7 Layers: Dell Focused on Open 5G Sanity

Dell Technologies’ Dennis Hoffman has spent the past three years refining his company’s growing focus on the 5G telecommunications space. A refinement that has been bolstered by the growing adoption of open and cloud-native architectures that Dell Technologies has been infusing throughout its broader ecosystem. “We've been focused almost exclusively from the beginning on helping people embrace open network architectures and monetizing them,” Hoffman said in an interview with SDxCentral. Hoffman, who is SVP and GM for Dell Technologies’ Telco Systems business, explained that this was an important challenge for the telecommunications space that has historically been averse to big technology swings. “If it's your job to run a network that can never go down – and only got more important during the pandemic – you have to be careful about the ways you do it,” Hoffman said. “It's an opportunity, though, for a company like Dell as cloud native, and industry standard, and all the stuff – all the the buzzwords that dominate it – start to get utilized in the design of telecommunications networks, it creates a massive opportunity for somebody like us.” Dell Technologies has slowly been chopping away at these opportunities, using its legacy knowledge in data centers and servers to help operators construct and run open systems to power their 5G core and edge networks. This has allowed the vendor to gain traction in both brownfield network deployments and greenfield operators like Dish Network. “There's this move from closed architectures and legacy technologies to all the new software defined, cloud-native industry standard stuff, [and it’s] well and good, but if it's all delivered by a group of vendors that you can't count on to be around in five years, it's very hard for them to adopt,” Hoffman said. “One of the pieces of feedback we get all the time is our scale, our global reach, and our financial stability are really important decisions for them as they kind of figure out how they move from where they are today to where they want to be and more fully embrace digital transformation.” Looking ahead, Hoffman said one area of focus will be on the growing push toward the network edge, which is a space telecom operators should be ideally positioned in to gain significant market presence. “All that edge real estate owned by the world's telecoms is really priceless real estate, frankly,” Hoffman said. “We felt like it was very much aligned with what we're trying to do to help enable edge computing. And it's not going to be easy for us to do that ff we don't have much deeper, stronger, more powerful relationships with the world's network operators. For those reasons we kind of entered the space and found pretty quick that the focus areas that needed help. We're taking open technologies and pulling them together into systems that telcos can rely on.” Listen to more of Hoffman’s insight into the market, the challenging vendor dynamics, and where operators are focused moving forward in the latest episode of the SDxCentral 7 Layers podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices