VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram today said the company’s experience virtualizing data centers and networks makes it a natural and critical partner for 5G operators and enterprises. 

“Our role in 5G is we provide the 5G underlay on top of which the 5G radio access network (RAN) software runs,” he said. “One of the critical things that’s happening with 5G RAN is RAN is being turned into software, and so we have this virtual RAN software stack from various partners.”

The vendor earlier this year released VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN, an expansion of its reorganized and repackaged stack of technologies for network operators, to target the most broadly deployed infrastructure of all.

Dish Network, which has repeatedly delayed the deployment and commercialization of its 5G open RAN, remains VMware’s first customer for the offering. The aspiring greenfield operator recently pushed commercial 5G availability to early 2022, a far cry from its original plan to activate service in one market before the end of 2020.

The potentially trailblazing effort could dramatically bolster VMware’s position in the telco market, but not until it has a commercial deployment to point to as proof of its capabilities on a massive scale. 

As Raghuram anticipates the “first full production 5G open RAN based service in North America running on top of our technology,” he’s as enthused as ever about VMware’s prospects in open RAN.

“The most exciting thing happening in the RAN space with respect to software is open RAN, which is an implementation of an open standard for software-based RAN,” he said during a press conference at VMworld. 

Raghuram described VMware’s work with Dish, although he didn’t call the company out by name, as “just the start of what we are able to do” in the telco space. “Subsequently, the most exciting aspect of 5G is 5G’s application to the enterprise,” he said, calling enterprise 5G “the next stage of 5G innovation” for VMware.

Private 5G and enterprise applications running on 5G are hitting the market in specific verticals, explained Sanjay Uppal, SVP and GM of VMware’s service provider and edge business unit. 

Those advancements will also benefit from the continued evolution of 5G architecture and where 5G intersects with other infrastructure, he noted.

“This is the first time ever that 5G is going to become a network on demand. So it has open interfaces and the overlay layer, which is the secure access service edge (SASE) layer, will be able to access 5G programmatically and then edge applications will be able to get all the way down to 5G for low latency, for autonomy, and disconnected operations,” Uppal said. 

“All these are areas where VMware is investing, and we think that the spend that is going to go on in 5G is going to create a whole new class of applications, some of which we have not conceived of today,” he said. “We’ll make use of these services both on the private side as well as on the public carrier side.”