Orange and Dell Technologies partner for 5G innovation | ZDNet

Dell Technologies has partnered with telecommunications provider Orange to work jointly on everything that falls under the edge computing and acceleration technologies umbrella in a bid to give consumers what they expect from the promise of 5G.

Announcing that the pair of companies had entered into an agreement on day three of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, the tech giant explained that as 5G will require a “new breed” of platforms to support near real-time edge computing and IoT services, they will work together to develop new distributed architectures for 5G, combining cloud and mobility.

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Specifically, Dell Technologies and Orange will work together on the definition and development of: Edge technology use cases, business models, and proof of concepts; open source consortia and partnerships for the edge ecosystem; the definition and validation of infrastructure accelerators, such as FPGAs, GPUs, and SmartNICs, for edge workloads, including Cloud/Virtual RAN (CRAN/vRAN), MEC, and real-time, interactive, latency-sensitive applications; artificial intelligence and machine learning-enabled software to support remote automation of a multi-technology, heterogeneous edge built on virtual machines, containers, and bare metal workloads; and edge infrastructure platforms supporting telco environmental, space, operational, and automation requirements.

“Orange entered this agreement with Dell Technologies to work jointly on a variety of topics revolving around edge computing and acceleration technologies that will be key to reach the full promise of 5G,” Orange VP of corporate cloud infrastructure Stéphane Demartis said.

“We believe it’s essential to prepare the ecosystem for telco use cases while progressing in our knowledge of the future technologies. 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.”

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According to Jean Paul Nussbaumer from Dell Technologies’ cloud and telecommunications arm, generally speaking, the tech giant has gradually become more involved in the deployment of telco clouds, while similarly leveraging infrastructure and virtualisation.

“Cloud is not a place, it’s a way to consume IT infrastructure, and we’ve been gradually moving this from the core to the edge and connecting to the broader cloud,” he said, speaking on the floor of Dell Technologies World Solutions Expo.

“This partnership is about making sure that we can actually leverage our expertise in building cloud towards the edge and the far edge in order to create or enable the right use cases for Orange and their customers.

“Dell Technologies, along with VMware, and the broader set of companies, is absolutely engaged in helping the telecom service providers around the world benefit from this aggregation and accelerate their journey into telco cloud computing and 5G in general.”

Disclaimer: Asha McLean travelled to Dell Technologies World as a guest of Dell Technologies