HPE and Qualcomm to Partner

The Six Five team discussed the HPE and Qualcomm partnership.

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Transcript:

Patrick Moorhead: Let’s move into a very similar announcement. That’s a partnership between HPE and Qualcomm. Now, before I dive into this, I do want to mention that Dell technologies and Marvell had a very similar type of partnership between them, where Dell was creating an ORAN, vRAN solution, that’s very similar to this one between HPE and Qualcomm. But the nuts and the bolts of this agreement is that HPE is combining one of their racks with a Qualcomm card. And let me see if I can find the name of it, the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN accelerator card with a HPE ProLiant DL110 telco server, in a very similar place.

So hopefully when you think about Dell getting into this and HPE getting into this with silicon providers and card providers like Qualcomm and Marvell, you can see where this is going. And I think you can see where this is going even more clearly, if you look at what the past was. And that was very proprietary RAN cards, primarily by vendors like Ericsson and Nokia and Samsung.

So with HPE and Dell Tech coming in here really leading in ORAN, I think this is a really good position for them. Dare I say the word it’s a little bit more commoditized of a market. And that’s where primarily Dell does really well, but HPE does well as well. For those wondering, hey, HPE and carrier, what the heck are you talking about? HPE is very, very locked into the carrier market.

In fact, in Western Europe, they have a bunch of, essentially, carrier-as-a-service deals at the core. And I think what you’re going to see HPE do is do a bunch more stuff on the edge. Aruba plays into this, and as far as I’m concerned, from the network and the carrier side, you’ve got HPE at the core, you’ve got it at the RAN, and then on the implementation with Aruba on the deep edge.

Hopefully, you’re all seeing that we weren’t lying upfront when we gave our, what we expect on MWC 22. And the great part is we’re seeing some of these announcements before MWC. Yeah, wait, why are we going to MWC again, Daniel, if there’s all these announcements now?

Daniel Newman: So we can shake hands and eat Jamon.

Patrick Moorhead: Sorry to put you on the spot here. And I also wanted to give some props to Dell Tech and Marvell that, quite frankly, have a very, very similar partnership going on at the same time. The big difference here between Qualcomm and Marvell is Marvell owns RAN. It was kind of cool when Marvell kind of snuck out the vRAN and ORAN stuff. I don’t think people were expecting it. I think they expected Marvell to stick to their guns and really lean into what they went at.

Daniel Newman: Marvell’s been a real success story in so many different ways. And I know it didn’t end up on the topic, because it’s the six five, and we’d had these, and that would’ve made the seventh, but, yeah, there is a shout out. There’s going to be a lot more of these kinds of partnerships though. I think that is the way we can describe this. You’re seeing chip makers, established chip makers, infrastructure makers, and saying, “Hey, if we’re going to virtualize this thing, it’s going to take a little bit of the best of all of us. It’s going to take software. It’s going to take hardware. It’s going to take chips.” Pat, you can’t run this stuff on air. You know what I mean? So you got to have the semi companies. I got that from you.

Patrick Moorhead: Thanks for the props, dude. You normally give me no credit, but you did this time.

Daniel Newman: I always give you credit.

Patrick Moorhead: I know, buddy. I’m just pulling your chain.

Daniel Newman: I almost always give you credit. And by the way, when I tweeted about Dell yesterday, I took your tweet and kind of just edited it a little bit.

Patrick Moorhead: Thank you, appreciate that.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. You know what? There’s nothing wrong, people put dumb titles on their LinkedIn, like growth hacker. That’s actually, growth hacking, is how do you more efficiently get stuff done? Well, sometimes someone’s all already said the exact same thing you’re trying to say, so the difference between reporting and analysis is I took the report data, and I put my own analysis around it, and that’s what you do. And that’s what good analysts do. We don’t need to share the earnings highlights, because that’s actually in the press release. We need to actually say, “What does this mean? And why shouldn’t anybody care?”

Anyway is going back to the HPE, Qualcomm 5G partnership. I’ve been watching HPE’s telco business, actually on both the Marvell piece and the HPE piece, you’ll see Futurum analysts, Ron Westfall has actually wrote a research note on both. So if you want to dive deeper, I will give you a little bit more there. But what we’re seeing is purpose built edge computing. And we’re seeing it built with some best of breed technology through a partnership. And right now, if you’re in 5G, you really can’t go wrong partnering with Qualcomm. You just can’t. It is where you want to be, when it comes to connectivity.

And so I really won’t be surprised kind of the way you saw Intel inside PCs to be seeing Qualcomm in inside a lot of virtualization and open RAN technologies going forward. So maybe I’ll be wrong, but I expect to be right.

Patrick Moorhead: Buddy, good adder there. I didn’t know you guys did a paper on that. Congratulations.

Daniel Newman: We write about everything.

Patrick Moorhead: You’re an equal opportunity writing. I get that. I get that. I might even go read it. We’ll see. Oh, maybe not.