Telecommunications

Enabling Digital Innovation in the Telecom Industry

Building an open ecosystem to power innovation and digital transformation for the telecommunication industry's future.
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The global telecommunications opportunity at the edge

The edge opportunity is tremendous and will transform every industry – powered by the confluence of connected devices and systems, highly distributed compute and storage technology, and 5G. By 2025, it is expected that 75 percent of all global data will be produced, analyzed, and acted upon at the edge. As organizations across all industries look to drive new value with edge technologies, IDC projects that the number of new operational processes deployed on edge infrastructure will grow from less than 20 percent today to more than 90 percent by 2024.

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) will be critical enablers of the next decade of innovation and are essential to enabling the enterprise edge. But it requires a transformation of their businesses and networks.

Realizing the edge opportunity

There are three key imperatives that need to happen in order for CSPs to capture the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the edge presents and move beyond the hype of 5G to the reality of a resilient next-generation network:

Telecom transformation

As telecoms work to provide greater connectivity across the world and capitalize on the emerging edge, they must quickly move and adopt new software solutions to capture the full potential of the edge. Network operators must accelerate their transformation efforts and partner with strategic advisors to rapidly optimize their IT infrastructure, modernize networks and enhance services.

Ecosystem evolution

As telecom networks disaggregate and move toward delivering powerful infrastructure and applications at the edge, the number of components to deploy and manage across geographic locations grows exponentially. To strategically identify and deploy new solutions and mitigate the risk and complexities associated with evolving network infrastructure  – CSPs need to leverage an open ecosystem to ensure that they can choose from truly open architecture and deploy carrier-grade solutions and outcomes, instead of disparate components.

Enterprise go-to-market

Moving to an open network infrastructure is just one piece of the puzzle. Telecoms need to monetize the networks that they’ve invested in, and the way to do that is to sell new edge services to enterprises – ultimately helping everyone to capture the edge opportunity.

How to support the future of telecommunications

Dell Technologies is working to support CSPs on their journeys to unlock innovation and strategically transform their infrastructure. This is something we do at scale, around the globe, every day… and it’s why we’ve decided to focus these capabilities on the telecommunications industry.

Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to drive enablement and support across the three imperatives that are critical for CSPs:

  • Accelerate telecom transformation

We have years of demonstrated, practical experience helping the world’s largest organizations on their digital transformation journey.

  • Contribute to and leverage the open ecosystem

We are building the telecom-specific infrastructure foundation and associated open network solutions to help CSPs capitalize on 5G innovation and capture edge revenue opportunities. And, working with partners, Dell Technologies is developing an Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab to explore and nurture future telecom technologies and applications.

  • Enable enterprise go-to-market access

Over the past 37 years, Dell Technologies has built one of the technology industry’s most robust sales and marketing capabilities. And, we have developed a world-class supply chain that offers our company and customers scale, cost efficiency, and dependability. Finally – we have a world-class services organization with more than 60,000 dedicated professionals and partners in over 170 countries. Dell Technologies has the breadth and expertise to help CSPs capture the enterprise edge opportunity.

And to drive our company’s increased focus and investment in the telecommunications industry – we created the Telecom Systems Business within Dell Technologies, a growing (and hiring!) organization of telecom and technology experts helping CSPs to ascend to and maintain their rightful role in the edge economy.

I am excited to work with our telecom customers and partners to build and cultivate a robust ecosystem that will deliver a full-stack continuous innovation, continuous development pipeline to power telecom innovation.

About the Author: Dennis Hoffman

Dennis Hoffman leads the Telecom Systems Business at Dell Technologies. In this role, Mr. Hoffman is responsible for the development and execution of Dell Technologies end-to-end operating plan and strategy in the Communication Services market. Mr. Hoffman is a 30-year veteran of the technology industry. Prior to his current role, he led the Corporate Strategy function at Dell Technologies following a similar role at EMC. Before that, he was responsible for launching EMC’s Virtual Computing Environment coalition with Cisco and VMware to help organizations around the world capture the promise and benefits of converged infrastructure platforms. He was previously responsible for the professional development, productivity and technical excellence of EMC’s global presales organization, as well as the performance of EMC’s Education Services offering and organization. Mr. Hoffman led the team at EMC that developed and initiated the execution of the company’s information security strategy, which resulted in the acquisition of RSA Security and several other security companies. While at RSA, he was responsible for the strategy development, execution and financial performance of RSA’s Data Security Business Unit, as well as strategic planning, strategic partnerships and business development for the RSA Division as a whole. In his first role at the company, he led product marketing for EMC Software Group. Earlier in his career, Mr. Hoffman served as CEO and Co-founder of Storigen Systems, a pioneering developer of distributed storage networking software that was acquired by EMC in October 2003. Mr. Hoffman also spent six years at Avid Technology where he was responsible for the marketing and business development of its storage and networking products, and he has held strategy consulting and engineering roles at companies including Marakon Associates, Eastman Kodak and Polaroid Corporation. Mr. Hoffman graduated from Union College with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and holds an MBA from Harvard University.