Enea Highlights 5G Innovation at Deutsche Telekom Campus Fair 2020
Enea was privileged to have been invited to attend the recent Deutsche Telekom Campus Fair. We may not have been able to attend in person this year due to the pandemic, but nothing was lost in what was a fantastic online event. Thanks to our experience of deploying solutions with tier-1 operators, we were able to highlight the ins and outs of 5G data management, our award-winning cloud-native product suite and the strategies to respond to the emergence of hyperscalers in the race for 5G edge computing.
Cloud-native architecture
Done well, intelligent management of 5G data can open the door to faster monetization with new use cases and increased reliability – not to mention significant savings in OPEX. A cloud-native data management environment, such as the Enea 5G Data Management suite, offers a highly automated, open-architecture ecosystem that can really deliver on the promise of low latency, high performance and interoperability.
Our experts discussed how operators can take advantage of 3GPP Release 16. For the first time there is a demarcation between 5G data and 5G functions. Different network functions on the 5G Core no longer need their own database. They can now tap into a single database that links to a Network Data Layer (NDL). This is something we know is going to be a critical 5G driver and an enabler for use cases in the years to come, and it was great to share our views with fellow innovators, Deutsche Telekom.
Here come the hyperscalers
We also touched on the emerging co-opetition between telcos and hyperscalers in the race for 5G edge computing. Enea shared its secrets to 5G data management – because with an effective 5G data strategy, this can be cooperative competition, given that operators can form mutually beneficial partnerships with webscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. These companies have seemingly endless capital and the knowledge needed to add computing power, memory and storage resources to any system. Yet, operators hold the key to connectivity.
Carriers already have reach, penetration and last-mile connectivity on their side, which is arguably more important than the global presence and capital of big webscalers. The race to 5G isn’t just about capital or speed; there are multiple technological components at play, including computing and network infrastructure, data collection, high bandwidth connectivity, not to mention the role of AI, machine learning, and a cloud data management layer that can tie everything together.
Innovation counts
Both operators and hyperscalers will have to put the integration of these technologies first and foremost in order to simplify the edge ecosystem and take full advantage of it – something Enea is in the privileged and hard-earned position to be able to do.
Deutsche Telekom is an innovator, just like Enea, and it was a pleasure to be invited along to share their platform with the theme “We won’t stop until technology is open”. We hope to do something similar in 2021, where hopefully social distancing is no longer a requirement and we can all meet in person.
