LAS VEGAS–This week during Dell Technologies World the family of companies made clear how its hybrid, multi-cloud strategy spanning edge, core and cloud is an imperative for enterprise digital transformation. And, while the digital transformation of telcos will serve as a catalyst for operators’ customers, the operators themselves have work to do.
For telcos, the latest frontier of “cloudification” is the network edge. As 5G brings significant latency improvements, there’s a need to push processing and storage closer to end users to make applications like mobile AR/VR and autonomous vehicles work as promised.
During the annual conference and exhibition, Orange and Dell Technologies agreed to “test and develop 5G use cases and business models” focused on “multi-access edge computing and supporting technologies for software-defined mobility with distributed, multi-cloud and edge architectures,” according to a statement.”
In an interview, Jean Paul Nussbaumer of Dell Technologies characterized the cloud not as a place but as “a way to consume IT infrastructure. Generally speaking, Dell Technologies has been helping its customers and service providers to deploy IT clouds for various usage. Gradually we’ve been evolving that to deploying telco clouds similarly, leveraging infrastructure and a layer of virtualization. This partnership is about making sure we can actually leverage our expertise in building clouds towards the edge and the far-edge to create, or enable, the right use cases.”
Orange’s Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Stéphane Demartis said the operator’s focus is edge and acceleration. “We need to innovate in edge computing in 5G,” he said.
“We believe it’s essential to prepare the ecosystem for telco use cases while progressing in our knowledge of the future technologies,” he continued. “Orange expects from this partnership with Dell EMC not only technical but also business outcomes in order to fuel our strategy towards multi-access edge computing transformation.”
