Ericsson has revealed plans to form a global business, technology and services alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate cloud transformation for telecoms service providers.
Terms of the deal will see Ericsson establish Cloud innovation centres with service providers, with work already underway with Australian operator ,Telstra, who will host the first Cloud innovation centre in its Gurrowa Innovation Lab in Melbourne, Australia.
“The industry is shifting towards an architecture driven by Cloud economics and flexibility,” says Vish Nandlall, Chief Technology Officer, Telstra.
“Adoption of hybrid clouds requires a secure transmission network linking on-premises to the cloud to provide a chain of custody for mission critical enterprise data.”
In addition, Ericsson is working with AWS to help service providers drive the convergence of mobile infrastructure and cloud, while providing application developers and service providers with new capabilities to accelerate innovation and enrich the Networked Society.
As part of this announcement, Ericsson is creating a global team of experts focused on the AWS Cloud alongside the opening of cloud innovation centres.
Ericsson will contribute expertise from its 25,000 R&D engineers and 66,000-person service workforce - more than 17,000 of whom are consultants and systems integrators, delivering 1,500 projects per year around the world.
“AWS is the world's leader in cloud computing with a highly-reliable, scalable, and secure global infrastructure,” adds Anders Lindblad, Head of Business Unit Cloud & IP, Ericsson.
“Ericsson has always taken great ideas, industrialised them, and made them available in every country.
“Building upon AWS' platform, we will drive new growth opportunities across the service provider industry.”
Cloud framework
Delving deeper, Ericsson will also leverage AWS' services and expertise to work closely with service providers to implement a cloud adoption framework to fit their unique business objectives.
The Ericsson teams will consist of program directors, solutions architects and system engineers who are trained on AWS and Ericsson technologies and bring together deep service provider industry and cloud domain expertise.
AWS is supporting Ericsson in this effort with a broad range of resources that may include solutions architects, professional services and training.
The companies' efforts are designed to accelerate cloud adoption through cloud transformation programs, data centre consolidation and application migration.
“Service providers are seeing explosive growth due to the rapid adoption of mobile applications and IoT, which is driving the need to think differently about infrastructure and ecosystems,” adds Terry Wise, Vice President of Worldwide Partner Ecosystem, Amazon Web Services.
“Communications service providers are uniquely positioned to capture the upsides of the cloud adoption wave going on in the market.
“Ericsson's new Cloud Innovation Centers, leveraging AWS service and expertise, are designed to empower communications service providers to accelerate innovation within their organisations and rapidly achieve the agility and cost optimisation benefits of using AWS.”
Good move?
For Chantel Cary, Research Analyst, Ovum, this partnership puts Ericsson in a good position to become a leading provider of digital transformation for telcos while helping the vendor to reduce the time it takes to deploy new systems.
“As the industry shifts towards more cost-efficient delivery models, such as public cloud, having the support of a trusted and secure public cloud provider such as AWS further strengthens Ericsson’s capabilities,” Cary says.
Cary says Ericsson aims to leverage AWS’s cloud to reduce the time required for digital transformation projects for telcos.
“The vendor will also use AWS to extend its cloud transformation services and infrastructure portfolio,” Cary adds.
“Ericsson will create a global team to focus on the AWS partnership and plans to open several cloud innovation centres with customers.”
