Ericsson, AWS and digital industrialization

Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona.

I read the news, the presentations 100% focused on Ericsson and biased towards cloud computing and digital industrialization. These are my personal impressions

Summary in a tweet

Ericsson torrential rain of products, services and alliances announcements at MWC16 need some time to process. This tweet is a concise summary

I think @ericsson, @aws, and @quanta announced the end of traditional IT @mwc2016... Welcome to hyperscale!

— Geoff Hollingworth (@geoffworth) February 22, 2016

The ideas of cloud before Ericsson at MWC16

Hans Vestberg, Ericsson CEO wrote in a recent blog

When we say cloud, we don’t just mean business documents accessible at work and at home.Cloud is unprecedented, secure collaboration regardless of physical borders. 

The MWC 2016 made visible to the world the idea of Ericsson Cloud, as created by a couple of visionaries, among them Jason Hoffman,  head of products in Ericsson Cloud.

Most people confused cloud with accessing an on-demand public service like AWS , Microsoft,  IBM and so on.

Jason wrote in a landmark article from 2014:

Talking to people from every part of the business, you’d almost believe that there aren’t any fundamental questions to be answered or significant problems to be fixed. You’d more or less accept that today’s most visible cloud players already have the entire market sewn up. And you’d just about be convinced that we’re not, in fact, at the very beginning of the cloud age, with all the uncertainties, complications and opportunities that would entail.

If we agree that cloud is the ultimate convergence of three pillars: Network, Compute and Data, we realize where we were two years ago was not sufficient. Jason says a cloud should be like a mobile network

So look at mobile networks and learn – because that’s exactly what the cloud should be. A really good policy-based, governance-focused, highly secure platform-as-a-service that runs on anything can just be rolled out. Fundamental object storage systems that are aware of the countries in which they are located, that automatically adjust to different legal and compliance requirements, and that don’t let you break the law by mistake – those are rollouts. Systems that stay resistant even when insiders try to access confidential data – a definite rollout too.

None of these things exist yet, but this is where the industry should be aiming. I’ll say it once more – we need a cloud equivalent to a mobile network.

Ericsson replaced the word "cloud" with  "digital industrialization" . In Europe, the term ICT (Information and  Communication Technologies) replaced the IT (Information Technology) used in US.

What about Amazon model?

If we accept this view of what the cloud should be, we also undercut the argument that Amazon, Google and Microsoft have already got the entire cloud market in the bag. Because for all their resources and visibility, none of these companies can realistically claim that their cloud offerings are anywhere close to meeting the standards set by a proper telco-grade cloud. Of course, their ambitions might well lie elsewhere, and they may see sufficient growth potential in addressing the small and medium-sized enterprise market. But that’s a very small part of a much bigger opportunity.

On the other hand, Amazon has some extraordinary technology in place  S3, EMR (Elastic Map Reduce), Redshift ,  DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, and so on linked on a data pipeline.

The two big add-on opportunities for AWS and Ericsson are:

The first is clouds for mission-critical infrastructure – defined as infrastructure that if it fails, so does a company’s core business. The second is clouds that drive top-line revenue, often for companies that are in regulated environments, such as banks or utilities.

Hyperscale Now

All the terminology is described on Ericsson Hyperscale pages . Ericson's  HDS 8000 software-defined infrastructure is core in datacenter industrialization. It has Intel rack architecture and it will compliant with OCP (Open Compute Project, originally started by Facebook). The key software component is  Apcera's container-based, policy-driven PaaS environment that is fully integrated with OpenStack. The configuration is flexible.

Ericsson and AWS agreement  "accelerates cloud transformation for telecoms service providers. Ericsson empowers   them as gatekeeper of accessing AWS." This is an explored territory to create new services and generate new profits

The Ericsson teams will consist of program directors, solutions architects and system engineers who are trained on AWS and Ericsson technologies. AWS will support Ericsson in this effort with a broad range of resources that may include solutions architects, professional services and training.

Australian operator Telstra has selected Ericsson to deploy a full stack telecom cloud platform. A couple of hour later Axiata makes a similar choice.  Swisscom announced Ericsson cloud solution  two days before. Ericsson has joined Open Data Center Committee (ODCC) in China to speed up adoption of next generation data center solutions, with Quanta as partner

Driven by requirements and specifications from main data center technology and solution users in China, such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, and other data center solution users, ODCC promotes open data center solutions with significant visibility in the industry.

Vision comes true

Yahoo Answers  contains this question: 

Is the word "visionary" complimentary or derogatory...?

I'm not a native English speaker...
I'm looking in the online Merriam-Webster's dictionary and a couple of the definitions offered are a bit confusing. Does it mean one who has unachievable goals or one who has great foresight?

The best answer selected reads

The key to the definition is whether or not they were just dreamers or ones who put action to those visions.

Ericsson has 140 years to prove they are not only dreamers, as they delivered their visions.

Experimental telephone manufactured by LM Ericsson in the 1920s.
Handset is made of hard rubber.

When Jason Hoffman, the Silicon Valley American industrialist  joined the small and select group of Swedish telco cloud dreamers, he wrote in Ericsson Business Review issue 4, 2014 the article "Head in the Clouds: is the ICT industry fooling itself?". Then the skeptics out-numbered the supporters.

Not today. The alliance with AWS, the clarity of the digital industrialization is undeniable. AWS has one of the most successful digital industrialization in place. We read Seattle local press, What Amazon's deal with Ericsson means for Seattle

Amazon has been seeing widespread adoption of its AWS cloud services and has been realizing a much thicker profit margin from its cloud offerings than from its online retail segments. For 2015, its profit for AWS was $1.9 billion on $7.9 billion in revenue — the latter figure is a staggering 70 percent more than the prior year.

In comparison, Amazon made just a $2.8 billion profit on $63.7 billion in revenue for its North America online retail segment.

Cloud growth is helping drive Amazon's rapid expansion in the Seattle area. The company just announced last year that it plans to build a third skyscraper in downtown Seattle.

 Soon, the telco operators will see similar results.

Disclosure

I don’t say anything online that I wouldn’t say in person.  What I say are exclusively my thoughts, views, opinions or understanding of a topic or issue, and not my employers'. I can be wrong even though I try hard not to be. I will admit to mistakes, correct them promptly and even apologize where it is appropriate.