World Wide Technology Opens New Service Provider Center of Excellence to Accelerate 5G Deployments

ST. LOUIS, MO — February 21, 2020 — World Wide Technology (WWT), a $12 billion systems integrator helping service providers more effectively consume and monetize next-generation technology, and Dell Technologies are opening a new Center of Excellence to create replicable solution blueprints that will accelerate the deployment of complex, multi-vendor, open source solutions for the service provider industry. 

The solution blueprints will be built on top of an optimized Dell Technologies infrastructure stack and be demonstrated in WWT's Advanced Technology Center (ATC), a one-of-a-kind testing and validation facility equipped with roughly $1 billion in hardware and software. The Center of Excellence will tap into WWT's capabilities as a Dell Technologies' Titanium Black Partner and launch with a focus on mobile edge computing (MEC), industry-specific IoT, telco cloud, data analytics and network function virtualization (NFV).

To thrive in a 5G world, service providers must re-architect their networks and change the way those networks are deployed and operated to better meet the rapidly changing needs of their customers. Service providers using the Center of Excellence will be able to more quickly deploy new revenue-generating services by leveraging the customizable solution blueprints that will be validated in the ATC before being integrated and deployed at scale anywhere in the world through WWT's global integration facilities. 

"As businesses continue to work at unparalleled speeds, organizations must identify ways to simplify and streamline their existing and new networks," said Kevin Shatzkamer, vice president, Dell EMC Enterprise and Service Provider Strategy & Solutions. "This center of excellence brings together the best of Dell Technologies and WWT to rapidly deploy solutions at scale and reduce the complexity for service providers, allowing them to focus on their core business." 

Customers utilizing the Center of Excellence will have complete access to a rich portfolio of blueprint demonstrations, proofs-of concept and labs-as-a-service to quickly validate solutions before deployment. These validated solutions can then be integrated, staged and deployed at scale through WWT's global integration facilities, located strategically in St. Louis, Amsterdam, Singapore and Mumbai.

"Service providers are focused on creating new revenue streams and decreasing their time to achieve that revenue," said Joe Wojtal, CTO of WWT's Global Service Provider organization. "The WWT/Dell COE will enable service providers to more easily consume the underlying infrastructure required to deploy new services allowing them to be more agile in creating those new services." 

In addition to building blueprints with technology delivered by traditional vendors, the Center of Excellence will work with the open source community to create blueprints based on a combination of open source and traditional vendor technologies. As an example, the Center of Excellence is hosting a bare metal continuous integration (CI) lab supporting the Openstack Foundation's Airship project (www.airshipit.org). 

Airship is a collection of loosely coupled but interoperable open source tools that declaratively automate cloud provisioning. Airship is a robust delivery mechanism for organizations who want to embrace containers as the new unit of infrastructure delivery at scale. Starting from raw bare metal infrastructure, Airship manages the full lifecycle of data center infrastructure to deliver a production-grade Kubernetes cluster with Helm deployed artifacts, including OpenStack-Helm. Airship allows operators to manage their infrastructure deployments and lifecycle through the declarative YAML documents that describe an Airship environment. The lab will establish a stable Airship reference environment which the community can use to test new code submissions. One of Airship's joint developers and supporters is AT&T.

"The creation of this new Airship lab in collaboration with WWT, Dell and Intel will go a long way to helping the Airship community deliver its 2.0 release, which aims to fully embrace Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects and further simplify open infrastructure bare metal deployments," said Ryan van Wyk, vice president of Network Cloud at AT&T. "Airship accelerates SDN deployments by removing complexity. Our Network Cloud team at AT&T intends to integrate the outputs from this and similar facilities into a release that will support Cloud Native Network Functions."

About World Wide Technology
World Wide Technology (WWT) is a technology solution provider with more than $12 billion in annual revenue that provides digital strategy, innovative technology and supply chain solutions to large public and private organizations around the globe. While most companies talk about delivering business and technology outcomes, WWT does it. Based in St. Louis, WWT employs more than 6,000 people and operates approximately 4 million square feet of warehousing and integration space in more than 20 facilities throughout the world.  

For more information about World Wide Technology, visit  www.wwt.com.
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