Dell EMC and VMware – Better Together for Service Providers

Co-authored by:

Kevin Shatzkamer, Vice President, Service Provider Strategy and Solutions, Dell EMC

Honore’ LaBourdette, VP Global Market Development, Telco Business Group, VMware

With Mobile World Congress in Barcelona coming soon, there is a lot of anticipation on what vendors will be showcasing at the event and what will solve the challenges facing for service providers today.  Some of their main challenges include:

  • Slowing growth & innovation due to increasing technological complexity
  • Rising CAPEX and OPEX for legacy network infrastructure
  • Price/Margin erosion due to disruption in existing businesses models
  • Uncertainty in new business models – new value chains, new competitors
  • Operational transformation requires workforce and process retooling

Dell EMC and VMware are teaming together to help solve these challenges and are excited to demonstrate of the value of Dell Technologies end-to-end for service providers.

As a starting point, at Mobile World Congress Americas last fall, we announced the Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware to simplify and accelerate NFV deployments for service providers.  This bundle includes open standards-based Dell EMC Cloud Infrastructure (compute, networking, Service Assurance Suite and management tools) and a choice of a Virtual Infrastructure Manager (vCloud Director or VMware Integrated OpenStack) with vSAN or Dell EMC ScaleIO.

The Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware was just the beginning of joint, pre-validated solutions between both companies.  Dell EMC and VMware are on a journey to integrate and demonstrate the value of our joint solution in other areas as well.

SD-WAN is another area where both companies are working together to expand SD-WAN opportunities for service providers.  According to IDC’s Worldwide SD-WAN Forecast, 2017-2021, SD-WAN sales will grow at a 69% compound annual rate and will hit $8.05 billion by 2021.

Enterprises are increasingly searching for cost-effective and simpler alternatives to WAN connectivity for their sprawling branch networks. SD-WAN addresses many enterprises needs around WAN costs, simplified operations and improved application performance.  For service providers, offering SD-WAN as a Service is a new revenue opportunity because they can manage WAN services for enterprises.  This is appealing to enterprises that don’t want to manage the WAN network, or applications, and would prefer to outsource these services to a service provider.

To help with SD-WAN adoption, Dell EMC and VeloCloud, which is now part of VMware, offer the Dell EMC SD-WAN Ready Nodes for VeloCloud to accelerate SD-WAN revenue for service providers. VeloCloud can also go one step further by hosting and operating SD-WAN service on behalf of the service provider to accelerate adoption.  We will also be demonstrating leading edge joint SD-WAN solutions for service providers at Mobile World Congress.

We understand that the industry is constantly moving and evolving, and Dell EMC and VMware will continue to integrate capabilities that service providers want.  Our goals as both companies is to significantly reduce deployment complexities by offering more joint pre-architected and pre-validated solutions that integrates industry leading Dell EMC hardware and VMware software, reduce installation complexity, and provide confidence that the joint solutions are ready to work in production for service providers.

We look forward to seeing you at Mobile World Congress on Feb. 26 to March 1!  Please visit us in the Dell Technologies/VMware booth 3K10 in Hall 3 to learn more about our solutions for service providers.

About the Author: Kevin Shatzkamer

Kevin Shatzkamer is Vice President and General Manager, Service Provider Strategy and Solutions at Dell Technologies with responsibility for strategy and architectural evolution of the intersection points of network infrastructure technologies, cloud and virtualization platforms, and software programmability. His organizational responsibility encompasses industry strategy and investment analysis, business development and go-to-market activities, technical architecture and engineering, and infrastructure evolution / futures-planning. He is also responsible for leading the Dell Technologies 5G strategy in close collaboration with industry-leading telecommunications providers globally. Mr. Shatzkamer represents Dell Technologies on the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Futures Council on New Network Technologies (5G-related). Mr. Shatzkamer's ecosystem-wide, experience-centric approach to working with customers allows for the identification and exploitation of synergies between disparate organizations to derive new technology / business models for the mobile industry, especially as “5G” defines transformation from technical architecture to ecosystem and service offerings. With over 20 years of industry experience, Mr. Shatzkamer joined Dell EMC in 2016, with prior experience at Brocade (Service Provider CTO, Head of Brocade Labs) and Cisco (Distinguished Systems Engineer). He holds more than 50 patents related to all areas of work. He received a Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Florida, a Master’s of Business Administration from Indiana University, and a Master’s of System Design and Management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Shatzkamer is a regular speaker at industry forums and has published two books discussing the architectures and technologies shaping the future of the Mobile Internet (2G, 3G, and 4G networks), from RAN to services.