AWS for Industries
Ericsson and AWS Partner to Support CSPs on Their Journey to Cloud BSS
Communication service providers (CSPs) are looking more and more into the cloud as a source of innovation to increase agility and efficiency at the same time. Ericsson and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are joining forces to deliver on such demand by offering the Ericsson business support systems (BSS) portfolio on AWS.
There’s never been a more exciting time to work in telecoms. New and emerging technologies continue to shake up our industry, pushing us to act faster, collaborate better and work smarter. 5G, the edge, IoT, microservices, CI/CD, and open APIs are transforming the role of CSPs and our industry as we know it. One crucial technology underpinning this digital transformation is the cloud.
CSPs are increasingly looking to leverage the benefits that cloud platforms provide, and as a result, new partnership ecosystems are being galvanized in the telecoms industry. Ericsson is a key player in the telco technology provider space and I’m pleased to share that we recently extended our long-term partnership with them to certify Ericsson’s mission-critical Telecom BSS product portfolio on AWS. This provides an additional option for our customers who are embarking, or are already on their cloud BSS journey, and want to take advantage of AWS offerings. Our combined capability enables CSPs to leverage an agile systems environment to accelerate their digital transformation and launch new innovative services.
Fireside Chat: Visit Ericsson Telecom BSS on May 26 to view a fireside chat where I’ll be discussing this relationship and what it means for our customers further with Mats Karlsson, Head of Solution Area BSS, Business Unit Digital Services, at Ericsson. Please mark your calendars so you don’t miss out (add to your Google Calendar | Outlook Calendar)! You can find out more from Karlsson in Ericsson’s blog post here.
Putting the Power of the Cloud in Context
However, let’s take a step back for a minute: why should you embark on a cloud transformation journey?
The capabilities that cloud platforms offer are instrumental in helping CSPs accelerate their digital transformations and to take advantage of cloud native software, like the Ericsson BSS product portfolio. Infrastructure-as-a-Code, automatic scaling, and managed cloud services – used in conjunction with new innovations such as AI/ML, serverless computing, and high performance computing – allow CSPs to react faster to customer demands and reduce the burden of heavy lifting activities on operations and development teams. With cloud capabilities, CSPs can focus their energy on offering innovative new 5G services and monetizing them as quickly as possible. At the same time as enabling better resource utilization, leveraging the cloud offers the potential to optimize capital expenditure, operational expenditure, and total cost of ownership.
However, every CSP has their own business and operational transformation journey. Every CSP has existing technology investments to deliver a ROI against. Unlocking the full benefits of cloud-native software and cloud technologies requires a serious strategy. So, where are our customers today?
Five Things You Need to Consider on Your Journey to the Cloud
Many of the biggest challenges for large organizations to move to the cloud aren’t technical, they’re about people and culture. The biggest differences between organizations that talk about moving to the cloud, and those that actually do it, and are having the most success often comes down to a few key things:
First, the senior leadership team needs to be aligned and truly committed that they want to move to the cloud. And they need to be setting clear direction and expectations with the rest of the organization to get everyone on the same page and working towards the same thing. It’s easy for others to do nothing or block things if the leadership team isn’t making the move a priority and building a culture for change. The most successful organizations moving to the cloud started with an aggressive top-down goal that forced the organization to move faster than it would have organically.
Second, it’s important that organizations are trained on the cloud and comfortable with the concepts as part of the whole process. We train hundreds-of-thousands of people a year for that purpose. It is key to have the proper skill set and operational processes to be able to get the most out of the modern software running on AWS. Concepts like DevOps, CI/CD, elasticity, and serverless computing require not only a competence ramp up but maybe even more important, a true understanding on how to operate and how to be organized to effectively leverage on them. Availability of tools, educational plans, and experts to consult and to walk the journey with you are major factors to be considered.
Third, speed is important in business and complexity is one of the worst enemies! Do not try to boil the ocean. Rather, go in smaller steps, identifying your key technology partners that have the right skills, products, experience, and have a step-wise approach in migrating to the cloud, planning and launching each application in a controlled way, getting traction and speed as you grow. This strategy allows short-term benefits to materialize and sets the pace and cadence for the full execution, giving the people and organizations the time to learn, streamline the processes, and improve over time. Likewise, your benefit intake from the cloud will follow a similar path: select a set of applications, decide how to migrate (such as just lift and shift it, modernize it, drop it), then migrate, operate, and optimize the software, the utilization, and reiterate. It is a continuous journey! But take a look at the next point for more.
Fourth, cloud-native software plays a critical role in unlocking the full revenue potential of 5G applications and the efficient operations in the cloud, and needs to be available where it makes more sense for the specific use case. Having the software running at the global infrastructure level (Regions), rather than close to the edge of the network needs to be possible in seamless way. Being first to the cloud means being the first to realize the benefits of economies of scale, resiliency, and efficiency than we’ve ever seen before. As I’ve already mentioned, but cannot stress enough: to meet changing customer expectations and stay competitive, evolving to the cloud is a north star to follow.
Fifth, cloud is about innovation, and depth and breadth of services means large options to modernize the software and make it easier and faster to change and adapt to the business needs, automate and scale as well as efficient in use of platform resources. It is a flywheel: by investing in innovation, you can bring greater returns in the long run via creating differentiation (new product), speed of reaction (ability to quickly catch up on competition), and ultimately productivity (leveraging innovation to be more efficient thus allowing faster time to market and lower costs). A BSS solution that leverages on the innovation brought by AWS will inherit these characteristics, thus greatly helping CSPs in the preceding three dimensions.
Securing Tomorrow’s Market by Making Inroads Today
The enterprise market opportunity is expected to unlock $700 billion in addressable revenue for CSPs by 2030. This is not something to be overlooked. With this in mind, a stepwise cloud BSS evolution is key for CSPs seeking to monetize 5G and establish their place in this highly lucrative new market.
By leveraging cloud capabilities and shifting the focus to enterprise customers, CSPs can transition from connectivity and platform providers to digital service providers that continually create innovative new services in collaboration with other ecosystem partners.
If you’d like to hear more about the importance of cloud and the different strategies service providers in more detail, please visit Ericsson Digital BSS on May 26 to view a fireside discussion featuring Mats Karlsson, VP & Head of Solution Area Business Support Systems (BSS), Ericsson, and Amir Rao, General Manager Solution Portfolio and Tech Alliances, Telco IBU, AWS.
In the meantime, dig deeper into the BSS cloud journey with this new Futurum Research report, The BSS-to-cloud journey: Powering innovation across the digital value chain.
Related Resources
Find out more about AWS for Telecom
Find out more about Ericsson BSS Solutions
Read about the Ericsson and AWS collaboration in Ericsson’s blog post
Mark your calendars for the joint Ericsson and AWS webinar on May 26 (add to your Google Calendar | Outlook Calendar)
Read about our partnership with AWS and Telefonica Germany