Ericsson And Canonical Team Up On Network Function Virtualisation

Steve McCaskill,
network fibre surveillance data pipes abstract © kentoh Shutterstock

Two companies hope to combine networking, cloud and open source strengths to help telcos make jump to NFV

Ericsson and Canonical have agreed a three year Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) partnership, claiming their respective strengths in networking, cloud and open source can help drive cloud innovation and create new, scalable services for enterprises and communication firms.

NFV technology can replicate many hardware components using software to make it easier and cheaper to scale and upgrade infrastructure while also allowing telcos to roll out new services more rapidly.

The two partners claim 90 percent of all communications firms plan to use NFV in some degree to modernise their infrastructure and believe there is a huge opportunity given that Ericsson-built networks carry 40 percent of the world’s mobile traffic and are used by 2.5 billion users.

NFV partnership

HPIt is hoped that by combining Ericsson’s network expertise and Canonical’s background in cloud and open source, the two firms can make more businesses and service providers aware of the benefits of NFV and OpenStack-based cloud technologies.

“Ericsson’s experience in telecommunications and enterprise means we can innovate together around the next generation of cloud solutions for the network,” said John Zannos, vice president of cloud alliances at Canonical. “Companies are struggling to automate, reuse and simplify the deployment of applications and services on clouds, our Partnership with Ericsson will work to help customers overcome these challenges.”

The deal will also see Ericsson use Ubuntu server OS to power its own cloud services and internal data centres, claiming the platform is the market’s “number one choice” for scale-out cloud platforms.

“Cloud Platforms for the network have to be secure, resilient, robust and high performing,” said Magnus Furustam, head of Product Area Cloud Systems at Ericsson. “Working together, Ericsson and Canonical plan to align engineering, product, and go-to-market efforts to drive the adoption of OPNFV and OpenStack based cloud technologies broadly across both telecommunication providers, where support for NFV implementations is critical, and large enterprises that are seeking to deploy the latest cloud and virtualisation technologies.”

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