Top executives from IBM, Qualcomm, and Verizon agree that 5G will deliver the greatest value and impact for enterprises, but the technology that will drive that won’t be available at scale until next year and beyond. Digitization efforts in the enterprise are a massive opportunity that vendors and operators are pushing heavily.

“If you look at the industrial timeline it really comes in a second wave” of 5G, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said during a televised interview on CNBC alongside his counterparts at IBM and Verizon. “The first wave you’re getting the so-called more G phase of cellular, but the real exciting and the part with huge economic potential is [IoT] or really digitization.  Every major industry is trying to figure out how they deal with data and the digitization of their infrastructure, their products, their customer data, and increasingly more and more of that is wireless or connected wirelessly.”

Mollenkopf likens this change in technology to the emergence of electricity in factories. “The change in the way industry will work and the way infrastructure will be controlled will be dramatic,” he said, underlining the rise and opportunity that telematics will bring to health care, transportation, and education.

Throughput and speed were the only capability improvements delivered during the transitions from 2G to 3G and 4G LTE, but 5G is an entirely different advancement, according to Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg.

“When 5G was designed the whole idea was actually to [determine] how can you enable enterprise in society?” he said during the interview. This turning point has opened four early business models for Verizon including mobile, fixed wireless access at the home, mobile edge computing, and broadband delivery at lower costs, he explained.

“We’re launching mobile edge compute this year,” Vestberg said. “The first mobile edge compute center space for 5G will be this year.”

Vestberg says he spends a lot of time working with large enterprises to understand the capabilities and requirements in order to partner effectively with companies like IBM to integrate their software on the network. “It’s going to be a combination of it all in order to deliver service” that can transform factories and other large-scale enterprise environments, he said.

5G is coming to market in parallel with other advancements, explained IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. Network operators are moving more workloads and processes to the cloud so they can implement SDN and eventually edge computing. That framework presents enterprises with an opening to get real-time analytics almost anywhere, she said.

“I actually believe with 5G the biggest impact will probably be, I think we all agree, enterprise first,” she said during the interview.

“Every network is becoming software defined so instead of being really hardware with its own specialized software, difficult to change, they’re going to make it like a cloud in that they can put up new services really easily,” Rometty said. “We’ve never been a network provider but with RedHat — they’re in 120 of the telcos around the world — so we’re the basis just to begin the cloudification of the network.”

Bringing cloud-like infrastructure to networks is a $50 billion new market,” she said, adding that entirely new markets and lines of business will emerge out of that transformation.

“You disconnect the hardware and software and suddenly you can do things you’ve never done in a network before,” Vestberg said.

“There are several hundred million dollar companies that essentially work in the hybrid cloud and you should think of that as the first step toward the real dream which is ‘how do i get the computing and the data close together so I can make real-time decisions?,’” Mollenkopf said. “The economic value that will come out of that, the business model evolutions, the way in which the winners and losers — really a lot of winners — will develop, it will be tremendous.”

The trend is “undeniable,” he added. “I’ve been in this industry for three generations of cellular This is the one that has the easiest sell with enterprise because they all realize the strength of it.”