Ericsson is expanding in the US enterprise market with a new virtual workspace service. The Ericsson Wireless Office subscription service will be aimed at at SMEs and distributed by master agent Telarus.
The company sees a potential USD 90 billion market for the services targeting SMBs, which make up around 40 percent of the US workforce. The pay-as-you-go service is designed to remove the need for in-house IT experts and physical network equipment, giving companies virtual work stations in the cloud, including business apps, storage, computing capacity and redundancy. Employees are able to work from anywhere, using any connected device.
The service builds on Ericsson's acquisition last year of Workspace as a Service (WaaS) technology from StratusWorX. In July, Ericsson completed the acquisition of the StratusWorX WaaS Platform technology and patent portfolio.
The launch targets the growing number of remote workers, a trend Ericsson expects to continue even after the pandemic. Small businesses are increasingly interested in this type of 'office in a box' solution to get staff online and working simply. The new Ericsson service is billed as '5G ready', suggesting it may later add other IoT or edge computing services for the enterprise market.
