TOKYO: Ericsson, the world’s leading maker of mobile network equipment, said it will help its global base of major telecoms companies to shift to cloud computing using Intel datacenter designs to compete more actively with Web rivals.
Ericsson’s partnership with Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, puts it in a crowded market for providing bespoke datacenters, where it will also be competing with a range of technology suppliers including Cisco and IBM.
“We will build datacenter equipment which will actually have the same performance as many of the big cloud providers are doing for themselves,” Ericsson’s chief executive, Hans Vestberg, told a news conference at the Mobile World Congress telecoms trade show in Barcelona on Monday.
Over the past decade Web-based services like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have stopped buying finished computers, storage devices and network components and instead developed their own systems in-house to create massive, low-cost datacenters in the cloud to serve billions of users.
The Swedish company’s plan is to focus initially on equipping big telecom operators rather than competing for new corporate customers in other industries, its CEO said.
Telecom operators are rushing to build datacenters in the cloud to slash the cost of hardware spending within their networks, improve the range of services they offer subscribers and to obtain the Web-wide reach of the big Internet companies.
“The difference is that we are going to provide it to the market,” Vestberg said. “This is predominately to see that we give a competitive edge for our customers, the carriers.”
The move builds on a number of smaller cloud software company acquisitions made by Ericsson over the past year.
