Dell Technologies and Orange agreed to work together on 5G and edge computing use cases, and also to develop a new edge platform to support telecommunications operators’ requirements.

The new agreement with Orange follows a 5G memorandum of understanding that Dell China signed with China Unicom last week. Under that deal the companies agreed to promote 5G, edge, and IoT, and share technologies and products that enable both.

Orange Business Services has been a Dell EMC infrastructure customer for many years, but this new agreement focuses more specifically on 5G, said Tom Burns, senior vice president of Dell EMC networking and solutions. “As we look at the explosion of connected devices, and the amount of data that is being collected at the edge, how service providers and telcos manage this core to cloud to edge network transformation is becoming critical,” he said.

The deal with Orange, Burns added, is "an effort to work with them to look at not only the transformation that’s occurring with 5G, but also what are some of the potential business opportunities that they could be enabling." Dell EMC is also aiming to help customers determine the "technical implication associated with core to cloud to edge as you look at compute, storage, and networking, and how we can help them along that path," he said. "This includes potential use cases for B2B or even consumer that Orange might be able to monetize — and hopefully monetize at a lower cost based upon standard, nonproprietary, disaggregated architectures."

Specifically, Dell Technologies and Orange will collaborate on the definition and development of:

• Edge technology use cases, business models and proof of concepts.
• Open source consortia and partnerships for the edge ecosystem.
• Definition and validation of infrastructure accelerators, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and SmartNICs for edge workloads, including cloud/virtual radio access networks (CRAN/vRAN), multi-access edge computing (MEC), and real-time, interactive, latency-sensitive applications.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML)-enabled software to support remote automation of a multi-technology, heterogeneous edge built on virtual machines, containers, and bare metal workloads.
• Edge infrastructure platforms supporting telco environmental, space, operational, and automation requirements.

Burns won’t disclose financial details about the Orange agreement.

Dell has been helping enterprises with this type of transformation for years, and more recently has been pushing into the telco space. At the annual MWC conference in Barcelona two years ago founder and CEO Michael Dell announced a multi-million-dollar push to target service providers, which, at the time was the only vertical inside Dell EMC.

“It’s a strong focus for Dell Technologies to apply our experience and technologies to help service providers with the transformation that’s occurring in their space,” Burns said.

And at this year’s MWC in February, Dell Technologies — leaning heavily on VMware’s technology — touted “a comprehensive portfolio of integrated, validated and customized solutions designed to support 5G and edge deployments.” VMware sees a “great opportunity to participate in an enormous market” that is the telecommunications service provider space, said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger during a press conference at the event.

VMware is one of Dell Technologies’ brands (it owns about 81 percent of the virtualization giant), and its technologies including its telco NFV platform and SD-WAN by VeloCloud play a major role in Dell’s telco strategy. Yesterday at Dell Technologies World, the companies rolled out a new product, called Dell EMC SD-WAN Edge, which is an integrated platform that bundles VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud software as a subscription with Dell EMC hardware.

As operators start to roll out 5G networks, “the opportunity for VMware inside of that is to help build a telco cloud, build an infrastructure that enables those services to be offered, and also on top of that build some new offerings like our VeloCloud wide area network announced with AT&T, integrating SD-WAN,” Gelsinger said at MWC. “Overall it’s a very good time for us and we see Mobile World Congress as a great way to be taking that next step into the 5G world.”