As carriers race towards virtualization, software-defined networking and increasingly complex back office IT platforms, they will increasingly engage with suppliers from the data center world. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and others are already very familiar to them, but now there will be a new powerhouse, if Dell’s record-breaking $67bn takeover of storage supplier EMC goes through. The deal will give Dell an end-to-end play for cloud and telco providers, as well as enterprises, encompassing servers, storage and virtualization, and it will pose a very interesting alternative for MNOs to set against the claims of Ericsson and Huawei, as well as the IT giants. This is at a time when the infrastructure space is ripe for the kind of disruption Dell brought,…