As many of you may have seen, I am about to transition from an operating role at VMware to a Special Purpose Acquisition Company focused on Telco, 5G, and Edge. As I hand over the baton to my esteemed colleague Sanjay Uppal, I am delighted to share with you some thoughts around 5G based on common assertions I’ve encountered – with the goal of helping to separate fact from fiction.
That’s what this “Think Again” column is designed to do. Periodically, our team at VMware will publish an update as an opportunity for us to add clarity on Telco and Edge topics. So, here’s the first installment for 2021!
Myth 1: Large-scale 5G deployments are another year away.
It’s true that the costs of 5G are massive; the infrastructure investment is estimated to be $80 billion by 20271. Given that expense, deployment delays would be expected IF the primary use cases were consumer oriented. But commercial use cases – like private 5G, remote work, AI applications for autonomous vehicles – are keeping global 5G deployments moving at scale and on schedule. Additionally, with the emergence of greenfield projects, like the cloud-native 5G ORAN deployment recently announced by DISH, Intel and VMware, the arrival of large-scale 5G deployments is now measured in months not years. So, yes, 5G is here folks; buckle up.
Myth 2: Hyperscale clouds can deliver the 5G Edge.
Whether it’s a hope or an assumption, there’s a notion that 5G Edge applications can be sufficiently supported by existing hyperscaler cloud infrastructure. Truth is, you can’t just graft your existing hyperscaler solution onto a new batch of distributed requirements and expect it to work. 5G Edges come with their own set of nuanced requirements around latency and scale, requiring any Edge solution to pull together communications and computing clouds in a seamless and effective way. Hyperscalers can’t dress up public clouds as low latency, distributed 5G Edges. Edge-native is the new craze … get on that train already and find the right Edge providers.
Myth 3: IoT was a passing fad.
I get it; with new technologies, there typically is an abundance of hype in the beginning with lots of ‘experts’ jumping in to show how it has promise, and a ton of startups and investment following the hope of a big return. IoT in its first phase went through this hype and subsequently cooled off. Carriers set up IoT businesses and only a few of them got returns. However, now we are entering a new and more robust, Edge-enabled phase of IoT. I am bullish about the applications in industrial automation –e.g. automation of a large-scale automotive factory shop floor — that are leveraging Edge-delivered IoT. So, no: not a passing fad.
Myth 4: The pandemic has had a slowing effect on Telco cloud and 5G deployments globally.
We’ve all seen the pervasive disruptions to life and work due to the COVID pandemic. It would be natural to expect that 5G and telco cloud deployments could be delayed — but the opposite has occurred. Driven by the shift to work-from-anywhere employment and the uptick in at-home education and entertainment, connectivity requirements have skyrocketed. That in turn, has accelerated and expanded telco cloud and 5G deployments to be faster, not slower. So NO, we aren’t seeing any slowdown in network deployments because of the pandemic.
Myth 5: 5G is what will finally drive XR into the mainstream.
Consumer applications of AR and VR have been hyped for years now – will 5G be what finally makes XR a consumer success? It’s true that XR form factors are getting better and that 5G infrastructure delivers on the low-latency, high-bandwidth requirements for rich XR experiences. But are consumers ready to embrace those still cumbersome and funky-looking goggles? Do they feel comfortable strapping around a set of gadgets 24×7? Jury’s still out on this one.
Our regular roundup of the technology news that matters
Welcome to the next edition of our ‘Telco Bits & Bytes’ news blog. Here we share news and insights from across VMware and the technology industry that caught our attention, so you don’t miss a beat. Enjoy!
I may be new at VMware, but I’m not new to the industry – I was actively involved with VMware during its first decade of its operation, when I was with EMC. In fact, I was part of VMware’s ‘Journey to the Cloud’ messaging effort, which inspired customers seeking to make the move to the cloud. At that time, cloud providers, now known as hyperscalers, were pitching the benefits of a utility-based computing approach with the promise of endless elasticity. The concept was easy to understand and pitched at a price point that made enterprise IT heads turn. For the next several years after that, the economics of cloud continued be a hot topic for customers who have made the leap and started to reap the benefits the ‘software defined data center’.
Even today, the hyperscaler narrative hasn’t changed very much, it is still much of the same utility play. As with traditional utilities, such as electricity providers, customers find themselves frustrated with limited options, higher prices than expected and very little they can do when their utility isn’t working as advertised.
The word utility is synonymous with service and in terms of technology, network connectivity is a service that many see as a commoditized utility. Historically, communication service providers (CSPs) have focused on offering connectivity, it’s what they do… Over the years, it has become faster, more reliable, and coverage has improved, but with each network evolution, connectivity has more or less remained the same. Think about it, CSPs spend vast resources on building new network connectivity as their core asset, even though the market is fiercely competitive, and differentiation is tough, and margins are thin as CSPs have launched unlimited plans. With 5G, CSPs have made massive investments upfront on new spectrum and they are in the midst of deploying their next-generation networks, based on cloud-native architectures, however many are still thinking purely in terms of connectivity.
If failure is not an option, then differentiation is paramount. CSPs must monetize new services to recoup their investments. In order to do so, we need to get to a place where we’re not thinking like utilities. The good news is that 5G can absolutely get us there—if we’re willing to take advantage of what it brings to the table: Openness. Cloud-native methodologies. Flexibility to add value-added services on top of connectivity.
VMware is perfectly positioned to help CSPs capture this moment and capitalize the opportunity. Unlike anyone else in this space, VMware provides the “5G OS”—a central nervous system for 5G. We give CSPs a consistent horizontal platform that extends from core to cloud to customer to facilitate real digital transformation. With VMware, CSPs can be more agile in how they deliver new services—plugging in new capabilities, driving new efficiencies, and continuously deploying infrastructure as it is needed. We’re helping CSPs play a larger role in the evolving ecosystem for digital services—and leave the utility model behind for good.
Whose cloud is it anyways?
If we’re going to break out of a utility mindset, we have to broaden our horizons beyond connectivity. We have to stop spending so much time thinking about the plumbing, with the host of undifferentiated underlying technologies in the CSP infrastructure and instead focus on the innovation we can deliver on top. That’s exactly what VMware does—and has been doing for years. We provide a telco cloud platform that enables CSPs to modernize, move to the next G, and monetize value-added services that they seek to deliver.
The most revolutionary thing VMware did, almost two decades ago now, was to anonymize compute hardware. If you were in enterprise IT, you used to have to think a lot about the physical servers running your business applications. Today, for all intents and purposes, those servers are now basically interchangeable.
In the future, I see VMware making the cloud itself just as anonymous. Our Telco Cloud portfolio provides that 5G OS to facilitate new kinds of interactions with the applications running on your network, while anonymizing everything underneath. By abstracting the underlying infrastructure, you gain:
More choice: In the same way the market for IT hardware has evolved, the piece parts underlying your network become basically interchangeable. You can use network functions from dozens of vendors in your 5G network without worrying about how they all fit together – because we have done the hard work of validating for CSPs.
More agility: When everything below the interaction layer is anonymized, you can choose any cloud as your fabric of choice for compute, storage, and underlying physical network transport. While this approach gives you great improvements to scalability, you also retain a common plane for management, operations, and security which improve efficiencies through automation.
More efficiency: Internally, the low-level details of how individual network functions work don’t really matter anymore. Instead, you’re focusing on how you manage, monitor, and assure amazing customer experiences for a growing portfolio of 5G and edge applications.
Making Openness Work for Your Business
5G opens up CSP networks—a breath of fresh air that’s long overdue. Industry initiatives like the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Alliance reimagine the previously monolithic RAN as a heterogeneous ecosystem for any vendor’s standards-aligned technology. This increases competition, fuels innovation, and enables both old players and new to treat the network as brand-new territory. Suddenly, new innovators in this space—Parallel Wireless, Altiostar, Mavenir, and others—are making big bets on open CSP ecosystems and building a thriving community of vendors to drive innovation.
Of course, that heterogeneity adds new complexity that CSPs, who’ve historically outsourced large portions of the network to their vendors, have never had to contend with. Here again, VMware is well positioned to help. We can facilitate open ecosystems while providing the safety net that comes with backing from a major global vendor.
Our Telco Cloud Platform, for example, includes a telco-ready version of VMware Tanzu which enhances open source cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes by hardening them for CSP-scale deployments. Delivered pre-integrated and fully supported, this solution sits within the framework we provide for multivendor network solutions to work together in a cohesive way. Then, our Ready for Telco Cloud ecosystem lets you plug in pre-validated, ready-to-deploy network functions from dozens of vendors. You can build the network you want to build, for the price you want to pay, and achieve the right margin between cost and potential profit.
Let VMware Join You on This Journey
This isn’t the first time CSPs have tried to broaden their scope beyond connectivity. Traditional network equipment providers (NEPs) have had years to help solve these problems and haven’t been able to do it. Which shouldn’t be surprising: their business is built around making you care more about the underlying infrastructure blob, not less. Hyperscalers aren’t the full answer either, as they’re likely to focus on making sure your customers are using their cloud, not freeing them to use any cloud they choose. This is akin to buying a car and being restricted to get your gas from a specific gas station brand, that is both inflexible and impractical.
If we’re going to see different results, we’ll need to stop thinking like utilities. VMware—a company that made its name abstracting away underlying complexity and helping businesses add value on top—is the right partner to help you do it. Look at it this way: 5G networks are intentionally disaggregated, with network functions broken up into smaller pieces, often from multiple vendors. The level of intricacy involved in validating that all those pieces work together, that they won’t create security gaps, that they can be managed and monitored in a consistent way, is enormous.
Who in the marketplace has dealt with anything like that before? I can think of one company. VMware has hundreds of thousands of customers, thousands of partners, relying on a vast web of interoperating technologies and vendors. Abstracting away gory infrastructure details so businesses can focus on what matters? That’s just what we do. I can’t wait to see what we do together next.
To learn more about the different ways is helps CSPs around the world transform, read this eBook of customer stories.
Our regular roundup of the technology news that matters
Welcome to the next edition of our ‘Telco Bits & Bytes’ news blog. Here we share news and insights from across VMware and the technology industry that caught our attention, so you don’t miss a beat. Enjoy!
OneBox MEC To Bring Together Edge Computing and Private 5G
Today we announced VMware is partnering with Dell Technologies and SK Telecom to develop a multi-access edge computing (MEC) solution, OneBox MEC, that brings together private 5G and edge computing capabilities.
MEC moves compute workloads from a centralized cloud to the edge of a network. By analyzing, processing, and storing data closer to the customer, we can achieve low latency and real-time communications.
Let me share a use case where it would be advantageous to move compute from the cloud to the edge.
Tech-forward retailers use smart surveillance cameras to analyze how customers move around their stores. The insights gleamed from this data help them provide a better shopping experience. If the retailer connected hundreds of cameras set up across multiple store locations to the cloud, high connectivity costs may become prohibitive.
Instead, with an edge computing solution, analysis of the video is streamed via a reliable and high-performance 5G connection to a server on the retail premises, which can aggregate the video feeds and perform the analysis. The only data that would need to be sent to the cloud would be that used for longer-term trend analysis and storage. From a security standpoint, all identifiable footage of customers would remain on the retail store premises.
This is just one of many use cases that exist today. The healthcare industry could use this model to improve in-patient monitoring. As robotics continue to proliferate on the assembly line, manufacturers could utilize a MEC solution to improve predictive maintenance on these connected machines.
Leading operators, like SK Telecom, see an opportunity to deliver MEC as a service to enterprise customers across a variety of industries that face similar use cases.
The MEC solution that SK Telcom is developing with Dell Technologies and VMware pairs edge computing functionality with private 5G network functions – using the same hardware. A solution that combines edge computing and private connectivity will be able to deliver both operational simplicity and infrastructure benefits in terms of the cost and space of the solution.
Let’s take a closer look at the OneBox MEC solution.
The OneBox MEC can use the Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 server for data-intensive, low-latency edge services to deliver the performance, availability and security required for CSPs to build their portfolio of private 5G and edge solutions.
Workloads can run on top of VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform, which enables the solution to include both virtualized network functions and cloud native applications. In addition, VMware Telco Cloud Automation will provide onboarding, life cycle management, and zero touch provisioning of both the MEC infrastructure and applications/services.
We are excited to play a critical role in delivering a solution that will help enterprises innovate at the edge with greater velocity. Our Telco Cloud Platform provides a foundation on top of which enterprises can deliver edge services on any cloud with agility and a consistent experience. Be sure to check back here for updates from the team as we continue to work with Dell Technologies and SK Telecom to bring this solution to market in the future.
Forward-Looking Statements
Except for historical and factual information, the matters set forth in this post identified by words such as “will,” “expects,” “believes,” and similar expressions are forward-looking statements as defined by the federal securities laws, and are subject to the “safe harbor” protections thereunder. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results and are based on current expectations only, and are subject to various uncertainties. Actual events and results may differ materially from those anticipated by us in those statements for several reasons. We may change our intentions or plans discussed in our forward-looking statements without notice at any time and for any reason.
Our regular roundup of the technology news that matters
Welcome to the next edition of our ‘Telco Bits & Bytes’ news blog. Here we share news and insights from across VMware and the technology industry that caught our attention, so you don’t miss a beat. Enjoy!
By Nicola Acutt, vice president, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)
When it comes to popular perceptions of environmental sustainability, big business can sometimes get a bad rap. It’s the biggest names in the industry—from Microsoft to Google to VMware—who’ve been leading the way in reimagining how big tech cancreate more sustainable operating models.
At VMware, we take this mission very seriously. Our success as a company—arguably, the whole reason we exist in the first place—is based on helping customers reduce energy consumption and waste. That is, after all, one of the core drivers for virtualization: the ability to support and grow your business while using less IT hardware.
Over the years, we’ve set ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, shifting to renewable energy, and conserving natural resources. We publish an annual Global Impact Report to track our progress. In many cases, these efforts have focused on enterprise virtualization. That work is important, and it’s worth taking a closer look at how these efforts translate to the service–provider space and will be able to impact the world’s communication networks in the coming years.
A Longstanding Commitment to Green Operations
Source: Global Impact Report
Review the latest highlights of our sustainability efforts, and you’ll note the big, overarching goal we’re working towards: radically decarbonizing our supply chain, operations, and customerecosystemsby 2030. We have a long list of initiatives we’re working towards on this front, includingcutting our emissions in half, improving the carbon efficiency of workloads, and fueling the transition to zero-carbon clouds.
The most impressive aspect of these efforts, however, is just how much progress we’ve already made. In November 2018, we officially achieved carbon neutrality—two years ahead of schedule. In 2019 (our fiscal year 2020), we cut our emissions intensity by 46% over the previous year, even as we grew total revenue by 12%.*We also now source 100% of the electricity for our global operations from renewable sources. In fact, Dow Jones just ranked VMware in the top 94th percentile in the software category for leadership in corporate sustainability.**
Our goals for 2020 were no less ambitious:
Maintaining carbon neutrality and continuing to use 100% renewable energy across our operations
Instituting aggressive water conservation in India and other water-stressed regions in our portfolio
Achieving over 90% waste diversion globally and sending zero e-waste to landfills
Procuring at least 50% of our business operations from suppliers who are committed to meeting the same kind of targets for sustainability and social responsibility
Building Transformative Products
The simplest way to reduce energy consumption in your digital footprint is also the most obvious one: run less hardware. As you might expect, this is an area where VMware excels. IDC estimated that from a cumulative standpoint, IT infrastructure efficiency due to VMware virtualization equates to energy savings of 347,968,000 MWh and carbon emissions avoidance of 1.2 billion metric tons from 2003 to 2019.***
Boosting Service Provider Efficiency
VMware technologies already translated to huge reductions in global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. But until recently, most of this innovation was happening inside global enterprises. When it comes to some of the world’s biggest users of IT and network hardware—large national and regional communications service providers (CSPs)—the benefits of virtualization are just getting started.
CSPs provide the connectivity to power digital transformation. But inside their own vast networks—sprawling environments with thousands of sites running tens of thousands of devices 24/7—many have continued to rely on legacy infrastructure models. As a result, the industry hasn’t benefited from modern efficiency advances as much as enterprises have. In the last few years though, that status quo has started to change.
Today, CSPs are moving away from dedicated physical hardware in every part of the network and using virtualized network infrastructure instead.**** This allows them to deploy and upgrade services much more quickly. But,it also means that the same benefits of lower power usage and carbon emissions that enterprises have long enjoyed can now extend to CSP networks. That’s a huge deal, and it will have a huge impact on our environment.
Vodafone, for example, has been working with VMware to virtualize and “cloudify” their mobile and fixed broadband networks in 43 geographies around the world. In the UK, that work has already translated to a reduction of 100,000 MWh hours of energy consumptionover the last three years and prevented 25,000 tons of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.*****
5G Kicks Virtualization into High Gear
CSP virtualization has long been viewed as a “nice-to-have” capability. As mobile operators roll out 5G though, it becomes a core technology requirement as the automated delivery and scaling enabled by virtualization will be necessary to deliver the on-demand, customizable services expected of 5G, and beyond.
This evolution is kicking off a huge shift from legacy hardware to virtualized infrastructure in the world’s largest networks, and it will have a huge impact on global sustainability. One recent study conducted by Telefonica and Nokia, for example, forecasts that Telefonica’s new 5G network will spur a 90% reduction in energy usage compared to 4G.******
It’s not just CSPs’ internal operations that will get more efficient. In the coming years, CSPs and their partners will use 5G network capabilities to deliver a wide range of new services that enable cleaner, more efficient energy production and distribution. That includes things like:
Predictive maintenance for energy generation, storage, and transmission infrastructure to improve efficiency and avoid failures
Automated controlof both renewable and conventional power generation equipment, using more sensors and artificial intelligence to maximize output
Location-based battery supply systems to track demand for electric vehicle batteries and optimize supply and storage
Intelligent energy demand/supply management applications that reduce and optimize energy consumption
Smart grid load-balancingthat uses real-time data and modeling to balance supply and demand across large-scale consumers and energy resources
These and other new 5G capabilities will help CSPs shake off the legacy hardware models of the past and become standard-bearers for a greener, more sustainable future. At VMware, we’re excited to play a key role in this transformation, and to enable some of the world’s most important, high-impact sustainability projects in the coming years.
For more information on the VMware 5G solutions visit: https://telco.vmware.com/
Our regular roundup of the technology news that matters
Happy New Year and welcome to the first edition of our ‘Telco Bits & Bytes’ news blog for 2021. Here we share news and insights from across VMware and the technology industry that caught our attention, so you don’t miss a beat.
In my last blog, I talked about VMware’s participation in the newly formed ATIS NextG Alliance. If you follow the research community around wireless technologies, you’ll note that this is just one of several industry organizations focused on upcoming wireless generations—commonly referred to as “Beyond 5G” (B5G). Already, we see B5G/6G initiatives launching from 3GPP, IEEE, ITU, the 6G Flagship Program in Europe, China’s new 6G satellite program, and several others. All of which raises the question: If we’re still in early days of deploying 5G, why is there already so much activity around what comes next? Let’s take a closer look.
Evolution of the Next Big G
Let’s start by looking at it from a pure wireless generation evolution perspective. Tradition holds that every generation introduces a new service concept. To support the new concepts, groundwork is laid for aligned evolution of radio and other essential elements. It isn’t until the next generation comes along that the work needed for full-scale adoption is completed. This pattern can be traced all the way back — cellular telephony introduced in 1G saw mass adoption in 2G, packet data was introduced in 3G, but full benefits weren’t reaped until Long Term Evolution of the architecture with 4G.
Another notable observation here is that mass adoption of almost every new wireless service introduced by 3GPP in the past has been led by an over the top phenomenon. Apple App Store being the 3G surprise, and the rise of the hyper scale cloud in early 2000s created a demand side pull for massive broadband. In turn, this enabled mass dissemination of compute which gave rise to services like uber – unthinkable without this powerful duo at play.
5G is no different – only a bit broader in its original ambition. The previous generations have been focused on evolution of wireless systems for higher performance and bandwidth, improving the quality of experience for human centric communications and content consumption and entertainment. 5G is the first generation of wireless designed for highly interactive collaboration amongst ‘smart things’, be it humans, machines, cyber-physical systems or any combination of the above. Antiquated technologies underpinning currently prevalent Packet Data Networks (including the wireless networks) designed and optimized for remote human consumption are seriously challenged with the new service characteristics vectors being shaped with machine centric communication and collaboration.
Hence, a new plan, design and operations paradigm was envisaged for 5G with a few key elements deemed essential to a solid foundation for the unprecedented applications ecosystem anticipated with 5G. We’ve come a long way with implementation of these essential elements, thanks to the leadership from 3GPP global community and telecommunications service provider led efforts (e.g. massive broadband, cloud native 5G and pervasive connectivity) but much remains to be completed for some of the broader elements that sit at the cross section of wireless, networking and cloud.
Below is a rough score card of our progress on these essential 5G elements, in the order of maturity from left to right:
As service providers prepare for their initial 5G deployments, mainly targeting broadband access and New Radio capacity augmentation of LTE for network densification, the research community continues to unravel the more complex challenges. These challenges include areas around network programmability and autonomics which must be addressed before we are able to take a crack at Time Sensitive Communications – the most interesting element of the 5G foundation.
At VMware, we think it’s critical that someone like us—a company that has one foot in the world of service provider networks and the other foot in the cloud—help lead this new chapter of 5G evolution.
How VMW is shaping the new chapter of 5G evolution toward NextG
A 5G connected world is anticipated to be an ecosystem of interconnected intelligence components, systems and fabrics enabled with fusion of technologies that sit at the intersection of wireless, networking and cloud industries. VMware aims to bridge these somewhat disparate industries for unification of cross-sectional technologies that maximizes the interoperability while maintaining individual differentiation of each for a sustainable win-win for all.
We analyze below, foundational imperatives of this unification for 5G era, paving a path toward 6G:
Virtualize the data center: We need the ability to adapt, federate, and optimize heterogeneous resources that span multiple physical data centers managed by disparate providers, across multiple geographies, as a unified pool of adaptive compute capabilities.
Virtualize the network: Next, we need to be able to adapt, federate, and optimize heterogeneous networks to enable distributed applications that span multiple providers, across multiple geographies such that the underlying networks become invisible to the application.
Virtualize the edge: We need the ability to adapt, federate, and optimize heterogeneous platforms spanning multiple providers, across multiple geographies to enable a fungibleedge that continuously optimizes itself to maintain QOE across vastly interactive, highly mobile, distributed applications.
Virtualize the control: Finally, we need to be able to adapt, federate, and optimize heterogeneous entities contributing to collaborative controlsapplications that are distributed across multiple intelligence agents that span multiple providers and geographies, ultimately leading to universal autonomy with complete virtualization of control.
We realize that this is a significant undertaking that can only be successful with a strong collaborative effort bringing together best and brightest of all the relevant industries. We are developing a world-class ecosystem to help unravel these challenges in a real-world setting. With the unique combination of our long-standing leadership in virtualization and our deep expertise in service provider and data center networks, VMware is perfectly positioned to drive harmonization across wireless, cloud and networking industries. And, we are already doing it through our participation in cross-functional industry groups like 5G Americas, ATIS NextG Alliance, 5G Open Innovation Lab and many others.
These NextG imperatives align closely with the major initiatives VMware is pursuing right now. Today, we’re partnering with our key customers to enable edge-to-cloud virtualization underpinned with our multi-cloud 5G edge platform. We’re also building a new generation of network controls and intelligence to lay a solid foundation for the most ambitious goal of tomorrow’s networks: universal autonomy. When the industry comes together to realize universal autonomy, VMware will be right in the thick of it.
Join us in our journey toward 6G by leaving comments on this blog and following us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Our regular roundup of the technology news that matters
Welcome to the last edition of our ‘Telco Bits & Bytes’ news blog for 2020. Here we share news and insights from across VMware and the technology industry that caught our attention, so you don’t miss a beat. Happy Holidays Everyone!
