The company announced expanded relationships with AT&T and Vodafone, along with an expanded alliance with Ericsson and a new partnership with T-Systems, all centered on transforming cloud offerings.
Communication service providers will ultimately look to transition to a virtualised telco cloud spanning network and IT to maximize 5G upside while containing risks.
The VMware Telco Cloud platform is optimized for both 4G and 5G – a single architecture that supports both networks – which helps communication service providers get to “5G Ready” faster.
“5G is at a massive inflection point, and planning decisions made today will have far reaching financial and operational ramifications for CSPs going forward,” said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president, strategy and corporate development and general manager, Telco NFV Group, VMware. “By moving away from the inflexible, hardware-defined architectures of the past, and rolling out 5G as a fully-virtualized architecture right out of the gate, telcos will be able to beat competitors to market with new value-added services and improve the performance and operational efficiencies of their networks. VMware today provides the best foundation for the 5G-ready telco cloud.”
Ericsson and VMware have signed a global alliance agreement that will simplify deploying and running a combination of Ericsson applications and VMware’s vCloud NFV platform for CSPs. The alliance agreement solidifies the close cooperation between the two companies, ongoing since 2012, and enables CSPs to accelerate time to revenue for new telco-grade services.
VMware announced new and enhanced solutions spanning the company’s telco portfolio that help ease migration to 5G without sacrificing performance or monetisation of existing networks. These innovations, focused on service assurance and network virtualisation, represent VMware’s commitment to 5G readiness and to helping customers harness the telco cloud.
VMware continues to increase the number of partners that have been certified within the VMware Ready for NFV Certification program. This program provides CSPs with the commitment that VMware partner VNF solutions will seamlessly and effectively deploy, run and interoperate with VMware vCloud NFV. VMware now has certified more than 105 Virtual Network Functions from 85 vendors worldwide. VMware’s broad ecosystem of certified partners creates a true marketplace that helps CSPs remove barriers to successful NFV implementations.
VMware HCX enables CSPs to build hybrid highways interconnecting heritage infrastructure and 5G environments on which commercial OpenStack ecosystem workloads can be migrated to the new distributed, multi-cloud architecture. VMware HCX delivers migration capabilities that can be integrated into Day 1 and Day 2 operations, helping CSPs mobilie the applications to 5G with minimum downtime.