News

VMware, Ericsson Partner for Service Provider Virtualization

• By David Ramel
• 02/21/2019

VMware's vCloud NFV platform, featuring new-age network functions virtualization, is the centerpiece of a new partnership with Ericsson formed to simplify network virtualization for Communication Service Providers (CSP).

The five-year agreement will specifically seek to simplify deploying and running combination implementations of Ericsson applications and VMware's vCloud NFV platform for CSPs. Ericsson is a multinational networking and telecommunications company based in Sweden.

The modular, multi-tenant vCloud NFV platform from VMware provides compute, storage, networking, management and operations capabilities. Generally, NFV is a network architecture putting virtualization to work to foster new classes of network node functions that serve as building blocks for communication services. NFV can be used to define, create and manage networks through the use of software and automation that replaces dedicated network appliances.

"The alliance includes technical collaboration and interoperability testing across Ericsson's portfolio of Virtual Network Functions, Billing and Charging solutions, Automation and Orchestration, with VMware's vCloud NFV platform to provide CSPs with faster, more cost effective and tested virtualized solutions," the companies said in a statement today (Feb. 21). "These solutions are increasingly critical as CSPs move to multi-cloud strategies to streamline costs and optimize resources."

As part of the partnership, the companies established a VNF Certification Lab designed to boost efficiency and reduce time-to-revenue for CSPs by ensuring organizations follow operational best practices for industrialized software deployment.

Today's news was characterized as an expansion of an existing partnership going on six years. "To enable CSPs to efficiently deploy and operate commercial virtualized networks, the two companies engage in technical collaborations e.g. in the Cloud Core and Cloud Communication domain, to jointly help secure optimized performance and platform utilization for high volume workloads" said VMware and Ericsson, noting they already have more than 50 CSPs running live production mobile networks with Ericsson VNFs on a VMware vCloud NFV platform.