MWC25: Andrew Border Shares HPE AI Strategy for Telco Growth

HPE unveiled its edge-focused AI implementation strategy at MWC25, concentrating on distributed computing frameworks that enable communications service providers to develop revenue streams through network intelligence and automation.

Speaking with us at the event, Andrew Border, Vice President Product Management - Telco Solutions Group at HPE Aruba Networking, shared with us the company’s main focus moving forward.

“The whole show has been a buzz with everything to do with AI,” he says. “This is an area that HPE is particularly focused on - really making AI deployable and something that can be consumable and help service providers change the trajectory of their businesses.”

5G and WiFi: Creating one network solution

Andrew shares how the company is combining Private 5G and WiFi networks through unified management platforms to confront connectivity challenges. This is fundamental to HPE's strategy, as the company considers how to best support future networks and customers.

“What we're focusing on is how we can really blend Private 5G networking with WiFi and being able to manage that all from one console,” says Andrew. “We see that as a great opportunity for being able to deliver connectivity in really complex use cases.”

He adds: “Being able to blend WiFi and Private 5G through Aruba Central, as one network solution, we think is really compelling.”

HPE announced during the congress that OREX, an NTT subsidiary, selected its Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) solution to function as the core component in its Open RAN implementation.

“OREX is bringing a new Open RAN solution to market and effectively acting as a system integrator,” Andrew explains. “They have chosen HPE’s SMO solution as the core SMO for that offering, so I’m very pleased about that.

The Open RAN architecture represents a core product area within Andrew's responsibility at HPE, specifically from an operations support system perspective. The architecture fundamentally centres on flexibility and vendor choice.

“It’s about being able to combine a solution from multiple vendors - it’s not about having vendor lock-in, it’s about being able to build the best solution for a modern 5G Standalone network,” he shares.

“We have a whole software suite that is designed to deliver the SMO capability, which is really critical to be able to deploy different radio access networks, different compute and also the core network as well.”

Bringing AI to the Edge

As the telecommunications industry focuses more on what AI means for them, Andrew is eager to point out that the focus must be on delivering concrete business value with applications of the technology. 

“There's a lot of talk [at MWC] around AI,” he says. “A lot of the customers we are talking to are looking to understand the use cases that can really generate business value and return.

“If we think about what's going on with service providers, they all need to be able to show new revenue streams and show that they can bring services to market much quicker and more cost efficiently. And AI has a very clear role to play in that.”

As part of this, HPE is working with a Middle Eastern service provider to deliver insights with the power of AI. 

“You could do this from a human intervention point of view, but it would take you so long to develop the use cases and understand those network conditions,” Andrew says. “By applying these AI techniques, you can deal with those scenarios and discover 10 other scenarios that the network operator wasn't even really aware of was a problem in their network.”

For HPE, the company expects to see a continuing trend around how the industry can make AI more scalable and deliver myriad benefits to designing modern networks.

“It’s really thinking about how we can support service providers and enterprises - and the people building modern data centres - to put everything they’re doing around AI in the right part of the network.

“For us, it's being able to extend AI out to the edge and then scaling that right through to the data centre.

“That's a huge challenge, but we also think that's where the promise of AI is and we're very committed over the next year to continue working on that.”

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