Technology has brought significant change, placing demands on people in a given industry who must adapt to a world where new skills and capabilities are constantly required. This has manifested itself in the telecommunications industry where the conversation has changed significantly.

“When we work within this industry, it’s not just a technology conversation,” said Kevin Shatzkamer (pictured, left), vice president and general manager of service provider solutions at Dell EMC. “It’s the ability for the team to consume and operationalize technology. Now they need to understand networking, compute, virtualization, APIs; they need to be able to script and program and have some level of data science so they can close a loop in the operational models eventually with artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies.”

Shatzkamer spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. He was joined by Ihab Tarazi (pictured, right), senior vice president and chief technology officer, networking and solutions at Dell Technologies Inc., and they discussed how 5G wireless deployment will likely mirror enterprise solutions of today and the challenges facing the telecommunications industry as it adopts to a rapid pace of change (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Impact on 5G

The changing technology dialogue and skills required are driving the pursuit of major new initiatives in the telecommunications industry. One of these is the deployment of the next-generation wireless standard known as 5G.

“What 5G is starting to look like is not network and wireless independent from enterprise solutions,” Tarazi said. “You really have to collapse to a single infrastructure to offer services and wireless embedded. Enterprises are starting to ask for those capabilities.”

With technologies such as virtualization, Kubernetes, cloud native, bare metal services, and microservices architecture now fully on the telco table, the industry is having to adapt to a much more rapid pace of change than it was previously used to, according to Shatzkamer.

“I think the telecommunications industry has been somewhat paralyzed as to where to jump in and how fast to migrate,” Shatzkamer said. “We see this progression of technology that’s happening so fast in various segments of the industry.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld 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