Google Cloud and Ericsson have announced a partnership to jointly develop 5G and edge cloud solutions to help communications service providers (CSPs) digitally transform, and to unlock new enterprise and consumer use cases.
This partnership brings together Google Cloud’s compute platform with Ericsson’s market-leading 5G portfolio.
Ericsson, Google Cloud, and TIM are currently piloting 5G cloud solutions in Italy for telco edge enterprise use cases in automotive, transportation, and other sectors.
Globally, industries with edge presences – including communication service providers, retailers, manufacturers, transport businesses, healthcare, and media and entertainment providers – face pressures to build more digitised businesses and new digital experiences for their customers.
To help businesses address this shift, Google Cloud and Ericsson are working together to develop new solutions at Ericsson’s Silicon Valley D15 Labs, a state-of-the-art innovation centre, where advanced solutions and technologies can be developed and tested on a live, multi-layers 5G platform.
Ericsson and Google Cloud have already completed functional onboarding of Ericsson 5G on Anthos to enable telco edge and on-premise use cases for CSPs and enterprises.
As part of the partnership, Google Cloud and Ericsson are also piloting enterprise applications at the edge on a live network with TIM.
The project, which will automate the functions of TIM’s core 5G network and cloud-based applications, will use TIM’s Telco Cloud infrastructure, Google Cloud solutions, and Ericsson’s 5G core network and orchestration technologies.
The joint offerings will help enterprises in the automotive, transportation, manufacturing, and other sectors improve efficiencies and lower latency by bringing connectivity close to companies’ physical locations.
“Organisations have a tremendous opportunity to digitally transform their businesses with 5G and cloud capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning at the edge,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud.
“We are proud to partner with Ericsson to help build a foundation for communications service providers and enterprises alike to take advantage of cloud technology and cloud-native services, from telecom network core to the edge and enterprise premises.”
“5G is a powerful innovation platform. Combined with edge cloud capabilities, 5G has the potential to accelerate the digital transformation of virtually any sector of industry or society,” said Niklas Heuveldop, president and head of Ericsson North America.
“We are excited about our partnership with Google Cloud as we engage with our customers to leverage our combined capabilities to solve real-world business challenges for the benefit of consumers, enterprises and society at large.”
Ericsson and Google previously formed a services partnership to enable the digital transformation of operator networks and application migration through cloud-native, container-based solutions.
