The next generation of mobile connectivity will transform the world, said VMware’s Shekar Ayyar in a VMWorld keynote address. He tells ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK how and why.
It was a
bold statement. “5G is about to transform the world,” said VMware executive
vice president Shekar Ayyar in a keynote address during the recent VMworld
conference, held virtually for the first time.
The event
introduced, also for the first time, a track dedicated to telco 5G because,
said CEO Pat Gelsinger in his opening remarks, “service providers are at the
intersection of so much right now”.
Ayyar, who is also VMware’s general manager for telco and edge cloud, spelled it out: “We knew 5G would change our world, but we didn’t predict how much it would be accelerated by these unexpected circumstances as service providers invest in 5G. We are at the dawn of a new era filled with promise, and opportunity.
“5G,
supported by digital technologies, is about to transform the way we live, work,
and play. 5G is providing communication service providers the chance to
reinvent themselves, with new customer relationships, new partnerships, new
business models and revenue and the opportunity to become a leading innovator
in technologies of the future.”
After the keynote, we caught up with Shekar to drill down into just how and why 5G will change the world.
“Many
catalysts are coming together, somewhat fortuitously. If you look at the
combination of wireless and wireline technology, people are looking at fibre
and wireless and spectrum all in the same way. There’s a lot of activity in
terms of how centralised computing is now going to become much more distributed
and towards the edge (of the network).
“If you
look at the dis-aggregation of the communications network, we now have a
transition where people can intersperse their own applications on top. On the
device side, software-driven architectures are going to take simple SIM cards
on phones and make it much more. You could potentially have like four carriers
on your phone and you could switch between them on an hour-to-hour or minute-by-minute
basis.”
This will
make for a more dynamic and agile infrastructure, allowing tremendous
innovation in what applications can be built and delivered on top of the mobile
network. It will have an impact on video-conferencing, gaming, and numerous
other enterprise and consumer applications that can benefit from rich bandwidth
and low latency, such as industrial automation and artificial intelligence.
“This is
all now a set of things that people know are going to get transformed and we
have just begun the process. But, equally, there’s a whole bunch of things that
are unknown.
“If I were
to give you a platform and say, go create whatever you can, because you can now
access the geolocation information of people in a particular geography, and you
can combine that with information around what they are doing from the
standpoint of security, and then the information that you have in terms of the
priority of their use around different types of applications… the potential is
immense.
“It could
literally change the face of how people do their retail shopping; it could
change the face of how people communicate with their doctors; how they are engaging
with their co-workers.”
That may sound
a lot like the language people use when they talk about digital transformation and
how it is already changing the world. The question is, do the two go hand in
hand? Does the one support each other, or are they separate trajectories that
will coalesce, and have an even greater impact on the consumer and the
workspace?
Watch the full interview here to get Shekar’s in-depth insight into the shape of the future: https://youtu.be/sDHfylAByAk
You can also listen to the interview as a podcast, on any of the following platforms:
