When it comes to the edge and 5G, things are moving from the theoretical to actual reality. And as important transformations happen across the technology industry, Intel Corp.’s 25-year-old history of partnership with Red Hat Inc. is helping to meet these challenges head on with advanced software-defined infrastructure platforms that improve agility and flexibility.

“Our customers and that developer community need us to go together because … of the combination of our hardware work and the open-source software work that we do with Red Hat,” said Lisa Spelman (pictured), vice president and general manager of Intel Xeon products and data center marketing at Intel. “And we see that every year increasing in value as we expand to more workloads and more market segments that we can help with our technology.”

Spelman spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. They discussed 5G, edge computing, and artificial intelligence in regards to Intel and Red Hat’s partnership. (* Disclosure below.)

Entering a brave new world of 5G, edge computing, AI

When it comes to 5G starting to be deployed and transformed, there is a bunch of underlying work that Intel and Red Hat have done together in order to make that a reality. This has been a project years in the making for both companies.

“What we’ve done is drive to have the virtualization capabilities that took over and provided so much value in the cloud data center also apply to the 5G network,” Spelman said. “So the move to network function virtualization and software-defined networking and … to run that on open-source standard — and have that open-source community really come together to make it easier and faster to deploy those technologies — it’s really starting to take off.”

As the edge becomes the point of content creation where actions happen, then compute capabilities become more important on the edge, according to Spelman. Intel and Red Hat have tried to look at things in a holistic manner as multiple types of industries look to automation and AI to help out each customer and what they might need.

“It’s rooted in what our customers need,” Spelman said. “That desire to utilize the cloud to improve their capabilities and services but also maintain that capability inside their own house as well so that they have really viable work load transformation, they have opportunities for their total cost of ownership, and they can fundamentally use technology to drive their business forward.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE