Swedish vendor forms global alliance with cloud services giant, teams with Quanta to scale up its cloud hardware platform development and joins the Open Compute Project (OCP).

February 22, 2016

3 Min Read
Ericsson, Amazon Web Services Get Jiggy

Ericsson stuck another badge on its cloud jacket Monday morning with the announcement of a new services development relationship with Amazon Web Services and an agreement to form a joint cloud innovation center with Australian operator Telstra.

Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) says it will work with Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) to help meet service providers' needs for IoT, cloud, analytics and operational transformation, "drive the convergence of mobile infrastructure and cloud and give application developers and service providers new capabilities that accelerate innovation and enrich the Networked Society."

Among the services it expects to develop are: 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; and gateway services for AWS storage services that help service providers meet local regulation and compliance requirements.

The vendor says it will create a team of AWS Cloud experts and open cloud innovation centers with customers: It has already started work in this respect with Telstra Corp. Ltd. (ASX: TLS; NZK: TLS), which will host the first cloud innovation center at its Gurrowa Innovation Lab in Melbourne, Australia.

AWS sees the partnership as an opportunity to help communications service providers (CSPs) get to grips with the cloud opportunities. CSPs "are uniquely positioned to capture the upsides of the cloud adoption wave going on in the market," said Terry Wise, VP of Worldwide Partner Ecosystem at AWS, in a prepared statement. "Ericsson's new Cloud Innovation Centers, leveraging AWS service and expertise, are designed to empower CSPs to accelerate innovation within their organizations and rapidly achieve the agility and cost optimization benefits of using AWS," he added.

The partnership follows Ericsson's leap into the cloud infrastructure market a year ago, when the vendor launched its Hyperscale Datacenter System (HDS) 8000, a modular, scalable and secure integrated storage and compute platform with optical interconnect and component-based lifecycle management that has been developed with another partner, Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC). (See Ericsson, Intel Target Telco Data Centers.)

The HDS 8000 has since been deployed by SK Telecom (Nasdaq: SKM) and Far Eastone and, noted Anders Lindblad, head of Business Unit Cloud and IP at Ericsson, been very well received by many more operators. (See SKT Adopts Ericsson's Telco Cloud Platform .)

Key to the future success of the HDS system will be the ability to "be cost competitive and be able to scale this up," said Lindblad at Ericsson's press and analyst briefing here at MWC Monday morning. To facilitate that, Ericsson has struck a strategic partnership with Taiwanese IT hardware manufacturer Quanta Computer Inc. to scale the design, development and manufacturing of that system.

In tandem with that move, Ericsson has joined the Open Compute Project (OCP) to "drive adoption of data center solutions based on software defined infrastructure and Intel Rack Scale Architecture," the hardware that underpins the HDS 8000.

Quanta Senior VP and General Manager Mike Yang, talking at the Ericsson briefing, noted that he believes CSPs will increasingly deploy standards-based open devices based on specifications such as those developed by OCP.

— Ray Le Maistre, Circle me on Google+ Follow me on TwitterVisit my LinkedIn profile, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading

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