With 5G still in its nascent phase, the enterprise at large is still unraveling new capabilities and value areas.

As stakeholders such as visionary startups, investors, technical experts and industry leaders work to build what’s next, the 5G Open Innovation Lab LLC is empowering that vision by creating a development-focused ecosystem around them.

“We incubate; we’re the connectors and builders of a network,” said Scott Waller (pictured, right), chief technology officer of 5G Open Innovation Lab. “We’ve had 101 startups over the last three years, and they’ve raised over a billion dollars. And it’s really valuable to our partners like T-Mobile and Dell.”

Waller and Warren Jackson (left), edge gateway specialist at Dell Technologies Inc., spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and David Nicholson at MWC 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the lab’s defining purpose, especially in applying 5G to enterprise edge computing use cases. (* Disclosure below.)

Harnessing the edge to create simple, cost-efficient solutions

Edge capabilities can serve a versatile range of needs across most industries. Encapsulating that is the example of a Framingham-based brewery that transformed its fermentation process by employing digital monitoring at the edge to get ahead of things, according to Waller.

“Somebody was walking around with a clipboard looking at analog gauges,” he said. “We digitized that process, allowing them to be proactive. So, anytime, anywhere on the tablet or a phone, they can see if that fermentation process is going out of range and do something about it before the batch gets scrapped.”

Keeping the data on the industrial side of the network is critical, and so is the collection and analysis of that data with hardware such as Dell’s Edge Gateway boxes, according to Jackson.

“It’s designed to be deployed at the edge in harsh environments, and it allows customers to do analytics and data collection at the edge,” he said. “What’s unique is that it’s got an extended temperature range. There’s no fan in this, and there are lots of ports on it for data ingestion.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MWC 2023 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for MWC 2023. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the primary sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE