The 5G network has arrived with a fanfare, but behind the scenes the telecommunications industry is in the crossfire of technological advance. Aggressive rivalry has always marked the competitive telco industry. But while the fight to rule 5G is fierce, going it alone isn’t the most effective way to roll out.

“I think one of the key differentiators of 5G over its predecessors is that the industry has recognized that it’s going to require partnerships in order for the service providers to really get their return on investment,” said Honoré LaBourdette (pictured, right), vice president of global market development, Telco Business Group, at VMware Inc.

“The belief is that when we help solve problems, it not only benefits the service provider we’re working with, it benefits the industry as a whole with the lessons learned so that we can then contribute back,” stated Kevin Shatzkamer (pictured, left), vice president and general manager of service provider solutions at Dell EMC.

LaBourdette and Shatzkamer spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed how Dell EMC and VMware are helping telcos compete in the cloud economy (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Every telco conversation revolves around 5G

5G requires a huge investment in new infrastructure, and network service providers are scrambling to get the technology in place so that their service can beat the rest. This is where the Dell ecosystem shows its power.

“Many of our [customer] conversations are really focused around how can we help these service providers … not just build out or take advantage of a software-defined infrastructure and all of the technologies that both Dell and VMware offer to them under the umbrella of the Dell Technology Companies, but also how can we help them accelerate services that they want to put on top of the 5G technology,” LaBourdette said.

The collaboration between VMware and Dell has been ongoing for many years and has now progressed to the stage at which the companies are jointly developing and releasing new technology to market. One example is the announcement of a IoT smart city use-case scenario for the City of Las Vegas. “That solution was codeveloped with [Japanese IT services company] NTT, Dell EMC and VMware using VMware software, Dell hardware, as well as Dell storage, Dell data analytics and intelligence, and NTT’s infrastructure and points of presence,” LaBourdette stated.

“The challenges of scale that have been solved in the public cloud are a different set of challenges than the telco industry is really trying to wrestle with,” Shatzkamer said. Where cloud automation and orchestration require handling “hundreds of thousands of things at a single-digit number of locations,” 5G requires telcos to handle “hundreds of thousands of locations with a single-digit number of things.”

This is another area where collaboration pays out. “Rather than us working in silos and delivering yet another disparate technology for managing the edge, cloud, or all these different locations, we’re working together so we can bring a cohesive technology to market for [our telco customers],” LaBourdette said.

“There’s clear recognition that the better capabilities are when we work together to really drive the platform and bring the true capabilities of the broader Dell technologies together,” Shatzkamer concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE