Written by Antonio Neri
We are excited to be back at Mobile World Congress 2024. As part of HPE’s continued and long-term commitment to these markets, we are pleased to meet our valued customers and partners across the communications and networking industries.
I’ve heard similar themes over the past years when meeting with customers and partners. That means carriers are still exploring the latest technologies to reduce network operating costs and are looking for new revenue streams to monetize their 5G investments. With more than 300 carrier customers in 160 countries, HPE is passionately invested in helping customers achieve both of these goals.
We believe three inflection points are converging to enable carriers to make significant progress toward these goals.
- The network is modernizing
- Network technologies are converging
- AI will become a “killer app”
Network modernization
The first step to increasing profitability and reducing operating costs is modernizing your network and moving from a previous generation model built on proprietary systems to an open, automated, cloud-native platform. The 5G standard was designed to help carriers deploy these platforms with the promise of faster deployment of new and innovative 5G-based services. Efficient cloud-native networks enable carriers to upsell high-margin services such as private 5G connectivity. It also presents an opportunity for carriers to move beyond connectivity to AI-native networks and address the emergence of AI inference at the edge.
HPE works with customers and partners to build open solutions that deliver efficiencies, reduce risk and complexity, and future-proof networks across the communications core, radio access network (RAN), and edge. , has driven innovation from the edge to the cloud.
Achieving higher levels of efficiency at every level of the network is essential for telcos to improve profitability. New HPE Telco Core Automation software, announced last week, uses the latest AI to improve operational efficiency and responsiveness.
Following our planned acquisition of Juniper Networks, our goal is to better address our customers’ challenges by bringing together two of the networking industry’s most innovative and accomplished organizations. Juniper and HPE’s portfolios are complementary, and together we have the opportunity to accelerate our innovation in the communications market and our ability to modernize our customers’ networks.
This creates an opportunity to improve automation and orchestration and add support for more virtualized network functions to the open RAN and Operational Support Systems (OSS) portfolio. Also emerging are new ways to leverage his AIOps in network orchestration, allowing telcos to virtualize and extend their infrastructure to offer new services and reduce operational costs.
Network integration
Ultimately, network technologies are converging. Customers and end users require universal connectivity with speed, security, and functionality, no matter where they are.
At MWC last year, we announced the acquisition of Athonet to establish HPE with one of the most complete private 5G and Wi-Fi portfolios. HPE has integrated his Athonet into our portfolio, continuing our trajectory as a global leader in private 5G solutions and strengthening our ability to provide a comprehensive set of solutions to meet our customers’ complex connectivity needs. .
We’re excited about what we can accomplish as we continue to incorporate Athonet’s technology into the HPE Aruba Networking portfolio, and in the future with Juniper. I believe Wi-Fi and private 5G will be deployed together and managed from a single screen will become the norm.
There is no doubt in my mind that HPE has a unique role to play in helping carriers succeed in the 6G era and beyond as networking technology converges. Drive toward a future where all spectrum is transparently managed through a diverse set of technologies that can maintain quality of service for mission-critical activities.
AI enables new revenue streams
It has long been said that the real benefits of 5G lie with businesses, not consumers. So far, few people have come true with this prediction.
Edge computing services delivered over 5G networks have been talked about as a new revenue stream for carriers, but no “killer applications” have emerged. AI may be that “killer app.” AI will be the most compute- and network-intensive application of this era, potentially allowing carriers to finally monetize their 5G investments.
Many business cases for AI inference at the edge require dedicated network and computing power to effectively infer data closest to the end user or device. It’s not economical to move all the data back to the cloud, and latency becomes a performance issue. Telcos with distributed data center assets are in a better position to offer more competitive solutions compared to hyperscale cloud providers.
HPE and Juniper have a unique portfolio that bridges these opportunities with our carrier and enterprise networking products, including a complete data center stack for AI inference and training, innovative AIOps technology, and a wide range of hybrid cloud services. I have. Our combined portfolio of expertise is transformative.
The hype around AI is real. This is an unprecedented technology shift, and we are making bold moves to capture the changes in the networking market.
I’m looking forward to
At MWC, I’ve been discussing the exciting possibilities that could lie ahead for HPE after the completion of the Juniper Networks acquisition plan, which is not expected to close for many months. Until then, we will remain two separate companies with our own strategies for supporting carrier customers.
In the meantime, it is clear that the technology landscape is changing. Telcos need a trusted partner to help them navigate these changes and grow their business. I believe HPE will become the new leader in the networking market with an unparalleled portfolio of both AI-native and cloud-native solutions, enabling our customers to take advantage of the market transition brought about by AI. I am.
(The author is Antonio Neri, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
