CTO focus sessions: Enabling a rich network edge

Listen to the podcast

In this podcast, Ericsson CTO, Erik Ekudden, talks to Bikash Koley, VP of Global Networking at Google Cloud, about the potential of 5G and edge computing.

Tune in here

Erik Ekudden: Okay, Hello Bikash and welcome to the 5G things events and the special CTO session.

Bikash Koley: Hello Erik. I am really happy to be here and thank you for inviting me, looking forward to our wonderful conversation today.

Erik: Likewise, looking forward to it and let's dive right into it, since we are so much in the middle of all the 5G roll outs. We see all the values that are coming to both consumers and enterprises. In fact, we actually see 5G as the biggest innovation platform being deployed today and it has a lot of new capabilities and we are just starting to tap into some of those.

So, how do you think, how can we start to leverage 5G and the edge as an even stronger platform for innovation?

Bikash: You know Erik the best way to think about what 5G can do for us is to go back and see how evolution of mobile network has happened in the past. Enormous steps have been taken with innovations with 2G to 3G to 4G but unfortunately with all this progress, the applications and the networks, they have been sort of ships passing in the night, right. Where applications try to guess what the network could offer them as capability, mostly looking at congestion and network has guessed what the applications are trying to do mostly looking at utilization, right. That's not the best way to utilize the capabilities that these modern networks can really bring to the fore, and I think 5G has real opportunity to truly change that for us.

Erik: And I think that the way you put it, ships passing in the night, I think it's a good analogy but if you think about the practicalities of this now with 5G we actually expose things through the SCEF and NEF and the exposure functions and this is really where information from the network in terms of performance could be efficiency gains but also pricing for certain services that can be readily available and I think that will firmly established what can be done together with the app developers, cloud platforms and the networks. I think that's really where it is making it a different way this time.

Bikash: I agree Erik, I truly think that 5G gives us the opportunity to turn this into a true platform right, where it's not locked  down into this proprietary sets of harder and software, you really allow the abilities to optimize application delivery by utilizing the best of what cloud can do and what network can do and really offer that as a way that applications can directly access with APIs and so on.

We finally have this convergence of compute storage and networking at the edge coming together and I think that's really the most exciting innovations that are happening with, with 5G and the experience that it can bring to the applications and the consumers as a result.

Erik: And I think you're already touching on the critical importance of partnerships in this and collaborating across the ecosystem because some of these values are obvious within the domain but to transfer them and make sure it works across the ecosystem, reaching all the way to the app developers and if its capability to come all the way from the device through the infrastructure. Of course, this is a big task for the industry to really make it work end-to-end. It's about the ecosystem.

Bikash: It is absolutely about the ecosystem Erik and it's an ecosystem that really spans cloud and network together and you know what the public Cloud providers can do, what the service providers can do and of course what the app developers can do.

You know if you look at the history of Google, we started out as a consumer application company right, we are app developers at the core of our DNA. You know Google search, maps, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet, you name it, it has always been. Cloud to us as always been optimizing the user experience for the apps that they used in day in and day out and therefore Cloud to us has been to, its about optimally placing compute storage and networking, so that we maximize the quality of experience that we that we deliver to our users and over you know last two decades plus we have built this infrastructure not just in our cloud data centers but also our age pops.

So as I view this ecosystem, I view this as how do I bring this different tiers of cloud and application delivery to the service providers and to the app developers so they can really build a highly optimized experience for the end users that they're building this applications for and again ecosystem as you said and platform, 5G as a platform, they are the most important things

Erik: And the speaking about the app developers here what do you think we need to do and how can we make sure that the app developers really take advantage of the power of 5G and the edge.

Bikash: Yeah, I mean ultimately if you talk to an app developer who is imagining this amazing application that can take advantage of you know the innovation of 5G low latency, programmability as well as Edge Cloud, there were to tell you there are four things that they're looking for right, they want openness, they want to build applications on an open platform. We have seen this by the way in the past with our Android operating system.

You know one of the biggest reasons that Android is so successfully is so when an app developer develops an application, it runs on all Android phones and it runs on all service provider network, right. We're trying to do the same thing with 5G and Edge Cloud, where that platform for us is Anthos, right, where we really have you know IT age 5G network applications. They're all delivered, orchestrated, manage, operated using the same common platform called Anthos around across-the-board ease of use. How do I get access to all this amazing capabilities that 5G and edge has, through simple APIs, how can I expose things like low latency in 5G network, in simple Cloud APIs that are accessible to be and I can write application that can run on edge or that can run on core or in a provider edge and have access to this APIs, right.

How do I have my application that is optimally placed across the cloud footprint from centralized Cloud to a public edge to a provider edge to even a customer edge, depending on what this application might be needing, right. Making the lifecycle management and the placement and the delivery of the applications real easy for the developers. I really want to write once but I want to sell everywhere, I want to really have it available on all provider networks.

How do I make it globally accessible across all these service providers around the globe and finally you know critically important security because you mentioned I do believe that 5G is going to be mission critical for application such as utility, health care, you know manufacturing, security is a must. How do I have through zero trust security across the board spanning network and cloud including edge cloud how do i how do i have an application delivered to the most latency-sensitive use cases without having to give up on the security posture that i expect with public cloud today, right. If we deliver those four things and build an ecosystem around this open platform, I think 5G and edge will have tremendous innovation.

Erik: I think some of the good examples that touches on getting global reach and of course ease-of-use on the APIs, we are already exploring in the labs we are seeing how this is coming to fruition for app developers and I would say that some of the most exciting cases they actually span everything from the advanced consumer cases with AR/VR, are all the way to the enterprise cases. So, I think there's plenty of good innovation that is unleashed right now. But as you mentioned, 5G really comes with this expectation of carrying mission-critical traffic, this is really a system where security is built in from the get-go from the standard and this is really where we move beyond the mobile broadband the best effort era and of course this is perfectly suited to the enterprises, but I will claim that it's also very much in need when it comes to advance media applications, gaming entertainment and so forth.

I think there's a whole range of network services that now we'll have to be offer to satisfy that need of app developers but it really comes back also to some of the locality as you mentioned in terms of leveraging the edge cloud capabilities, orchestrated across and making sure that it works all the way from the devices the senses through the network infrastructure, the network edge, all the way with orchestration to the public cloud if that can be done in a seamless easy to adopt way then I think we are doing the right thing. In fact here it is really about partnerships again, it's about cloud providers, it's about OT companies when it comes with the IoT space, of course SI companies to some extent but also operators and of course wider open source community that is part of building and developing this.

So, I would claim that some of these we already did back in the 4G days in the smartphone labs of that era optimizing for performance that you mentioned Bikash but also working across the ecosystem from devices, networks all the way to the applications. Now we just have to do it when it comes to 5G and the enterprise use cases. So we already see some of the earlier segments picking up on 5G and edge and I think retail is one of those but also logistics, manufacturing like our own smart manufacturing plant in Texas which is the 5G plant building 5G and 5G equipped of course, but what's in your view Vikas the industry segments that will be first to capitalize on these new opportunities.

Bikash: You know, this pandemic in the last year plus, it has really highlighted the need for all industry segments to be agile and adaptive because the changes have come so fast at us and truly you know digitization of industries were happening before but it has accelerated across the board. Cloud is no longer about data center migration because of efficiency, right, it is truly about digitizing the whole industries where you know healthcare visits are now remote. We order food and grocery from our smartphones, we do banking from our mobile devices increasingly, right. So retail, healthcare, financial services, media and entertainment, manufacturing, they're completely at the forefront of digitization of industries that we see across the board.

They will continue to innovate, but when it comes to 5G and edge I think they have two primary perspectives how do the leverage that as a way to change the customer experience and how do they leverage 5G and edge as a way to increase operational efficiencies and I can give you an actual concrete example of this right, how do you completely change the experience that a consumer has as they walk into a car dealership, this is something that Fiat Chrysler automobiles and Google Cloud are actually working together to solve as part of Fiat Chrysler's virtual showroom in the recently concluded CES event. You could actually walk and experience a new 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4XC where you could scan a QR code on your smartphone, you can walk into the car, you can change the color, you can even place the car in your driveway, and see whether you like that right. This is truly possible because of the power of edge and the abilities to render this highly complex models, very close to the consumer and enable interactive applications with low latency that again 5G and edge together are going to deliver. That is true digitization of an industry segment, edge cloud and 5G together will truly make it possible for the very first time.

Erik: While that's a great example Bikash now I'm just thinking about the how the pandemic has changed our digital habits and most likely for the long term it's not going to go back to what it was and of course a big part of the world's population they are still in, in work from home or only in digital and would probably continue like that for quite some time and I think the new habits they are also teaching us that we have to do things in new ways when we are digital. You can't just digitalize what we were used to see but if you come back then to the edge compute, we in our research we actually see that already by 2023 some 25% of the 5G use cases they will be reliant on the edge compute. So, it's a massive shift over to using this new infrastructure and if you go another seven years out to 2030, we expect a significant part of the 5G revenues to be find in the enterprise and the IoT services. In fact a very big part but coming back then to the consumer experiences, where we just published our report on potential businesses out of the consumer space in 5G, the cumulative revenues when it comes to digital consumer services alone will reach some hundred and thirty billion dollars over these next ten years. So, it's a fantastic opportunity both in the enterprise space and in the consumer space.

But we are talking about high performance, we are talking about how to reach users wherever they are in a wide area settings with new services under new SLA giving enterprises and consumers much better performance than today and to do that we really have this core technology - the network slicing which allows us to give individual users - individual services the right kind of service and of course under an SLA. So, in your point of view what do you see in terms of opportunities for network slicing from an app developer’s point of view.

Bikash: Yeah, I've mean slicing is such an interesting technology and it could be just easy to focus on mechanics of a network slice and the nitty gritties of that but to me that would be missing the point because network slice is really about offering a truly differentiated quality of experience for the users and applications. Now in order for that to happen, we must expand the conversation of network slicing to devices, edge, network, cloud and applications, right. It is imperative that the experience being created consider all these factors end-to-end but equally important, you mentioned this before Erik, programmability and easy access, right. Slicing has to be accessible to the app developers as a set of cloud APIs, so they can pick and choose the experience that they need for their applications, that they're going to use. And the use case of slicing, it spans across many industries like I can use an example of an  actual ISP that is working with us, that are helping retailers to manage their warehouses differently by having robots, maybe scanning the inventory of the shelves or even you know the barcodes on the stuff that they have on their shelf, right. If you think of how one would be writing applications there are clearly micro services that are controlling this robot, they are highly mission-critical whether it's in retail store or in a warehouse or in a manufacturing floor and it must rely on a slice that is highly secure, robust with the highest SLA that you can possibly get from the network.

Now on the same application, there are micro services that are streaming very high-resolution video and other sensors data for either anomaly detection or real-time processing for creating, you know a need for restocking the inventory potentially or for creating other models right. You can imagine a slice that is optimized for streaming high volume data for that use case and if I have an application developer, I really want to utilize these slices dynamically through APIs. So, to me the real success of this highly valuable technology slicing will rely on slice becoming a consumable experience, experience tier for network and for edge end-to-end.

Erik: And I think we're getting there although as you said there is some mechanics of the technology that needs to be implemented and now we're rolling it out across core networks, across radio access networks and orchestration around the world because it's basically standard technology that comes with every chipset, comes with every network infrastructure . So, it becomes really this enabler for all these new use cases on top but one example then because your point is well taken it needs to be dynamic, it needs to change much faster than on a static basis. One good example is how we working with network slicing in the drone space or drone delivery space, is a hugely exciting space I would say and in many cases both for delivery of consumer packets, all the way to a maintenance, inspections and so forth. It has wide range of applications but it also requires if you want to go beyond line of sight to have almost perfect connectivity and that's again where network slices comes in, knowing the data in the network, knowing where you have congestion can allow you to route around such congestions and that would be a way to sort of guarantee connectivity but you could also ensure that you actually get a bigger part of the connectivity with the performance of the slice is enhanced when you enter a congested area so that you are ensured about the delivery of the goods with a drone delivery. So, I think there are lots of examples where that dynamic city is really key and it needs of course to be available in the right format for the app developers and for the applications.

So, Vikas on the here and now as well as on the future 2021, what do you see in and also for next year 2022, any predictions from your side?

Bikash: It's going to be very exciting two years ahead of us Erik. First of all I'm really hoping that the pandemic is going to be over, but you know coming back to cloudification, 5G and an edge. I believe that cloudification of networks will see continued deployment across the world in public cloud, private cloud, edge cloud and hybrid cloud across the globe.

The other part that I already see early signs of is truly effortless edge cloud where the concept of edge cloud expands beyond public cloud and goes into service providers as well as even customer cloud and the abilities to deliver application seamlessly, effortlessly across this edge cloud is going to become a reality. There will be tremendous focus on ecosystem, how do we actually have the service providers, the public cloud operators, the application developers, the technology providers for 5G and networking like yourself, all coming together and building a vibrant ecosystem for really the innovations that we potentially can't even imagine that are that are going to come our way. If you just look back, maybe even five years back and if you think about how we used to call a cab, we used to really call a cab by raising our hands even five years back. 4G and smartphones they really enabled us to really have ride sharing applications where you can just call them from a smartphone. It is not hard to imagine future in a two years, three years, where a calendar entry with a destination address in our smartphones will actually call a self-driving pod to swap at our home and maybe you know take us to the meeting that we need to get to.

The reality is we just don't know where this technology will take us but we do know that the ecosystems ultimately create innovation and we'll see an explosion of it over the next two years because of this 5G and edge platform and the ecosystems that we are all trying to build together.

Erik: I think it's good to reflect on those five years or perhaps relatively recent past when things were very different but it's to your point, 5G is the biggest innovation of the greatest innovation platform that we are now deploying around the world and I think as such it will unleash much of that, but I also think that today's service providers are really well positioned to take significant share of these new revenue opportunities, as they are emerging in the edge and 5G ecosystem. And the fact that we are building networks in with cloud native network function principles, the fact that we are building edge cloud or distributed cloud functionality across a global infrastructure that is really allowing all of us to move beyond the classical network services and really combine compute networking, and storage into one unity and the edge compute becomes kind of the central all of that. But this doesn't come without all the partnerships that we've discussed several times now, this comes with course working with startups in the ecosystem, service providers working with cloud providers like Google and with network infrastructure vendors like Ericsson.

I think coming together in terms of building and fostering this ecosystem is really our challenge and our opportunity in there in the coming period. So, with that I'd like to thank you very much for taking part in this series thanks a lot Vikas.

Bikash: Thank you very much Erik for hosting me and really looking forward to where this ecosystem and the 5G on the edge platforms take us in the next couple of years. Thank you very much for listening.

Erik: So continuing on the discussion of three key topics that we just discussed namely the 5G and edge platform, the ecosystem and also the high performance required with network slicing, I have invited Ericsson’s Director of Cloud Strategy Execution, Carlos Bravo.

So, Carlos great to have you with us.

Carlos: Thank you very much Erik, great to be here.

Erik: Should we start with the first one then. So, we talked about 5G and edge coming together as a platform with openness and programmability, we're working quite a lot in this area with partners and certainly on our own portfolio. Any more reflections from your side on this?

Carlos: I think it was a really important point that was raised about how networks are built right now from the closed architecture that we had in the past into an open architecture primarily being open, exposing capabilities and actually providing innovation on top of it. So, I think this is a really important thing. One of the aspects that we are working on is understanding how applications and the rest of the ecosystem will actually interact with the network and leverage the capabilities that we know that the network can provide.

I think Bikash put it in a really good way when talking initially like ships passing in the night right, they don't know about what the others can provide or need and now what we're building is a platform that will allow that interaction to happen.

Erik: And it brings up the second question which is really about the ecosystem and here we are talking about app developers but we're talking about a broader ecosystem when it comes to the startups, the enterprises that are now leveraging 5G and the edge and how to interact between the public cloud and its developer ecosystem and the network. So, exposure is a key part in that, any more thoughts on that part?

Carlos: I think it is important to engage in a broader ecosystem with industry alliances like for example the 5G AECC and 5G-ACIA on the automotive Edge Computing Consortium. It is important to enable that ecosystem bringing together all the players that will have different needs and also provide the different capabilities into this ecosystem right and I think it is important with operator as well sitting together, aligning together. I mean one of the things that was raised is an application developer is expecting these to have reach, right, to be able to be deployed across different places in the world and in order to do that we need to enable this ecosystem as well from the operator perspective bring in all the operators together and aligning into what capabilities can be provided depending on the on the application needs, on the different application providers or different supplier.

Erik: I think those application needs naturally takes us to the third item we discussed which is really about network performance, the importance of having a n SLAs for the services, the importance of using network slices that are allowing applications to get the service from the network that they demand otherwise it won't work and that of course ties into how you actually program towards these network slices and how you are making them available on a global basis.

So that is true for developers but he's also very much true in the runtime execution in the networks. Any thoughts or reflections on that one?

Carlos: I think it is important to make the applications aware of those capabilities and make those I think Vikas put it as simple APIs right. Easy to use, easy to manage, that is what the application developers need. They need to be able to develop an application consuming those capabilities without you can say wasting too much time or knowing things and technologies that are not their core business. This is something that they need to do, but it's also important that those APIs are available when those applications are going to be deployed so those APIs needs to be ready and available in the different cloud providers across the different operators, service providers, so the application knows that now that I need it I know that I can consume it.

Erik: And I think that actually is one of the main reasons that we are taking an active role in nurturing this ecosystem working in our D15 lab in Santa Clara, California, to really expose those simple APIs and make them then available across the world such that applicators/application developers really know what they can expect both when they're developing as well as when they are deploying in the networks around the world. I think that's a good conclusion of these really important topics and I want to thank you Carlos for taking part in this. Thank you.

Carlos: Thank you very much.

Erik: Partnerships between the cloud providers, operators and us providing 5G are really emerging as a way to unleash new opportunities with 5G and edge, I think this is just the beginning. Service providers are in a really good position when it comes to their unique assets and also the global combined scale of operators. They are really the best place to allow for application placement, of the quality of service enablement, traffic routing, network monitoring and also mobility management and billing to just name a few examples.

5G and massive increase in compute power in the network will really transform the telecom industry and it will be the starting point for what we can offer to both enterprises and consumers in the years to come. Operators in the middle of this combining 5G and edge stand to benefit significantly from this but it really comes from partnerships, it comes from working together in the ecosystem, creating these new opportunities, exposing capabilities to application developers and of course making sure that it works seamlessly, ease-of-use across the world and this is just the start.

So, if you want to know what's next watch the next session, will tell you more. So thanks for watching.