are and specifically obviously the telco requirements?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (03:39):
Yeah, we do. And Wind River, we're really focused on four key verticals, industrial, which includes energy and manufacturing. So there is a energy and manufacturing element to what we do. A lot of our clients in that area, companies like Schneider Electric and A BB who are into building robotics and digital factory automation and how you would actually deploy 5G based private infrastructure to support some of those applications and services. So that's one area that we're very focused on and that's very AI centric as well. The other one is around aerospace and I hinted towards some of the vertical takeoff and landing elements, but also what you'd experience in an aircraft overall, how you would manage communications and experiences for infotainment in the aircraft on more on the commercial side. And then if you then look at the third vertical, we're very focused on, I mentioned automotive, very big area and what we're trying to drive there in terms of the connected vehicle and the electrification of vehicles in general.

(04:42):
Then the fourth one really is very focused also on that telco use case. We are very focused on O ran as a disaggregated concept, and again, we think AI is really going to add a lot of value in that environment because it's diverse and it'll actually attract many different players and applications and services there that we're really leaning into. So coming back to your silicon comment, we're working with the silicon vendors to ignite elements in the silicon that will drive better performance characteristics, low power, high performance security, are those key elements though building elements in the software that enables that from a hardware perspective and connecting that to a very diverse ISV ecosystem that we're working very closely with who are innovating in AI all the time.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:31):
We talked earlier in a couple of our panels about the need to scale and accelerate. I mean, are we talking quite lengthy lead times between having these discussions about what future silicon needs to incorporate and futures need to light up against what actually when it comes out and is available for commercial use?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (05:51):
I think there's an interesting dichotomy there. I think the silicon vendors and the ones that we work with want to be more agile and move a lot faster. One of the challenges they have as businesses is if they have to make wait for major releases of core software that could happen once or twice every year, they want to move a lot faster. So what we're trying to do is figure out ways that we can leverage what we have done at Wind River to ignite those silicon elements and our heritage prior to being spun out of Intel was part of Intel. So we understand that environment very, very holistically, and we're investing significantly in simulation technologies to speed up innovation. So you can actually use the silicon that's there today and ignite elements that exist in IT to build new applications and services. So the silicon vendors themselves can actually work with us to be a little bit more agile.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:47):
In your conversations with the telecoms industry and focusing on telecoms in particular, what are the biggest challenges you are hearing from the CSPs that are the obstacles to them successfully implementing their AI strategies?

Darrell Jordan-Smith, Wind River (07:02):
Well, I think, again, it might be a little bit controversial here, but I think a lot of the CSPs in general have lost a lot of the in-house knowledge, the innovation gene that they traditionally had say 10 years ago. I think they're trying in a very broad ways to get that back, and I think that's one of the inhibitors they have to think very differently and they have to be able to disrupt what they already have built in order to be innovative in what they need to go in terms of moving forward. The other inhibitor that I experienced personally is they're spending a lot of money in building out infrastructure, whether it's 5G or beyond, and there isn't a killer app and there's a lot of skepticism about that. So internally, they're finding it difficult to build those use cases and those business cases with a degree of confidence that the board might want to buy into because they're a bit skeptical. So I think that inertia is sort of a double whammy skills and scared to make the first step are two big barriers, and I think that we're going to see hopefully some of the operators in these areas, the CSPs innovate a little bit better. The ones that do innovate will thrive, and I think the ones that don't will

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:20):
Stagnate. Fantastic. Well, Darrell, this leads us really nicely onto our final session, which is all about building the telco AI ecosystem that Ray's going to take on now, and you and I, we'll talk again tomorrow at the Great telco debate, but thanks very much indeed. Thank you. Thank you.