Ericsson Plans to Take Its Carrier Customers Shopping on Amazon

It isn’t just the big telecommunications carriers that are seeing the future in other people’s clouds, its their own vendors too.  Ericsson today unveiled plans to ally with Amazon’s AWS as part of the next generation of the backoffice and operations support it supplies to carriers worldwide.

Ericsson is aiming to help its network operator customers to leverage the cloud for their own systems, and specifically Amazon’s cloud services as opposed to anything more home grown.  They are putting significant resources into simplifying the task of using AWS to power internal systems while still satisfying all the various national government regulations on data etc.  They want to ‘industrialize’ that capability, and of course then sell the services needed to build and maintain the next generation of systems used by carriers to manage their business and networks.

The first carrier to sign on to Ericsson’s new cloud-powered panacea is Australia’s Telstra, which will be hosting the first of Ericsson’s cloud innovation centers in the Currowa Innovation Lab in Melbourne.

At the moment, beyond the fact that Ericsson is planning to push AWS on carriers themselves, today’s announcements are still mostly just a collection of buzzwords and potential developments.  The real applications will presumably come later on.

But it’s also another data point along the path for telcos and the cloud where the bulk of the opportunity seems to have been lost to the likes of Amazon, Google, and others of their ilk.  Various large telecommunications providers have been linked to rumors looking for the exits for their own data center and cloud infrastructure forays.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · ILECs, PTTs