In an interview with Telecom Review, Geoff Hollingworth, Head of Product Marketing, IT and Cloud talked about Ericsson's could strategy and its role in the cloud domain.
What is Ericsson's cloud strategy?
The largest internet companies have changed how they buy, build, operate, govern cloud and have created a different outcome and economic system. With Intel we are productizing what they have started to enable the same on private premise where required and interworking with public cloud where beneficial under one governance. We need to bring the same accessibility and economic efficiencies to prepare for the connected everything and ultimately 5G.
What are Ericsson's expectations for the future of cloud?
The future internet will have very different use cases from the current internet as all businesses fully connect all assets. Governance, security, localization, performance are all required pre-requisites when connecting business, or mission, or life critical applications. Given the size of each industrial application and the real-time requirements of the mission critical ones, requires cloud to be distributed throughout the network. The scale of connectivity from what we have today will be 10 to 100x and as such we need to have predictable, accessible, trustworthy infrastructure that continuously takes cost out of the model.
How can the different business benefit from cloud services?
By removing the inherent static nature of digital infrastructure and changing it into a homogeneous set of on demand services that are highly accessible enables business to increase flexibility, lower overhead and thus radically improve economic performance
What are the challenges facing vendors in the cloud domain?
The traditional approach of selling traditional IT is end of life. Incumbent vendors have to adopt the new approach which is sometimes difficult when businesses need to maintain existing margins. Adopt the new way or die.
What are Ericsson's main focus areas in the cloud domain?
We are leading the creation of a new open way to create cloud that is designed for the next generation demands. We are leading this with Intel and Intel Rack Scale Design and have the first commercial product with the Ericsson Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000.
What is Ericsson's current position compared to competition in the cloud domain?
In our existing telecom market we are recognized as the leaders in Network Function Virtualization (NFV), the telecom process for adopting industrialized cloud across the whole network. In the new Intel Rack Scale Design market we are leading with Intel the adoption in the market. As skylake/purely becomes available in the 2nd half of 2017, we see this adoption accelerating across all industries.
