Co-authored by:
Kevin Shatzkamer, Vice President, Service Provider Strategy and Solutions, Dell EMC
Honore’ LaBourdette, VP Global Market Development, Telco Business Group, VMware
Some of their main challenges CSPs face 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.
