T-Mobile’s Business Push, Technology Advantages, and 5G Slicing with Daryl Schoolar

Full Transcript

Don Kellogg 0m10s

Hello, and welcome to

Roger Entner 0m11s

the two hundred

Don Kellogg 0m11s

and twenty seventh episode of The Week with Roger, a conversation between analysts about all things telecom, media, and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg, and with me as always is Roger Entner. How are doing, Roger?

Guest Speaker 0m22s

I'm great. How are you?

Don Kellogg 0m23s

Good. So Roger, this week, you Daryl and Mitch are all at the Mavenir analyst event. And we have a great guest. Brandon Larson is SVP for Cloud AI and IMS at Mavenir. Brandon, welcome to the podcast.

Roger Entner 0m35s

Yeah, appreciate being here. Thanks for having me.

Don Kellogg 0m38s

Absolutely. So Roger and Daryl, you guys are there on the ground. How was the event this year?

Guest Speaker 0m44s

This is one of the best analyst events in the circuit. Mavaneer shares more data, more insights and intelligence than anybody else that we interact with. Quite a bit is under NDA, which is fully understandable. But they share under NDA things that others don't share. And so it really helps us to be not only informed about Mavaneer, but also about the industry at large and how the trends are.

Guest Speaker 1m19s

This is particularly important because Mavenir is like the largest, the most important US infrastructure provider. It's also cloud centric and has really pioneered a lot of that drive to virtualization. The company has now entered the radio market and they just have been named one of the winners for the Open RAN build out with AT&T. So it's really exciting to be here and see, you know, what's happening.

Guest Speaker 1m53s

Yeah, I agree. Certainly appreciate the fact that Mavenir, like you said, supplies a lot of information to us. It's not a lot of puffery like you get at some event. And also, always appreciate actually your CEO, the fact that he's willing to talk about some uncomfortable stuff instead of like letting us guess about things. Is much more upfront than you normally see.

Guest Speaker 2m13s

Absolutely. And Pardeep has a tremendous amount of passion. Yes. Yes.

Roger Entner 2m17s

He lets you know what he's thinking. He lets you know where it's going. And I think that's a large part of our culture. And as you mentioned, we have a very open DNA, right? Not pardon the pun on open, Open with you guys, but we're also very open with our customers, right?

Roger Entner 2m32s

What we can and can't do, what their problems are, how should we look at solving them? And when you look at the areas of kind of innovation, that's what our customers are really looking for, right? So I think what we talked a lot about in the analyst event was what are our customers' true pain points, right? And what are we doing to solve them? I think we had a lot of good dialogue, right?

Roger Entner 2m51s

The questions we got from the analyst community

Guest Speaker 2m53s

had on so many enthusiastic customers here. It was really heartwarming to see how happy and well, I'm sure you don't know you're not going to send any disgruntled customers. But how passionate the customers that were here, and I counted like half a dozen, that really gave us a lot of comfort in what you are delivering. And I think one of the topics we want to talk about is also the role of AI, because that rolls up to you, right?

Roger Entner 3m22s

Yeah, absolutely. And the way we look at AI is it's just really a tool to solve problems and solving it differently than you typically do in telco today. Think in telco, we focus on what can we do with technology. When you really apply AI, it's what can we do with the data? And if you really think about telco, it is rich, rich, rich with data.

Roger Entner 3m40s

That's where there's a lot of opportunity. So you can use AI, it could be anywhere from fraud detection. Do the Net Promoter Score, we could use that to figure out how we're serving customers, provide better solutions around that. We use it for network optimization. We could use it for next best offers.

Roger Entner 3m55s

We could understand how people use network services and provide even more services for them. So the way I look at AI is in two parts. One, we say what problems can we solve with the data? And two, keep it practical. It's not about the moonshots, it's about solving practical everyday problems.

Roger Entner 4m10s

And a lot of what we talked about at the analyst event today, just see even simple problems that exist today that we can just do better, right? And provide better customer experience, better operational experience through the use of AI.

Guest Speaker 4m21s

You're one of the premier providers of fraud prevention solutions, and you're training that with AI and making it smarter.

Roger Entner 4m30s

Absolutely. And that kind of touches on another one of the concepts that we look at is that AI is only as good as the people that are putting their intelligence into So it, I always talk about a lot of what we do with AI is taking our domain expertise and putting into AI. So if we want to solve a RAN problem, we have our RAN experts working with AI team. We want to solve a security problem, it's our fraud and security analyst experts. Want to solve problem in IMS, it's our IMS experts.

Roger Entner 4m54s

So that's the trick. AI is the tool, but it's our ability to take our domain expertise and put it in the AI that actually makes it deliver value for our customers.

Guest Speaker 5m4s

Yeah, know. And not sure if I can say who, but we had customers here who were explaining to us how they're using your technology and your expertise to solve their problems.

Roger Entner 5m18s

Yeah, absolutely. And I always kind of look at the problems come in four buckets for our customers, right? And what they're trying to solve from a business problem standpoint. One is they're always trying to get more productivity. How can I deploy networks, upgrade networks, maintain networks, right?

Roger Entner 5m32s

Less people, less time, less human error. How do I secure my network security threats are growing? And that security, the network as well as the communication channel terms of fraud. How do I run more efficiently? I call it like, you know, get more gas mileage out of my network, whether it be energy or capacity.

Roger Entner 5m48s

And the other is how do I make money? What are the ideas I can use to make money? And that could stem from everywhere from open APIs to data channel to new things we can do with random fixed wireless access to slicing technology, the gamut. And what can we do with mining more intelligence to that data and using that business intelligence even in BSS systems, next best offer. So endless opportunity.

Roger Entner 6m11s

And what a

Guest Speaker 6m11s

lot of people don't know, Mavenir is a little bit one of those not as well known as they should be providers, because you mentioned BSS OSS, you're a big BSS OSS provider.

Roger Entner 6m24s

No, that's a good point. Sometimes we do get very pigeonholed. Remember, Mavenir used to be known for only messaging. Way back in the day when we had the end of the Congress decision that Azure type of stuff, then we kind of now known as an ORAN company. But what I call Mavenir is kind of a problem solving company.

Roger Entner 6m39s

We've always meant disruptor, looking at the problem a different way and say, how can we solve it? And you mentioned BSS, we looked at it and say, you know what, today's BSS systems and rating systems are kind of about metering the pipe, minutes and throughput data. But how do we create new rating systems based on the new value that will be delivered? So let's think forward into the VSS. So I think we're always looking at the problem a different way.

Roger Entner 7m0s

And that's leading us to new spaces of innovation.

Guest Speaker 7m3s

Yeah, I don't think a lot of people are as aware of two things about Mavenir to me. One, the breadth of your solutions that you offer.

Guest Speaker 7m11s

Because like you said, yeah, a lot

Guest Speaker 7m12s

of people think about you either as open RAN or back to the old voice over Wi Fi IMS days. But you have a pretty broad set of solutions. Secondly, I think people also kind of don't understand the breadth of your customer depth. I mean, honestly, a lot of this stuff is under NDAs. I'm not going mention any names, keep everything.

Guest Speaker 7m32s

But not only speaking at the event, but what you shared, you have a broad mixture, of course. You have the startups, Greenfield points. But you are also working in a lot of large brownfield networks as well.

Roger Entner 7m46s

Yeah. Which I don't

Guest Speaker 7m47s

think people fully appreciate that part of your business. And that gives us a lot

Roger Entner 7m52s

of perspective. You mentioned it's working with customers that are large to small. We work with everything from greenfield, MVNOs that entered the MNO space. The guys that have been around forever, they're looking to innovate, get into the satellite, the guys that are trying to trust your network. So the point is, is that regardless of who the customer is, they all have problems, right?

Roger Entner 8m14s

And I think what you'd heard from our customers that are speaking today on our behalf is that we listen, we understand their particular challenge. And we're not trying to put, you know, things we've already developed on them, we look and say, how can we leverage some of the things we've done, and then we kind of mold and manipulate that to their situation. And that's where they're happy, right? They're saying, you guys are out there actually taking care of business and solving our problems, right? Not going through the motions.

Roger Entner 8m39s

I think that kind of came through in some of the testimonies at the event this week.

Guest Speaker 8m43s

Yeah, absolutely. What are you the most excited about right now?

Roger Entner 8m48s

Well, know, because I have AI in my title. This is

Guest Speaker 8m51s

what I run.

Roger Entner 8m51s

I'm most excited about that. And here's the reason why. What I've seen, and it's not just the technology we're providing, it's actually a lot of the development of the people and the way of thinking. And I think for industries to innovate, you have to change mindset. And actually, I do cloud too.

Roger Entner 9m7s

One of the things I found very interesting about cloud and AI, it's a different way of thinking about a problem. I always say, I could bring a telco engineer who's been doing stuff for twenty years. So I'll bring a cloud guy in a room and I'll bring a data science in a room. And if I give them the same problem, they'll all approach it a different way. But if I get them thinking together, and I've seen this happen when all three of those mindsets start melding and they start thinking about the problem, it's amazing some of the new ideas and innovations we can come up with.

Roger Entner 9m32s

So I think what I'm most excited about is putting some new DNA, building some new cultures, new way of thinking inside of the telco industry, looking at problems a different way. That's where I think a lot of the innovation is going to come from.

Guest Speaker 9m44s

You know, I'm with you, because as much as we want to move very quickly to a cloud centric or cloud native five gs standalone everything solution, and we want to have it now. For a lot of providers, it takes longer than even they want to, right? Technologically, we want to go there tomorrow. It would be possible a lot faster than we're going, but it's not always financially possible, right?

Roger Entner 10m12s

Absolutely. And I would say another challenge with that is the cultural and human inertia. That's the other one. Because I always say, especially in the area of innovation with cloud and AI operational transformation, really these moonshots about how we're going to do things differently. Getting that into the telco operational bloodstream has always been a challenge, right?

Roger Entner 10m31s

So you can draw something up in a whiteboard with the CTO, have a completely different conversation with the head of operations, right? So a lot of what we're focused on with the innovation, I think we covered in an analyst event is like, how do we make these new technologies digestible for the folks that are going to operate this day to day in the network, knowing that these folks have goals, they gotta keep this KPIs, they gotta keep They the networks get the call when there's an outage, right? They're not there So to take you have to be very attuned to their concerns and say, if we're gonna use this automation, if we're gonna use this AI in operations and every day, we have to do without putting your job at risk and we have to make your job better. And you have to understand how it uses and we need to be sensitive to that. And that's the way we're approaching the problem and it's been successful when we're taking that practical

Guest Speaker 11m17s

approach.

Guest Speaker 11m17s

Because the tolerance for failure at telcos is very limited. People get very upset and get very loud very quickly when there's a network outage. They're working their hardest to minimize that. And when we had network outages, very often it was because of when we went too quickly, too fast for our own comfort, and then somebody pushed the wrong button it cascaded the network down. Whereas in previous lives where you had to go into every switch manually and change things, if somebody had fat fingers, they brought one side down, and now they bring the entire network down.

Guest Speaker 11m59s

And customers rightfully don't care. I want this to work and why doesn't it work? And then us who are steeped in the technology are like, why can't we go faster? And it's because people's lives often depend on those networks.

Roger Entner 12m15s

You're absolutely right. In fact, when we look at I always have in the back of my mind that this is critical infrastructure, critical infrastructure, right, that are protected by governments. It doesn't work, if networks come down, you know, we were just talking with some of the analysts at dinner. And I was just like, if you ask people said, would you go without food for today or your phone? How many people would probably say, I'll skip the meals, just eat my So if you think about how critical it is to people's day to day lives, right?

Roger Entner 12m39s

For everything they do. We talked before about why do six year olds have cell phones, right? We just talked about the Fortinet cause. It's so their parents can keep connected because they're scared to death of school shootings. So that connectivity, right?

Roger Entner 12m50s

It's no longer a luxury. It is now a necessity and people treat it as a necessity like they do food and clothing. I think that presents a lot of opportunity for the telecom industry because we provide such an important service. But it's also you have to be mindful of man, you have to be responsible in how we deploy that technology and innovate because it is so crucial in people's Because

Guest Speaker 13m10s

if Gmail goes down or if Facebook goes down

Roger Entner 13m13s

I don't know.

Guest Speaker 13m15s

A, I don't know. B, it's an inconvenience.

Roger Entner 13m18s

Exactly.

Guest Speaker 13m18s

If my cell phone goes down and I need to call 911. Matter of somebody you might

Guest Speaker 13m23s

be be gone. And

Guest Speaker 13m25s

so, we need to take this very seriously. And at the same time, be really excited about the new opportunities that come with all the new cloud centric or cloud native five gs opportunities that still exist. We haven't really lived up to the promise like every generation. We don't live up to the promise from the very beginning. And then we're actually solving a problem we didn't figure out at the beginning of the

Roger Entner 13m54s

year. Exactly.

Guest Speaker 13m56s

It's like we had four gs networks, and the promise was, oh, now we can send pictures to each other much faster. Not realizing that it's going to be moving pictures and people are watching videos now on this thing. Nobody thought about this in the three gs world.

Roger Entner 14m9s

Exactly, exactly.

Guest Speaker 14m10s

And it's the same thing here with five gs. Yeah, and

Roger Entner 14m13s

I also think, you know, and Steve Jobs had this one insight, I remember, was from like seven years ago. He's been burned so many times with doing technology and then figuring out to market But he's like, well, you first start with the customer work your way back with the technology. And I'm seeing that mindset a little bit more in telco now. Think it used to be we just develop standards, but technology and the business will go. I think people are more aware now that we've got to start with what value can we create and then start working our way back to technology.

Guest Speaker 14m39s

Yeah, well, think

Guest Speaker 14m40s

as we entered five gs, mobile in my mind became three-dimensional. Mean, originally two gs was about coverage, one dimension. And then when you got to four gs, it was like two dimension. It's about your speed and your capacity, or your coverage and your capacity. And now he's moved into five gs, you still need coverage, you still need speed, but now it's about more specific type services or experiences adding a third dimension to it.

Roger Entner 15m4s

Yeah, no, absolutely. And let me give you an example, right, of one of the use cases. So we go down and we put networks in mining in Australia, right? And you're thinking like, the heck does wireless networks have to do with mining? But then what we find out is because they're running autonomous vehicles, right?

Roger Entner 15m18s

That if the network connectivity went down and it stopped operations, you could put hundreds of thousand dollars on that delay. So it wasn't about The

Guest Speaker 15m27s

truck falls down and hit

Roger Entner 15m28s

the pit. Exactly. So the point being is when we're looking at the connectivity, we're not looking at the spectrum and the handover success rate, whatnot, we're now looking at it through the problem statement of my operation's down, that's costing $100,000 keep it up. So mapping that technology to the business problem, it makes you appreciate how to solve that through the lens of the customer.

Guest Speaker 15m51s

Yeah, but also what I appreciate coming here is I always learn something new. And it reminds me of also the other thing that Steve Jobs said, it's not the job of the customer to figure out what they want. That's so true. It's so true. And then it relies on people in the industry to come up with the solutions that the customer never knew that they needed.

Roger Entner 16m16s

Absolutely. That's part of it. A lot of that is understanding what the problems of the customers are and when we provide a solution. So they don't even realize sometimes what solutions are available for the problems they have. So if you listen to them, you say, well, forget about what you're asking for.

Roger Entner 16m30s

Tell me what you're trying to do. Maybe there's then something you haven't thought of yet, another way to circle the But to your point, that really is a different way of approaching the problem statement, right? We're not just building technology and hand to the customer and say, you figure out how to use it. We're also saying, we have this technology, tell me what your problem is. Together, we'll figure out how we take this technology and apply it to your business problem.

Roger Entner 16m53s

Different way of approaching the problem.

Guest Speaker 16m55s

Which brings us back to AI. Yeah, back to AI.

Guest Speaker 16m58s

Brendan, thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Guest Speaker 17m2s

Daryl Thank you.

Guest Speaker 17m3s

As always.

Guest Speaker 17m4s

Yes. Thank you.

Roger Entner 17m5s

No, guys. Appreciate you having me. It's always fun chatting with you guys. Look forward to doing it again. Alright.

Don Kellogg 17m10s

Alright. Thanks, Roger. We'll talk next week.

Guest Speaker 17m12s

Talk to you next week.