LAS VEGAS — The edge will balloon even bigger than the cloud said Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell at a VMworld press conference.

“We see a pretty massive build-out on the edge that’s related to the billions of connected devices,” he said. “While some of that data will get aggregated back into data centers, whether they are distributed or in mega-clouds or otherwise, increasingly what you’ll see with things like 5G is node-to-node communication and new kinds of applications that are developed on the edge. If you plot this out — how much data will there be — the edge will be quite a bit larger than any of the stuff that exists today in what you would think of as public cloud, private cloud, whatever. Explosion in the edge is maybe not fully understood.”

The press conference followed VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger’s opening keynote, during which he announced a new edge product under development called Project Dimension. It’s essentially a hyperconverged infrastructure device running VMware’s full cloud software stack. Dell EMC — another Dell Technologies brand — is one of the two initial hardware partners. Dell owns about 81 percent of VMware.

As edge computing gains momentum, networking becomes “a key element of that connectivity layer at the edge,” Gelsinger said during the press conference. To this end, NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud becomes a must-have for every multi-location business, Dell added. And service provider customers become an increasingly important segment for VMware to pursue.

At Mobile World Congress earlier this year the company announced updates including SD-WAN to its telco software and cloud services portfolio to help providers prepare for 5G. And in June it released NFV for OpenStack specifically tuned for telcos, which Gelsinger suggested is preferable for telcos as opposed to deploying OpenStack on their own.

“We have embraced OpenStack APIs on the VMware infrastructure to give them that layer of programming they want in the telco space, but we do it with these rock-hard technologies we have been maturing. Six of the 10 largest telcos in Europe are now deploying VMware-based NFV. OpenStack is like Apple pie and motherhood. You can’t say it’s bad. But often open source is like a free puppy. There ain’t nothing free about it. And telcos are even more concerned about those characteristics.”

Photo: Micheal Dell (left) and Pat Gelsinger at a VMworld press conference.