Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today unveiled a new cloud offering called HPE Edge Orchestrator that it says will enable telecommunications providers to offer edge computing services to their enterprise customers.

Telcos worldwide are spending billions of dollars to upgrade their networks to 5G. HPE in March launched a push to capture this market by introducing 5G Core Stack, a containerized platform for building 5G networks. Edge Orchestrator extends the push to the edge of the network, where the company sees new revenue opportunities both for its own telecommunications technology business and for its telco customers.

Telecommunications providers “have significant enterprise business, but they are often seen as little more than bandwidth providers, competing mostly on price,” detailed Phil Mottram, the head of HPE’s Communications and Media Solutions unit. HPE says Edge Orchestrator can help telcos open another revenue stream besides selling bandwidth packages by allowing them to host applications at the edge for enterprise customers.  

The vision is that providers will use Edge Orchestrator to deploy servers at the edge of their networks or directly inside customer facilities, say corporate offices. Enterprise can then run applications on these servers. Because the hardware sits closer to the customer’s location than a remote public cloud data center, applications benefit from significantly lower latency. 

Edge Orchestrator includes software tools that can be used to provision, configure and provide “general management functions” for edge servers. HPE says the service is hardware-agnostic, enabling providers to create an edge hosting environment using off-the-shelf gear such as the technology giant’s own ProLiant machines. 

Once the environment is set up, a provider’s enterprise customers can deploy their workloads either as virtual machines or containers. Edge Orchestrator provides an app catalog from which a telco’s customers can deploy pre-packaged applications with a “one-click operation,” according to HPE. Each user also receives a private administration console they can use to manage and monitor their hosted workloads.

HPE is positioning Edge Orchestrator as a way for telcos to enter the edge computing business without relying on the major public clouds. This suggests the company may be looking to compete with the carrier edge computing platforms introduced in recent quarters by Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC. Some carriers compete with the three cloud giants in certain areas and using Edge Orchestrator could be an appealing alternative to working with a rival. 

“Telcos will be positioned to compete more effectively with cloud and over-the-top competitors,” HPE’s Mottram said.

Besides giving HPE a new software-as-a-service revenue stream, Edge Orchestrator could also help boost its hardware business. A telco that builds an edge hosting offering on top of Edge Orchestrator is likely to at least strongly consider using HPE servers for the project. 

In addition to commercial product development, HPE’s telco strategy also includes open-source development. The company recently teamed up with Intel Corp., Red Hat Inc. and other partners on an open-source project aimed at simplifying the management of carrier networks that incorporate hardware from different suppliers. 

Edge Orchestrator is expected to become available on July 31.

Photo: HPE