HPE’s new business unit aims to fuel enterprise 5G adoption


Sabina Weston

25 Feb, 2021

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled a new organisation that aims to help telcos and enterprises take advantage of the wide range of opportunities offered by the 5G market.

The newly-formed Communications Technology Group (CTG) was created by combining HPE’s Telco Infrastructure team with its Communications & Media Solutions (CMS) software arm. The latter alone has generated more than $500 million (£355m) of revenue in the fiscal year 2020, with orders growing by 18% and revenue increasing by 6% sequentially in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2020, according to HPE.

CTG comprises over 5,000 professionals who aim to provide consultancy, integration, installation, and support services tailored to the telecoms market.

Commenting on the announcement, CTG SVP and GM Phil Mottram said that “HPE aims to become the transformation catalyst for the 5G economy”, building on “more than 30 years of experience designing, building and tuning telco-grade infrastructure and software”.

“CTG’s founding principle is to drive innovation from edge to cloud through secure, open solutions. We are collaborating with customers and partners to build open 5G solutions that deliver efficiency, reduce risk and complexity, and future-proof the network across the telco core, the radio access network and the telco edge,” he added.

Mottram also unveiled two solutions which he described as foundational to HPE CTG, the first one being the HPE Open RAN Solution Stack, which features the industry’s first Open RAN workload-optimised server – the new HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen10 Plus. The Open RAN Solution Stack aims to enable the commercial deployment of Open RAN at scale in global 5G networks and includes infrastructure with RAN-specific blueprints, as well as orchestration and automation software.

The second “foundational” solution is the HPE 5G Core Stack, first announced in March 2020, which provides telecoms firms with 5G tech at the core of their mobile networks.

CTG’s portfolio is expected to play a crucial part in advancing HPE’s edge-to-cloud platform as a service strategy, providing enterprise and telco solutions alike, such as open, cloud-native, and flexible solutions which aim to facilitate the rollout of 5G services or modular aaS solutions that use cloud economics in order to help businesses manage demand and future-proof their enterprise.

“I am confident that with such a solid foundation and common purpose, we will strengthen our thought leadership in the telecoms sector and are set on a path for innovation and growth,” said Mottram.