VMware announced expanded relationships with AT&T and Vodafone, along with an expanded alliance with Ericsson and a new partnership with T-Systems.
“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.”
Highlights of the announcements:
- AT&T is working with VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud to implement 5G capabilities into its SD-WAN. The collaboration targets 5G.
- 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.
- T-Systems is providing customers with a managed services offering for VMware Cloud on AWS. Together with its long-standing partner, VMware, the Deutsche Telekom IT service provider is connecting clients’ private clouds with VMware Cloud on AWS.
- Vodafone has expanded its footprint of VMware’s cloud infrastructure to power its network and to capture operational agility and cost efficiency at scale. VMware is Vodafone’s primary strategic partner for telco cloud infrastructure services. VMware’s services are used across Vodafone’s operating markets around the world; they are live in 15 countries, in more than 50 sites, carrying increasing amounts of subscriber traffic on more than 300 core network functions.
VMware also announced new and enhanced solutions across its telco portfolio.
VMware Smart Assurance: provides full integration with VMware vCloud NFV, VMware’s NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) platform, along with new carrier-oriented advancements in VMware NSX-T Data Center. These advancements will give CSPs a strong foundational NFV platform with advanced networking features, accelerated data plane performance, intent-based assurance and support for a broad set of certified VNF applications to deliver multiple services and applications today and bridge the gap to tomorrow’s 5G networks.
Evolution of Networking in vCloud NFV: VMware NSX-T Data Center is a core component of vCloud NFV that provides a software network overlay across the complete NFV infrastructure and supports multiple telco use cases. The new VMware NSX-T 2.4 release delivers even higher levels of cloud-scale, operational simplicity, resiliency, and performance. This includes IPv6 support, near line-rate speed, high availability, and scalability to tens-of-thousands of unique networks per NSX-T Data Center instance. With Network Service Header (NSH)-based service chaining, service providers can deliver new services faster while significantly reducing CapEx and OpEx.
Expanding VMware Ready for NFV Certification 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 Seamless Migration and Multi-Cloud Mobility for the 5G-Ready Telco Cloud: delivers migration capabilities that can be integrated into Day 1 and Day 2 operations, helping CSPs seamlessly mobilize the applications to 5G with minimum downtime. VMware integrated OpenStack (VIO), with VMware’s support for Kubernetes orchestration capabilities complement VMware HCX in delivering easy migration and multi-cloud connectivity.
