Ericsson and Cisco have announced a number of new joint customer engagements and offerings, building on their next-generation strategic partnership announced in November 2015.
The two companies will collaborate with Intel to develop what they expect will be the industry’s first next-generation 5G router for business and residential services. As members of the Verizon 5G Technology Forum, Cisco, Ericsson and Intel are partnering with Verizon within an ecosystem to accelerate the pace of critical 5G innovations.
Ericsson and Cisco are also accelerating work on their joint go-to-market models and sales force training, and are making progress with their tactical planning and global resource build-up. The company will also pursue collaborations, in parallel, in six strategic areas: IP core, fixed cable broadband access, business VPN, mobile backhaul, IP transformation services and IP & IT managed services, as well as smart cities, with the potential to collaborate on Internet of Things (IoT) technology development.
Ericsson also introduced the Ericsson Dynamic Service Manager, a new product for real-time management of network services via multiple technology and vendor domains. The Dynamic Service Manager will initially focus on multi-vendor mobile backhaul, IP core, and enterprise VPNs. It brings together Ericsson's leadership in OSS and Cisco's expertise in IP and optical for the cost-effective management of complex network services. The product will become generally available in the second half.
Beyond these partnership developments, the two companies have also signed a joint intellectual property rights agreement, as well as a professional services agreement. The professional services agreement will leverage a combination of 66,000 Ericsson and 11,000 Cisco services employees to provide consulting, systems integration, support and managed services across IT and networks in 180 countries.
As part of a cooperation encompassing intellectual property, the two parties also launched the Ericsson Dynamic Service Manager. The product enables service providers to dynamically configure, monitor and optimize the network resources available to applications in multi-vendor, multi-domain network environments. It brings together Ericsson's leadership in OSS and network management and Cisco's complementary expertise in IP and focuses on multi-vendor mobile backhaul, IP core, and enterprise VPNs.
The system features pre-integration with Ericsson and Cisco network devices and domain management solutions and a rich set of tools that facilitates services and for proactive resolution of potential problems, before customers experience them. By leveraging advanced capacity planning, policy management and SDN capabilities, the productallows for a high degree of automated network service change management with near real-time characteristics.
At Mobile World Congress, Ericsson will demonstrate use cases for Ericsson Dynamic Service Manager that illustrate the complete lifecycle of a typical network service that originates as a business request. General availability of this product is expected in second half of this year.
