MWC 2016: Ericsson And AWS Enter Cloud Partnership For Telcos

Ericsson wants its customers become more efficient and productive by adopting cloud technologies based on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Announced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, it is claimed the wide-ranging partnership will help telecoms providers move applications to the cloud, consolidate data centre infrastructure by making use of the public cloud, and transforming business processes.

Customers will be supported with teams of Ericsson and AWS experts, while the new partners will also jointly develop new services such as cloud-based end-to-end security and data traffic management for mobile networks and other infrastructure.

Ericsson cloud

Strengthening this aim will be ‘cloud innovation centres’, opened by Ericsson and its telco partners. The first such facility will be in Melbourne, Australia with Telstra.

“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 Terry Wise, vice president of Worldwide Partner Ecosystem at AWS. “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 Centres, 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.”

Strengthening this cloud push is the news that Ericsson has also joined the Open Compute Project (OCP) to drive the adoption of data centre technology based on the firm’s software-defined infrastructure and Intel Rack Scale infrastructure.

Ericsson also wants to help mobile networks take advantage of the popularity of over the top (OTT) services with the launch of OTT Cloud Connect – an open cloud platform that promises to make it easier for operators to deliver multiple OTT services to users. Google is one of the first partners to sign up.

“We believe initiatives like these will accelerate innovation between operators and OTT providers, and we look forward to working with operators on new features and services to users,” said Jay Akkad, senior product manager on the YouTube emerging markets team.

What do you know about UK mobile operators? Find out with our quiz!