Amid a period of significant disruption, MWC 2023 in Barcelona brought forward several major trends to watch regarding telcos and transformation.

“In a lot of ways, they’re sort of protecting their existing past from their future, so they have to be careful about how fast they move,” said theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “But at the same time, if they don’t move fast, they’re going to get disrupted.”

TheCUBE was on the ground in Barcelona for coverage of this year’s MWC, formerly Mobile World Congress. The event has grown significantly from focusing on mobile to include virtual reality, artificial intelligence, servers, software and more.

Major players from Dell Technologies, DISH Network, Red Hat, Cisco Systems and more were on-site during the event, bringing with them notable insights during SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the event. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three key insights you may have missed:

1) Carriers are looking for companies that can deliver.

This year’s MWC marked the first iteration of the conference since Dell Technologies Inc. launched its telecom business. It has sought to steer telecom providers away from legacy monolithic structures and shift the conversation to modern, disaggregated telco stacks. As previously reported on SiliconANGLE, the server world is moving from a CPU-centric environment to one that is connect-centric. Meaning companies such as Broadcom Inc., which supply RAID controllers, network interface cards and other key components are increasingly contributing to server performance and cost efficiency.

Service providers, in particular, today are looking for network transformation — driving more disaggregation into their networks so that they can get better utilization of the infrastructure — but to also get more agility and cloud-native characteristics for their network, according to Manish Singh, chief technology officer, telecom systems business, at Dell, during an interview with theCUBE.

“Further on, it’s important for them to really start to accelerate the pace of innovation on the networks itself, to start more supply chain diversity — that’s one of the challenges that they’ve been having,” Singh said. “There has been all of these market forces that have been really getting these service providers to really start to transform the way they have built the infrastructure in the past, which was legacy monolithic architectures, to more cloud-native disaggregated.”

When it comes to working relationships, carriers need someone like Dell who can bring the right capabilities and infrastructure, according to Singh.

“But also bring in the ecosystem together and deliver a performance solution that they can deploy and that they can trust, number one,” he said.

When it comes to cloud, Singh referenced the Dell Telecom MultiCloud Foundation and the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River.

“Think of it as the hardware and the cashier all pre-integrated with a lot of automation around it, factory-integrated, delivered to customers in an integrated model with all the licenses,” he said. “So it starts to solve the day-zero, day-one, day-two integration deployment and then lifecycle management for them.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Manish Singh and Doug Wolff, head of product management, telecom systems business at Dell:

2) Automation at every layer is key.

Three years ago, DISH Network Corp. started a journey to build the nation’s first open Radio Access Network 5G edge infrastructure, partnering with Dell. It was a complex process that, initially, involved a lot of learning from Dell, who would teach DISH what they should expect and what things should look like, according to Sidd Chenumolu, vice president of technology development at DISH Network.

From there, DISH began bringing the telco aspects on top of that.

“It was not like, ‘I’m going to build a 5G.’ We said, ‘No, Dell, tell me, what does the data center look like? Tell me the day-to-day challenges,’” Chenumolu said. “It was like, software first, infrastructure second, now you bring in the telco part of it.”

DISH was doing Open RAN, which was completely new at the time. What was vital moving forward in the process was automation, according to Chenumolu.

“Automation has to be the key for it. We cannot scale a company. We are a startup. This wireless is a startup. That’s how we started with a handful of people,” he said. “We obviously hired a lot of people since then, but we said, ‘We will never be at the scale of the existing CSPs today.’ We can’t. Time is not on our side, and we don’t want to be at that scale anyways, because we want to be nimble, move fast. So what do you need? Automation. Automation at every layer. And it’s a journey that never stops.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Sidd Chenumolu and Song Toh, senior director of product management for infrastructure automation at Dell:

3) Disaggregation is a key focus moving forward.

There has been a lot of evolution at MWC over the years, and Honoré LaBourdette (pictured, right), vice president of global partner ecosystem sales at Red Hat, has seen a lot of it. She’s been to at least 15 iterations of the event. What she has seen as being the most interesting in recent months has been the focus on disaggregation.

“It’s so relative to 5G and the 5G core, and the benefits and the features of 5G core around disaggregation,” she said. “But one thing we have to remember, when you disaggregate, you separate things. You have to bring those things back together again in a different way.”

That has been key to Red Hat’s partnership with Dell, which focuses on bringing those disaggregated components back together in a cohesive way that takes advantage of new technology.

“At the same time, taking out the complexity and making it easier for our telco customers to deploy and to scale and to accelerate the time to revenue,” she said. “What we’re seeing is two things. How do we solve for the complexity with the disaggregation? And how do we leverage the ecosystem as a partner in order to help solve for some of those challenges?”

That train of thought led to the companies recently announcing a new offering aimed at open telecom networks: Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat.

“At the end of the day, things may go wrong, and if they do, who are they going to call for that support?” said Tony Jeffries (pictured), senior director of product management, Telecom System Business, at Dell. “That’s also really a key element of an engineered system … this experience that they get both with Red Hat and with Dell together supporting the customer as one, which is really important to solve this disaggregated problem that can arise from a disaggregated open network situation.”

Of course, people have loyalties in the IT space to certain technologies they have been successful with for years. How might both companies move forward with these new solutions?

“Both Red Hat and Dell have been in the marketplace for a very long time. So we do have the brand with these telco customers for these solutions,” LaBourdette said. “What we’re seeing with this solution is it’s an emerging market. It’s an emerging market for a new technology. There’s an opportunity for both Red Hat and Dell together to leverage our brands with those customers with no friction in the marketplace as we go to market together.”

The companies are essentially co-selling together, according to Jeffries.

“Dell is fulfilling that from an infrastructure perspective, putting Red Hat software on top and the licensing for that support. It’s a really good mix,” he said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Honoré LaBourdette and Tony Jeffries:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of MWC 2023, here’s our complete event video playlist:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for MWC 2023. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the primary sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE