Dell expands its Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab program, adds new participating partners

The telecom industry is moving into the cloud-native world, and Dell Technologies Inc. recently unveiled two initiatives to make that process easier.

The company announced an expansion of its Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, located in Round Rock, Texas, to include enhanced partner self-certification capabilities. Dell will also open another telecom lab facility in Cork, Ireland.

“Carriers [need] to see the path going from a closed system to an open system,” said Tibor Fabry-Asztalos (pictured, left), senior vice president of telecom systems and product engineering at Dell Technologies. “We’re looking at playing a key role with the … Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, where we take these pieces of the open ecosystem, combine them, validate them and provide the pipeline to the customer.”

Fabry-Asztalos spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at MWC 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Gautam Bhagra (right), vice president of strategic partnerships at Dell, and they discussed the company’s key announcements during MWC 2023. (* Disclosure below.)

Simplifying disaggregation

In addition to the expansion of OTEL, Dell also announced a major telecom partner initiative during MWC. New collaborations with technology partners include Juniper Networks, Nokia, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Samsung and Amdocs. Telecom partners and communications service providers will come together at the Ecosystem Lab to simplify today’s disaggregated telecom landscape.

“We have created some really good strategic partnerships with key providers … and there’s a lot more in the pipeline,” Bhagra said. “We want to grow the impact of the ecosystem, and that’s why we are launching the partner community as well to make that happen.”

The move by the telecom industry to develop open technology solutions is reminiscent of the exploratory move by risk-averse banks into cloud over the past decade.

“Nine years ago, no one at a bank was thinking about applications that would run on the cloud,” Bhagra said. “It was like a side project — they’ll try and test something, see if it works, and then they’ll think about cloud in the future. Now core applications on banks are actually being built on public cloud. We see the same happening with telco operators as well.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MWC 2023 event:

(* 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