News

Ericsson Enlists AWS for Telecom Service Provider Cloud Transformation

• By David Ramel
• 02/24/2016

Telecom giant Ericsson is teaming up with Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) in a wide-ranging effort to help service providers move to the cloud.

Ericsson, which claims relationships with every major telecom provider, provides services, software and infrastructure products to those customers with an army of some 115,000 professionals. As part of the agreement to help providers leverage the cloud for at least some of their traditional datacenter operations, Ericsson will devote some 25,000 R&D engineers and 66,000 service professionals to help with consulting and system integrations. It expects to undertake 1,500 projects per year.

"Ericsson will leverage AWS' services and expertise to work closely with service providers to implement a cloud adoption framework to fit their unique business objectives," the company said in a statement this week. "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, datacenter consolidation and application migration."

Ericsson said the partnership is designed to help providers increase efficiency and agility, reduce risk and quicken innovation in growing technology areas such as the cloud, mobility, Big Data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT).

New capabilities and offerings expected from the partnership include:

• End-to-end security and data traffic management from mobile networks and on-premises infrastructure to the AWS cloud.
• Trusted cloud and workload management across on-premises infrastructure and the AWS cloud.
• Gateway services for AWS storage services resident at communications service providers, to help maintain local regulation and compliance requirements.

"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," said AWS exec Terry Wise in a statement. "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 organizations and rapidly achieve the agility and cost optimization benefits of using AWS."

The first customer to set up such a Cloud Innovation Center is Telstra, which will set up that shop in Melbourne, Australia.