- As usual, Qualcomm teed up a slew of press releases for MWC
- Qualcomm has talked a lot about AI on device; it’s now ramping up the discourse around AI and the network
- It recently debuted the Dragonwing brand aimed at industrial and enterprise sectors
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, BARCELONA – Given this is Qualcomm’s 40th anniversary, the San Diego chip giant might be feeling like it wants to make a bigger-than-usual splash at this year’s Mobile World Congress.
Enter Dragonwing, a new moniker for enterprise-oriented tech solutions that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Snapdragon, its long-time brand name for consumer-oriented products.
With Dragonwing, Qualcomm is putting an exclamation point on its diversification strategy, highlighting a portfolio that, while not entirely new, is certainly aimed at keeping the Qualcomm name at the forefront of technology when it comes to cutting-edge industrial and enterprise solutions. (And it’s not to be confused with the entirely different and independent backhaul company DragonWave; we’ve already done that and had to correct more than a few pre-post typos.)
Here, the name “Dragonwing” and its logo symbolizes ascension, power and acceleration, according to Qualcomm marketing guru Don McGuire, who introduced it in a blog post last week.
That sounds very “dragon-y” to us.
It also makes us think of the dragons in HBO’s fantasy drama “Game of Thrones” series, not to mention more recently, the dragons mentioned as part of the Hollywood melodrama involving Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. But we digress. (Hey, don’t judge us for getting a little off the subject here; who doesn’t use the 16-hour journey to Barcelona to catch up on stockpiled “People” magazines???)
Alright, back to the program. The new dragon-themed brand marks a significant step in Qualcomm’s journey to “empower new industries and help businesses scale to new heights,” said Ignacio Contreras, VP of Product Marketing at Qualcomm, during a media briefing.
To be sure, Qualcomm continues to raise the bar for connectivity in the device. For example, today it announced the X85 5G Modem-RF sporting 5G Advanced capabilities for Android smartphones, PCs, fixed wireless access points, automotive and XR.
But while Snapdragon offers premium experiences for consumers, “the Dragonwing brand is focused on business transformation,” Contreras said.
“The Dragonwing brand will encompass, or already encompasses, our products for industrial and embedded IoT for wireless networking, such as solutions for Wi Fi access points, and cellular infrastructure offerings, such as those for open RAN,” he said.
Our take
Speaking of open RAN, that’s still very much part of the conversation at Qualcomm even as AI threatens (or promises, depending on how you look at it) to overtake the RAN. Qualcomm’s here to talk about the latest developments in its Dragonwing cellular infrastructure products, including the latest commercial deployments of open RAN with partner operators like NTT DoCoMo in Japan.
But it’s also showcasing the application of AI in the RAN to facilitate management of the overall network. Qualcomm recently (as of late January) joined the AI-RAN Alliance, a consortium that kicked off here at last year’s MWC, with SoftBank and Nvidia leading the way.
Obviously, Qualcomm intends to be very much a part of the whole AI extravaganza.
“One thing that we expect to be a theme at this show is the intersection of connectivity, and of course, artificial intelligence, or AI,” Contreas said. “The context for this is hybrid AI, the notion and understanding that AI workloads, particularly AI inference, will run not just on the cloud or on devices. It will spread across the spectrum, going from AI inference running on the devices themselves, AI running on edge infrastructure and systems, and AI, of course, running on cloud data centers.”
Running AI on each of these areas brings different capabilities and benefits, and at the end of the day, “we need all of them to power the next generation of AI applications that's rising today,” he said.
In other words, AI will be everywhere. Maybe it’s a good time to round up some dragons?
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