I love 5G and NFV as you know, I live and breathe Telco and Mobile and Enterprise Mobility on a daily basis (some might say 24 hours a day), and as one of the hats I wear professionally is that of market analyst, I am constantly watching all aspects of this complex and rapidly evolving market and the positive impact it is having on existing as well as new and emerging business models.
In doing so, being kept up to date by some of the biggest brands in the world is critical. Being party to Ericsson Digital’s digitalisation journey has been nothing short of amazing and I am continuously humbled and grateful for the inside view they afford me.
Jonas Falkena &Tamas Zsrios talk about Ericsson Mobility Report
An example of that was when I had the pleasure of having Cecilia Atterwall (VP & Head of Marketing & Communications for Networks at Ericsson) and Thomas Noren (VP & Head of 5G Commercialisation at Ericsson), on my podcast as featured guests on the same show together, to talk about the latest data from the Ericsson Mobility Report, all things 5G Marketing & Commercialisation, the Telco industry, the emergence and impact of 5G.
As I have regularly reported to my followers, readers, listeners and viewers, in blogs, podcasts, video interviews and live streams combined, Ericsson have not only transformed their *own* organisation first, such that I have regularly described Ericsson as being “their own first customer”, but they had the foresight and objectivity to be able to document what the journey looks like, from end to end, “closing the loop” as I like to describe it – to pull it apart and put it back together from the telecommunications (telco) service provider’s perspective. That’s nothing short of amazing.
And at the same time, Ericsson are playing a key thought leadership role in supporting #CloudNative and #OpenSource, an endeavour I recently discussed at length with Gareth Price, Practice Head, for Europe & Latin America across Core, Cloud & Security Consulting at Ericsson when he was a featured guest on my podcast show ( be sure to tune into that episode of Conversations with Dez for the insights we shared during that fireside chat ).
It takes enormous strength and company-wide fortitude to stare into the exciting but largely unmapped and unknown future and develop a strategy, supporting plans, and roadmap to lead and inspire an industry and the various related markets. It takes surviving the potential minefield of digital transformation, industry disruption, the pivot from physical, through virtual and then into cloud in the form of software defined “everything.” And THEN, as part of that journey, to be able to develop awareness, education, and engagement such that you can encourage an entire community to adopt change and then undertake the work to build forward into it? That is exactly what Ericsson have done, and are still doing.
With the support and strength of Ericsson’s leadership, we will ALL manifest what #Digital has to offer #Telco’s in the way of #5G and beyond, and the harmonious, transparent, collaborative approach will deliver results far greater than any singularly profit-motivated strategy ever could. I had the opportunity to have Anders Rosengren, Head of Architecture and Technology at Ericsson Digital Services on my podcast show to discuss a number of these exciting spaces from Cloud, Cloud Native, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, through to Software Defined Infrastructure (#SDI).
Thus it is with all of this in mind, that through this blog, I have the great pleasure of sharing and responding to the insights shared by two of the world’s most formidable #5G & #Cloud Native architecture experts in this space, Jonas Falkenå and Tamas Zsiros of Ericsson Digital.
I not only encourage you to register and take in their awesome webinar format update and briefing, but I would recommend you schedule time in your diary to do it justice, and tune into their webinar briefing, ideally bring a friend or colleague / co-worker or two ( or three or more ) and arm yourself with a notepad and pen to “take notes”, perhaps “host it” as a team activity in a meeting room, as it’s not often we get to hear so many great updates directly from the architects themselves.
On a related note, I actually had the pleasure of having Jonas on my podcast show for of my one-on-one fireside chats, this one about many of the key topics this webinar briefing covers; you can listen to that conversation here.
If you’ve tuned in to any of my podcasts with Ericsson’s other Cloud Native thought leaders, you’ll find those conversations to be great footing for this latest webinar briefing from Jonas Falkenå and Tamas Zsiros.
In particular I do recommend you tune into my conversations with Anders Rosengren and Peter Worndle. In fact, digitalisation is a constant throughout my Transmissions from Tomorrow themed podcast shows featuring many of the amazing subject matter experts from Ericsson. Also make sure to read the series of blogs I wrote in response to Ericsson’s NFV thought leadership, as you’ll get a more architecture-first perspective there.
Ericsson has built an entirely digital, largely cloud-native architecture centred on automation, a topic I had the opportunity to discuss with Fernanda Mendez, Vice President and Head of Management Orchestration & CENX at Ericsson as a featured guest on my podcast recently – in particular the automation provided by Ericsson’s Dynamic Orchestration, Cloud Deployment Engine & Ericsson Orchestrator.
Going digital creates speed; going cloud native creates scale; going open source creates giga-scale. It’s this software-driven environment that makes network slicing possible, which in turn opens up an incredible array of business opportunities for enterprise-specific services, so long as you have a digitized business system (BSS) to monetise the new business cases and a dynamic orchestration operations systems (OSS), which Ericsson has built as well. These capacities together form the digital infrastructure that creates what at the surface we call 5G.
What are Cloud Native Applications
In this latest webinar briefing by Jonas and Tamas, they focus on the applications themselves and their transformation to Cloud Native, and as well as how the cloud infrastructure and APIs need to evolve in support (as indeed, they do). It’s an engineer’s perspective framed by guiding principles (they have five) and essential building blocks (Kubernetes). As they remind us, “a cloud native application has to be agnostic to the underlying infrastructure,” be it IaaS or Kubernetes CaaS.
Image: The cloud native design principles guiding Ericsson Digital
So why would Ericsson share this kind of window into their engineering principles? Because they are working very hard to bring us all along on the transformation journey. Whether you’re an engineer or are business-decision focused, I recommend tuning into this briefing by Jonas and Tamas, it’s truly a back door view into how these architectures are being built. As they say, “if you understand the core principles, you understand not just the deliverables of the moment but what we’re building for tomorrow”.
Here are some of the key reference materials I mentioned above, all are worthy of your time and attention in my humble opinion. I would also like to convey a huge thank you to the team at Ericsson for making all of possible and I look forward to sharing further updates with you soon.
For more information, follow these links:
- Cloud native tutorial with Jonas Falkenå and Tamas Zsiros of Ericsson Digital
- the episode of my podcast featuring Jonas Falkenå, of Ericsson Digital
- “Why you should be taking note of cloud native NFVI” – cloud native blogpost with Mats Johansson of Ericsson Digital
- “Is cloud native design really needed in telecom?” – cloud native blogpost with Mats Johansson of Ericsson Digital
- Top five #Telcom #Futurecasting podcasts of 2019 (compiled by of Ericsson Digital)
- the episode of my podcast show featuring Peter Worndle, NFV expert at EricssonDigital
- the episode of my podcast show featuring Anders Rosengren, head of Architecture & Technology at Ericsson Digital
- my eight part Network Function Virtualisation ( NFV ) blog series
- Automation and AI e-Brief
- BSS monetisation systems
- Dynamic orchestration OSS http://bit.ly/DS_DO19
- Network Slicing
- ONAP open-source white-paper