Michael Dell is famous for saying, “Cloud is not a place; it’s a way of doing IT,” and the ways of “doing” information technology are changing as rapidly as the industry itself. As the lines between solutions blur, the decision-making process becomes less of a choice between A and B, and more of an open buffet where a customer can select from a variety of options.

“I think more and more what we’re seeing is a transition to an ‘and’ environment,” said Kevin Shatzkamer (pictured), vice president of service provider solutions and strategy at Dell Technologies Inc. “The cloud is just a whole bunch of different places, and we’re going to move services, and applications and workloads to the locations that are best able to meet the subscriber experience and deliver on what the applications expect.”

Shatzkamer spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the evolution of network infrastructure, including the introduction of 5G for enterprise networking and “internet of things” applications. (* Disclosure below.)

Stepping up to 5G network solutions

Over 20 years in the computing service industry, Shatzkamer has seen a constant trend toward more open technologies: “During the entire time, what we’ve continued to witness is continued move away from proprietary more towards open technologies, obviously moving away from proprietary hardware appliances, more towards x86-based appliances, the networking stacks moving more and more open,” he said.

Back in 2012, software-defined networking and network function virtualization were at the forefront of wireless networking. Now, as the industry prepares to move to fifth-generation wireless systems, Shatzkamer sees “disillusionment” with network functions virtualization with challenges in operating at scale, while software-defined networking has been “confined to sitting within the data center for interconnecting servers and building overlay technologies for the data centers.”

Incrementally adjusting to 5G will not be practical, according to Shatzkamer, who predicted “an absolute step function in terms of performance, in terms of reliability, in terms of reduction in latency, all at a drastically different cost economics.”

Large cloud-based providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and others have developed around massively scaled centralized data centers. However, this has caused unpredictability problems for highly interactive, data-driven, low-latency services when the users and applications are far apart, Shatzkamer explained. Solving this means focusing more services on the edge.

“So I think that the number one iteration, the number one innovation that we will see in the networks is the innovation at the edge … we’ll see the edge become the new cloud,” Shatzkamer stated.

To service the anticipated demand for edge, Dell EMC has introduced the Virtual Edge Platform 4600. “[It is] the industry’s first Skylake-D platform specifically targeting the access of branch edge,” Shatzkamer said. “I think that going forward, the end goal of the programmability that we talk about, both at the application layer as well as at the infrastructure layer, means that the boundaries between what’s a server and what’s a network device really start to blur,” he predicted.

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 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE