As operators invest in 5G networks and chart a course toward service revenues, scale is a key piece of winning consumer and enterprise business while also realizing the network resource and spectral usage benefits that 5G can unlock. However, achieving scale requires not just a massive investment in technology, but also an investment in rapidly deploying a steadily increasing stack of hardware and software. What that means for a service provider is that time to revenue increases with scale; furthermore costs and complexity can prolong this. In order to capture this market opportunity, operators are well-advised to take a partnerbased approach as they strike a careful balance between a rapid, scaled network rollout and delivering the customization necessary to create differentiated services and, following from that, service revenues. Previous generations of cellular networks have largely seen operators work with a small number of large infrastructure vendors specializing in RAN, core, transport, OSS/BSS and other broad areas of technology. Given this dynamic, vendor consolidation broadened portfolios resulting in a handful of highly-scaled companies offering a full stack of proprietary solutions. However, 5G is serving as a catalyst for adoption of telco cloud and virtualization which, in turn, creates an opportunity for new sets of vendors focused on disaggregating hardware and software to help operators re-think network architectures and economics. Dell Technologies’ Director of Product Management for Service Provider Solutions, Eric Vallone described an “era of disaggregation” wherein operators are “moving towards building their own architectures that create the differentiation they need to be successful in the markets they see as opportunistic for themselves.” This dynamic creates the ongoing need to assemble components, test systems, onboard third parties, develop APIs, move from planning to production, and so forth. He said it’s like “starting with a blank sheet of paper every time. And the net result of that would be the dramatically increased time to operationalize deployment and, by proxy of that, time to revenue of the new service offerings.” This leads us to striking the right balance between driving scale and return while containing costs and complexities. It comes back to having an ecosystem to depend on, Vallone said. “They want the ability to build, design, select their own ecosystem and really disaggregate the stack while simultaneously looking for an industry player that’s both well respected as well as has the scale to then put it back together into something that’s more consumable. I think it’s really a catalyst for accelerating how rapidly the industry can consume what is a very complex ecosystem that is built upon an even more complex range of technology.”
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