Dell talks taking an ecosystem approach to help reposition operators as “trusted business partners,” and capture new 5G service revenues
“If you go back 20 years, telcos provided a broad range of services to enterprises, and they were a trusted business partner,” Dell Technologies Senior Director of Telecom Product Management Douglas Lieberman told me during Dell Tech World in Las Vegas. “The telco was a true trusted partner in delivering capabilities to enterprises, and enterprises went to telcos to say, ‘Can you help me solve these challenges we have?’” In the last 10, 15 years, that has drastically shifted.”
So far most operators have spent a lot of money on deploying 5G but have not made a lot of money from 5G-enabled services. With industry-wide hand wringing around 5G monetization—that includes virtualized and cloud-native networking, mobile edge computing, private networks, public networks, all of it—operators find themselves in a difficult position. Is there an opportunity for them to effectively address the megatrends shaping technology and business, and perhaps return to growth?
Lieberman sees a path forward but first, “There needs to be a reintroduction of the telco as a trusted business partner to help solve a problem beyond connect a couple of wires over in that closet and route some IP packets for me.” That’s where Dell comes into play. In addition to being a central part of the ecosystem needed to deliver modern networks, the company also has a massive field services organization with inroads into essentially all large enterprises around the world.
Telcos “obviously have infrastructure and teams to support that infrastructure everywhere,” Lieberman said. “And they do understand a lot about your traffic and your needs because they helped plan a lot of that stuff for you.” To “change the perception of how an enterprise views them, they need to leverage that partnership they already have and come back into the conversation.”
He continued: “What my team works very hard on is jointly building value propositions and collateral that help the sales teams on both sides to explain why this is awesome and how one plus one is three. One of the things that the telcos, why they want to partner with someone like Dell, is because they know Dell is a trusted partner to enterprise…We have a trusted role and we want to maintain that trusted role.”
Among Dell’s current focus areas, including both its own products and ecosystem initiatives geared toward technology integration and solution development, Lieberman called out cellular-connected PCs, cybersecurity and recovery, private mobility and edge solutions tailored to specific verticals.
He double-clicked on private mobility, noting that telcos have an important role to play regardless of whether enterprises have access to dedicated spectrum, e.g. Germany. Lieberman noted three flavors of private mobility: a fully on-prem solution, a local RAN extension connected to a public core, then a network slice. Whichever route, “What we have found is private mobility today is still complex to manage and run. What we’re finding is even mega corporations we’re talking to, their desire for a science project is a lot lower than it used to be. The most important thing about private mobility when it comes to an enterprise is no one wants private mobility for private mobility. They have an outcome they want.”
He gave the example of the mining industry which has turned out to be something of an eager and early adopter of private cellular. Lieberman chalked that up to a number of factors, including performance constraints of Wi-Fi, particularly as a function of the number of necessary access points, and a topology that’s constantly in flux. Mining interests are focused on health and safety, and autonomous vehicle use cases, and have found private 4G and 5G up to the challenge.
“To get to that outcome faster and to be more successful, it helps to work with a telco,” Lieberman said. “Once that enterprise buys into that…now that enterprise starts to trust them as a partner. Then that lets them move up the stack.”
