Dell Technologies’ executive team presented 5G, and its strategy for the market, as a series of compounding developments that coalesce into a grandiose opportunity for many arms of its business.

“5G is the digital fabric that allows us to extend the cloud to the mobile edge,” Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said at today’s Dell Technologies World. 

“The digital transformation will only accelerate from here with the combination of massive computing power, 5G, and [artificial intelligence],” he said. “It’s like a machine, and the fuel for that machine is data. And as everything in the physical world becomes intelligent and connected, the amount and relevance of data will continue to explode.”

The company’s brass expanded on that further during a Q&A session with journalists, while addressing the layers of 5G it’s targeting most aggressively and how its strategy differs from other vendors. 

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger likened the evolution underway in mobile operator networks to the changes that occurred in data centers around the turn of the millennium. He also, as has been increasingly common in these virtual event formats, shifted into infomercial territory, saying “but wait, it gets better,” followed soon after by “but wait, it gets better than that.”

Pre-5G networks are built “exactly like we built data centers 20 years ago. And with 5G, we see this fundamental shift from vertical systems to horizontal,” Gelsinger said. “We believe we’re going to unleash a cycle of innovation,” leading to lower costs and a standardization of how 5G is built in the core and radio access network (RAN), which he described as the “holy grail” of mobile networks.

“When you actually start cracking open the RAN, now you have changed the entirety of the geopolitical landscape. You’ve moved from Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson to standardized hardware, a standardized operating system, and we believe a broadening of the applications that will run on 5G,” he said. 

Gelsinger’s brief flourishes of infomercial pitchman were reserved for 5G’s ability to power edge computing and become a defining technology for enterprises. Enterprise 5G, he added, will “help displace WiFi. And as one of the creators of WiFi, that’s sort of like eating my children, but we believe that 5G has the characteristics” to create a foundational shift away from WiFi among enterprises. 

At “VMware, we’re out to be the 5G operating system. Dell is now bringing forward its infrastructure,” Gelsinger said. 

5G also presents a framework for operators and enterprises to maneuver within its IP and cloud environments, explained John Roese, CTO at Dell Technologies. “When you go into your VMware toolset and you deploy in Tanzu a manifest to push an application to production, it doesn’t just deal with compute, and storage, and traditional networking. It actually controls the 5G network slices [and] it creates the end-to-end experience,” he said. 

The challenge, according to Roese and Gelsinger, is that telecommunications is bifurcated. “There's a traditional world of telecom that's just fine doing traditional telecom, but to build what we're talking about, it can't be done without the cloud and the IT ecosystems fully engaging,” Roese said. 

“We're being pulled in because we're necessary. You have to have strong virtualization, you have to have Kubernetes, you have to have an industry standard hardware footprint,” he said. “The most important thing is you have to have big companies that actually know how to put it all together and help these modern operators, modern enterprises, modern industrial companies actually build this new version of wireless.”

Dell and VMware technologies are already present in many layers of mobile network topology, and they will be equally present in 5G, Roese said. “Mark my words. Three years from now, we'll be talking a lot about what 5G did for us, not what it's going to do for us.”