Deployment Options Are Coming For Private 5G

welcome to zcast everybody i'm c.s caraval principal analyst zk research and i'm returning again for another one of my thought leadership videos uh before i get started though quick shout out to e-week my media partner all z casts are done in conjunction with the eevee heat speeds program uh today i'm joined by uh a returning guest uh ozer i can never pronounce your last name ozer so i'll say ozer d vp of marketing for solana those are wanting to say hi to everybody and introduce yourself and uh tell us how you've been doing absolutely aziz thanks again for having me uh jose donder jolo everyone um a turkish last name for you there great to be back uh we've been busy here at solona for the last three years working on a private 5g solution which we carefully uh moniker to say 5g lan solutions for the enterprise i look forward to sharing some updates about what we're doing and kind of review some of the very latest uh market news but great to be back i've been with the company for the last three years my background is wi-fi i've spent 14 plus years at aruba networks working on different wireless technology solutions wi-fi and bluetooth so great to be talking about 5g again on the show yeah well it's always good to talk about 5g everybody loves 5g uh it's one better than 4g so we know that um and you guys met some good momentum right uh i in fact i did a recent z cast with somebody from ntt uh they're uh reselling your product now aruba is as well so uh and uh so you guys have had some really good partnerships here so congratulations on that now one of the interesting announcements came um earlier uh this week that cisco you know the 800-pound gorilla networking announced its own private 5g offering and so what do you think that means for the market yeah i think um one there's going to be quite a bit of options for the customers if we look at just last year what happened we of course brought our 5g land solution to market we've been able to achieve significant growth in different industries primarily warehousing logistics industries supply chain verticals and we've seen aws come into play um we've seen us partnering with the ntt p5g team as you highlighted and then shortly afterwards cisco comes into play and you know everybody has their own unique approaches as they go after the market but it shows that we were not crazy to start salona and there were real use cases and real customer value that we can create and this is just another validation that somebody like cisco who has the ears of many customers out there and who's in touch with many enterprise environments out there is also hearing what we're here which is enterprises can in fact take advantage of 5g can in fact make it accessible within their own environment they can take advantage of the growing 5g device and application ecosystem and create an express lane of communication for wireless in their own environment for their critical critical infrastructure that message is clear in cisco's announcements just like it was in aws's announcement a couple of months ago and uh those are the type of use cases that we've been lucky to support many of our customers and another validation um we always welcome cisco to to the things that we do because they not only validate the market but they also um usually through educated uh means they pick the best areas to invest in in terms of customers the use cases tackle so um and their announcement points to some of the things that i highlighted uh moments ago so great news for the market overall in my opinion yeah so the one of the interesting uh things about their announcement though was they tied it to also a wi-fi launch right so um they had they did talk about customers not having to choose between wi-fi and private 5g so where do you see um the similarities between private 5g and wi-fi and what are the differences where would a customer use each yeah i think the analogy with wi-fi starts with hey what is the other technology wireless technology we use in an enterprise setting and that is wi-fi there's a way it's cheap and it's ubiquitous right like we all have it and it's cheap we all have it and we're all used to using it we all wake up turn off turn on our phones we connect to a solar network public seller network and then shortly after that we connect to a wi-fi network many of our devices at home and at work stay on the wi-fi network for 24 7. so it's kind of like oxygen at this point and there's a method to madness in consuming that technology you need to have talented managed service provider partners or engineers in-house design the network based on square footage based on coverage capacity requirements you want to work with vendors who can support you 24 7 quickly address any issues that might come up roll out new buildings new floors in a matter of hours instead of days and days uh you want to be able to learn about new features new capabilities by just reading uh community posts online or asking questions to your colleagues or just going through certification classes there's a way to learn enterprise networking technologies and cisco you know long time ago they were at the forefront of how that enablement and community building could be done and many enterprise networking vendors who came after cisco took the same model we advocated that the same model of adoption learning adoption getting certified deploying something um trying a technology and rolling it out on large scale could be done using that same methodology and we were kind of alone for a while because a lot of people thought hey this is 5g it must be complex it cannot be made that accessible to the enterprise and um you know i think cisco's announcement says no no we're going to follow the same playbook we're going to make this as easily accessible and uh guess what uh solona has also been doing that for the last three years um so if you combine wi-fi and 5g together what ends up happening is the same network engineer or the same msp partner who is planning your building rollout for wireless technologies now they have two options hey i have my byod devices and my guest users at a let's say at a hospital um i'm going to support with wi-fi 6 y56e and on the other end maybe we have some automated mobile robots and video surveillance cameras maybe patient bedside technologies that would rather not spend you know tens of thousands of dollars on wires why don't we put that stuff on a 5g spectrum 5g private spectrum and those two things can live side by side and again deployed and managed by that same exact team whoever is supporting the existing wifi installation that has been our motto just to accelerate that adoption cycle and i think that's the approach that cisco taken here i don't think that we're seeing a direct product integration like a single radio or single management plane but we're seeing a methodology of onboarding the technology to an enterprise facility in pretty much the same way that you would do uh cisco wifi it sounds like at least on paper i think it'd be hard to build a product that had a single radio for all those different technologies now wi-fi itself is going through its own evolutionary process right so there's this thing out there called 6e versus wi-fi 6. and i know there's some um 60s you know it's a different spectrum so it's a lot cleaner you're not fighting all those 2.4 devices and things is 6e um a substitute for private 5g or do you see those two things being uh distinct as well they're still distinct two separate spectrums um i think the majority of differences if you want to take advantage of wi-fi 6e you need 60 devices and you need to open up the spectrum to be able to use that 60 devices but the channel access the ability you know the ability to schedule traffic between clients and radios uh very much similar to the past generation of technologies on 5g um the traditional way of uh access to a wireless medium continues which is scheduled by the infrastructure mobility events device wake up uh when the devices are going to transmit they're all very infrastructure dependent very infrastructure controlled um so you expect a little bit more control over the quality of service with 5g you can assign a latency promise or throughput a packet error rate promise let's say to a robotics infrastructure that might be quite critical and honestly um given the fact that you have to reserve a portion of the spectrum through the local regulation for example in the united states done by fcc and other countries have different way of regulating that spectrum access for 5g that centralized coordination always ensures that your client device on the 5g network in an enterprise and the radio is always clean that clean spectrum benefit turns a lot of heads around around wireless engineering and say i actually have an application for that um and sometimes it's simple as network segmentation right people think about it um saying yeah it's enough that we put these five different use cases on wi-fi the sixth use case is critical a little bit more security conscious and we want to run that on a different spectrum altogether because we just want clean layer one uh network segmentation that's another use case to think about these things separately and some of these are have been highlighted in the market but the more we hear it between different announcements the more i'm believing that they're actually there's more use cases out there than we have imagined we might be hitting the tip of the iceberg here with what we discovered in the last three years so i'm looking forward to what we discovered in the next five well you weren't first out of the gate um with with private 5g there's no doubt about that and so you've had some time to you know get your product out in the field you've got some great partners can you give me we talk we've talked theoretically about this vertical on that vertical but do you have any actual deployments you can you can tell us about yeah absolutely i would pick uh we publish a couple of case studies on our website um where we can note customer name and some of them we cannot because they're private at the moment we want to talk to them about market about the use case we recently deployed an outdoor setting at csu stanislaus california state university system stanislaus campus and their use case was simply hey look i want to be able to have a backup wireless network on my own across the campus for whatever needs i have they do have remote learning needs today they would like to cover some temporary research facilities around the campus depending on different department's needs but they also wanted to say look what if i want to put together 12 video surveillance cameras next year i'm not going to be able to reserve 60 000 for fiber pool at the time when that knee comes i'll just use a public mobile network a private lt 5g network as that backhoe instead of spending money on fiber so it became a facilities iot facilities slash remote learning backbone outdoor wireless network for them again this is not using license spectrum it's using the cbrs spectrum that's usually the private spectrum option for 5g in the united states but that use case is very clean my student wifi is reserved for students everything else i would love to save money by cutting the cable with 5g everything else that's running on the campus let's put them on a different spectrum so that the student wifi is not impacted negatively and another customer that i cannot 100 name today hopefully one day is a warehousing automation company we publish the store on our website and they are the manufacturer of automated mobile robotics infrastructure there are the robots but then there's the infrastructure where the products are located within a cage-like system this cage sits in the middle of a warehouse and robots are instructed to go and pick products and deliver products outside the cage so the humans can pick the products and put them in trucks and different you know forklifts etc so that automation is a 24 7 operation um in that facility and the number of those facilities are increasing uh we're essentially the wireless network for the robots and the wi-fi is the wireless network for the humans so that's kind of an interesting use case from a critical infrastructure perspective yeah that's interesting too because in effect in both cases you're actually by offloading that from wi-fi you're letting the wi-fi perform better and i think overloaded wi-fi is something that we've all faced and we all don't like because it doesn't work properly and so in a sense by creating a separate network for these other things uh you're actually letting the wi-fi work better now uh one of the interesting things that i thought about the cisco announcement when i read about it was that it came out of the service provider group which means that it's likely going to be sold through that channel as a managed service or some sort of subscription-based service where you're this is more a traditional enterprise model for the do-it-yourself buyer correct can you talk about those differences yeah absolutely we've taken the approach of a diy solution first so uh cloud-based system radios on premises your mobile core software on premises that supports those radios and enables them to function as a 5g network those are all provided by us end-to-end system all ingredients you can set up your own mobile network essentially if you are a network engineering team who is used to deploying enterprise networking products firewalls sd-wan systems wi-fi switching you can just pick our solution and get going uh that's the ease of use that we enabled and made it accessible as we like to call it soon after though as is the case with our entity partnership a lot of the msps actually really enjoy that model they said hey look i can offer my customer a diy model but ultimately what i want to be able to do is as these customers scale we know that they're going to be needing our msb help so maybe in two of the sites out of 10 customer wants to use a diy model by the remaining eight sites maybe they want to rely on our msp so we built a modern system that goes either way you can start diy just like many other enterprise networking technologies i've done in the past but then you can build a layer of msp managed services on top and both models can be supported by installation services professional services by our channel partners and of course as the product and technology vendor we're responsible for software hardware components warranty technical support but our partners can build up a variety of different levels of service on top so that's the approach that we've taken and you're i think you're right uh cisco's initial release looks like it's going to be msp friendly first let's see what comes down the road uh but that seems to be the uh kind of comparison there yeah and and from my point of view i don't think either model is better per se than the other they're just different i mean some customers will want to deploy themselves uh that's typically you find a larger enterprise and it sounds like some of the use cases you've had that was the case and then as you scale it does move more to a managed service i think npt's interest in yours bears that out um and really it makes sense for every 5g operator that sells it on the wide area side to also sell on the private five you know uh private 5g side in fact this this is a great opportunity for your partners like an ntt to actually play a more important role with their enterprise customers than they have in the past i think historically um you know let's be honest telco's sort of been on the outside looking in when it came to strategic thinking right so you know given how important the network is this is a good opportunity for them so exactly exactly i mean one thing that i would add is that going back to the robotics example you know the entire journey really starts today with private 5g on a specific application or a solution you know if there was no robotics automation then you know you just kind of do what you do and wi-fi is good enough and you keep carrying boxes and you have a level of efficiency this customer obviously measured and double measured and triple checked the efficiency that they will get with the robotics infrastructure installation and that's where you're able to realize today they can move things faster and then the robotics team thought hey look it would be really good to have a super reliable wireless network for these things that are moving around at high speed and with the minimum amount of disconnects and maybe segmented away from wi-fi so that we access the cleaner spectrum so it's an application driven deployment application driven purchase and roll-up and one of the things that we are religiously follow is finding that key use case key application and then tying that 5g performance back to an enterprise policy enterprise networking teams are usually pretty diligent about how they segment the network but they also are very diligent about setting quality of service policies so we kind of build a system that goes application quality of service based on a specific type or device group or both and that flexibility we allow them adjust you know they can kind of change onboard new devices on board new applications as their use cases evolve and that flexibility i think will continue to differentiate us i would love to kind of see what cisco has to say about that piece of the puzzle in the upcoming days but that continues to be a pretty big differentiator for us and we hope to put that to good use similar to that robotics deployment and other use cases as well okay so uh to let's to wrap this up let's uh i want you to give a little advice here if i'm your typical average network manager that's got way too many endpoints to manage and i've got remote workers coming up you know at the wazoo today and i'm interested in private 5g how do i get started here because it is while you guys have set it up to deploy similar to wi-fi it's still different so what's the where do i start with this yeah so i would first recommend check out selena dot io i guess shameless plug um the reality is it's bit of a spectrum uh mapping you know you there's nothing um wrong with your current wi-fi installation that doesn't have to be it's just that your application mix in the upcoming years most likely is going to change just like it has been doing for the last 10 20 years if you're an i.t networking we usually ask folks to look at hey within your use of wi-fi are there applications that you would like to improve the performance of are they applications that generate the most trouble tickets for you people asking hey this thing is not perfectly supportable um that might be an opportunity for innovation for 5g and there are next to it networking teams there are application delivery teams those are the folks who usually spend lots of money with aws and other compute platforms and they're the ones who are worried about application development and robotics infrastructure they usually ask the question hey is there a network for this thing that i'm building after the fact so my recommendation is think about networking a little bit first because you might have a really good friend in private 5g to get that networking piece solved really quickly in the past you have to beg and steal for wired infrastructure and wi-fi infrastructure you don't have to do it anymore there's another express lane for you to innovate under and for some organizations it may not be early enough um maybe you're a conservative organization maybe you have an innovation team cto team that's kind of thinking about what should be our private 5g strategy i would recommend giving them some time to figure out okay let's look at the market players and plan something for the next three years we're of course open to those conversations as well and not just short-term relationships because the journey and discovering what that initial use case is going to look like but it usually starts with those the first two audiences i mentioned the guys who build the network uh let's be honest about what's really working on wi-fi great and what may not be super great and application delivery teams i think they now have an opportunity to think about networking layer a little bit easier with private 5g well let's see if they do that my uh as a former network engineer i can tell you that a lot of application delivery teams don't often think about the network until it's too late so it's a great opportunity to step into it so anyways those are from solona uh and five um 5g pioneer thanks for joining me uh and i do agree with you now that cisco's in the market it certainly uh legitimizes it and it's going to get it exposed to just thousands of customers and thousands of channel partners and that's obviously a good thing for the industry so anyways thanks for joining me uh thanks for watching and don't forget to click to subscribe you

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