Ericsson and Intel have begun a multi-year collaboration to align their software development efforts in software-defined infrastructure (SDI), distributed cloud, and 5G. The partnership focuses on combining expertise to accelerate the delivery of cloud-native capabilities across telecom and edge environments.
The initiative aims to provide a hardware management platform that brings cloud-like agility, transparency, and efficiency to Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), distributed cloud, and 5G deployments. By extending cloud principles down to the hardware layer, the platform is designed to shorten time-to-market, improve resource utilization, and lower total cost of ownership for service providers and operators.
As part of the collaboration, Ericsson and Intel will integrate Ericsson’s SDI Manager software with Intel’s Rack Scale Design (RSD) reference software, while preserving full backward compatibility for existing customers. This integration is intended to simplify operations and accelerate adoption of open, interoperable infrastructure across centralised data centers and edge sites.
Lars Mårtensson, Head of Cloud and NFV Infrastructure in Ericsson’s Digital Services business area, said the effort will concentrate on software as well as hardware and called the collaboration “truly transformative” for service providers looking to deploy open cloud and NFV infrastructure from core data centers to the edge. He added that the joint work with Intel strengthens the competitiveness and roadmap of Ericsson’s Software Defined Infrastructure offering.
Intel has emphasized the opportunity presented by data-centric technologies. In August the company raised its estimate of the total addressable market for the data-centric era of computing from £124.27bn to £155.33bn. Navin Shenoy, president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, highlighted rapid data growth and the potential to extract far greater value from it. He noted that most of the world’s data has been created very recently and that analysts expect data volumes to grow dramatically by 2025. According to Shenoy, only a small fraction of that data is currently processed and acted upon, suggesting significant opportunity if more data can be leveraged at scale.
In a related development showcasing high-capacity wireless links, an Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom innovation project in January successfully demonstrated a millimetre-wave connection capable of 40 Gbps. The live trial at the Deutsche Telekom Service Centre in Athens represented a step toward future 100 Gbps wireless links, illustrating the pace of advancement in high-speed transport technologies that will underpin next-generation network services.
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