Dell Technologies is doubling down on the telecom industry, directing its expertise in software development, cloud native architecture, and digital transformation to the aid of network operators. 

“As the telecommunications networks open up and become more about virtualized workloads running on industry-standard hardware, they become addressable in a way for what we normally do that they haven’t been historically,” explained Dennis Hoffman, SVP and GM of Dell Technologies’ Telecom Systems Business, in an interview with SDxCentral.

Dell Technologies is assembling what it describes as cloud-native network infrastructure with a full stack of open and scalable servers and software to make bigger waves in the wireless and fixed communications market. 

The company is confident it is uniquely positioned to help telecom companies along that journey by extending its IT and enterprise chops with specialized software, hardware, and automated management systems for all layers of network infrastructure.

“It’s turned out to be a very nice foundation to bring to an industry that is now beginning to wrestle with what an open ecosystem looks like” and how operators can take advantage of that architecture, Hoffman said.

“We really haven’t signaled or identified any one part of the telecom network as more important than another. We are very much supportive of and proponents of opening up the network from core to edge to RAN (radio access network), really all the way to the enterprise edge. It seems to be starting in the core and rippling its way out,” he said. “It’s more about the end-to-end transformation of telecom in order to capture the edge.”

Telecom network spend hasn’t until recently been something Dell could broadly target. “But now as virtualization starts to work its way from the data center, to the network core, and from the core out to the edge, and from the telecom edge into the RAN, suddenly all of that really does become addressable,” Hoffman said.

“To the extent that we are an information technology infrastructure company, this is all IP infrastructure, it's just now making its way into a whole new domain called the telecom network,” he said. 

Opening telecom infrastructure by moving away from proprietary technology doesn’t just put Dell in position to compete for those dollars, it also makes for a more agile architecture at lower costs, according to Hoffman.

Project Metalweaver, a new initiative Dell revealed today, will allow communications service providers to select, deploy, and manage thousands of compute, network, and storage devices across multiple locations. The company is also releasing new reference architectures that traverse the telecom edge, core, and open RAN environments.

By pooling together resources from VMware, Red Hat, Affirmed Networks, CommScope, Intel, Mavenir and Nokia, Dell wants to provide operators with software, hardware, and services for the network core, private networks, and multi-access edge computing. The company recently added Red Hat’s OpenShift software and management to its telecom-focused server equipment.

“It really feels like the edge is going to become the focus over the next several years, just as the public cloud has been for the last several,” Hoffman said, adding that operators need better organization and tools to capture that opportunity.

“We would argue it needs an anchor tenant, and we’re going to try to be that anchor,” he said. “One thing the computer industry has been very good at over the years is selling thousands of things to one or two locations. It has not yet had to really develop the capability to sell one thing to hundreds of thousands of locations, and then support it, and then manage it. The thing that really makes this vertical market so unique is it’s geographic distribution, and we think that we’re very well positioned given that’s our heritage.”

Michael Dell, founder, chairman and CEO at Dell Technologies, is also increasingly optimistic about the company’s opportunity in telecom amid the rise of 5G, open RAN, and edge computing. Improving broadband infrastructure is “dependent on building open telecommunications ecosystems and increasing competition, and those two elements together are going to give communities increased options” while lowering the cost of deployment and access, he said in a recorded video presentation. 

“Open radio access networks play to our strengths in software and cloud,” Dell said. “Open standards are super important. They are leveling the playing field for telecom network equipment and encourage a tremendous amount of innovation for the future of the network.”

Moreover, he said, “as the edge expands across all industries and cities with the rollout of 5G, the possibilities become limitless” because moving data seamlessly at scale and speed will unleash the power of that data.