2.27.19
VMware, Inc. today highlighted innovations that can help communications services providers (CSPs) capture the 5G opportunity and break into the cloud economy. Additionally, the company announced expanded relationships with AT&T and Vodafone, along with an expanded alliance with Ericsson and a new partnership with T-Systems, illustrating that VMware is a proven and strategic partner of choice for telco cloud transformation.
Communication service providers must transition to a virtualized telco cloud spanning network and IT to maximize 5G upside while containing risks. VMware offers the industry’s only comprehensive 5G Telco Cloud platform. The VMware Telco Cloud platform is optimized for both 4G and 5G – a single architecture that supports both networks – which helps communication service providers get to “5G-Ready” faster.
“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.”
Customer and Partner Momentum across VMware’s Networking and Cloud Portfolio Organizations worldwide, customers and partners alike, are turning to VMware’s portfolio. With new engagements from CSP adoption designed to unify networks, to partner deployment of VMware’s SD-WAN solutions, VMware is emerging as a leader in the telco space. Details on new customers and partners include:
• AT&T Selects VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud for WAN of 5G Service: AT&T is working with VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud to implement 5G capabilities into our SD-WAN to give businesses new levels of network control. This transformative combination could be an ideal solution for businesses looking to use SD-WAN with a high-speed, low-latency 5G network as their primary or secondary WAN connection type in combination with other transport connections.
• Ericsson Teams with VMware On Network Transformation: 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 Selects VMware Cloud on AWS for Hybrid Cloud 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 and VMware Expand Deployment: VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced that 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.
New Telco Portfolio Innovations to Ease 5G Migration
VMware announced new and enhanced solutions spanning the company’s telco portfolio that help ease migration to 5G without sacrificing performance or monetization of existing networks. These innovations, focused on service assurance and network virtualization, represent VMware’s commitment to 5G readiness and to helping customers harness the telco cloud.
• Unveiling VMware Smart Assurance: VMware Smart Assurance 10 will provide 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: VMware continues to increase the number of partners that have been certified within the VMware Ready for NFV Certification program. This 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: VMware HCX enables CSPs to build hybrid highways interconnecting heritage infrastructure and 5G environments on which commercial OpenStack ecosystem workloads can be migrated to the new distributed, multi-cloud architecture. VMware HCX 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.
Momentum with Service Providers for VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud
SD-WAN is a critical technology for enterprises right now due to its edge-to-edge, cloud-delivered connectivity and ability to scale. 5G will only enhance SD-WAN capabilities and services for both enterprises and CSPs, bringing the benefits of 5G to bear with unprecedented speed and agility.
VMware is continuing to grow its technology integration collaborations to align with the digital needs of tomorrow’s highly agile enterprises. To facilitate interoperability between current and future technologies, the scalable framework of VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud enables customers to integrate the preferred security, cloud infrastructure and network management technology. New and expanded collaborations announced today aim to provide enterprises and service providers with easy deployment of services and applications and improve visibility across their entire networks.
Leading Communication Service Providers Select VMware Workspace ONE as Preferred Unified Endpoint EUC
VMware partners with many of today’s largest Communication Service Providers to offer a range of enterprise solutions, including mobility and workspace management services for customers at all stages of the digital workspace journey. VMware Workspace ONE, for instance, enables management and security of all customer devices – SIM-based devices sold by the operator to business organizations (corporate-owned), employee-owned (BYO) devices, and (non-SIM) endpoints like MacBooks and PCs. Today at Mobile World Congress, VMware announced recent partnerships with Samsung SDS and T-Systems that will make Workspace ONE available to their customers.
VMware Pulse IoT Center: Building a Strong Optimized Foundation for Edge and IoT Solutions
Organizations implementing new technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) can benefit by building on top of open industry standard components. Organizations implementing new technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) can benefit by building on top of open industry standard components. Project Photon has released Photon OS 3.0, a minimal lightweight Linux operating system (OS), that provides an open, flexible, and stable foundation for edge, IoT, and modern application environments.
New today, VMware Pulse IoT Center and Photon OS can now support multiple IoT use cases across the value chain of any organization with a consistent, secure and scalable infrastructure. Running the VMware Pulse IoT Center agent with Photon OS on IoT devices enhances the security of these otherwise highly vulnerable devices with certificate, DNS, and security token services. Additionally, VMware Pulse IoT Center’s over-the-air update capabilities can deliver security patches and BIOS updates to IoT devices as well as updates to the Photon OS running on edge devices. VMware Pulse IoT Center and Photon OS also support the implementation of containerized applications such as data analytics and data filtering, among others, close to the point of data origination in IoT use cases.
