INTELLIGENT MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
Dell Technologies and Orange sign
agreement to collaborate for telco
Multi-Access Edge Transformation
Dell Technologies and Orange sign an agreement to work together and
develop a new platform for cloud mobility in the digital economy.
ell Technologies and Orange, one
of the largest operators of mobile
and Internet services with 264
million customers worldwide,
have entered into an agreement to jointly
explore developing key technology areas for
distributed cloud architectures to deliver the
real-time Edge use cases and new services
opportunities 5G will create.
5G will require a new breed of platforms
supporting a rich catalogue of near real-
time edge computing and IoT services. The
companies will collaborate on meeting
demands for new distributed architectures
for 5G that combine the best of cloud and
mobility. These distributed architectures
will provide a common hardware foundation
of automated, agnostic software-defined
infrastructure, extending from on-premise
to the radio to the core, to accelerate
innovation and service delivery.
The new mobile platforms must be
built on a trusted supply chain delivering
an innovative ecosystem of solutions
that fulfil the promise of 5G. They will
use network telemetry to feed intelligent
automation and service orchestration
systems, using Artificial Intelligence to
ensure consistent service levels and insight
across the distributed environments. In
short, all layers of the network stack will be
visible to management systems, and those
management systems will autonomously
ensure both efficient network operations
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and high customer experience. These
technologies are the same that have been
driving the realisation of both enterprise
data centres and public cloud. 5G extends
these cloud and ‘IT-centric’ requirements
beyond traditional fixed-function
hardware to deliver more dynamic, agile
edge compute, storage and networking
solutions. In order to capitalise on the new
business opportunities that 5G will create,
Communication Service Providers need open,
industry standard architectures combined
with Software Defined Networking (SDN),
Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV),
cloud native applications and Multi-Access
Edge Computing (MEC).
“We’re working closely with Orange to
combine our joint telco best practices with
decades of data centre transformation
experience to help service providers
re-tool their operations to quickly and
profitably roll out new 5G services,” said
Tom Burns, Senior Vice President, Dell
EMC Networking and Solutions. “For 5G
and telco cloud services, service providers
are turning to IT-proven technologies such
as IaaS, virtualisation and standardised
infrastructure to deliver the required agility,
security and control. Dell Technologies has
helped our data centre customers thrive for
decades with a trusted, world-class supply
chain and support system.”
Combining their respective expertise,
Dell Technologies and Orange will
collaborate 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
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
AI/ML-enabled software to support
remote automation of a multi-
technology, heterogeneous edge built
on virtual machines, containers and bare
metal workloads
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,” said Stéphane
Demartis, Vice President, Orange, Corporate
Cloud Infrastructure. “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.”