By combining enterprise IT-friendly hardware and software with private wireless, Dell and Nokia are making digital transformation more accessible
Private 4G and 5G have long been positioned as catalysts for enterprise digital transformation—enabling real-time automation, asset tracking, computer vision, and more. But despite the promise, adoption has often lagged due to deployment complexity and difficulty integrating with existing enterprise infrastructure.
That’s the challenge Dell Technologies and Nokia are directly addressing through their integration of Dell NativeEdge and Nokia private wireless solutions. By embedding private wireless into a more enterpriseIT-friendly hardware/software stack, the companies are making it far easier for enterprises to deploy edge devices and applications across the enterprise edge estate. This functionality is crucial to effectively leverage artificial intelligence (AI).
“Dell NativeEdge with Nokia Private Wireless is a comprehensive edge solution that integrates Dell’s software capabilities for edge operations with Nokia’s highly secure and high-performance private 4G and 5G systems,” Abu Islam, Senior Consultant in Product Management at Dell Technologies, said.
At Mobile World Congress, Dell and Nokia demonstrated the solution in a compact, “edge in a box” form factor: a Nokia 5G core and baseband unit running on a Dell PowerEdge XR8000 server. The setup can handle everything from local compute to AI-powered video analytics using NVIDIA L4 GPUs—delivering both connectivity and intelligence in one unified package.
The real innovation lies in how Dell NativeEdge turns a historically telecom-centric deployment into a seamless IT operation. NativeEdge offers centralized management of edge infrastructure and applications, combining zero-touch onboarding with zero-trust security to eliminate the need for on-site IT expertise.
The combined solution, Patrick Williams, Senior Principal Engineering Technologist at Dell, said, is “designed to address unique challenges in the industry, to help customers manage their edge operations and secure the environments…One of [customers’] biggest concerns was around a lack of local IT resources. So what we did is we developed our platform to address these concerns in a unique way—we combined both zero-trust security and zero-touch onboarding together, and so we can help customers securely deploy and manage both their applications and secure, deploy and manage their compute devices.”
NativeEdge-enabled devices are shipped with unique digital keys and automatically recognized by the platform. Once online, enterprises can deploy software via blueprints or select from Dell’s public application catalog—giving customers access to a growing ecosystem of edge-ready applications.
Nokia’s private wireless capabilities ensure secure, reliable connectivity at the edge, while Dell’s compute platform provides a robust foundation for running containerized apps, AI inference, and real-time data analytics. The system is built to scale—enterprises can start small, populating only part of a chassis, then expand capacity as demand grows.
By making private 5G part of the enterprise IT toolkit—not a specialized, siloed deployment—Dell Technologies and Nokia are removing friction and accelerating real adoption. Enterprises gain the operational benefits of private wireless and edge computing without the complexity that’s historically slowed them down.For industries from manufacturing and logistics to energy and healthcare, Dell NativeEdge with Nokia Private Wireless unlocks the promise of digital transformation—with scalability, security, and simplicity built in.
