HPE makes play for 5G market with new products

Today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) launched a new range of products for 5G, including a cloud-based core network model: the HPE 5G Core Stack. 

 

“Openness is essential to the evolutionary nature of 5G and with HPE 5G Core Stack telcos can reduce operational costs, deploy features faster and keep themselves open to multiple networks and technologies while avoiding being locked-in to a single vendor approach,” said Phil Mottram, VP and GM at HPE Communications and Media Solutions.

 

HPE is confident that this new technology will help operator’s rollout 5G more quickly and at a lower cost. Not only this, it will support virtual RAN and multi-access edge computing, leaving telcos with an IT service environment at the network edge.

 

Thus, HPE’s focus with this launch seems to be on the edge and the core of the network – at least for now, HPE is not moving to challenge the likes of Ericsson and Huawei in the traditional RAN market.

 

Perhaps the most interesting part of this new portfolio launch is that they will be delivered as-a-Service as part of HPE’s GreenLake model, starting in the second half of this year. In this way, HPE hopes to help facilitate the ways in which operators can monetise the many opportunities that come with 5G.

 

“We can help with this monetisation problem by linking our charges that we make to the operator with when they take money from 5G customers,” said Mottram. 

 

For Mottram, 5G needs to be thought about in a new way, as being “all about enterprise”.

 

“It’s less about connecting employees, cars, whatever it might be,” he said. “It’s the extension of that technology across all of enterprises that represents the opportunity for enterprises, but also for telecom operators.”

 

HPE is among a number of companies that the US government is leaning on to provide an alternative to Huawei, so news of this portfolio launch will surely be music to the ears of the Trump administration.